FOURTEEN
Once outside the Old Town he pulled over in an empty parking slot on a busy commercial street and sat in the car and waited for Abby’s call. It came after a couple of minutes, on the phone she’d given him.
‘Got it. Want to listen?’
‘Yes please.’
Her voice was replaced with a burst of static which he realised was probably clothing brushing against the device. He’d slipped it under the collar of the woman’s shirt when he’d fitted the hood over her head, its location making it less likely to be discovered but meaning that audibility might be reduced. The tiny, Velcro-like hooks were designed to attach to the fibres of clothes. It was an audio-monitoring device which was simultaneously trackable in real time using GPS. Abby was relaying the audio feed from her laptop to his phone while at the same time a pulsing beacon against a street map on her laptop indicated the location of the device.
After the static came a voice, distant but distinct: Elle Klavan’s. ‘Here’s where you get out.’ Another harsher burst of interference and now Klavan’s voice was clearer. The hood must have been taken off. ‘Know where you are?’
‘Yes.’ The woman Lyuba Ilkun’s voice, louder, closer by.
The slam of a door, then footsteps and a confusion of ambient street sounds.
Into the handset Purkiss said, ‘Abby?’
‘Hearing you.’ Her voice cut across the feed from the listening device.
‘That’s great, works a charm. Can you identify my position in relation to hers?’
‘Sure. Got a GPS track on your phone as well. You’re half a kilometre away. I can guide you towards her if you want.’
‘Not just yet. I need to make a call on the other phone. Could you mute the feed but keep my line to you open?’
‘Done.’
With the other handset, the one he’d been using since buying it the previous evening, he called Klavan. She answered before the first ring had finished. ‘John?’
‘Just left the office. I’m going to stake out Ilkun’s flat, see if she comes back and then tail her.’ The lies flowed smoothly. ‘There’s no point relying on the substituted SIM card in her phone. She’ll be wise to that and she’ll ditch it.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because you treated her with kid gloves in there. I’m not saying rough stuff would have got any more out of her, but it’s what she would have been expecting. Her suspicions will be up.’
‘I see. How did Rossiter react to your plan?’
‘Hopping mad, as you might imagine.’
‘So why are you phoning me?’
‘To check if Rossiter’s got a bead on the SIM card. I don’t want to stake out her place if she’s heading in the opposite direction.’
‘Hang on.’ Elle’s voice faded to a murmur, then came back. ‘Rossiter on the line to Teague. The signal from her phone has gone.’
‘As I predicted. She’s got rid of it.’ He started the engine. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
He rang off, fitted the earpiece for the other phone and said, ‘Abby, still there?’
‘Right here.’
‘I’m on the move.’
She began to direct him like a bizarre living satellite navigation system. He listened and took the turnings she advised. All the while he pondered the discovery he’d made: that one of the agents had tipped the woman off.
It was at least one of them, or possibly two, but not all three; he was fairly confident of that. If they were all involved then why would they have gone through the charade of the interrogation, just for his benefit? Why not simply say they hadn’t been able to apprehend her? As to which of the three it was, he didn’t think Klavan was likely. She after all was the one who’d responded to his distress call in the nightclub, when she could have ignored it and left him to the Russians. Teague was a possibility. He’d come along for the ride with Klavan when she had rescued him from the club but might have done so to avoid making Klavan suspicious.
Rossiter was the one he favoured. Rossiter, who’d shown hostility and suspicion towards him from the outset, who’d almost flinched when he had mentioned Fallon’s name. At the time Purkiss had assumed this was because of the ominousness of Fallon’s presence in the city at this point, but now he wondered if it was the reaction of someone who had just felt the carefully constructed edifice of a plan tremble a fraction.
‘Mr Purkiss.’ Abby’s voice cut across his thoughts. ‘She’s stopped moving and there’s something coming through on the audio.’
He pulled over when he spotted a clear stretch of pavement and kept the engine running and listened. The scrabble of material against the bug again and a loud noise – another slammed car door – and then a man’s voice in Russian.
‘They hurt you?’
‘No.’ Even the suboptimal sound failed to disguise the fear in her voice. ‘They knew about Ivan.’
‘Your son is in no danger.’ The voice was raspy, middle-aged. ‘You told them nothing?’
There was a prolonged blast of static that made Purkiss wince, then a muffled rumbling. When it continued beyond ten seconds Purkiss said, ‘Damn.’
Abby: ‘It fell off.’
‘Must have. It sounded like she got in a car. Her seatbelt probably pulled the bug off.’
‘But it’s still in the car. That sound is the rumble of the engine. And the signal’s moving again, more quickly now.’
‘Okay. Guide me again. And if there’s a change in the audio, voices or anything, patch it through to me.’
*
It was more difficult this time because he was chasing an unseen target moving at a car’s speed, with only Abby’s directions to give him a sense of where to go. Always the other vehicle managed to stay several blocks ahead, so that he couldn’t begin to work out which car it was.
‘Hang on, they’re stopping,’ said Abby. ‘Not a traffic light, I don’t think. Halfway along the road.’
He put his foot down a touch and overshot before she could correct him and went round the block and she murmured, ‘You should be nearing them just about now,’ and then he saw her, Lyuba, standing talking through the open rear window of a black car by the kerb, a Lexus by the look of it. She straightened, nodded and walked away. The car pulled off.
‘Got a visual,’ he said to Abby.
‘Are you going to follow her, or the car?’
‘The car.’
Now it was easier because he could hang back a little, confident that if he lost visual contact Abby was still tracking the car. He couldn’t be sure but it seemed there were two people in the Lexus: the driver, and the man in the back to whom Lyuba had been talking after she’d got out. The Lexus moved smoothly through the streets, heading north through the bustle of early afternoon commerce. Purkiss felt the first salt tang of sea air in his mouth.
The office blocks and arcades thinned out and finally yielded entirely. They were heading along a coast road, the sea shifting and glittering on the left. Ahead the Lexus was slowing and pulling on to the pavement. There wasn’t any apparent reason for Purkiss to stop, so he drove past and turned off into a small parking lot on the edge of the water where people were unloading picnicking materials. He parked so that he could watch the Lexus in the rear-view mirror.
Another vehicle had been waiting where the Lexus had pulled in, a large four by four which looked bulkier than normal as though it had been customised, possibly with armour plating. A man emerged from the rear of the Lexus, large and blocky in build, hair in a military crop, perhaps fifty years old and dressed in a business suit. The distance was too great for any decent pictures but Purkiss lifted his phone to the window. He did what he could with the zoom function and took as many photographs as he could of the man before he climbed into the passenger side of the four by four, which began to turn on to the road back in the direction the Lexus had come. The Lexus pulled off in the opposite direction.
Purkiss considered the options for a second. The man in the four by four appeared to be in charge and was potentially a more valuable target, but the tracking device was in the Lexus. Plus, there was only the driver in the Lexus, which meant better odds in the event of a confrontation. He waited until the black car had passed, then reversed back on to the road and set off after it.
Ahead, inland to the right and set back from the road, Purkiss saw a stone spire which put him in mind of Cleopatra’s Needle on the north bank of the Thames in London. The Soviet War Memorial. He knew this because it had featured heavily on the news in recent months, was the site at which the meeting was to take place between the Russian and Estonian leaders. As he passed it he saw the activity around the cordoned-off base. A couple of news crews were shooting footage and a chanting crowd brandishing placards was being kept back from the cordon by a thin film of uniformed police.
The Lexus turned off the coast road as the city began to coalesce into a discrete whole in the mirrors. Buildings started to become sparse and the aroma of pine began to supplant the sea air. Traffic was thinner here, too. Purkiss touched the brake to pull back.
‘Abby?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’re obviously heading away from the city. What’s ahead?’
‘Google Earth says forest, and plenty of it.’
‘Okay. I’m going to keep well back. I might lose visual contact. Let me know if he turns off or does anything odd.’
*
The road began to wind and climb upwards. Pine and spruce soared on either side, blanketing the road in shadow, and the temperature was dropping noticeably. Purkiss had lost sight of the Lexus fifteen minutes earlier but took Abby’s silence to mean that he was still keeping pace. They had taken a turnoff some way back when he’d still had the Lexus in view and were now on a single-lane road. Cars passed in the opposite direction at the rate of perhaps one every three minutes.
Abby’s voice startled him. ‘He’s stopped.’
‘All right.’ Purkiss pulled off the road on to a pine-carpeted bank.
‘Hang on. The sound’s different. Listen.’
She patched through the audio feed. There was no longer the rumble of the engine. Instead there was silence, punctured by an intermittent undefinable scratching.
‘He’s killed the engine.’ Purkiss put the car into gear. ‘I’m going to drive past.’
‘Careful, boss.’
The road ahead curved upwards and to the left. On the right the forest sloped downwards, the drop becoming sheerer as the road rose. Purkiss glanced out and down and felt a twinge of vertigo, the darkness of the depths accentuating the drop. Unbidden, the opening chords of Sibelius’s Tapiola echoed in his head. Wrong side of the Gulf, he thought.
The curve was blind and he tensed, prepared to dodge a car speeding down towards him. None came. He kept up a steady speed, sensible but not excessively slow, to avoid giving the impression that he was on the lookout for something. After fifty feet or so the road curved again, this time to the right.
‘Boss. You’re right on top of him.’
The trees were packed tightly enough that there was no room for the Lexus to be hidden among them.
‘You’ve passed him.’
Purkiss understood. The man had found the bug and ditched it.
The realisation caused him to slow a fraction. As he did so he caught sight of the nose of the Lexus around the curve.
The roar of the car’s engine sounded off the forest wall and the shriek of tyres echoed like the cry of some unnatural woodland beast. The Lexus was bearing down on him from ahead, the driver’s arm extended through the open window, his fist gripping something black and metallic.