Cronos Rising Read Free

left wrist. As he did so, he applied torque to the arm, twisting it ever upwards and anticlockwise until the fingers of Billson’s left hand opened involuntarily and he released the handle of the case.
    Purkiss released the arm and caught the briefcase deftly by the handle with his left hand. He dropped the bolt cutters back in his pocket to free up his right hand and raised it, prepared for a counterattack by Billson. But his blow to the man’s neck had been effective, not quite knocking the man unconscious but stunning him. Billson slumped against the stone wall, his hands gripping the top to keep himself from sliding down. He didn’t look round, but rather shook his head as if in dazed wonder.
    Purkiss ran.
    He headed back the way he’d come, in a straight line away from Billson and directly behind him, so that the man would have to turn round fully to see him. The side street from which Purkiss had emerged, and into which he now plunged once more, led to a short maze of unlit alleys. Purkiss dodged and weaved, taking a different route from the one he’d followed while checking for surveillance earlier, before he came out on a broader thoroughfare. There he slowed, controlling his breathing, dropping to a purposeful stride. An informally dressed man sprinting though the streets with a briefcase in his hand would arouse suspicion at the very least, and might even trigger pursuit.
    When once again Purkiss was confident he wasn’t being followed, he entered a small piazza, one he didn’t recognise but which probably, like most places in Rome, had some historical story attached to it. The square held a scattering of evening strollers, mainly tourists by the look of them. No police.
    Purkiss sat on a stone bench and examined the briefcase. It was a plain leather one, neither brand-new nor battered, with two combination locks. He took a Swiss Army knife from another of his pockets and jemmied the hasps open, ruining the locks in the process.
    Vale had instructed Purkiss to procure evidence that Billson was being paid for information by the Chinese. He hadn’t told him to examine that evidence himself, but Purkiss knew he was justified in opening the briefcase, and that Vale would see it the same way.
    The case was full of paper, but not in the form of banknotes.
    Instead, there were reams of A4 and A5. Some had Chinese characters printed on them, in the format of text or letterheads or sometimes both. Some of them were completely blank.
    Purkiss didn’t read or speak Mandarin, or Cantonese, or any other Chinese language. He’d therefore need to keep the paper for scrutiny by somebody able to interpret the writings.
    But he was fairly certain the writing was junk. That the paper in the briefcase was just that. Paper. Filler.
    Purkiss placed the contents carefully on the bench beside him. He set to work inspecting the briefcase itself. The inner lining, the leather exterior. The handle.
    There were no hidden compartments. No flash drives stitched into the seams. No microdots secreted behind the metal rivets.
    Purkiss replaced the stack of paper in the case, closed it, and, holding it shut beneath one arm, made his way out of the piazza.
    *
    H e didn’t go back to his hotel room. He’d done a comprehensive sweep for bugs, which had come up clear, but this latest development changed everything.
    He had to assume his hotel was under surveillance.
    Instead, Purkiss took a metro train to the Trevi Rione. It was a quiet area, but not so desolate that anybody could make a move on him without being seen. He found a cafe and sat at a window table with a clear view of the street. The noise level in the place was just enough that it would interfere with any long-range audio device which might be used to try to eavesdrop on his conversation.
    Any known audio device. The Chinese regime might have, and probably did have, access to technology far in advance of anything the Western or even the Russian intelligence services were aware