TWELVE
‘You need to speak to this woman, find out what she’s not telling us.’
The Jacobin’s voice was steady, grip on the handset loose.
‘I have spoken to her already. She’s hiding nothing.’
‘This man she was sleeping with, this Fallon. Purkiss is desperate to find him and won’t say why. He’s got to be important in some way. We have to find out what the woman told him.’
‘She told him nothing. She’s rock solid, loyal beyond question.’ Kuznetsov sounded offended.
‘Kuznetsov, I don’t think you really appreciate the seriousness of this. This man worked his way into the affections of clearly the weakest link in your outfit, then disappeared. Until we find him, we have to assume he has knowledge that could compromise us.’
‘You speak to me like this, you impugn the character of one of my people. Yet you yourself keep this man Purkiss alive. You allow him access to your circle.’
‘For your information, he’s the best chance we have at the moment of finding this Fallon. I’m working on him, trying to persuade him to tell me why Fallon’s of importance to him.’ There was a tap at the door and the Jacobin opened it and held up a hand – one minute – and closed it again. ‘We’re going to have to bring the woman in. You need to make her aware of this, prepare her for interrogation.’
‘No torture.’
‘Of course.’
They spoke for another minute before ringing off. The Jacobin stood gazing through the window at the night, then went to find the others.
*
Purkiss had argued that there wasn’t time to rest, but he’d been trying to persuade himself as much as them. In the end he lost the battle. Teague gave him the once over, applying antiseptic to the laceration from the garrotte. They had worked out a plan for the following morning, and it was agreed that Purkiss would crash out at the flat which Klavan and Teague shared. Rossiter was apparently staying behind at the base. Apart from individual offices off the central open-plan area, all of which were soundproofed, Purkiss noticed, there was a tiny bedroom and bathroom as well as a kitchenette.
In the car on the way back out of the Old Town Purkiss sat in the back again, with Klavan driving and Teague in the front passenger seat this time.
Purkiss said: ‘Am I going to have a problem with your boss?’
‘Rossiter?’ Teague lifted a shoulder. ‘No. He doesn’t like you, mainly because he doesn’t trust you. To him you’re a rogue agent just like Fallon, even if your motives are more sympathetic. You have to admit, he has a point.’
Purkiss had told them Seppo was an old friend and colleague of his who’d sent him the photo of Fallon but then hadn’t been contactable when he’d tried to ring him. He’d told them everything, essentially, apart from saying anything about Vale or Abby, and had admitted his bafflement at the signs of Fallon’s presence in Seppo’s flat.
‘You think Seppo was setting you up? Luring you to the city?’ Klavan asked.
‘Possibly. But it doesn’t explain how he ended up dead in the freezer, unless someone else sent the photo using his phone to lure me over here.’
For their part, Klavan and Rossiter had been taking coffee outside a café across from the Russian embassy on Pikk Street the previous morning when they’d noticed the small man, who turned out to be Seppo, taking photos apparently of the embassy building with his phone, trying to be surreptitious about it. Their curiosity piqued, they had spent the better part of the morning following him, and tracked him to his flat on the Toompea. They returned to the office to run a check on the address. Later, after she’d finished her day’s routine work, Klavan went back to the flat, expecting Seppo to be at home, in which case she would have found a pretext to enter the flat and nose around. Instead she found Purkiss there.
‘Your face was vaguely familiar, and became more so when I discovered you were English. I didn’t spot you tagging me back to the office, though. That was good tradecraft.’
Purkiss didn’t mention the memory stick he’d found at the back of Seppo’s drawer. He supposed they had the equipment and possibly even the skills to override its password protection, but he decided this was something he’d keep to himself for the time being.
The coloured lights of stationary police vehicles daubed the streets around the nightclub. Klavan’s and Teague’s flat was two blocks away. They parked in the basement and took the lift. Inside it was comfortably furnished, a home rather than merely a place to sleep.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘We set up a year ago when the date for the summit became known,’said Klavan. She handed him a mug of tea and although caffeine wasn’t what he needed now he took it gratefully, declining the offer of something to eat.
Teague threw a sheet and blanket on the couch. It was half-past two. They agreed on a seven a.m. start and Klavan and Teague disappeared. To separate rooms, Purkiss noted wryly.
He lay in the dark, feeling sleep and fatigue take gradual control. Rossiter didn’t trust him. Nor, clearly, did the other two. That was fine, because he didn’t trust any of them either.
His last thought before numbness overwhelmed him was of Claire, leaning on her elbows, supporting her frowning brow with her fingers and peering into a monitor, trying to solve some conundrum. He thought: If you were here to help me now…
But of course that wouldn’t make sense.
*
Beside him his wife slept deeply, untroubled. Venedikt squinted at the bedside clock: two-thirty. He needed sleep for what was to come, but knew he wouldn’t get it by forcing himself. Instead he rose, went into the living room, and turned on the television to a Russian-language twenty-four-hour news channel.
… will arrive in Tallinn tomorrow evening for a formal banquet...
… first official visit by a Russian premier since independence...
… historic signing of a friendship agreement...
The channel took great pride in what it called its political neutrality. Venedikt thought this a euphemism for cowardice, treacherousness even. Five years earlier he had been in the crowd protesting against the removal of the Bronze Soldier, the statue celebrating those like his grandfather who had fallen defending Estonia. Under cover of darkness the statue had been uprooted from its proud place in Tonismagi in the city centre and dumped in the wasteland of the Defence Forces Cemetery on the outskirts, along with the desecrated remains of Soviet heroes who were buried beneath it. Venedikt and his compatriots had vented their fury tirelessly, for two nights, during which one of their number had been shot dead, murdered, by the police. When he’d tried to explain to his son afterwards the importance of what had happened, the boy had shrugged and made to run outside. That had earned him a beating.
The ravaging of the statue was as nothing compared to what was planned for the day after tomorrow. The government had never admitted any intentional symbolism in the moving of the statue out of the city, even though nobody, not even those in favour of the act, had any illusions about why it was being done. But on October the thirteenth the Russian president was going to stand with his Estonian counterpart, the lickspittle of America and the West, and shake his hand, grinning, while behind them the memorial spire to the fallen of Mother Russia, not just those who died in the Great Patriotic War but all the others as well, was exploited for sickening political ends. The Estonian thinking was clear: not only are we going to extort apologies and craven concessions from you, we are going to do so in the shadow of one of your most treasured icons. Venedikt was not an especially imaginative man but he couldn’t fail to see the metaphorical significance of the limp handshake in front of the proud spire, the suggestion of emasculation it brought to mind.
There was nothing symbolic in what Venedikt and his people were going to do. Nothing ambiguous at all.
He switched off the television and went to stare out of the window. It was far too early for daybreak, but the night seemed to have shed some of its darkness, as though conceding grudgingly that its allotted time was passing once more. Two dawns left, and on the second the sun would rise on a very different city. A different world.
The day had been a perfect one and had ended perfectly, with the news about the Englishman. He couldn’t believe their luck. Nothing like this had even been considered when they’d first made their plans all those months earlier, yet the opportunity had fallen into their laps. Occurrences like this almost made Venedikt question his rejection of religious faith.
The excitement threatened to keep him further from sleep, so he went back to bed. In his mind he rehearsed the sequence of events over and over until it was smooth as a beach pebble.