The screaming was threaded through with other shouts, angry, authoritative ones.
‘Tell me where Rossiter is. Tell me so that I can find him, and stop him. Let that be your legacy. Let your people, in the FSB and in Russia itself, remember your name as, at the last, a heroic one.’
He angled his eyes and saw the boots, lots of them, advancing down the platform. He was aware that the shouting was being directed at him. Without taking his face from Saburova’s, he extended his arms as far as he could to the sides, his hand splayed to show they were empty.
The hold-all was beneath him, pressed against his chest.
She jerked, a sound emerging from her broken mouth that was part cough, part choke.
‘Do it, Yulia,’ Purkiss murmured. ‘Tell me.’
Her lips moved.
He listened.
‘Again.’
She repeated it. Her voice was a harsh rasp, barely more than a whisper. But the words she said were clear.
Hands gripped his arms and his collar and he was hauled upright. An officer in a flak jacket squatted and picked up the hold-all.
‘Careful with that,’ Purkiss said.
Another officer crouched beside Saburova, spoke into a mouthpiece, demanding medical assistance.
But Purkiss knew she was beyond that.
Twenty-six
Just as the dawn was delayed this far north, so the dusk arrived earlier. The day had been overcast, and the failing light merely deepened the existing gloom.
Rossiter climbed to the top of the broch again, as he’d done in the early hours of the morning. This time, the ground below was silent, not teeming with activity. The sea all around was restless, discontented. Even the circling gulls sounded troubled.
It was a serious setback. Rossiter was nothing if not honest with himself. And it would make next time that much more difficult.
But setbacks were just that. Obstacles to be overcome, or circumvented.
He’d watched a few of the news reports down below, in the modified caverns. A suspected terrorist incident had been thwarted at King’s Cross Station. Depending on how much information was allowed to leak out, over the next few days the incident would be upgraded to major catastrophe.
Saburova had called him at three ten in the afternoon to report that she’d collected the item, at the rendezvous point in Barnet, North London.
Half an hour later, she’d rung to confirm: the package was in place at King’s Cross.
And she was meeting Purkiss, together with the Russian who had apparently survived the attack last night.
At just after five, the intuition Rossiter had honed over the decades, the one every operative of his experience learned to cultivate, began to tell him something was amiss.
He called Saburova’s number.
And got a dead tone.
Less than five minutes later, his phone rang.
‘She’s been terminated. The item has been found and is in the process of being deactivated.’
And so it ended.
Rossiter said, without emotion: ‘What happened?’
‘Purkiss. I don’t know how, exactly, yet. But he took her down.’
‘Are we compromised?’
‘No. He had no opportunity to interrogate her. She was struck by a train. Dead before the medics arrived.’
Rossiter thought for a moment.
‘I’ll close up here,’ he said. ‘No point in taking chances.’
‘We’ll need a period of cooling off.’
‘Agreed.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I’m hardly going to tell you that.’ Rossiter ended the call.
By seven o’clock, preparations for the exodus were almost finalised. Rossiter considered striking out immediately. But he knew it would be better to wait until darkness had fallen completely.
He’d worked down below, co-ordinating his men — all six of them — and allowing himself a brief glance at the clock at six p.m. That was when the timer had been set to go off. The remainder of the caesium he’d obtained from the Iranian, the Locksmith, would have been seeded throughout the Underground system.
And London would have become a dead zone. If not physically, necessarily, then certainly psychologically and symbolically.
And the old enemy, Russia, would have been to blame.
Disappointment was an emotion Rossiter no longer experienced. He’d cauterised those particular nerve endings a long time ago. It was the only way to survive life.
From the broch, he watched the Eurocopter crew make their way to where the chopper squatted on a flat stretch of land, a hundred yards from the caverns. He would leave with the crew. The rest of the men would take the boat moored to the small jetty.
It was a pity, Rossiter reflected, that McCammon was no longer with him. He’d been useful, and shrewd. But he’d been cut down on the Merseyside docks along with the others, part of a ruse which had, it appeared, failed to work.
Still. One learned from one’s mistakes.
High above, the thin drone of an aircraft, presumably on its way to Scandinavia or across the Arctic, cut through the vast silence.
Saburova was a loss, too. She was on the opposite side, and yet on the same side as Rossiter. She, too, resented the way the great adversaries of the Cold War had become bit players on the world stage. And she, like Rossiter, wanted to see her organisation assume its rightful prominence in her country’s life once again.
They still had Mossberg, Rossiter thought. He would be useful. He was now in Teheran, being pumped for his nuclear expertise. In reality, what he would be giving the Iranians was disinformation, designed to impede their progress towards developing weaponry rather than speeding it up. Perhaps there was a way of working him into future plans.
Rossiter closed his eyes, inhaled deeply of the wild sea air.
It was time to get moving.
He climbed down the side of the broch, taking care in the gloom.
At the base, he glanced across to the southern edge of the islet.
And saw the figures closing in, silent and black.
Twenty-seven
The four men with Purkiss hadn’t given their names, nor had he offered his. They’d said nothing to him during the flight.
They were paratroopers, but he didn’t know from what division. They wore no insignia, no identifying marks. He recognised their weapons, though. L85A1 assault rifles.
Vale had come through.
When Purkiss had emerged into the hubbub of the station, the delays down below significant as the armed officers had tried to detain him, he’d headed for the exit, his phone already in his hand.
‘The bomb’s secured and Saburova is dead.’
A slight pause was all the relief Vale offered. ‘First class, John.’
‘I know where Rossiter is. I need you to procure military transport for me with full urgency. Plus some personnel. And Quentin.’
‘Yes.’
‘You need to do it yourself. Don’t involve the Service.’
Purkiss waited for an objection, or at least a question. But Vale said, ‘That should be within the bounds of possibility.’
By six o’clock, little more than an hour later, Purkiss was boarding the transport plane at an airfield in Hertfordshire, north of the city. The four men aboard gave him the once over before ignoring him.
He strapped the pack onto his back. He’d made night-time jumps as part of his Service training, but that was more than a decade ago and he hadn’t used the skill since. He hoped it was like riding a bicycle. Once learned, never forgotten.
A spare assault rifle had been provided for him. He declined it. In a shoulder holster he carried the SIG P226 and a spare magazine.