The Ferryman took out his tablet computer and called up the Turkish Airlines site. Flight TA15 was confirmed as airborne.
Six fifty-two.
And the Ferryman had seen the man not only checking in at the desk, but boarding the plane out on the runway, a little over thirty minutes ago. Had watched him from the great glass windows of the concourse, a stooped figure, shuffling in the queue across the rain-streaked runway and up the steps leading into the cabin of the Boeing.
The Ferryman mopped up the last flakes of his pastry, put away his newspaper and his tablet in his attaché case, and tossed a couple of ten-euro notes on the table.
He headed for the escalators that would lead him towards the terminal’s exit, an unremarkable middle-aged man in a grey suit, with fair hair and a purposeful but not hasty walk. Just another cosmopolitan Northern European businessman going about his daily schedule.
Turkish Airlines Flight TA15 blew apart at one minute past seven on Tuesday the twenty-eighth of October, in the slate-coloured sky twenty thousand feet over the countryside of the German region of Hesse.
The plane didn’t explode, in the strict sense. Rather, the blast caused by the detonation of the plastic explosive buried in the large intestine of the Pakistani national named Umair Jat, and triggered by the signal from his mobile phone which he activated while sitting on the toilet seat and muttering a heartfelt prayer, tore a hole in the fuselage of the port side of the aircraft which led to a chain reaction, the metal rending further and the sudden change in pressure sucking passengers and baggage and the general bric a brac in the cabin out into the freezing air, and causing the Boeing 737–800 to veer sideways before the pilot and co-pilot grasped what was happening.
There were no clear witness accounts of what happened next, given that the incident occurred over an area of sparsely populated farmland. Aviation experts were later able to confirm that the structure of the plane had been relatively intact when it hit the ground, with the fuselage ripped to ribbons but neither wing having detached itself.
The passenger manifest revealed that one hundred and eighty-four people had boarded. Though it was impossible to identify all the bodies, or even match all the various parts to each other, it was clear there were no survivors.
Two
According to the local police database, the typical mugger in the district of Borgo in Rome was locally born, and aged between seventeen and twenty-four.
As an Englishman pushing forty, John Purkiss didn’t fit the demographic.
He didn’t, therefore, pull a ski mask over his face, or otherwise disguise himself as he strode rapidly towards his victim. It was eight o’clock in the evening, and the streetlights were sparse along this stretch of the Tiber. The lights of central Rome across the river, and those of the Vatican behind, plunged the narrow street into contrasting shadow.
The target leaned on the railing thirty yards ahead of Purkiss, in a pose of relaxation as he gazed over the river. He was a short man, compactly built, in a light woollen suit and no overcoat. The autumn was slow to come to southern Italy, even though October was two thirds gone.
Purkiss himself wore a sweater and cargo pants and a duffel jacket, the last for its pockets rather than to provide warmth. His rubber-soled running shoes made the faintest whisper on the pavement as he closed in.
In the pocket of his jacket, his hand gripped cold steel.
The man at the railings ahead was called David Billson. Officially a mid-ranking Foreign Office liaison consultant at the British Embassy on the Via XX Settembre, he was in fact an employee of SIS, colloquially known as MI6, the British intelligence service. There was nothing surprising about that. Every embassy and consulate of every nationality harboured a quota of its parent country’s spies. The United States had CIA operatives in its Grosvenor Square embassy in London. Britain, in turn, planted its own secret agents in Washington and New York. Even notionally friendly countries conducted clandestine intelligence operations on each others’ soil.
That was what embassies were for, to a large extent. They provided an inviolable base on foreign territories from which the Great Game could be played out.
David Billson, though, was more than a British spy in Rome. He was a British spy in Rome who was providing intelligence to the Chinese government.
Whether he was a true double agent, working for the Beijing regime, or whether he was a mercenary selling information to the highest bidder, wasn’t clear. Nor was it particularly relevant, as far as Purkiss was concerned. Purkiss’s remit was to obtain evidence that Billson was providing information to a man named Xing Ho Lee, a teacher at one of the local Chinese schools here in Rome. Lee was known to the British and US authorities to have an affiliation with the Ministry of State Security, the intelligence service of the People’s Republic of China.
And, forty minutes earlier, Purkiss had witnessed Lee handing over a briefcase to David Billson, in the hushed confines of the Galleria Spada.
The handover had been professionally done, neither man interacting with the other, but both ending up side by side and gazing at the gallery’s Brueghel collection. Lee was instantly recognisable to Purkiss, who’d studied pictures of his appearance just as he had those of Billson prior to arriving in Rome. Lee had lowered the briefcase to the floor neatly, bending his knees the way you were always taught to do rather than curving his back. After a couple of minutes studying the Brueghel pictures, he’d walked away. Billson himself had waited a similar time before picking up the briefcase without looking down at it. Purkiss watched him clip the chain attached to the handle of the briefcase smoothly around his wrist.
Purkiss had followed Billson through the brightly lit streets and across the Tiber into Borgo, where Billson paused on the river bank. Purkiss wondered about this. Was the man meeting somebody else there? If so, snatching the briefcase might mean walking into a trap. So Purkiss had scouted around the point where Billson was standing and looking out over the river, and had carried out every counter-surveillance manoeuvre he knew. When he was as satisfied as he could be that Billson wasn’t being watched, Purkiss closed in.
The bolt cutters in his pocket were a standard piece of kit he employed when following a target. You never knew when a mark might be observed to padlock something in a locker, or pass through a gate which he then secured behind him. In this case, the briefcase was chained to Billson’s wrist, and the bolt cutters would allow Purkiss to remove the case without having to go through the tedious process of finding out where the man kept the key to the lock.
Purkiss lengthened his stride as he came into the final few yards of his run. Billson would hear him, or sense him, at the last minute, he knew, and so it was essential he built up enough momentum that he’d retain the advantage of surprise long enough to prevent a defensive move by his target.
And, sure enough, Purkiss saw Billson’s head start to turn when he was five paces away.
Purkiss’s right fist connected with the back of Billson’s neck with perhaps seventy per cent of the maximum force it could deliver. At the same time, Purkiss gripped the man’s left arm, the one holding the briefcase, with his own left hand and jerked it upwards. Billson slammed forward against the stone wall overlooking the river as Purkiss dipped his right hand into his pocket and pulled out the bolt cutters and used their jaws to snap efficiently through the lightweight chain securing the briefcase to Billson’s left wrist. As he did so, he applied torque to the arm, twisting it ever upwards and anticlockwise until the fingers of Billson’s left hand opened involuntarily and he released the handle of the case.