Gravity had pulled Asher’s upper lip back in a snarl. His eyes rolled, seeking the sky, the wall, Purkiss’s own face.
‘I’ll fabricate a car crash,’ said Purkiss. ‘You were killed. I was injured. It’s foggy up here. Nobody will ever be able to prove anything different. You’ve read about me. You know far more about me than I’ll ever know bout you. You know what lengths I’m reputed to go to. So — and I’ll ask this just once — who are you?’
The exposed teeth clamped together, and Purkiss thought the man was going to swear at him, or plead with him, or both.
Asher hissed: ‘I’m CIA.’
Eight
Asher stared straight though the windscreen. His jaw worked intermittently, as though he was tasting something. Purkiss had noticed the thin smear of blood at one corner of his mouth, and thought the man had bitten his tongue at some point.
He hadn’t soiled himself. That was to his credit.
Purkiss sat back against the passenger door, facing Asher. He didn’t think the man would risk a sudden move.
A solitary lorry had rumbled past, a couple of minutes earlier. It had slowed for the briefest instant before its driver seemed to decide that the Mercedes didn’t look like it had crashed, or broken down.
Other than that, they were alone.
‘The Company is involved because of the missing physicist,’ Asher said. ‘Mossberg.’
He hadn’t abandoned the accent entirely, but it had slipped a little, so that the American rhotic Rs were evident, the vowels a little longer than before. His tone was matter-of-fact, without a trace of humiliation.
That was another point in his favour.
Purkiss waited.
‘The exchange, Rossiter for Mossberg, was brokered by Washington,’ said Asher. ‘Your Prime Minister made the final decision, of course. But he did so after consultation with the President. And the President persuaded him that Mossberg was of high enough value to both of us, the US and Great Britain, that it was worth losing Rossiter in return.’
When he said no more, Purkiss asked, ‘What’s so important about Mossberg?’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Asher.
Purkiss sighed inwardly.
Asher turned his head to look at Purkiss.
‘No. I mean, I genuinely can’t. Because I don’t know.’
Purkiss watched his eyes. Looked for tell-tale signs in the rest of the face, a twitch or a tightening. Saw no minor movements of the hands indicating a suppressed attempt to cover up the mouth after a lie.
He thought Asher was telling the truth.
‘The Company persuaded MI6 to let them in on this investigation,’ Asher continued. ‘Hence my presence here. Waring-Jones assumed you’d be suspicious if you knew I was CIA, so a legend was quickly created for me that established me as an MI6 operative. I guess it wasn’t convincing enough.’
‘The legend was fine,’ said Purkiss. ‘As I said, it was your use of idiom that tipped me off.’
For the first time he saw a reaction, a minute narrowing of the eyes. He recognised the clench of shame in Asher’s face.
‘So what now?’ said Asher.
Purkiss nodded through the windscreen. ‘Get going.’
Asher looked at him.
‘To the site of the exchange,’ said Purkiss. ‘We’re here now. We may as well finish what we came here to do.’
The road, the rocky slopes and scatters of woodland, became ever more desolate as they progressed.
After a full five minutes of silence, Purkiss said, ‘What’s your take on Mossberg? Why’s he so valuable?’
‘I told you. I don’t know.’
‘I didn’t ask if you knew. I want your opinion.’
Asher drew deeply though his nose, seeming to relax a little. ‘The obvious answer is that he’s a professor of physics. He’ll have knowledge of Moscow’s nuclear facilities and programmes.’
‘Doesn’t make sense,’ Purkiss said. ‘The Russians wouldn’t hand him over if he had any really useful information for us.’
‘Right.’ Asher paused. ‘You know anything about Mossberg’s background?’
‘No. Waring-Jones didn’t see fit to tell me.’
‘Mossberg was serving a fifteen-year prison sentence in Moscow for falsifying scientific data. He fiddled the results of a research study he was conducting into reactor safety standards. His conclusions were that many Russian nuclear reactors were at an unacceptably high risk of melting down. It turned out his research had proven no such thing. He was being overly cautious.’
‘Scientific fraud isn’t a criminal offence,’ Purkiss said. ‘Even in Russia.’
‘But his findings caused Moscow to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on upgrading their reactors,’ said Asher. ‘When they discovered the money had been wasted, the Russians prosecuted Mossberg for defrauding the public purse. Something like that.’
Purkiss took a few moments to absorb it.
‘And you know all this how?’ he said.
Asher had regained some of his confidence. ‘The Kremlin assumed at first that Mossberg was a CIA plant. He’d travelled to the US many times, and he had contacts in the scientific community over there. How exactly he’d pose a threat to Russian security by improving their nuclear safety standards is hard to work out. But if they hadn’t picked up his fraud before completing the upgrades of the reactors, the cost would have run to billions of dollars. So I guess Moscow viewed Mossberg as a possible economic saboteur. Anyhow. The Kremlin accused Washington of being behind Mossberg’s fraud. Washington denied it, of course. There was no evidence to link Mossberg to either the CIA or MI6, and in the end the Russians had to just drop it. But they jailed Mossberg for fifteen years. He was three years into his sentence when the exchange was proposed.’
‘Who proposed it?’ said Purkiss.
‘We did. Washington. And, like I say, we persuaded your government to hand over Rossiter in return.’
Purkiss ran through it in his mind, trying to establish if it added up. ‘Perhaps Mossberg really was CIA. And this is a way of bringing him back.’
‘Yeah,’ said Asher. ‘It’s a possibility. It’ll certainly convince the Russians that they were right all along. Why else would we be so eager to get our hands on a disgraced former academic who’s rotting in a Moscow cell?’
‘But you don’t believe that.’
Asher tilted his head. ‘Even if Mossberg was one of our assets, it still doesn’t explain why we’d be willing to sacrifice somebody like Rossiter to get the guy back.’
Purkiss looked out the window, at the thickening layers of pine forest. ‘Unless Mossberg knows something the Russians don’t know he knows,’ he said. ‘Unless there’s some crucial piece of intelligence we need to get hold of, and the Russians are unaware he has it.’
‘That’s my thinking,’ Asher said. ‘It’s plausible, at least.’
The security cordon around the site was as tight as if a live bomb had been discovered there and not yet disarmed. As soon as the Mercedes came within half a mile of the area, a line of military personnel appeared as if from nowhere, melting out of the trees, and halted the car.
Credentials presented and approved, Purkiss and Asher were escorted the rest of the way until they were directed to pull over near a rough gravel track. A small army of forensic technicians swarmed over some kind of clearing at the end.
Stepping carefully so as not to interrupt the forensics people, the two men picked their way across the ground.