Vale applied himself to his cigarette. Through the smoke, he said, ‘I couldn’t be certain, right up until now, that Gideon wasn’t the instigator of all this. That it wasn’t him resurrecting Cronos’s plans.’
‘So that’s true, what Gideon said? About Cronos, and the four gods, as he called you?’
Vale nodded. ‘Rebecca sent me a message not long ago, informing me that Gideon told you all of that. Yes, it’s true. And with Gideon now above suspicion, and me as well, it means he was right. Clay is the man pulling the strings.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘Yes.’
The answer startled Purkiss.
Vale exhaled smoke, turning it into a sigh. ‘And that’s the problem. We need to bring him down, as a matter of urgency. But he’s in Moscow.’
Purkiss waited for more.
‘He goes by the name of Kyrill Grabasov. You’ve heard of him?’
Purkiss searched his memory. ‘No.’
‘You perhaps don’t read the financial papers. Grabasov is the CEO of Rosvolgabank. One of the six largest financial institutions in Russia.’
‘So he’s got money,’ said Purkiss. ‘Resources. It makes him harder to get at. It doesn’t make him invulnerable.’
‘It’s infinitely more complicated than that,’ Vale said heavily. ‘Think about it, John. Why might a former SIS asset reappear in the guise of a Russian citizen, in a senior position in the Moscow elite, with access to the highest levels of government?’
The answer came to Purkiss like a shot of some stimulant drug.
‘Because he isn’t a former asset,’ he said.
‘Precisely.’ Vale sat down again for the first time, as if pressed down by an invisible hand. ‘Kyrill Grabasov — Oliver Clay — is the highest-placed mole the British Secret Service has ever run within Russia.’
‘His legend was built up with painstaking care over almost a decade. It was an operation originally planned during the Cold War, but it never came to fruition because of the difficulties of access to the Soviet Union. Then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the grip began to tighten once more, SIS decided to revisit the idea.’
Vale had begun to wander the room, smoking as he walked. The rest of them, Purkiss and Rebecca and Kendrick, remained standing. Purkiss noticed that Kendrick had his eyes closed, like an unused computer which had entered sleep mode.
‘I didn’t learn all of this until a year or two ago,’ said vale. ‘Until then, I had no idea of Clay’s whereabouts. Now I understand why I had such difficulty tracking him down, and why Gideon did, too.’
He turned back from the window.
‘The intelligence Clay provides is apparently first class. From it, SIS has been able to put together a picture of the Russian economic infrastructure, its strength and its weaknesses, which is richer than anyone else’s, even the CIA’s. The advantages to Britain are immeasurable. In addition, as I mentioned, Clay has the ear of senior Kremlin apparatchiks, up to and including, it’s rumoured, the President himself. He’s been able to supply details about power relations within the government, the various factions and camps which always develop in such bodies, of the kind we’d only ever get from senior defectors back in the Cold War days.’
Vale massaged the knuckles of his cigarette hand with the other. The arthritis in his fingers was becoming pronounced, Purkiss noticed.
‘So you see our difficulty, John. The man we need to bring down in order to save our own lives, and in order to prevent SIS from becoming the kind of renegade outfit that sets itself up almost as a private government, is a man who’s regarded as untouchable by SIS itself.’
The silence that followed was broken by Kendrick, who shuffled his feet impatiently. He went to the bedside table and drank water directly from the bottle, noisily and sloppily.
Purkiss said, ‘Are there others involved, Quentin? Other targets, apart from you and me? And presumably Rebecca, by association?’
‘No.’
Had there been the slightest flicker in Vale’s eyes, the merest hint of hesitation, before he’d answered?
‘So what’s the story with Delatour?’ said Purkiss. ‘You didn’t suspect him?’
For the first time, annoyance showed on Vale’s furrowed face. ‘No. And it rankles. But it just shows how devious Clay can be. He had one of his own people working for me for years. I became suspicious, of course, when Rebecca informed me that he’d approached you offering to help. But I told her to watch him, and report back any concerns to me.’
‘He played us well,’ said Purkiss. ‘Something I don’t understand, though. How did you come to realise in the first place that you were being targeted?’
‘Tell tale signs,’ said Vale. ‘Nothing obvious, nothing concrete. But it was the gradual accumulation of small details. A wrong number called to my phone. Evidence of surveillance in the street. An attempt by a hacker to breach the security safeguards on my computer. Little things. You develop a sixth sense, John. You know that.’
‘Did you ever suspect me?’ Purkiss said evenly.
‘No.’ Vale’s answer was neither hesitant, nor too quick.
He took another turn round the room. ‘The reason I decided on this rendezvous, John, is that things have moved on. Saul Gideon is dead. Clay knows we’re on to him. We’re past the stage of deceit, of clandestine activity. Of pretending. Our cold war has heated up. And we need to find a solution together.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Purkiss.
Vale turned his head. ‘Say again?’
‘About our being past the stage where deceit might be useful. We still have a trump card.’ Purkiss paused. ‘Clay still believes you’re dead. We have the advantage of surprise.’
He told Vale what he had in mind.
Twenty-four
Grabasov seldom got home before ten p.m.. Often it was after midnight. On some nights, he didn’t go home at all, but slept in a small apartment annexed to his office.
Tonight, he made it back at eleven.
His wife, Dominika, was usually still awake, but on this occasion he found her in their bed in the darkness, dead to the world. Grabasov was relieved. When his day had been taken up with business matters, he enjoyed talking with her over a glass of wine, finding it cathartic. But when the major events of the day involved his other life, his secret one, he needed to be alone.
On such nights, he was tempted to sleep over in the annexe. But he was careful not to overdo his stays there. Dominika probably already suspected him of infidelity: it came with the territory of being a wealthy, powerful businessman. But too many nights away from home would suggest that he’d found himself a soulmate, rather than simply a mistress. Dominika might decide she’d had enough, and demand a divorce.
And she was an essential part of his cover.
In his previous life, as Oliver Clay, Grabasov had been moderately promiscuous. It had always amused him that his unprepossessing appearance, his excess weight and his boorishness and his puerile humour, had been no barriers to female interest in him, and he’d indulged his opportunities as and when the fancy took him. But ever since he’d begun his new existence — he couldn’t call it by the trivialising name of a mission — he’d been a model of restraint. There’d been no affairs, relatively little boozing by Russian standards, and strictly no corruption in the form of monetary malfeasance.
His position was simply too precious, too precarious, to risk.
He cleaned his teeth in the marbled bathroom. The sumptuousness of the fittings, of the entire house, left him indifferent. These trappings were for show, and for Dominika. Grabasov was no sybarite.