Cronos Rising Read Free Page B

meant Purkiss himself was cut off.
    Exposed.
    A church loomed ahead of Purkiss. Tiny by Roman standards, it was nevertheless spectacularly striking, in that typical Italian way. In the north of the continent, where the iconography was darker, more primeval, such a church would have sported gargoyles leering from its walls.
    Above the doors, an ornate Christ in bas-relief grimaced, the terrible torment of its expression enhanced by the sculpted gore that leaked from its widespread, transfixed hands.

Three
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    P urkiss spent the next three hours crossing the city following the most chaotic of routes, chaotic in the sense of random, unpredictable. When he noticed he’d been following an approximate figure-of-eight path, he changed it drastically to a diagonal zig-zag. When he found himself once again at one or other bank of the Tiber, he headed for the outer suburbs.
    Absolute certainty was an impossibility in Purkiss’s line of work. But by eleven o’clock, with the crowds thinning on the piazzas and the residential streets darkening, he was as positive as he could be that he wasn’t under surveillance.
    He felt the urge to dispose of his clothes, to scrub himself in a shower somewhere, in case some kind of monitoring device had been secreted about his clothing or even implanted in his skin. He felt the urge, and he resisted it, because that was where normal healthy paranoia segued into madness. He’d known agents who had succumbed to that degree of fear, a corroding force which eventually became paralysing.
    In the last hour before midnight, Purkiss found a tiny hotel on an authentically cobbled street in the Ludovisi district. In the reception area, barely as big as a kitchenette in a studio flat, he asked the sleepy woman behind the desk for a room for the night.
    He ascended the vertiginous stairs and inserted the old-fashioned key into the lock, stepped inside, and braced himself for the brilliant flash of light and noise which never came.
    Get a grip , he told himself.
    The room held a single bed with a sagging, too-soft mattress, a single chair, and a dresser with a telephone and portable television set. Purkiss drew the thin curtains across the window, finding them inadequate to the task of blotting out the light from the street lamp directly outside. He sat on the edge of the bed and took stock.
    His single suitcase was back at his original hotel. All it held were a couple of changes of clothes and his toiletries. His passport, and his wallet, were in the pocket of the duffel jacket he was wearing. He had the briefcase with its prised-open locks and the most likely worthless scrap paper inside.
    He needed to get back to Britain, but he didn’t know how vulnerable he’d be at the airports. He could take a train out of Italy, but the stations might be under surveillance.
    His best bet was to hire a car.
    He’d make his way back to London, and then... what? He had no contact details for Vale, apart from the phone number which now appeared defunct. Vale didn’t use an office, at least not one Purkiss was aware of. All their meetings had taken place outdoors, or in other public places.
    He couldn’t very well walk into the MI6 building and ask after Vale, because Vale wasn’t officially Service any more.
    No. He’d have to wait to be contacted, either by Vale himself or by somebody who knew him. And that cast Purkiss in a passive role, which he didn’t like.
    Purkiss had spent the day tailing David Billson, and realised that as such he hadn’t kept up with the news. He looked for a remote control, couldn’t find one, and turned the small television set on manually, flicking through the channels until he found a 24-hour news channel in English.
    He watched the grainy footage. The black smoke billowing towards the slate sky, the frantic activity as people scurried about in bright neon outfits. The aerial shots, taken from helicopters, of the shattered plane, half-submerged in the field in