It was a blow designed for use from the side or the front and instinct made her turn slightly and bring her shoulder up so that his knife-hand caught the trapezius muscle between her neck and shoulder. She pivoted, jabbing an elbow into his abdomen, but he tightened in time, simultaneously getting an arm across her throat and bringing his other fist in a hammerblow against her forehead. She sagged, and he supported her.
A group of passersby turned to stare and Purkiss said, ‘Whoops. One too many,’ and hoisted her across his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. Down the alley and behind the block of flats was his rental car in a pool of darkness. He opened the boot and lowered her into it. Her pulse was there, weak but steady, and she was breathing normally. With a roll of duct tape he bound her wrists and ankles. He left her mouth unsealed. She was a professional; she’d know that calling out wouldn’t work.
Purkiss drove southwest, heading vaguely in the direction of the megaliths he’d visited a couple of days earlier, where the roads were rough and potholed and rocky scrubland predominated. When it felt isolated enough he pulled the car in and opened the boot. Cass glared up at him, dishevelled, her face streaked with sweat.
He hauled her out and tore free the tape around her ankles, then pushed her stumbling down a slope to a stone wall on the edge of a field. At the wall he turned her to face him. The implications of the remote setting were clear.
‘What are you doing?’ she said. Her voice was surprisingly steady.
‘Silverman’s working with Motruk,’ Purkiss said. ‘I saw them in a restaurant in Mdina this afternoon. Right before I was ambushed by two armed Sicilians.’
‘What did you —’ It came out quickly. She had diplomatic responsibilities, Purkiss supposed. He shook his head.
‘They’ll live. But Motruk’s clearly involved with them. He met a group of them at the Freeport Terminal before he went to Mdina.’ He began to roll his sleeves up. ‘Neither you nor Silverman seemed interested when I mentioned Motruk was in Malta. You didn’t seem all that surprised, either. I thought perhaps that was because you’d already spotted him. But you’ve got no surveillance on him. And then I catch Silverman breaking bread with the man.’
She stared at his eyes. There was calculation going on there. Was she planning a move of some kind? With her hands taped together behind her? Purkiss thought perhaps she was considering what to tell him.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘But not in the way you think. Silverman did go to meet Motruk, and I knew about it. I’ve met Motruk. And he is dealing with the Sicilians.’
‘But?’
‘But he’s one of ours. Motruk is an SIS agent.’
THREE
‘Have you heard of the kaw kaw?’
Cass was rubbing the circulation back into her chafed wrists, flexing her fingers. On the road above them a car slowed for a moment, then drove on.
Purkiss shook his head.
‘Local legend. The kaw kaw,’ she said, ‘takes different forms according to different versions of the story. Some say it’s a grey, slug-like creature, others a giant that strides across Malta and the other islands in the archipelago. Either way, it has the ability to detect the presence of guilt wherever it goes, and to force its way into the houses of the guilty.’
‘Your point being?’
‘That’s the role you’re stuck in. You don’t work for the Service any more, and I don’t know what you do these days — my research hasn’t been able to find that out — but you’re trapped in the Service mindset. You smell guilt where it doesn’t exist, and you can’t leave it alone.’
Purkiss didn’t need this. He wanted to know about the Sicilians.
Cass went on: ‘You did what any responsible former agent should have. You informed us after you’d spotted Motruk. But that’s where your involvement should have ended. There was no call for you to go surveilling him, to blunder into a meeting between him and his SIS handler and jump to the wrong conclusions. Now you’ve ballsed things up for us. The Sicilians saw you taking an interest in Motruk and will now assume there’s something fishy about him.’
Purkiss leaned against the stone wall, folded his arms. He was missing something.
As if noticing, Cass said: ‘I’ll explain, not that you have any right to further information. The Service recruited Motruk three years ago, as a useful Mediterranean asset given his knowledge of the region and its denizens. For the last eight months he’s been here in Malta under my and Leon Silverman’s authority, forging links with Sicilians from the Andreotti family. Heard of it? Yes. The Sicilians use many different routes to launder their money these days. Most of it’s done electronically, but they like to hang on to more traditional ways. One such channel is through Malta. Motruk’s posing as the broker. He takes charge of large cash shipments from Sicily and swaps them for clean money, supplied by our government as well as Italy’s.’
‘So why haven’t you grabbed the Sicilians yet?’
‘We’re waiting for the big one. I said Motruk exchanges large cash sums. They’re actually relatively small in comparison to the haul that he reports is coming in next month. If we can catch Andreotti’s men with their fingerprints on that one, it’ll make any prosecution worthwhile.’
Something didn’t add up. Purkiss said, ‘But the Sicilians who jumped me didn’t follow us from Marsaxlokk. I wasn’t tagged. I’m certain of it. Which means they were in Mdina already, and watching the restaurant where Motruk met Silverman. So they already suspect him of being involved with the Service.’
‘They know he is. It’s his cover story: he’s a Service agent who’s two-timing his employers. It makes him more useful to the Sicilians because he’s their man inside the enemy camp.’ She shrugged, wincing slightly. ‘Of course they’re naturally suspicious, so they ask him when he’s meeting his handler and put people in place to make sure he’s where he says he is. They’ve probably bugged the restaurant where he and Silverman met, which is why the two of them will have discussed nothing we don’t want the Sicilians to hear.’
‘Have you told Motruk about me?’
She held his gaze. ‘We had to. He needed to know about the Sicilians attacking you, so we told him everything. How you spotted him and informed us, then tagged him. He was impressed, said he’d no idea he was being surveilled.’ She exhaled, slowly, through pursed lips. ‘As I said, this has buggered things a bit. The Sicilians will want to know from Motruk who might be stalking him. He’ll have to profess ignorance, but it’s unlikely they’ll be entirely convinced. They’ll treat him with suspicion from now on.’
‘They’re not stupid. They’ll know he’s made enemies over the years. I could be anybody from his past, out to settle a score. If anything it bolsters his credentials with you.’
‘Nice try, Purkiss.’ She straightened. ‘Take me home. And for Christ’s sake back off. Don’t go anywhere near Motruk, or me, or Silverman. In fact, best of all, go back to London. Malta’s a small island and the Sicilians are everywhere. You’re marked.’
At the car Purkiss opened the door for her. He saw it coming an instant too late to avoid it entirely, the blow glancing off the side of his jaw and knocking him sideways, stumbling. He put his hand to his mouth, saw blood on his fingers.
She dropped into the seat and looked up at him. ‘Don’t you ever do anything like this to me again. Don’t you dare.’
Purkiss dropped Cass off outside the High Commission — she said she’d prefer he didn’t see where she lived, which he thought was fair enough — and took a winding drive northwards through Sliema and the resorts of St Julian, sifting his thoughts.