He thought about Asher. Wondered if he was fleeing the man, or abandoning him to an attack.
Shouts on the pavement behind Purkiss almost caused him to turn, but he kept going, because to turn would be to slow them both down, and he sensed the pursuers gaining ground.
‘Hey.’
The man stepped in front of Purkiss from nowhere, a large man, beefy rather than honed. Purkiss tried to side step but his momentum was too great and he cannoned into the large belly.
‘What you doing, mate?’
He smelled beer on the man’s breath, had a vague impression of a belligerent, twisted mouth. The woman was several paces ahead and Purkiss realised it appeared as if he was chasing her. This man was her knight in shining armour, his bravado fuelled by alcohol.
Purkiss dropped the man with a moderately forceful sword hand to the side of the throat, hard enough to hurt and to stun the carotid plexus but insufficient to cause any lasting damage. As he went down, the fat man flailed blindly and a ham-like fist caught Purkiss in the belly.
He’d tensed his abdominal muscles at the last moment but the pain flared, dull and nauseating, and his stride faltered.
The woman was now ten paces in front, the back of her head visible between those of the interposed crowd. People were milling about in confusion, vaguely aware that some kind of commotion had started up.
Purkiss understood that he’d lost ground, and that whoever was behind him would be upon him at any moment.
He made his decision, and turned.
The first man bore down, startlingly quickly, closing in with his empty hands ready. Purkiss jabbed the stiffened fingers of his right hand upwards and under the man’s breastbone, pivoting from the hip for maximum force. The man jackknifed and Purkiss brought his fist down on the back of the man’s neck, stepping back to allow him to hit the pavement hard.
A woman screamed, shrill and primal.
A second man was struggling with the crowd, his face peering at Purkiss.
Purkiss turned and continued after the woman. There was no point hanging around.
She stepped out from a doorway and was at Purkiss’s side and walking swiftly, keeping close.
‘What happened?’ she said, not looking at him.
‘Two men, at least,’ he said. ‘I put one of them down.’
‘They are FSB.’
Without warning she took his arm and tugged him down a side alley. It was too narrow for them to move abreast. At the far end, it opened into a bright street, blaring with music.
They kept going, crossing the road and heading down a second alley, Purkiss following her lead, aware that they were heading towards the river.
The embankment sloped to the water on the other side of its iron railing. The crowds were thinner here, less raucous. Purkiss and the woman had slowed to a walk, and nobody gave them a glance.
At a bench on a stretch of grass near the railing, she stopped. She knelt on the bench with her back to the river. Purkiss understood: she was keeping the area behind them in view. He sat beside her, facing the riverside.
‘I am Yulia Saburova,’ she said without preamble. ‘FSB.’
Purkiss waited, every muscle taut and primed.
‘I am based here at the Embassy.’ Her voice was flat, declaratory. ‘You were observed arriving at London City Airport this evening, and instructions were issued to place you under surveillance. If you detected us, and attempted to evade us, we were to close in and apprehend you. As you have discovered.’
When she fell silent, Purkiss said, ‘So why are we here now?’
‘You are looking for the fugitive, Rossiter. Apprehending you would be a disastrous action on our part. You have a better chance of locating Rossiter than we do. To remove you from the field, even temporarily, would be to waste precious time.’
Purkiss watched the strolling couples on the embankment, the joggers, the dog walkers.
‘You’re saying you’re disobeying orders?’ he said. ‘Helping me evade capture by your own people?’
‘Yes.’ For the first time, her tone of neutral confidence wavered a fraction. ‘I argued with my head of station that you should not be taken into custody. He disagreed, telling me the orders had come from the President himself. I chose to follow my own judgement. In the interests of my country’s security.’
Again there was a slight pause, as if the implications of what she’d said were beginning to sink in. Purkiss glanced at her. Her hair was short and dark, her cheekbones sharp above a wide mouth. She was perhaps thirty, or a little older.
‘How did you find me?’ said Purkiss.
‘My unit at the Embassy coordinates FSB surveillance activity here in London. It was a simple matter to locate the vehicle which followed you, and track it remotely. I patched into the communications system and learned the details of the car you were in. I located you, and the surveillance car, with relative ease. When it became clear you were taking evasive action, I intervened. Perhaps you would have succeeded in escaping. Perhaps not. I decided not to take the chance. It was I who obstructed the traffic, with my own car, in order to get you out.’
Watching her eyes, Purkiss said: ‘The Embassy’s in Kensington Palace Gardens. Miles away from the airport. You couldn’t have got there in time.’
She didn’t hesitate, didn’t betray anything in her eyes or her posture or her voice that might suggest she’d been caught out in a lie. ‘I was not at the Embassy. We have offices further east, too. In St Paul’s. From there, the distance was not so great.’
Purkiss let the silence hang, like a drop of water swelling on the tip of a leaf before plunging.
‘A serving FSB officer, in a good post abroad, defies the orders of not only her head of station but also the President himself, to help a foreign agent evade capture by her own side.’
He stood up. Saw her tense on the bench.
‘Forgive for pointing out that it stretches plausibility beyond breaking point.’
‘Sit down, Mr Purkiss.’ There was steel in her voice, though she spoke quietly.
‘Or else?’ He didn’t move. ‘What, you’ll shoot me? There’s a contradiction there which you’ll appreciate, I’m sure.’
‘You believe this is a ploy,’ she said coolly. ‘That this is some orchestrated FSB plan to gain your trust, and thereby to allow us to use you to find Rossiter.’ She tilted her head. ‘It’s the way I would have run it, had I been in charge. But I am not.’
‘It doesn’t matter, in any case,’ Purkiss said. ‘I have no reason, or desire, to work with the FSB on this.’
Somewhere, nearby, her colleagues would be waiting for a signal from her. Waiting for the indication that the plan had failed, and they were to move in and take Purkiss down after all. He let his gaze slip through two hundred and seventy degrees, back and forth. Felt his heart rate begin to rise, in preparation for flight.
She stood up. He waited for her to put her hand inside her jacket, take hold of the gun.
She said, ‘I can help you.’
‘I already told you, I don’t need —’
‘I have the name for a contact of Rossiter’s,’ she said. ‘Within MI6.’
Thirteen
A wind had risen from the river and Purkiss turned his collar up. They were walking along the stone path that ran along the bank, leaving the Docklands behind and heading towards the heart of the city. Every jogger that slipped past them, every strolling couple, represented a momentary threat.
‘Again,’ Purkiss said.
The woman, Saburova, if that was her real name, had shown him the photo on her phone. It was a standard Service personnel file mug shot. Purkiss didn’t recognise the face: a white man of perhaps fifty-five, with level black eyes and cropped-back hair and sharp grooves on either side of his mouth.