Ratcatcher - By Tim Stevens Page 0,97

from crying out, pounding on the wood inches from his face, was the knowledge of what would follow.

Instead he concentrated on his phone, staring at the backlit blue face as though by force of will he could summon a signal into being. By his watch they had been airborne for ten minutes. Assuming they were heading out to sea, as he suspected, they would by his estimate still be over land, and certainly potentially in range of a phone mast.

It was ingenious, he had to admit it, now that he understood what they were going to do. Purkiss was no expert on missile systems but he remembered reading something about the new Israeli development, a missile that could reach its target at a range of fifteen miles without the target’s having to be in sight of the person operating the launcher. The exclusion zone for air traffic around the War Memorial had a radius of ten kilometres, Elle had said. Fifteen miles was twenty-five kilometres. There’d be plenty to spare.

He blinked, moved the phone an inch back from his face to make sure of what he thought he’d seen. A single bar had crept into the upper left hand corner of the screen. Weak, but a signal.

He had already composed the text message a few minutes earlier. He pressed “send”. As he waited, the words that he assumed to be Estonian for “sending message” flashing at the top of the screen, their pulse almost mocking in its languor – don’t get your hopes up, friend – he reread the message.

It’s Purkiss. I’m hidden on board a Black Hawk heading out over the sea. They plan to use a long-range missile to make the hit. They have Fallon prisoner. I believe they have him on board & intend to leave his body in the wreckage of the chopper so it looks like SIS was responsible. You have to alert the authorities & they need to find us & shoot us down.

A smiley face filled the screen. Message sent.

*

The handset made a tiny chirrup. The Jacobin grabbed it off the seat and stared at it, negotiating the bends in the country lane with one hand on the wheel. The signal had been reestablished. Purkiss was on the radar again.

Instead of the stationary pulse centred in the airfield that the Jacobin had been expecting, the beacon was on the move, crossing fields, moving steadily across boundaries such as walls and streams. Purkiss was in the helicopter.

Three possibilities. One, Kuznetsov had him prisoner on board the chopper as planned, and had for some bizarre reason allowed him to keep his phone. Two, Purkiss had command of the machine and was either flying it himself – virtually impossible – or forcing Kuznetsov’s pilots to take it to some unknown destination. Or, three, Purkiss had stowed away on it.

Whichever was correct, there was only one course of action to take. He dropped the phone back on the seat, seized the wheel, and gunned the engine.

*

As a schoolboy Purkiss had developed the involuntary habit of waking seconds before his alarm went off in the mornings. He would lie paralysed by the lingering grip of sleep, anticipation of the blare from the clock radio rising in his chest to a peak of terror. He felt that way now, eyes on the tiny screen, fist slick around the handset, waiting for the reply.

Fallon, I got you in the end, he thought bleakly. It was too late to hear what the man had promised to tell him. He should have pressed him harder while they were imprisoned together in the basement. But he suspected it was all bluff. Fallon had no stunning revelations to offer. It was more likely to be a last-ditch torrent of blather to try to achieve absolution for his crimes.

It would be quick, Purkiss supposed. The Estonian security forces would scramble fighter jets with air-to-air missiles. There would be no messing about with close-combat artillery, no opportunity for Kuznetsov and his crew to go down in a blaze of defiance. Boxed in his coffin, Purkiss wouldn’t hear the end coming. All of which assumed that Elle had got his text message and could persuade the authorities quickly enough of the seriousness of the threat. It assumed that the air force could locate the Black Hawk in time, before Kuznetsov and his crew discovered that Purkiss had raised the alarm and took evasive action.

The reply came then. Purkiss didn’t register the words on the screen, was unaware