Rebecca exited the hotel through the front doors, and lingered across the street under an awning, aware that she was obtrusive, a single young woman out in the rain on an October night. But nobody accosted her. She watched the hotel entrance until, half an hour later, a pair of taxis pulled up in front and a group of five or six revellers spilled out, laughing raucously.
Quickly, she made her way back across the road and joined the partygoers as they stumbled up the steps to the doors. There were three men and three women, all in their thirties or early forties, all inebriated. One of the men grinned at her, his gaze unfocused, and said something in Italian. She smiled and shook her head.
She timed it right, holding back until the first of the group made it though the doors and lurched over to the reception desk to engage the staff there in cheery conversation. With the two concierges’ attention focused politely on him, Rebecca detached herself from the group and strode across the lobby and round the corner into a corridor, where she saw a bank of lifts.
She took the fire stairs to the third floor, found a silent corridor beyond. Cautiously she crept along it until she reached room 331. Unlike most of the doors, it had no do not disturb sign hanging on the handle.
She placed her ear to the door and listened.
No sound from within.
The lock was operated with a key card. Rebecca had no way of opening it, short of going downstairs and asking for one, which was out of the question.
She knocked softly on the door, then stepped aside, out of range of the fisheye lens.
Her ears strained. There was no sound from within. No footfall on the floor.
Rebecca walked back down the corridor to where she’d seen the fire alarm, behind a panel of glass at eye level. She glanced about, before hefting the bag containing her laptop and ramming the corner against the glass.
The shriek of the alarm was immediate, a harsh repetitive whoop that echoed around and down the corridor. Quickly she sprinted towards the stairs and down a flight, emerging on the floor below just as the first sleep-befuddled faces were beginning to peer through the doors.
The throng began to grow in the corridor, the jabber of panic rising, and Rebecca merged with the milling crowd.
She manoeuvred her way back to the fire stairs and ascended them, a look of bewilderment on her face, as if she’d forgotten the need to go down rather than up. Reaching the third floor again, she looked down the corridor towards the door of room 331.
It remained shut, though all the rest of the doors on either side of it were open and people were pouring out.
Rebecca waited as long as she dared, until the last of the guests were piling past her, yelling at her and tugging at her sleeves, trying to get her to snap out of her reverie and accompany them to the lobby.
Still the door remained closed.
Rebecca followed the others, making her way through the lobby where the night staff were trying to corral the crowd, to maintain a semblance of order. She pushed her way to the entrance doors and through into the night.
On the rain-slick pavement she ran along the front of the hotel and round the corner, to the side where room 331 looked out. She paused, located the third floor, scanned the windows.
She couldn’t be sure which ones belonged to room 331, but they all remained shut, and intact.
A fire engine’s bleat sounded in the distance.
Rebecca returned to the front of the hotel and watched the doors from across the road once more. Among the people flooding out, she couldn’t see anyone resembling John Purkiss.
By the time the fire engines had arrived, she was convinced. Purkiss wasn’t in the room. Had probably been gone for some time.
Which left her stuck.
She took out her phone and thumbed in a text message.
Target absent from hotel.
She hit the send key, and began walking away.
The response came within five minutes, as Rebecca was nearing the station once again.
It consisted of a text message with a new name and address. He may have a lead, read the message.
Rebecca looked up the address on the map application of her phone. It was a long distance to walk from where she was, and she sensed that time was not to be wasted.
She raised an arm to hail a taxi.
Eight
The trouble with looking for surveillance in an airport concourse was the sheer number of people populating the area, the myriad opportunities for concealment.
Frankfurt Airport’s Terminal 1 was still open, but was operating a reduced service following the events of the previous day. It meant that the crowds were smaller than they might usually have been, both because many of the flights had been cancelled, and because a lot of passengers had baulked at the thought of taking off from or arriving at a place which had so recently been the departure point for the ill-fated Turkish Airlines flight, and had scrapped or revised their own travel plans.
The concourse crawled with police and military. People were being stopped and questioned, their bags sifted through. People of all ages and racial backgrounds, not just young men of Middle Eastern appearance. The German chancellor had appeared repeatedly on the news broadcasts Purkiss had caught, her face tight with defiance: Life goes on. We will not permit ourselves to be cowed by terrorist murderers. And she’d exhorted the people of Germany to cooperate with the security forces, to accept that in the short term at least, there would be inconveniences to be endured.
It all posed a problem for Purkiss. The police would be on the lookout for any signs of stealthiness in anybody within the airport terminal. A man without luggage would attract suspicion.
And the visible security presence was one thing. There’d be scores, perhaps hundreds, of plainclothes personnel strewn throughout the terminal as well. Purkiss had identified four of them, three men and a woman, within just five minutes of entering the terminal through the arrival gate.
He’d bought a fresh set of clothes at Fiumicino Airport, choosing chinos and smart trainers and an overcoat and ditching the duffel jacket in one of the bins. The United Airlines flight had been only half full, and he’d had no trouble securing a seat at short notice.
At eight fifty on Wednesday morning, less than two hours after he’d boarded in Rome, Purkiss reached Frankfurt. He did an initial sweep of the terminal with several purposeful strides from one end to the other, giving the impression he was a man on his way to an appointment of some kind. That was when he’d spotted the four undercover security personnel, though they didn’t seem to have taken an interest in him. Afterwards, he settled himself at the counter of a coffee shop, from which he could survey a fair stretch of the concourse, and ordered breakfast.
While he ate, and watched, he caught up with the news through four papers he’d bought from a kiosk, two of them German and two British. There was little difference between them in the known facts they relayed. Flight TA15 was thought to have been brought down by a relatively low-yield explosion within the cabin, which had torn open the fuselage and done enough damage to cause the pilot and co-pilot to lose control. Of the 148 passengers, seventeen had been nationals of Muslim countries. Suspicion was already being cast on one man in particular, Umair Jat, a citizen of Pakistan who had previously been investigated by the authorities in Islamabad for possible links to radical jihadist groups, though nothing had been proven.
Much was made in the news reports of two other facts. One was the telephoned admission by a supposed spokesman for the Islamic Caliphate in Asia that the ICA was responsible for the killings. The German Security Service and the US State Department had separately issued confirmations that the admission was likely to be genuine. The other noteworthy detail was the arrest of a man at the departure gate of a Swissair flight, a few minutes before TA15 took off. The man was a Jordanian, Adnan Hanahneh, who’d been observed to be acting suspiciously as he approached the gate.