Purkiss drew them together, his arms across Clement’s and Avner’s backs. ‘This is what we do. Gunnar, can you lock the doors of the hangar?’
‘Of course,’ Haglund shouted back. ‘There’s a dead bolt.’
‘Okay. Go and do it. Patricia, Efraim, you go with him.’ He felt Avner tense in protest, drove his fingers into the younger man’s shoulder to shut him up. ‘Stay in the hangar, inside the side door. Keep quiet. Arm yourselves with whatever’s on hand, wrenches, crowbars, whatever. If the door opens, hit him. He might push Budian through first, but that’s a risk you’ll have to take. Just act decisively and immediately. Understood?’
‘Yes,’ said Haglund. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going back in.’
‘He’ll be waiting,’ said Clement. ‘He’ll shoot you as soon as you set foot inside.’
‘No, he won’t.’ Purkiss had to raise his voice even more to be heard over the wind. The cold was making articulation difficult. ‘He won’t hang around to see if we return. He’ll take Budian and get out some other way. Head for the hangar. That’s where he’ll be expecting to find us, so you’ll have to be on your guard. I need to get to him before he reaches you.’
‘How will you — ’
Purkiss cut across Haglund. ‘I have an idea.’
He clapped Clement and Avner on the back, shouted ‘Go,’ and as soon as the three of them started moving away, advanced to the door.
Clement might, of course, be right. Montrose could be standing in the same spot as before. In which case, Purkiss would barely have time to register his presence before the rifle blew him away. But he didn’t think it likely. Montrose would be expecting them to come back at some point, but probably not so soon, barely two minutes after he’d ordered them out.
Purkiss’s instructions to the other three had been for the sake of appearances. He didn’t expect them to be able to take down Montrose with mechanics’ tools. Montrose was a professional, and he’d drop them all before they could get even close. But Purkiss needed them out of the way, to carry out unimpeded the plan he’d been formulating.
He stepped inside and pulled the door closed and for a heartstopping moment imagined movement down the corridor to his right; but it was just that, imagination. Montrose and Budian were gone. Medievsky lay sprawled against the wall, the pool of gore around his head no longer spreading. Haglund’s rifle was gone.
Purkiss pulled off his goggles and balaclava. Quickly he knelt and searched the pockets of the body’s snowsuit. He found the Walther, the one he’d taken from Wyatt and that Medievsky had subsequently taken off him. He hadn’t been certain Medievsky had kept it. Purkiss ejected the magazine. Four bullets remained.
Gun in hand, he loped down the passage, acutely aware of his footfalls and stepping as lightly as he could. He reached the third door on the left. On the evening of his arrival at the station, Medievsky had tapped it as he led Purkiss past. Fuse boxes, he’d said.
Inside the room he examined the panels, which covered most of one wall. There were separate boxes for the east and west wings, as well as for each outbuilding and the perimeter lights. The master switch drew his attention.
He could shut off the lights within the complex while keeping the hangar illuminated. That way he’d avoid plunging Haglund and Clement and Avner into darkness, and possible panic. On the other hand, Montrose might already be on his way out of the main building, in which case the hangar would be a beacon of light on which he’d focus.
Purkiss reached up and tripped the master switch.
The station shut down around him with an audible hum that spread through the walls like a sigh, the lights and the remaining computer equipment and electrical appliances ceasing their activity in quick succession. Purkiss was surprised by how suddenly the wind outside reared into prominence, now that the static obscuring it was gone.
The blackness around Purkiss was total.
He believed Montrose would now do one of three things.
One: lie low, wherever he was, waiting with his hostage to see what developed.
Two: return to the entrance corridor and confront whomever it was that had cut the power.
Three: assume the Spetsnaz forces had arrived and were shutting the station down. In which case, Montrose’s priority would be to get out at all costs. One of the costs would involve killing his hostage.
It was a risk Purkiss thought unavoidable. Because he suspected Montrose would be listening out for the approach of a helicopter, would accept he hadn’t heard it and that the noise produced by the wind wouldn’t be enough to mask it, and would therefore regard the cutting of the power supply as an act of counteraggression by Purkiss.
And Montrose would, in Purkiss’s estimation, most likely sit tight. Recognise it was worth waiting to see what kind of counteroffensive Purkiss was mounting, and prepare himself for it, confident in the knowledge that he, Montrose, had the upper hand, because he had Budian as a shield.
Which meant Purkiss had to find Montrose, somewhere in the depths of the station, in pitch darkness.
He stood in the dark, his eyes widened to allow the rods in their retinas the best opportunity to absorb the faintest photons of light filtering in through his pupils. The process of maximal adaptation to complete darkness would take twenty to thirty minutes. Purkiss didn’t want to wait that long — Montrose might well decide to escape towards the hangar in that time — but he was prepared to give it ten minutes.
In Medievsky’s office, he’d checked the spreadsheet for the entry on the twenty-ninth of December. The log stated clearly that Medievsky, Wyatt, Montrose and Haglund had gone out to look for Feliks Nisselovich after he’d disappeared from the station. Yet Clement had been adamant that the search party had comprised only Medievsky, Wyatt and Haglund. It meant, if Clement was both telling the truth and remembering accurately, that the log was wrong.
Which suggested it had been falsified afterwards.
Purkiss had taken the biggest gamble of the mission so far, and had told Clement of his belief that Montrose was the person they were looking for. He’d told her quickly what to do: hit him from behind with the trophy on Medievsky’s shelf, causing a plausible injury, so that Purkiss could create the fiction that she was the killer. It was a gamble because if he was wrong, if Clement had been lying all the time, she’d take the opportunity to kill him, and would succeed, smashing the weight of the stainless steel cup against the exposed vertebrae of his neck or simply sliding a concealed blade in between them, severing his spinal cord.
But he’d been right, and the ruse had worked. His ploy to keep them all at the station until the Spetsnaz arrived had provoked Montrose into showing his hand.
Before Purkiss’s dark-blinded eyes, details were starting to take form: the expanse of the wall opposite, the shapes of the rows of shelves. As his vision struggled to reestablish itself, his other senses sent out their probing tendrils to compensate, his ears attuning to the creaks and ticking of the walls of the station in the sudden silence, his hands finding substance in the stippled grip of the Walther and the smooth curve of the trigger against his index finger.
He decided it was time.
Purkiss opened the door of the room and tossed a box of replacement fuses into the corridor beyond and waited.
He expected the box to clatter into the corridor and produce a brief echo and then for the black silence to settle once more.