Jokerman (16 page)

Thirty-three

The whole set-up put Purkiss in mind of Spandau Prison.

He wasn’t expecting to see Gothic gates or machine-gun towers, and indeed the building, as it appeared over the rise, didn’t look like a place of detention at all. Rather, it had the appearance of a squat office complex on an industrial estate, the kind normally found on the outskirts of a fair-sized town.

This one, though, was in the depths of the Berkshire countryside.

‘The Room,’ said Vale, in the seat beside him.

Kasabian had suggested Vale take Purkiss there. Although she said she’d cleared the way to allow Purkiss access, there was still the possibility of his being stopped by suspicious or ill-informed personnel along the way. Vale would be able to call in for assistance, pull strings if necessary.

Hannah had slipped out at seven, declining Purkiss’s offer of coffee. She hadn’t quite blown a kiss at the door, but there’d been a mischievous cast to her eyes he hadn’t seen before.

Vale picked Purkiss up in his car at the Covent Garden flat and they made their way west, out of the city, the traffic relatively light at eleven thirty on a Sunday morning. The highrises and estates in the west of the city gave way gradually to the undulating countryside of Royal Berkshire.

Vale began a winding descent towards a pair of high electric gates flanked by kiosks in each of which sat a uniformed police officer. The policemen emerged long before Vale reached the gates. Purkiss noticed they both carried carbines slung across their chests.

The Room, Vale had informed him on the journey, was the place Richard Rossiter was being detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. A former safe house and interrogation facility for Soviet defectors during the Cold War, it had sat disused until almost a year ago, when someone had come up with the idea of turning it into a prison for one man. That man was Rossiter.

It wasn’t house arrest, because The Room was nobody’s idea of a home. But it was a step up from a normal prison, even a white-collar one. Rossiter apparently had a large cell, more like a dormitory but with a single bed. He was allowed a small selection of his own clothes to wear. He was permitted fresh air and exercise, books, and television, though no Internet facilities.

Every inch of the property, indoors and out, was covered by closed-circuit television cameras and concealed audio monitors. The reason, Vale surmised, was not so much to anticipate any escape plans Rossiter might be forming, but rather to pick up the smallest scrap of information he might inadvertently reveal about his former collaborators.

Rossiter had been part of an illegal black-operations project within SIS, one which took it upon itself to dispense with legal niceties and due process and to mete out torture and execution in the interests of British state security. Apart from Claire Stirling, Purkiss’s fiancée, whom Rossiter claimed he’d trained and run as one of his own, it wasn’t known who else was involved in the project. Indeed, it wasn’t clear if Rossiter was in charge, a mere underling, or even a lone wolf.

He’d been questioned, threatened, cajoled, offered deals that would allow him an early release. None of it had worked. Rossiter had flatly refused to answer any questions about anybody else he might have operated with. He hadn’t denied there were others involved, nor had he confirmed it. He simply hadn’t discussed the matter at all.

So the hope was, Vale assumed out loud, that Rossiter might betray the identity of others inadvertently. By blurting out their names in his sleep, perhaps.

‘It’s a long shot,’ Purkiss said drily.

‘Indeed.’

Might Rossiter be willing to open up about a dead person, though? In this case, Arkwright? Purkiss hoped so.

The carbine-laden policemen stepped forwards, one peering into Purkiss’s side of the car, the other approaching Vale’s. Purkiss wound down the window.

‘John Purkiss.’ He held up a special laminated card, replete with his mug shot, which Kasabian had supplied for him. He’d brought along his passport, too, just in case further ID was required.

The officer studied it from behind mirror shades, then nodded. ‘Straight through, please, sir. Stop just inside the gates.’

The gates slid sideways. Inside, Vale was asked to hand over the keys. Four more officers, who had appeared from nowhere, took over, one of them driving the car off towards a smaller building of some kind, no doubt for it to be scanned for explosives, the other three escorting Purkiss and Vale to the main block.

Inside, Vale stood to one side, his journey ended for the moment. Silent, unsmiling men in prison officers’ garb took Purkiss’s watch, wallet and mobile phone. He was expertly patted down, had metal detectors as well as a Geiger counter run over every inch of his outline, then told to walk through another doorframe-style scanner.

On the other side, two prison guards and two policemen led him down a brightly lit, institutional corridor to a door at the end. One of the warders touched his fingers against a scanning pad and pushed the door when it buzzed. Purkiss found himself in an airlock. The warder opened the door on the other side similarly.

‘No physical contact whatsoever,’ the warder intoned. ‘No standing until you’re ready to leave. You’ll be under video but not audio surveillance, so your conversation is confidential. But if there’s any sign that things are getting heated in there, that the prisoner’s temper is being roused, my staff and I have discretion to terminate the interview immediately. Understood?’

‘Yes,’ said Purkiss.

He stepped through the door into a square room lit with fluorescent ceiling panels. The room smelled freshly painted and clean. There was no other visible exit. In the centre of the room stood a metal-framed table with a laminated wood surface. On the table, in turn, stood a plastic jug of water and two beakers.

A man stood behind the table. Short, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, eyes blue chips that stood out against surprisingly tanned skin. The trace of a smile teasing the thin lips.

Rossiter.

Thirty-four

Up until the moment he entered the room, Purkiss hadn’t known how he was going to feel, despite his reassurances to Vale.

He looked into Rossiter’s eyes, and felt nothing. Because this was a different man.

It was Rossiter, technically speaking; but the eyes were different. When Purkiss had seen them before, in Tallinn, they’d been alive, as though fine blue membranes were providing a precarious barrier between the man’s inner rage and the world outside.

Now they were the same blue, but calmer. Resigned looking.

They stood on either side of the table, watching one another. Rossiter was the first to sit. Purkiss followed.

‘John.’

The voice was quieter, again with none of the seething tension Purkiss remembered. Rossiter looked older, too, and had lost a little weight. He must be around fifty, but he could have passed for five years older.

‘Rossiter.’

It was the point at which two old acquaintances meeting for the first time after a separation would start complimenting one another on how well they looked. Purkiss fought an insane urge to laugh.

‘You know why I’m here?’ he asked.

‘I’ve no idea, no,’ said Rossiter levelly. ‘I must admit to being intrigued, though.’

‘I’m here to ask you some questions.’

‘Not this, surely? Not ten months on?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Purkiss.

Rossiter placed his palms together, rested his chin on his fingertips. ‘I always wondered why they didn’t send you in to interrogate me back then, John. After I was first taken into custody.’

‘Because I would have killed you,’ said Purkiss.

‘You didn’t kill me on the boat, when you had the chance.’

‘That was a crazy, heat-of-the-moment display of mercy. With time to cool off, I’d have done it.’

Rossiter looked faintly amused. ‘So what’s stopping you from killing me now? Or
is
that why you’re here?’

‘I don’t want to kill you, Rossiter,’ Purkiss said. ‘Not any more.’

‘Why not?’ Now genuine interest had replaced the amusement.

Purkiss waved a hand, glanced around. ‘All this is death.’

‘It’s really quite comfortable.’

‘
Comfortable.
This from a man who was prepared to trigger a war between NATO and Russia in order to restore the importance of SIS in the world.’ Purkiss smiled. ‘Comfort isn’t your style. And here you are, in a parody of middle-class suburban hell. Good food, reading material, regular exercise. A stress-free environment, designed to allow you to nurture your spiritual side.’ He sat back, aware he’d been leaning steadily forward and not wanting to attract the disapproval of the watching warders. ‘No, Rossiter. I don’t want to kill you. I’m quite satisfied knowing you’re dying in here. And you’ve got thirty or forty years worth of dying ahead of you yet.’

For an instant, for the briefest beat, Purkiss thought he saw a flash of the old expression in the eyes, a bulging; but it was gone even as he registered it. Rossiter chuckled, a cordial sound.

‘Why the hell didn’t you join us, John? You’d have been an enormous asset.’

‘
Us.
You said that to me on the boat.’ Purkiss paused. ‘There are others, then.’

‘Good God, of course there are.’ Rossiter looked mildly astounded. ‘I never said there weren’t.’

‘But you won’t reveal their names.’

Rossiter sighed. ‘John, you’re at risk of becoming something I’d never have thought you were capable of. Boring. Are you going to get to the point?’

‘All right. I need your help.’

Purkiss had meant to wrong-foot Rossiter, and if he didn’t quite succeed, he saw from the raised eyebrows that he’d at least surprised the man.

‘
Well.
That, I wasn’t expecting, I must admit. Full marks for honesty.’

Purkiss took from his pocket the one object he’d been allowed to bring in with him. It was a printout of the photo of Arkwright from the SIS database, the one Vale had sent him. The one showing Arkwright before the scars.

Rossiter took out a pair of glasses and put them on, peering down his nose at the picture. He seemed to consider for a moment; then he said, ‘Dennis Arkwright. In handsomer days.’

‘That’s very forthcoming of you,’ said Purkiss.

Rossiter shrugged. ‘There’s no reason I’d keep his identity secret. He was never a colleague of mine. Just a thug for hire, with a brute talent for interrogation.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

‘He was shot yesterday. I was there.’

Rossiter waited.

‘What was your connection with him?’

‘Now, now, John.’ Rossiter wagged a finger. ‘You’re going to have to give me a little more.’

‘Before he died,’ said Purkiss, slowing down for emphasis, ‘Arkwright revealed he was hired as a torturer by the current head of the Security Service, Sir Guy Strang.’

And there it was, definitely this time. The force behind the eyes. The roiling, almost feral energy.

Rossiter leaned in.

‘
Now
you’re being interesting,’ he said.

Thirty-five

‘Istanbul, in early 2007, it would have been. You were in Marseille at the time, weren’t you? Yes. My brief was to investigate the flow of Turkish drug money which was suspected to be helping fund the insurgency in Iraq.’

Rossiter’s gaze was in the distance as he remembered.

‘Our relationship, the Service’s relationship, with the Turkish authorities, was – how can I put it? –
complex
. Nominally we were allies, and still are. But there was a strong element within the Turkish services which bitterly resented our presence there, even though various pacts and accords enshrined our rights to be involved. So although we were reliant to some extent from the intelligence shared with us by our Turkish counterparts, we couldn’t always fully trust either its accuracy or its completeness.

‘I decided this wasn’t good enough, and developed my own intelligence-gathering network within the city. Off the books, of course. The official SIS line, even internally, was that we were to engage in no underhand operations that didn’t have the approval of the authorities.

‘I used local  people for the gathering of intelligence, but outside sources for the extraction of information. I’d tried Turkish interrogators before, but I’d found them either too soft on their compatriots, or by contrast too zealous. One has to strike a balance. So I hand-picked a number of people, mostly Europeans, to carry out the questioning of individuals I’d identified as being involved in the local drug business.’

‘One of them being Arkwright,’ said Purkiss.

‘Yes. He came recommended to me through a complicated series of links, none of which probably have any bearing on the matter at hand. I learned of his background as a Royal Marine Commando, and of his dishonourable discharge. At the time I recruited him, he was working for a low-rent security firm in Saudi Arabia.’

‘Did you discover anything about his involvement with the Security Service?’

‘No. That part was carefully covered up. No doubt he’d had professional assistance in doing so. His CV was a list of short-term contracts with assorted mercenary and security outfits. I looked into one or two of them, they held up, so I didn’t bother vetting him further.’

‘Sloppy,’ remarked Purkiss.

Rossiter turned a palm upwards. ‘Perhaps. But you have to remember, John, I wasn’t hiring an agent to do sensitive, complicated undercover work. I was hiring a torturer. A flavour of the background of such a person is usually all that’s necessary.’

Purkiss thought about it. ‘You recruited Arkwright in early 2007.’

‘March, I believe.’

‘He told me he’d left Iraq in February 2005, after the car bombs at Al Hillah. He returned to Britain to have his injuries seen to. And then, as he was about to go back to Iraq, he was approached by the Security Service.’

‘When was that, exactly?’ said Rossiter.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t get a chance to clarify that point.’ Purkiss counted off on his fingers. ‘But let’s say he was undergoing medical treatment for three months. That’s probably an underestimate, given the apparent extent of his injuries, but we’ll say three months. He’s recruited by the Security Service in May 2005. He told me he worked for them for two years. Till May 2007, that would be. It doesn’t tally with when you say you hired him.’

‘It’s close, though’ said Rossiter. ‘When he told you two years, it might have been an estimate.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘But I take your point. And if he did come to work for me immediately after the Security Service work, it means the last job on his CV – the one in Saudi – was fake.’

Purkiss drew a long breath, released it through his nose. He sifted through the information, trying to find something of use.

‘Why would Arkwright have mentioned you with his dying breath?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been wondering that myself,’ Rossiter said, sounding genuinely intrigued. ‘He obviously wanted you to speak to me, but it’s hard to fathom why.’

‘Did you ever have anything to do with Mohammed Al-Bayati?’

‘No. I hadn’t heard of him until you mentioned his name. I didn’t have a great deal of involvement in the Iraq arena.’

Purkiss ran through the sequence in his mind again.
Al-Bayati gets killed. Arkwright, when confronted with Al-Bayati’s name, confesses to torturing him and dozens of others. After being shot, and presumably knowing he’s dying, Arkwright mentions the name of Rossiter, a man he was hired by only
after
doing the torture work for the Security Service.

It didn’t add up.

Purkiss transferred his gaze to Rossiter across the table.

‘You haven’t told me why you’re interested in this, by the way.’

‘Because it’s a puzzle, and I always like those,’ Rossiter said.

Purkiss shook his head. ‘That’s not the only reason.’

‘No. It isn’t.’ Once more, the cold blaze behind the eyes. ‘The mention of Sir Guy Strang is what got me.’

Purkiss waited.

‘Strang represents everything that’s wrong with the Security Service.’

‘How would you know?’ said Purkiss. ‘You were SIS. You had nothing to do with them.’

Rossiter smiled faintly. ‘Not wanting to boast, John, but an SIS operative of my seniority starts to get roped into interdepartmental liaison more and more.  Particularly since the start of the new terror threat, Five and Six have been forging closer links, even as they’ve come to detest one another increasingly. I’ve seen the workings of the Security Service up close.’

‘So what’s wrong with Sir Guy?’

‘Strang is, on the surface, a Churchillian figure. A big, bluff, no-nonsense ox of a man who enjoys a drink and a cigar and has little time for the oily corporatism and middle-management mentality which seems to be suffusing both our services at the moment. He’s a clichéd hate figure, a privileged white middle-class male with High Tory political views and no sensitive feminine side whatsoever.

‘The immense irony is, he’s exactly the same as the careerists and opportunists he affects to despise. He’s all image. All style and no substance. His image is a rebellious, snook-cocking one… but it’s an image, ultimately, and that’s all it is. He’s not serious about the job. He has no principles. He’s easily led. And at a time when the head of Britain’s Security Service
cannot
afford to be weak, or even show weakness… he’s exactly the wrong person for the job.’

‘It sounds as though he was decisive enough, supervising the torture of prisoners.’

Rossiter wagged his finger again. ‘Don’t confuse
ambition
with
suitability
, John. Plenty of ferociously ambitious people have clawed their way into jobs they were eminently unfit for. Look at most of the Cabinets of the last couple of decades. Strang was ruthless enough when he was bulldozing his way to the top job. But now that he’s there… he’s achieved his goal. All his efforts are now focused not on getting the job done, but on staying where he is.’

‘Have you ever met him?’ asked Purkiss.

‘I have, as a matter of fact. Three years ago, about six months before he was appointed as his service’s head. Some joint policy meeting or other. He was both a boor and a bore. I listened to his stupid quips and his pig-ignorant opinions and I thought,
my God, we’re doomed
.’ Rossiter tilted his head as though realising something for the first time. ‘In fact, that may have partly influenced my decision to do what I did in Tallinn. I came to understand that if Britain was destined to have a third-rate Security Service, it had better have an absolutely top-notch foreign intelligence agency.’

‘Really,’ said Purkiss. ‘I thought you told everyone the reason you tried to murder the Russian president was to avert a nuclear war.’

Rossiter tipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘Ultimately, yes. Nuclear destruction is the only issue that matters in the end. All else is fluff. And nobody’s willing to face up to the fact.’

Purkiss glanced where his watch should be, remembered he’d handed it in at the front. ‘We’re digressing.’

‘Indeed. But I just wanted to answer your question, as to why I’m cooperating with you. You’re unearthing evidence which could well bring Strang down. I’m all for that, in the interests of the body politic.’ Rossiter clapped his hands together. ‘So. Your man Morrow discovers, through his links with Al-Bayati, that Arkwright was a torturer who not only tortured Al-Bayati himself, but did so at the behest of Strang, the head of Five. He –’

‘We don’t know that,’ said Purkiss.

‘What?’

‘We don’t know Morrow found out about Strang. He may have learned from Al-Bayati only that Arkwright was carrying out the torture on behalf of Five.’

‘Fair point. In either case, Morrow decides to blow the whistle. He requests a clandestine meeting with the Home Secretary. Strang finds out about the meeting – he could have done so in any number of ways, the simplest being that the Home Secretary told him – and arranges to have Morrow killed.’

‘That makes sense so far,’ said Purkiss. ‘But it doesn’t explain how the gunman got on to me, and tried to kill me at my home.’

‘You’re sure Mo Kasabian didn’t send him?’

‘Yes,’ said Purkiss. ‘There’s the evidence of the polygraph, and my own eyes. She was telling the truth.’

‘Then her security’s been breached,’ said Rossiter. ‘Somehow Strang’s found out that you’ve become involved.’

Purkiss sighed. ‘Rossiter, this is all stuff I’ve already figured out. Is there anything you can give me that might help?’

Rossiter thought for a moment. Then: ‘The security firm Arkwright said he was working for at the time I recruited him. The one in Saudi.’

‘What about it?’

‘It exists. I checked it when I hired Arkwright. Even got a reference for him. But if he was really doing Strang’s dirty work at the time, then the firm might be a front. A shell company, designed to provide cover for other activities.’

Purkiss considered it. ‘Yes. It’s a possibility.’

‘The firm’s called Scipio Rand Security. It’s based in Riyadh. I can’t recall its address or contact details but you should be able to find it without difficulty.’

‘All right.’ Purkiss couldn’t bring himself to say thanks.

He studied Rossiter. There really wasn’t anything more to ask, or say.

Purkiss stood. Rossiter gave it a second and then rose too.

Behind Purkiss, the door opened and he felt the warder’s presence.

Quietly, so as not to be overheard, Rossiter said: ‘Get him, John. Get Strang.’

Purkiss turned his back and went out.

Vale was waiting near the entrance, in a small office they’d lent him. He stood when he saw Purkiss.

‘Anything?’ he asked.

‘Maybe,’ said Purkiss. ‘I need a flight to Riyadh.’