As if there’d been no break in their conversation back in Waring-Jones’s office, Asher said: ‘I’m not here to keep an eye on you. If that’s what you think.’
He pulled away through the gates of the airfield and turned onto a desolate grey road.
Purkiss said, ‘Of course you are. Which is rather ironic.’
He saw Asher tip his head in acknowledgement. Purkiss’s job was to bring rogue elements of SIS to heel. This was a turnaround.
‘Nonetheless,’ Asher said. ‘I’m aware — and Waring-Jones is aware — that if I tread on your toes too much, I’ll lose whatever cooperation you’re willing to give me. That isn’t in our interests. So I’ll try to be helpful.’
On the flight up, Purkiss had used his phone to read the dossier Vale had emailed him. He’d requested it when he and Vale were alone in the room after the others had left.
‘He seems above board, John,’ Vale had said, referring to Asher. ‘But I’ll send you what I can find about him.’
The dossier gave a potted biography of Paul Asher. Aged thirty-seven, unmarried, he’d been with SIS twelve years. Cryptography was an especial strength of his. And, as Waring-Jones had said, Asher had an excellent track record in the Russian arena. He’d done some good work last year during the Crimean invasion, sending back detailed intelligence about the various factions within Ukraine and their relationships with each other and with Moscow.
Purkiss read the dossier twice. By the end, he still didn’t grasp why Asher had been chosen to accompany him. He understood that Waring-Jones would want one of his own people to be involved. But why Asher, in particular?
A ground fog blurred the road ahead into opaque greyness, causing the automatic headlights of the Mercedes to flick on. The tarmac was cracked and potholed, testing the car’s suspension.
Purkiss watched Asher’s impassive profile.
He said, ‘So what’s your story, Asher?’
The corner of the man’s mouth twitched in something approximating a smile. ‘I suspect you’ve already brought yourself up to speed.’
‘I mean, what do you get out of this? Your work for the Service.’
Everybody who stayed with SIS for more than a few years was driven, in some manner. Plenty of people signed up each year, seduced by the James Bond notion of a life of intrigue and glamour. But those who stayed the course usually did so because they were working off some neurosis or other. They were either chasing some distant goal, or running away from a demon of some kind.
Asher seemed taken aback by the question. ‘I’m good at what I do. I discovered that along the way. That’s what’s kept me going.’
Purkiss understood that. He thought it probably applied to a lot of people, in various fields of endeavour. You drifted into a random career, and it ended up teaching you things about yourself you’d never considered before.
‘What was your entry point?’ Purkiss asked. He meant: how were you recruited?
‘I saw an ad.’ There was a shrug in Asher’s tone. ‘It was late 2002, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. MI6 was actively touting for staff. I guess you could say I wandered in off the sidewalk.’
The car’s engine was well-tuned, almost silent. The wheels hissed on the road surface.
Purkiss listened, hard. Because there’d been two things of note there.
No; three.
He replayed the man’s words in his head, before time could distort the memory.
Watching Asher, he said, ‘Have you ever thought about jumping ship? To Big Sister?’
Big Sister was slang for MI5, or the Security Service. It was better funded and employed more personnel than SIS, the foreign intelligence service, hence the nickname.
‘No.’
There’d been a pause there.
A hesitation which had been driven not by consideration, but by incomprehension.
Purkiss said, ‘You live in the States at all? Work there?’
‘You’ve read my dossier.’ Asher sounded exasperated. ‘You know I haven’t.’
The road ahead curved gently to the left, around a rocky crag. No oncoming headlights broke the gloom. No lamps revealed themselves in Purkiss’s wing mirror.
He shouted: ‘There. There,’ and jabbed a finger diagonally, aiming through the windscreen at a point slightly to Asher’s right.
Asher turned his head instinctively, away from Purkiss.
Purkiss lunged, jabbing the stiffened fingers of his right hand at the man’s throat, just below the jawline, targeting the carotid artery. At the same time he twisted his torso and brought his left arm across his body and gripped the steering wheel, steadying it.
Asher reacted, quickly, but not quickly enough, bringing up his left shoulder too late to offset the force of Purkiss’s strike. His head jerked sideways and Purkiss felt the steering wheel nearly torn from his grasp.
The car veered rightwards, the wheels scrabbling on the gravel which bordered the grassy verge alongside the road. The verge ended after a few feet in a low stone wall. Purkiss hauled the wheel anti-clockwise just in time to pull the front bumper away from the wall, the gravel spraying against the solidly piled stones.
The Mercedes stalled with a jolt, the momentum snapping Purkiss’s chest hard against the safety belt. He’d already extended his legs into the footwell to steady himself.
He wrenched the handbrake up and released Asher’s seatbelt and then his own and leaned into the man, ready to deal with a bluff. But Asher slumped against the door, his face pallid, his eyes half closed.
Purkiss leant across him and opened the door and heaved him out onto the verge.
Beyond the wall, the ground dropped at a sixty-degree angle into the mist.
The slope was scrubby and pocked with rock outcroppings. It wasn’t quite a ravine, Purkiss reckoned, but when he tossed a pebble into the murk he heard the clicks of its progress becoming ever more faint.
He lowered Asher backwards over the wall so that his waist was balanced on the top. The centre of gravity was just far enough beyond the wall that if the man struggled, or tried a manoeuvre with his legs, he’d tip himself all the way over.
Before dragging him the few feet to the wall, Purkiss had searched him. There’d been a tiny .22 pistol, flat as a saucer, strapped to Asher’s right ankle beneath his sock. Purkiss pocketed it.
He leaned across Asher’s waist, pinning him to the top of the wall, and reached down and knuckled his breastbone hard.
The arms flailed, vaguely at first, then in a more focused effort to push away whatever was causing the pain in the front of his chest. Purkiss saw the head lift, the reddened, vein-engorged face try to bend towards him.
‘A fifty-foot drop,’ Purkiss said. ‘At least. Plenty of rocks on the way down. If you don’t break your neck, you’ll almost certainly break one or more limbs. And you’ll be stuck down there, until I make my way down and find you.’
The eyes peered wildly up at him, the features grotesquely distorted by gravity. The man’s tie flopped over his mouth and he spat it away.
‘You’re not SIS,’ Purkiss continued. ‘Nobody in the Service for twelve years refers to it as MI6. You had no idea what I meant by Big Sister. And you’re not even British. Your accent’s first-rate, but your idiom is off. You said sidewalk. And I guess. You’re American.’
He felt the torso writhe beneath him. He eased off, allowing the squirming movements to tip the body a few millimetres further over the edge.
‘Not a good idea,’ Purkiss said. ‘You need to be clear on this, Asher. If you try to bluff, or stonewall me, I will let you fall. I want Rossiter. Want to find him more than anything else I’ve wanted in a long time. I need to find him quickly. I haven’t time to mess about.’