Ratcatcher - By Tim Stevens Page 0,14
many of us, most of us, perhaps, in the multilateralist camp were putting our trust fervently in the idea of deterrence, believing that if deterrence failed then it really didn’t matter who had more weapons, there were others who saw the annihilation of the human race in nuclear fire as not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the other side didn’t win.’ He tapped one of the cellars. ‘Better dead than Red, better rubble than roubles. I’ve no doubt such people existed on the Soviet side as well. Ideologues who believed ideas could exist without a population of actual people alive to hold these ideas in their heads.’
Some of the salt had spilled. Purkiss swept it into his hand and disposed of it on his empty plate. Vale said: ‘What I’m getting at, John, is that to blow the lid off, as you put it, corruption and crime within the Service is to take the fanatic’s approach. Let the whole structure burn as long as it keeps its purity. I don’t take this view. I believe in the Service. I want to save it from itself. But I don’t want to destroy it in the process.’
Purkiss learned a great deal that night, which stretched on into the early hours. Vale had had his eye on Purkiss, and Claire too, for many months before the murder. The man knew almost more about Purkiss than he remembered himself, not only details of his degree at Cambridge and his prior upbringing as the son of a Suffolk farmer and landowner, but names of people from Purkiss’s childhood whom he hadn’t thought of for decades.
Purkiss learned about drug rings, national and intercontinental, in which Service personnel were suspected of having a hand. He learned of deals between Western oligarchs and foetid tinpot dictatorships brokered by British agents. He heard about terrorist atrocities the commission of which had been assisted by undercover operatives, who had walked away scot free because the outrages had taken place in impoverished third world areas which lacked the blessing of a large population of lawyers.
What Vale was proposing was that Purkiss leave the Service and work for him instead. Purkiss’s role would be to track down and shut down the renegades, avoiding the ponderousness and potential for scandal which would attend the normal official investigative process.
‘You’ll be hated,’ Vale said. ‘Hated, and despised as a turncoat. But if we do this right, in time you’ll become a legend. And we know the power legends exert, the atavistic awe they inspire. Awe enough, perhaps, on occasion to deter.’
Purkiss asked Vale for a week to think about it.
Five days later Fallon was convicted of murder. The next morning Purkiss resigned from the Service. By the river in sight of Legoland, the name by which insiders referred to the Service’s headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, Purkiss shook Vale’s bony hand. It was all the contract they’d ever have.
*
The Jacobin watched the monitor as the zoom on the camera was adjusted and the image sharpened. Kuznetsov’s man had chosen well, a position in a coffee shop with a head-on unobstructed view of the arrivals corridor. The other two men were among the crowd lining the railing, one of them visible on the periphery of the camera’s field.
Six minutes earlier the man had relayed back that the baggage was now at the carousels according to the information board, and now the first of the passengers from Stansted began trickling down the passage, led by an exhausted young backpacker with a wan smile for her waiting parents. As the video streamed through, the Jacobin’s computer was recording it for playback later.
The voice of the man with the camera murmured through the phone link as though to himself: ‘Fifteen.’
He was keeping a tally of the passengers. Good. They were arriving in clumps now. The passenger list had numbered one hundred and seventy-four, none of the names familiar. The Jacobin examined every face, discarding each one in turn.
Then it flared, the shock of recognition, and the Jacobin watched the figure stride down the corridor and emerge into the crowd and disappear from view. The Jacobin brought up the window with the recording of the footage, rewound it and played it again at half speed, then paused it when the face was turned straight towards the camera.
A tall man, lean. Hair dark and on the long side. Clean shaven. Blue shirt, khaki chinos, duffel coat, a shoulder bag.
‘I’ve seen him,’ said the Jacobin, and gave the description. The two