Cronos Rising (7 page)

The man seated at the counter a few feet to Purkiss’s right said, in German: ‘Would you mind if I had a look at the paper?’

Purkiss nodded. ‘Feel free.’

He reached to his left and handed the stack across to the man, who opened and folded the
Allgemeine Zeitung
and studied the front headlines.

Purkiss lifted his fork to his mouth and chewed, his eyes on the hubbub of the terminal, his thoughts on Vale, and the wild goose chase the man had sent him on in Rome.

Distraction. One of the essential tools in the espion’s kit. Vale had used it expertly.

Distraction...

Purkiss dropped his fork with a clatter.

He’d reached for the papers
to his left...

The pain scored vertically down behind his breastbone, as if a clawed beast was trying to achieve purchase within his chest.

Before him, the terminal blurred, doubled.

His hands flailed, knocking his coffee cup over, the hot liquid burning his thighs. Down the counter, nearby, somebody shouted.

Purkiss dropped off the stool he was perched on, his feet hitting the floor one at a time and clumsily. The floor tilted and lurched upward towards him.

His throat felt as if it were puffing closed. Panic gripped his chest in a tight band.

The food he poisoned the food he poisoned

Through his swimming, telescoping vision, a woman recoiled. On the small round table before her stood a solitary bottle of water. Purkiss snatched at it, missed, stumbled into the table, tipping it. He grabbed the bottle through sheer luck and raised it and dumped the contents over his mouth, soaking his face and his head but getting some of it into his narrowing throat. He swallowed convulsively.

Dilute. And purge.

He coughed, violently, finding himself without warning on his hands and knees. Around him, gasps and yells were distorted as if by some electronic mechanism.

Purkiss rammed the fingers of his hand deep into his mouth, the tips probing for the pharynx. The gag reflex was triggered immediately and he felt the gorge rush up from deep within his belly and spew hotly over his hand and sleeve to rain across the floor.

It wasn’t cyanide. There was no bitter almond tang in his mouth.

He felt obscurely, pathetically grateful.

Purkiss crawled between the tables, seeing legs step aside for him as the hum of wonder and fear around him began to spread. His limbs functioned, after a fashion, arms and legs. He was making progress forwards. The absence of paralysis suggested there wasn’t a neurotoxin involved.

A stabbing, wrenching pain in his belly made him stop, hunch over, dry-heave with his face almost touching the floor.

Arsenic, perhaps. Or some seemingly innocuous plant toxin. Oleander?

He grabbed somebody’s arm, though it wasn’t an arm because it didn’t pull away, and its rigidity suggested it was a table leg. He hauled himself up so that he was on one knee.

Focus. Prioritise.

Purkiss turned, the movement sending a new ripple of nausea through his gut. His eyes somehow coordinated with one another and he stared at the counter he’d vacated.

The man who’d asked to borrow his newspapers was gone.

Hands, no longer fearful, were grasping at his arms and his shoulders now. In his ears, on both side, voices shouted: ‘Are you all right?’ and ‘What’s wrong?’

Purkiss rose fully to his feet, finding his balance. He shook his head, murmured something about a fear of flying.

Somehow he managed to extricate himself from the knot of people around him. He made his way unsteadily towards the entrance of the coffee shop, wiping his mouth, tasting the bile.

There’d be more of them. He needed to establish just how many, because that would help him estimate his odds of survival.

Taking care not to walk too gingerly that he’d attract attention, but not so nonchalantly that he risked keeling over, Purkiss headed down the terminal in the direction of the check-in desks. These were the areas that would be under the scrutiny of the security detail, and as such he’d be relatively protected there.

His face was set, but his eyes roved, scanning the bobbing heads that passed on either side of him. His vision was rapidly returning to something approaching normal, but the excoriation in his gullet and his gut remained. If the mucosal lining of his gastrointestinal tract had been damaged, he might start vomiting blood at any moment. Perhaps haemorrhaging uncontrollably. There might be an anticoagulant in the toxin, a warfarin-like agent that would turn him into a leaking vessel of blood –

Focus.

Purkiss passed a woman, and for a moment glanced at her face. Their eyes met for the briefest of instants before she disappeared behind him.

He fought the impulse to turn and stare after her.

There’d been something there, in that split-second of contact. It was more than the neutral acknowledgement one human being might display of another. Neither had it been a spark of sexual interest.

The woman had recognised Purkiss.

Without breaking stride, he angled himself a little to the right so as to begin an imperceptible loop back in the direction he’d come. He concentrated on the brief impression he’d had of the woman, burning the details onto his memory. She’d been young, perhaps late twenties or early thirties. Dark blonde hair, possibly bobbed, beneath a hat. Casual clothes: a fleece, jeans. And a shoulder bag which looked as if it might hold a laptop computer.

He was almost certain he’d never seen her before.

So: she recognised his face, which meant she’d been primed to spot him. He had to consider her one of the opposition. That increased their numbers to two, at least, including the man in the coffee shop who’d poisoned his meal.

Purkiss reached the queues for the check-in desks. Despite the restricted numbers of flights, the major airlines seemed to be doing good business, with the lines of waiting passengers snaking back almost to the opposite side of the terminal. Purkiss chose a queue for a budget airline and joined the end. He fished out the new phone he’d bought and gazed at it, his thumb moving, just as everybody did these days while standing in line and waiting.

Using the periphery of his vision, and occasional lifts of his head to check the progress of the queue, he studied his environment.

The woman was nowhere to be seen. He assumed she’d passed close to him as part of a surveillance sequence of some kind, which involved the opposition keeping close to him at all times to reduce the risk he might escape. Sooner or later, they’d make a move. But would they dare to do so here, in full view of the watching security people?

The nausea roiled though his belly and chest once again, without warning, and Purkiss thought for a moment he was going to throw up again. He clenched his jaws, breathed deeply through his nose, fought the squirming in his gut back down.

He felt himself shoved from behind and half-turned, tensing, the adrenaline surging in his blood. But it was a couple with three children and a huge pile of suitcases. The man, his sweating face red with harassment, muttered an apology.

As Purkiss turned back to face the distant desk, his gaze sweeping the terminal, he sensed a tug at his right side. He glanced down, saw his overcoat swaying, felt a lightness there, barely noticeable.

Clapped his hand against his coat.

The wallet.

A man was moving quickly away from the queue, towards the row of shops and eateries at the back of the terminal. Purkiss automatically worked out the quickest route to him. He could reach the man in under ten seconds.

Distraction
, his mind shouted at him.
Don’t focus on the distraction.

He twisted to his left, brought his left arm down sharply, felt the edge of his palm connect with a wrist, heard a hiss of pain. Another man was close up against him, ostensibly squeezing past to move further up the queue. Purkiss glanced down between them, saw the man’s arm at waist level, his hand barely emerging from the sleeve of his coat, something glinting in his fist.

Purkiss seized the wrist, began to apply pressure, squeezing the bones together, adding a small degree of torque. All the while he remained standing, facing forwards. The man beside him maintained a similar posture, peering at the desks as if trying to read the flight information on the display on the wall behind them.

Purkiss felt the man rotate his wrist, trying to turn it into a position which would allow him to pull it free from Purkiss’s grip. He didn’t look down, but he hadn’t heard the blade clatter to the floor, so he knew the man still had it in his grasp. He assumed the intention had been a smooth sweep as the man passed him, a neat severing of the femoral artery in the thigh or perhaps, more messily, a stab into the abdomen.

The problem was, Purkiss couldn’t risk a counter-attack without drawing attention to himself. His best bet was to disarm the man and release him.

Still the man continued to resist the pressure of Purkiss’s grip, though his arm was beginning to shake. Purkiss glanced at the side of the man’s face, a natural enough thing to do when you were standing in a queue and somebody lingered beside you, perhaps with intentions to push his way in ahead. He saw a European profile, possibly British, the hairline receding. The man’s jaw was set, but apart from that he betrayed no sign of the pain he must be in.

Purkiss murmured, his tone conversational and just loud enough that the people in front and behind him wouldn’t hear, ‘Drop it or I’ll break your wrist.’

The man let out a muffled grunt. His eyes flicked sideways at Purkiss and back again.

The queue began to shuffle forward. Behind Purkiss, the family got moving with a great deal of noise and fuss. He felt the suitcase-laden trolley bump against the backs of his legs again, heard another apology.

Purkiss glanced back over his shoulder. The trolley was just behind his legs.

Keeping his grip on the man’s arm, he turned a little to his left, drawing the man with him. While the family were preoccupied, both parents scolding two of the children whose lips were quivering, Purkiss hooked the tip of his shoe under the front end of the trolley and swung it slightly so that it rolled between his legs and those of the man beside him. He pulled the man towards him, letting go of his wrist an instant later.

The man stumbled across the trolley, tipping the precariously balanced suitcases off with a crash. Purkiss stepped aside, watched the man right himself and help to load the suitcases on again. There was no sign of the blade; he must have concealed it deftly.

Purkiss backed away from the queue, keeping the man in his line of sight. The man apparently ignored him, fussing over the suitcases he’d knocked over. Purkiss surveyed the environment, looking for others who might be poised to take over and close in.

Three of them, then, so far. The man from the coffee shop, the woman, and this man.

If he could identify them all, it would give him an edge. Not much of one, but at least he’d know his enemy’s numbers. He needed to draw any others out, but it meant detaching himself from the public and putting himself in a position in which he could be cornered. And that could prove fatal.

The burning in Purkiss’s chest and abdomen had eased, but had been replaced by a cramping which in itself provoked nausea. He hoped diarrhoea wasn’t next in the line of symptoms. Around him, the crowd appeared to be moving in slow motion, as if underwater, and the noises filtering into his ears seemed echoing and distant.

Perhaps there had been some kind of neuromodulatory agent in the poison, after all.

Purkiss needed cold air, and quickly. He could always exit the terminal, inhale a few lungfuls, and then return. And by going outside, he might draw out further enemy elements.

He reached the glass façade of the terminal and was approaching the sliding doors when the woman appeared at his side, walking in the same direction as him, and murmured in English: ‘Turn around immediately.’

Purkiss reacted more quickly than he’d believed himself capable of, pivoting on one foot and jabbing the stiffened fingers of his right hand upward at a point just below her breastbone. It was a potentially incapacitating blow which had the advantage of preventing the recipient from crying out, and was often useful in public places for subduing an opponent while attracting the minimum of attention.

But his aim was off, and she turned her body so that his fingertips jabbed into her upper arm. He grabbed the arm, felt unsteadiness drag at his legs, and took a second to regain his balance.

She caught him and pressed in close so that he leaned against her, as if they were two lovers parting or reuniting. He tensed his abdomen against the blade that would surely slip in, cold and hard.

In his ear, she whispered: ‘There are four of them waiting outside. You’re in no fit state to confront them. They’ll take you down easily. Stay inside the terminal.’

‘Why –’ he started to say, but found he couldn’t complete the thought. He let her turn him slowly, with an arm around his waist, and he saw the hubbub of the terminal swing back into shaky view.

‘What happened to you?’ she said, quietly but conversationally, as they walked slowly back towards the check-in area.

‘Some kind of toxin,’ he said. ‘I expelled most of it, I think.’ He realised now what he had been meaning to ask:
why are you protecting me?

As if she’d read his thoughts, she said: ‘I’m a friend. There are at least two of them inside the terminal. Probably more. And four outside. All male.’

Purkiss said, ‘Another exit. There must be.’ He shook his head, the disjointed word order sounding stupid to him. ‘A service tunnel.’

‘No. Too easy to get trapped in.’ She said, ‘I have an idea.’

She told him. He nodded.

‘What’s your name?’ he said.

‘Deacon.’

‘I’m –’

‘Purkiss,’ she finished. ‘I know.’

They reached a pair of police officers armed with rifles, who stood stockily, their impassive gazes trained on the crowds.

‘Excuse me,’ the woman said, still in English. ‘My boyfriend. He’s not well.’