Purkiss had meant it as an offhand remark, but Gideon made his way to a cupboard door built into the wall. He tossed out a pair of boots.
‘Those should fit.’
Kendrick twitched impatiently, shifting from foot to foot. He’d put the gun away, at least.
Gideon didn’t offer them a seat. He perched on the edge of the desk. For the first time he seemed to take the other three in.
‘So what’s the story?’ said Purkiss.
Gideon said: ‘Vale sent you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Before he died.’
‘He left me a posthumous message,’ Purkiss said. ‘He warned me that you might be dangerous. Though he said you were one of us.’
‘I recognised you when you got off the boat.’ Gideon tipped his head at the bank of monitors. ‘My first thought was that you were leading an assassination squad.’
‘Why?’
‘I assumed you’d turned against Vale. That you were working for them.’
‘Who’s them?’ Purkiss asked.
Gideon gazed off to one side, as if marshalling his thoughts. Then: ‘Cronos.’
He watched Purkiss closely, as if trying to read a lie in his eyes.
In a moment, he said, ‘I see. You don’t know.’
‘You’ve heard of the Greek myth. The Cronos myth.’
Purkiss and the others had pulled up what chairs they could find, Kendrick perching himself on the edge of the desk at the other end from Gideon.
‘Yes,’ said Purkiss. ‘The titan son of Gaia and Uranus. Father of the gods.’
‘It’s usually spelled Cronus, or nowadays Kronos,’ said Gideon. ‘But this version has a C and two Os. The father of Zeus, whom he tried to eat, as he’d done with all his other children. Zeus turned against him, defeated him. Castrated him, in fact, though modern tellings tend to expurgate that detail.’
Gideon paused; not, Purkiss thought, for dramatic effect, but rather because he was about to reveal something he’d never told anyone before.
‘You’re Vale’s man,’ said Gideon. ‘You neutralise renegade elements within the Service.’
It wasn’t posed as a question, so Purkiss didn’t answer.
‘You’ll have wondered where this all started,’ Gideon continued. ‘Where Vale comes from. Whether you follow a long line of people with similar remits to yours.’
‘Naturally,’ said Purkiss.
Gideon got up, took a few slow paces away, turned and came back.
‘In the late nineteen seventies — ’77, to be exact — a high-ranking officer in SIS decided, unilaterally and without official sanction, that the Service needed to be cleansed. We were losing the espionage war against the enemy. There’d been the Philby scandal the previous decade, and the rest of the Cambridge spies before that. Anthony Blunt was yet to be exposed publicly, but he was known about. The apple was rotten, and the worms needed cutting out. Our high-level asset decided that the best place to start was by targeting the criminals. Not necessarily the traitors or the moles, but the agents behaving in reprehensible ways, for personal gain. It was the concept of zero-tolerance policing, two decades before it became fashionable.’
Gideon drew off another cupful of water from the cooler and drained it.
‘And so Cronos was born. Nobody knows if he called himself that, or if it was a moniker bestowed on him as his legend grew. But he was the father of the gods. The gods being the people who sought out the wrongdoers within the Service, and punished them for their sins.
‘There were four of us. Quentin Vale. Oliver Clay. Helen Marchand. And myself. You’re known vulgarly, Purkiss, as the Ratcatcher. We had no such description. Because nobody knew about us. Our activities, our countermeasures against the rogue and criminal elements within the ranks of the Service, were truly clandestine. Our job wasn’t to deter. It was to eliminate.’
The older man’s eyes had changed, the black irises expanding so that they crowded out the whites. Purkiss could imagine that stare, thirty or forty years ago, provoking the same effect in a transgressor as any interrogator from the formal enemy, the KGB, could achieve.
‘We were in many ways like the gods of the ancient Greeks. And I say that without any hint of pretentiousness. Our characters, our personas, were contrasting and complimentary. There was Vale, the thoughtful, serious one. Clay the joker, the buffoon. Myself, Gideon, the irascible, restless man of action. And Helen Marchand, the mother figure, the peacemaker who held us all together, and sometimes kept us apart when it was necessary.’
He broke eye contact for a moment.
‘Each of us had his or her own motivation for doing what we did. In my case, it was loyalty. That most sneered-at of virtues, in today’s degenerate world. But I owed the Service, Purkiss. And not merely for giving me employment.
‘I was born in 1943, in Poland. As an infant I was spirited out along with my mother and a few members of my extended family. I grew up in England, and never knew the horrors of that era first hand. But my father was left behind, in Chelmno extermination camp. I spent the first twelve years of my adult life trying to find the people responsible for the administration of the particular section of the camp in which my father was held, and in which he was murdered. The Service — SIS — helped me to find them.
‘It became my Service. My family. I swore a blood oath to it. And I was proud to serve it as Cronos directed, by keeping it clean. Keeping it honourable.’
Gideon seemed to pull himself back to the present. His gaze snapped to Purkiss once more.
‘At some point, Cronos changed. We were in part to blame for that, the four of us. We were so successful, so effective at what we did, that Cronos became convinced we were being underused. He began to envisage us, under his leadership, as needing to broaden our scope. To start formulating and implementing policy within SIS. Even when such policy didn’t have official sanction.’
‘He wanted to create a fifth column,’ said Purkiss.
‘Yes.’ The anger was back in Gideon’s voice, but it had a different quality to that which he’d displayed when talking about his father. ‘A black-ops cell, in current parlance, although that doesn’t quite capture it. We weren’t simply to carry out unofficial operations. We were to become a guiding force within the Service, one which would steer it in the direction Cronos believed it should be heading. Freed from accountability to Parliament and the Prime Minister, invisible to scrutiny.’
Gideon sat down again on the edge of the desk. He glanced at the monitors for a few seconds.
More quietly, he said: ‘It was arrogance in the extreme. Hubris. And we couldn’t permit it. Couldn’t allow the Service we’d purified and nurtured with such passion to become corrupted in such a flagrant manner, turned into one man’s megalomaniacal tool. So we raised arms against Cronos, our creator. The gods turned upon their father. We castrated him.’
Kendrick let out a guffaw, the sound startling in the enclosed space.
Without looking at him, Gideon said, ‘Your friend takes me literally. Of course that’s not exactly what happened. But we curbed Cronos’s ambitions, and with them his power, so yes, castration is an apt metaphor.’
He exhaled deeply.
‘The programme, or whatever it was that the four of us constituted, fell apart. We went our separate ways. I left the Service, as did Helen. Vale and Clay remained. And Vale took up the mantle, in his dogged way. He became the new Cronos, if you like, though a gentler, more low-key version. He began to recruit his own agents.’
A frown creased Gideon’s forehead.
‘All of this, the great disruption, the neutralisation of Cronos, happened in 1999. More than two decades after it all began. You would have been a boy then, Purkiss. Twenty-three or twenty-four. Vale couldn’t have recruited you at that time.’