SIXTEEN
He hung clutching at the slope for what seemed like an hour but was probably a minute. Then he clambered up over the edge. Crouching on the bank, he turned to look down the drop.
Far below, the only sign of it a hint of its buckled white door panels among the foliage, was the Toyota. It had turned sideways during its descent and had left a wake of smashed branches and fragments of glass. Closer by, ten feet below Purkiss, the Lexus was wedged nose-down in a fork created by the trunks of two huge trees. One of its rear wheels was twisted sideways, almost wrenched off the axle. From its engine came an occasional desultory tick. The smell of petrol swamped the pine scent.
Purkiss had had the presence of mind to turn off the ignition after the back of the Toyota had gone over the edge. He didn’t know if the other man had done the same with the Lexus. Of the man there was no sign, and Purkiss wondered whether he’d fallen through the windscreen and dropped down into the forest, or whether he was still inside the car.
A car was approaching along the road. Purkiss debated for a moment but decided against flagging it down and crawled swiftly over the edge and squatted out of sight on the slope until it had passed. He moved, crabwalking, looking for the least treacherous way down, and began to make his way towards the Lexus, sliding on his bottom and gripping the roots and rock protrusions for support. Just above the car the slope dropped away, sheer. Vertigo made him reel and press himself against the slope. When it felt safe to look down again he peered straight through the rear window space of the car. He could see the dark shape of the man inside, folded against the windscreen, which hadn’t entirely given way. There was no movement.
Purkiss turned onto his belly and sidled down the slope using his elbows until he felt his feet touch one of the trunks between which the car was jammed. He tested the strength of the trunk by stamping a little – it seemed solid enough – and reached out and took hold of the rear bumper of the car. He gave it an experimental shake. The metal protested against the trunk, and he felt the minutest shift. So it wasn’t securely wedged; any significant weight would drive it through the other side and send it plummeting.
He knelt on the trunk and leaned over as far as he dared. Again dizziness took hold of him. The front end of the car hung below the trunks over a sheer drop of perhaps a hundred feet, a great cleft in the earth coated with trees. Secure though the trunk was, his movement on it produced further creaking from the car.
Craning his neck he peered through the driver’s window just below the trunk. The driver was concertinaed against the webbed windscreen, his head locked in place by a branch that had been driven through the windscreen into his left eye socket. His mouth was agape.
He was in the way. Purkiss clambered back along the trunk to its base and moved across to the other trunk. This one did not feel as secure, and swayed palpably as Purkiss edged along it on his hands and knees. By lying along its length he was able to cling almost alongside it and look through the passenger window. On the dashboard he saw what he wanted. It appeared undamaged.
The problem was getting to it. He could climb into the car through the rear window or the passenger one, but that would certainly push the Lexus all the way through the fork and send it falling. His arm wasn’t long enough to reach it from where he was clinging to the branch.
He hugged the trunk, and thought about Claire, and Fallon, and the three Service agents, one or more of whom were betraying him. And he thought about how the forest around him was darkening as the afternoon set in, and how this was the last afternoon before Fallon set in motion whatever he had planned for the morning.
He needed a way in, and urgently.
Purkiss shuffled up the trunk until he was directly over the passenger window and braced his hands on the trunk, testing the strength in his arms. He swung down so that once again he was hanging in the air, trying not to imagine the drop below him, the consequences of slipping and falling. He pressed his feet together and pushed them through the window hole, catching the back of the seat with his shoe as one of his hands slipped. He regained his grip but the nudge to the seat produced a terrible growl from the metal and it shifted against the ancient bark. The Lexus jolted a foot further through the wedge.
He had to withdraw his feet to steady himself. Once more he dangled, flailing. He tried again and this time he got one foot hooked around the back of the small box on the dashboard. Tongue between his teeth, he groped with the other foot, pressed it against the box and tugged gently, feeling it shift in its slot. In a second it was free. Gripping it between his feet, he withdrew it through the window. He hung for a moment, arms burning and the sweat in his palms slicking the bark. He could feel himself losing his grip, and every instinct screamed to let his legs kick and scrabble at the air, anything to help him regain purchase, but if he did so he’d drop the box. He kept his feet clamped together and instead tried to swing his arm further over the trunk in a movement like a swimmer’s crawl stroke. As he did so his other hand gave way and he was falling.
Keep your feet locked together... With hands curved into hooks he caught the hub of the front passenger wheel and the jerk to his shoulders felt as if it had pulled them from their sockets. He hauled upwards with all his reserves, feeling the ton-and-a-half of vehicle begin its inexorable slide through the wedge, and now he was bracing his feet on the hub, awkwardly because of the prize still gripped between them. His hands were reaching up and getting hold of the trunk again and this time he didn’t let go. He swung up and on to the trunk and the box slipped from between his feet but he reached back and caught it one-handed before it fell.
He scrambled to the base of the branch and leaped to the safety of the slope as the Lexus dropped in virtual silence through the space below and landed directly on to the Toyota. The driver hadn’t killed the engine because the tanks went up in twin blasts that roared off the sides of the valley, the heat from the fireball sending up a shower of wood and rocks and spinning fragments of metal.
Purkiss lay prone on the slope, one arm shielding his head while he leaned on the other, staring at the box in his hand. A satellite navigation system, chipped and scuffed but in working order.
*
Behind the man the sea was wild, lashing ropes of spume against the rocks of the shore. He’d got there first and Venedikt didn’t like that, although Venedikt himself was a little early. The man stood quite still beside his car, a top-range Mercedes. On either side of him were four other men in civilian clothes but with a bearing unmistakeably military. Most had the wiry build of the Special Forces soldier.
Venedikt emerged from his own car and approached, Leok remaining behind the wheel. Two others fell into step beside Venedikt, one of them Dobrynin, his deputy. Behind him and to his right the van lumbered forward and came to a stop, shuddering under its own bulk like some ungainly prehistoric behemoth.
Like Venedikt the man was wearing a suit. Counter to expectations he wasn’t hiding his eyes behind a pair of dark glasses. Venedikt respected that, thought it showed the proper respect for him. The man was of medium height, far shorter than Venedikt, with a slight build. His pedigree was uncertain. His Russian was impeccable, down to the Muscovite accent, but he didn’t look Slavic: his black hair and black eyes and burnished complexion suggested southern European or Middle Eastern origins. Yet he was said to speak English like an American.
Venedikt glanced about without moving his head. They were in a grassy depression half a kilometre across, lined on two sides by rocks, on one by the sea, in a peninsula jutting finger-like into the Baltic. A bank of clouds had dragged across the sun and from the rocks there came no tell-tale glints on metal. Venedikt’s own snipers, two of them, were in position, invisible even to him. He assumed the same for the other man.
Venedikt stopped ten paces from the other man, refusing to do all the work. As if he sensed this the man gave a slight nod and stepped forward, his men keeping perfect time on either side. He extended his hand. Venedikt shook: it was dry, firm but not bone crushing.
‘Let me show you.’ The man’s tone was pleasant, conversational. No names, no hello, you must bes. He gestured behind and to his left, towards the rocks.
Venedikt walked alongside the man up the slope, their respective people massing discreetly around and behind them. The man, the dealer, stepped up to the rocks first and offered down his hand. Venedikt accepted and was surprised at the strength with which the smaller man hauled at his arm.
He stood staring at what rested beyond for a long time. He felt the urge, overwhelming, immediate, to walk around it, touch it, but he had to maintain dignity. His elation squirmed as he fought it down.
‘I’ll need to check it. Verify its authenticity.’
‘But of course.’ The man called back over his shoulder and said to Venedikt, ‘Come down. We’ll bring it out for you.’
Dobrynin, the man with the nose for deception, stood by as the dealer’s men brought the second part of the product down the slope. The authenticity of the larger component wasn’t in doubt; it was visibly what it was. But when the second part was hefted down, exposed in its box, the frisson of excitement that rippled through Venedikt’s group was unmistakeable. Dobrynin squatted beside the container and with eyes and hands began his examination.
Waiting in the van for the signal from Venedikt were two more of his people, their wrists chained to steel suitcases. Once Dobrynin was satisfied it would be the dealer’s turn to carry out his own inspection. Perhaps he would demand a full count, in which case it would take a while, even though the money had been laundered from krooni into large-denomination euros.
Dobrynin muttered for assistance and two of the dealer’s own men knelt and prised and lifted so that he could peer underneath. Venedikt tried not to hold his breath, tried to keep his back and neck from tensing in anticipation of the sign of a double cross, a movement on the part of the dealer or his men. Equally he tried to banish from his imagination the cry from the watchers, the massing of police cars and helicopters above the lip of the depression, the bullhorn commands to surrender. Beside him the dealer stood, feet slightly apart, hands folded neatly before him, almost prim, watching Dobrynin with something that looked like genuine appreciation of his thoroughness.
Dobrynin straightened and brushed off his trousers and hands. He paused in front of Venedikt, looking up into his face, before giving a nod of triumph. Venedikt felt the tension leave him in a great funnelling of breath.
He glanced at his watch, then up at the sky, allowing his neck to flex luxuriously. Step two was complete.
Two o’clock. Eighteen hours to go.