He’d been in Athens, still, basing himself in a hotel room in the city centre, and it had taken him a matter of three hours to assemble the necessary equipment. He had an Islamic Caliphate contact in the city, who procured him the chemical components in short order. The rest of the material had been purchased from a department store.
He’d walked the Metro line from station to station, above ground, nine hours ago. And he’d had everything in place by the time the first trains started running at five thirty that morning.
Delatour looked at the window as the train plunged into the tunnel. In its reflection, he could see the seat backing on to his. A teenaged boy, earbuds plugged in and head hunched over his mobile device, sat beside an elderly woman who appeared asleep.
A man barged past Delatour’s knees and shoved himself into the seat next to him, pushing the briefcase to the far side against the wall of the carriage.
As Delatour turned his head, he felt the ratcheting of something around his left wrist. He glanced down and saw a plastic handcuff encircling the soft gap between the bones of his forearm and the base of his hand. The cuff was so tight that the skin bulged around it.
On Purkiss’s lap, his own right wrist was clamped by the matching handcuff.
‘He’ll bring backup, of course,’ Vale had said.
‘No he won’t.’
And Purkiss had explained.
Rebecca had found the plastic cuffs at an Army surplus store.
Purkiss had been sitting in the last-but-one carriage, and had seen Delatour on the platform as the train had pulled in. He was on time, then. If he hadn’t been there, Purkiss would have got off at the next station and watched the end carriages of the next two trains.
The middle-aged couple on the seat opposite hadn’t noticed a thing. Purkiss murmured in Delatour’s ear: ‘We get off at the next station. If you resist, I’ll kill you here, unlock the cuffs, and disappear.’
Delatour said, barely moving his lips, and so quietly Purkiss had to strain to hear him, ‘There’s a bomb in the briefcase.’
Purkiss didn’t look at it, but he became intensely aware of the press of the case against his side.
‘It’s on a timer,’ said Delatour. ‘I won’t tell you when it’s set for. But it’s an incendiary device. The blast will blow out the windows, both the external ones and the connecting ones between the carriages. The flame will be funnelled down the tunnel and engulf both the carriages down the line and the upcoming platform. The casualty count will be high. Scores of people, at least. Probably hundreds.’
Purkiss thought rapidly.
Back in the hotel room, when they’d been considering strategies, Vale had said: ‘It’s a matter of pride with Clay. He’ll pull a trick at the end. He won’t be thinking about the repercussions. It’ll rankle that we’ve outsmarted him. He’ll do whatever he needs to defeat us.’
A matter of pride…
The phrase had stayed with Purkiss. And it had given him the solution.
He said, matching Delatour’s almost inaudible murmur: ‘Then we’ll all go out together. But you’re going out, Delatour. That’s all I care about.’
He watched the side of Delatour’s face, the smooth expanse at the temple where the hairline had receded.
The skin was pale and matte, with no sheen of sweat.
The briefcase pressed heavily against Purkiss’s side. He fancied he could feel it move with an imagined ticking within it, which was absurd.
The train pulled into the next station with a squeal of brakes and juddered to a stop. Purkiss heard the doors slide open, but didn’t look at the mix of people pouring off and stepping on the replace them.
With his eyes still forward, Delatour said: ‘Purkiss. I know this is brinkmanship. But the bomb will go off. You have the option of disembarking, or not. Your choice.’
‘No. You’re the one with options, Delatour.’ Purkiss watched the couple opposite. Still, neither of them seemed to have taken an interest. Purkiss had cast his jacket over the armrest between his seat and Delatour’s, covering their forearms where the cuffs joined them. ‘You tell me how to disable the device, or you die with me.’
He reached awkwardly with his left hand and found the handle of the briefcase and pulled it out from where it was wedged at his side and laid it across his lap. The weight wasn’t excessive.
Two hasps closed it. Purkiss tried sliding the release buttons with his thumb. The case was locked.
It was a cheap piece of luggage, and the hasps could be prised open with relative ease. But to do so might be to trigger whatever was inside.
With his left hand Purkiss reached inside a pocket of the jacket draped over the armrest and extracted his Swiss Army knife, just as he had done on the piazza in Rome with the earlier briefcase, the one he’d taken from Billson. It seemed an aeon ago.
Keeping the knife concealed between his body and the briefcase, Purkiss opened it and eased the blade behind one of the hasps.
He glanced at the side of Delatour’s face once more.
Still no gleam of perspiration at the temple.
The man was lying.
Purkiss slipped the knife under his right arm and touched the tip against the crook of Delatour’s elbow, pressing hard enough to make its pressure felt.
‘There’s no bomb in this case,’ Purkiss murmured. ‘Either you admit it, or I’ll open up your brachial artery. It won’t be a quick death, but you’ll bleed out before you can leave the train. It’ll be a mess, but I’ll get out of these cuffs and disappear before anyone can stop me.’
The man was lying, but he had some plan in motion. Purkiss was certain of it.
Delatour’s face remained impassive. There was no sweat, still, no tiny tic at the corner of the eye or the mouth.
Purkiss leaned forward, peering across Delatour, seeking out his right hand. It was hidden by his side.
With a sharp sideways snap of his neck, Purkiss rammed his head into Delatour’s face.
The man’s head rocked back, his nose giving way beneath the force of Purkiss’s skull. Across from them the woman gave a stunned gasp. Purkiss lunged across Delatour with his right hand, the one holding the knife, and jammed the blade into Delatour’s own right forearm.
He saw the fingers open involuntarily as the knife went in, saw the tiny round flat object in Delatour’s palm, with its central red button.
Purkiss gouged the blade into the arm, twisting and ripping, needing to hurt rather than to kill. The blade had been slowed by the sleeve overlying the arm but the material was reddening rapidly.
The woman across began to scream, and her husband let out a yell.
Purkiss jerked the knife upward and outward, dragging the arm with it, and saw the object drop from Delatour’s palm and skitter away down the aisle of the carriage.
Purkiss pulled the knife free from Delatour’s arm and jammed it into his throat, beside the windpipe where the carotid pulse was now a pounding, visible thing.
The screams from the passengers opposite drowned out the gurgling hiss from Delatour’s own throat. The blood, bright and fresh and arterial, spurted onto Purkiss, catching the side of the face before he could avert his head entirely.
He left the knife where it was, protruding from Delatour’s thrashing neck, and dropped his hand into his trouser pocket and found the tiny key and fitted it into the plastic cuff and freed himself.
Delatour’s flailing hands were at his throat, grabbing at the knife and jerking it out, but Purkiss didn’t wait to observe.
He shoved out into the aisle, taking the briefcase with him, his face and neck and chest daubed with blood. The screams reached a raging pitch, and someone pulled the emergency cord because the brakes set up their own screech.