Ratcatcher - By Tim Stevens Page 0,12
shot as one of his people walked round administering coups de grace. Dobrynin, his second in command, raised a hand.
‘Yefimov.’
Venedikt walked across the wet tarmac to Dobrynin who stood and looked down at Yefimov: the driver of the first armoured van, Venedikt’s man on the inside, the one who had supplied the intelligence about quantities and timing and guard numbers and vehicle specifications which had enabled the robbery to be planned with such precision. Yefimov, who had deliberately stalled the van to allow the trap to be sprung rather than taking the evasive action expected of the driver of a cash transporter. He’d been hit by a blast from one of the guards’ shotguns, his lower abdomen a swamp beneath his clutching hands.
Venedikt squatted beside him, gripped his elbow.
‘Pyotr Mikhailovich, you have served your country with great honour.’
The man’s grimace widened. His eyes looked into Venedikt’s.
Venedikt stood, drew his pistol from his belt holster. He thumbed off the safety and shot Yesimov in the forehead.
The vans’ engines were running, exhaust fumes clouding the brittle September air, and the last of the steel boxes was loaded, like the others undamaged by the rounds from the rocket launcher. The front van swung so that its passenger door presented itself to Venedikt. He sprang in and they were away. There was no cheering in the van. Triumphalism might have made them careless, and there were still the police to be avoided, the money to be counted to confirm that they had not been duped. But although Venedikt sat in grim silence, exultation gripped his chest and throat so fiercely he felt faint.
For you, dedushka, he thought.
FIVE
Purkiss was at the taxi rank in the back of a cab when he changed his mind, got out and walked on to the bus stop. The taxi would have been quicker but, glancing in the wing mirror as he settled himself in the seat, he’d seen the man striding past, rangy and crop-headed, his nonchalance too studied. The man had been part of the small crowd in the arrivals hall just after the final customs check. Although Purkiss had lost him for a few minutes, he’d spotted him again near the exit, peering into a shop window.
If he took a cab the man would lose him. Purkiss didn’t want that.
He approached a middle-aged couple in the queue at the bus stop and said, ‘Do you speak English?’
The man rocked a palm from side to side.
‘Do you know how much the shuttle costs? Into Tallinn?’
The man told him. Purkiss turned to raise eyebrows at the driver of the cab. He hoped his change of transport choice would appear to be about money. In any case the crop-headed man had walked on past the bus stop and turned on to a pedestrian crossing. Purkiss boarded the bus, watched the man disappear into a multi-storey car park, not looking behind him.
Purkiss held on to a support pole as the bus tried to sway him loose. He focused on the feeling that was tightening his chest, trying to give it a name and thereby reduce its grip. Apprehension? He’d failed to reach the contact, Seppo, even before entering the field of operations. From the moment he’d set foot in the field, he’d been identified. Somehow Fallon had been expecting him.
Not apprehension, no. Fear.
*
On the plane, with nothing to read or otherwise occupy his thoughts for three hours, Purkiss had given himself up to memory, promising himself it would be the last time for a while.
In his mind’s eye was Fallon as he’d been four years earlier. Forty years old, average height, slim build, shortish brown hair. Nothing conventionally distinguished about his looks, but he had a smile that could charm the paint off a wall. He was erudite without being affected, a supremely self-confident Harrow and Oxford boy without a trace of arrogance. To the amusement of those who worked with him he always carried round a particular book as a kind of totem, a paperback copy of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Apparently he’d been reading it during the mission in which he’d most narrowly escaped death.
And, as it turned out, he was corrupt. Corrupt and corrupting, his taint seeping into the lives of other people, spoiling them irreversibly. Purkiss had left the Service after Claire’s murder, and while his colleagues accepted tacitly that he’d done so because to remain would have been to be reminded daily of what and whom he’d lost, in his more honest moments