stand up to interrogation, to lie convincingly under duress.
In the event the Jacobin’s hand was forced. The man made a last desperate effort, an extended-knuckle punch with his good arm behind him which connected with the kidney area. The Jacobin swallowed against the roiling pain and flexed the arm across the man’s throat until he sagged. Not wanting to take any chances, the Jacobin gripped the pale, high head between the heels of both palms, and with a quick twist dislocated the vertebrae of the man’s neck.
*
The Jacobin sat on the rug for a minute, eyes closed, finding calm. It wasn’t formal meditation of any kind, but rather a necessary process of reestablishing equilibrium after the taking of another human being’s life. For the dead man himself, the Jacobin felt nothing. For the fact of having killed – again – there was disquiet, a feeling that was growing, not diminishing, with each such episode. A limb that was beginning to rot with gangrene could be salvaged by the excision of the corrupted matter. Did the same apply to a soul? Could it?
In the passage by the front door, the Jacobin retrieved the small grip dropped there on entry. Inside was the equipment that, given more time, the Jacobin would have installed at leisure after first establishing that the man wasn’t at home. The man’s body would have to be hidden within the flat. The smell would attract attention in a few days, of course, but by that time it would all be over.
Spreading the contents of the grip across the dining table, the Jacobin set to work.
*
Vale was a motionless silhouette against the cold morning sky. Purkiss parked in the dirt semicircle at the bottom of the track and made his way up through the light ground fog towards the churchyard. It was Vale’s way, always had been. Remote locations for meetings to minimise the risk of surveillance. Purkiss had no idea where Vale’s office was, or if he even had one.
They’d arrived back from Zagreb mid-morning. To be on the safe side Purkiss had packed Kendrick off to see a doctor about the strangulation injury. He had freshened up, then phoned Vale for a rendezvous.
Driving out into the Hertfordshire countryside, Purkiss let his thoughts drift back four years. He’d replayed those events many times but there had always been the imperative to look forward, not to wallow. There was nothing more that could be done, and justice of a sort had been achieved. Now, that justice seemed ephemeral, like a software programme whose licence had expired.
*
He’d met Claire Stirling at a consulate bash when he was stationed in Marseille, and he’d immediately recognised her as SIS, like him at the time. The service disapproved of office relationships but with discretion Purkiss and Claire managed it. They were spies, after all. After a few months they were engaged.
A field agent of five years’ standing, Purkiss’s work in Marseille involved the study of immigration patterns into the city from Middle Eastern countries and the application of closer scrutiny when anybody suspicious arrived. Someone, for instance, whose name had come up before in connection with a Service operation elsewhere. Claire’s work was to all appearances more humdrum, monitoring radio traffic between the various embassies. They both enjoyed their work, they socialised mainly with diplomatic staff, and they loved together passionately, the clandestine nature of their union adding to the thrill.
The change came with the death of Behrouz Asgari. An Iranian-born businessman who had made Marseille his home for the previous twenty years, he was also a philanthropist whose investment in local infrastructure had lifted thousands of residents out of slum tenements. Asgari was openly opposed to the incumbent American and British governments and a devout Shi’a Muslim. He’d been extensively investigated, of course – Purkiss had done a lot of the work himself – and came up clean, with no links to hostile activity against the West.
One evening, while Asgari had been strolling along the waterfront with his wife, a lone motorcyclist had ridden up and shot him dead. The hit was a professional one, a double tap to the head using modified hollow-point nine-millimetre rounds. Asgari had been a personable, well-liked man, but he had business rivals aplenty, and the police investigation, such as it was, concluded that some unnamed competitor was responsible.
Two weeks after the murder, Claire had come round one evening to Purkiss’s flat – circumstances dictated that they live separately – in an odd mood, silent and brooding.