Ratcatcher - By Tim Stevens Page 0,61

Purkiss and his colleague. To his mind that would have been irresponsible, would have left the rest of the farm dangerously underprotected. In any case, a larger group wouldn’t necessarily have managed to hunt Purkiss down.

Venedikt’s phone rang.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve warned Purkiss off. You don’t need to relocate.’

‘Warned him.’

‘I have his friend. The contact he had here in the city. I’ve told him she’ll die if he alerts the authorities.’

Venedikt watched a truck reverse into position and wheeze to a standstill. Two men came running to drag the rear doors wide. ‘It’s not enough.’

‘He cares for this woman. He won’t do anything to jeopardize her safety. I know him.’

‘But we’re still exposed here. He might come back.’

‘If he comes back you’ll be ready for him. And the woman dies.’

‘It’s my decision to make.’

‘I know it is. And if you choose the upheaval of relocation, it’s more of a problem for you than for me. But it is my problem too, because it increases the risk of something going wrong with the operation, of your being discovered along the way.’

Venedikt sucked hard on his teeth. He hated to change his mind once he’d made it up, especially at the urging of another whom he did not respect. Especially when that person was an English. But the possibility that they were still secure, could proceed as planned without the disruption of changing bases... it was attractive.

He said, ‘I’ll stay put for the time being.’

‘Good.’

‘Any change in circumstances, any hint you get that Purkiss is alerting anybody else, you let me know immediately.’

There was no reply. Venedikt thought that showed contempt.

He stepped forward, raised his hand, and gave the orders. One or two of the men glanced at him but they were all finely trained, obeyed without question. He went to look for Dobrynin who was supervising the wiring of the farmhouse. The charges, the detonators, would remain in place, just in case circumstances changed.

*

After an age they were surprised by another road. Again they crossed it, its surface slick with the drizzle that was beginning now that the cloud cover had ceased its drifting. The compass on Purkiss’s phone told him they were heading east-south-east, but they were still far from anywhere that looked familiar. Soon they would have to leave the cover of the forest and chance the road.

Beside him Kendrick kept pace, hobbling slightly, his leg bound with strips torn from his shirtsleeves. His mouth moved, bitten-off mutters barely audible over the tramp of their feet.

There had been no telephone signal now for half an hour. Purkiss checked the display periodically. The time was just after eleven p.m. Nine hours until the summit, and he didn’t care.

He had let Abby down.

Guilt was a phenomenon – not a feeling, that was too slight, too ephemeral a word – with which he was familiar. In the weeks and the months after Claire’s death it had lived with him constantly, on the good days a weight pressing down on his head and driving him into the ground, on the bad an internal parasite clawing and sucking the innards of his chest and his abdomen into a compact ball. Now it was a slash from a scalpel blade, so pure and shocking that it was cold rather than painful.

When he’d told Kendrick, the first thing Kendrick said was, ‘Shit. Jesus,’ and the second was, ‘How?’

Purkiss knew the answer. The memory stick in Seppo’s flat, the one he’d conveniently been allowed to find, the one with the password that even Abby couldn’t crack – there it was, you idiot, the giveaway – hadn’t been a memory stick at all, but a tracking device. Fallon had been on to Abby and her whereabouts from the moment Purkiss had given her the stick.

They got moving at once after that, Kendrick binding his own wounds with concentrated grimness, Purkiss pacing about helplessly, understanding how caged animals felt. Kendrick didn’t say it’s not your fault or anything like it. It wasn’t his style. When they were ready to set off he hefted the rifle – he’d insisted on taking it back from Purkiss – and said, very low and very precisely: ‘I tell you what, Purkiss. If you see this Fallon, you better kill him quickly. Because if I get my hands on him first, he’s mine.’

They used their goggles in the deeper parts of the forest now that there was no moonlight, and saw a startlingly wide variety of cowering and scampering shapes. As they walked Purkiss cast his mind