Nemesis Read Free

the steps from the plane’s door, he saw Vale standing on the tarmac.
    It was unusual. Normally Vale contacted him by phone to arrange a rendezvous. Unexpected meetings like this weren’t his style.
    Vale was a tall black man, skeletally thin, and tending towards a stoop as if sixty-plus years of life were finally getting the upper hand. He watched Purkiss as he disembarked, but didn’t raise his hand in greeting. The late March air was chilly, winter seguing sluggishly into spring, but Vale wore a heavy overcoat. Purkiss supposed a man as bony as he was felt the cold more than most.
    Purkiss stepped onto the runway.
    ‘Quentin,’ he said.
    ‘John.’
    There was no handshake. No hello . It wasn’t the way they did things.
    The rest of the passengers began filing towards the airport terminal. Vale turned and motioned for Purkiss to fall in step.
    ‘Passport control’s been taken care of,’ he said. ‘Your luggage will be collected and delivered to you later.’
    They headed for a gate in the wall along one side of the runway. A security guard held it open for them.
    Vale said, ‘Are you fit?’
    It wasn’t small talk, wasn’t an idle query about Purkiss’s wellbeing. Purkiss had spent the last week in the Belgian countryside, not on holiday but being put through his paces with six other people by a former officer of the French Foreign Legion. The man offered a private - and expensive - service for intelligence operatives, security personnel, mercenaries, and anyone else who had requirements which went beyond those available through the normal channels.
    The training had been brutal. Comprising all-weather endurance courses, hand-to-hand combat sessions, and simulated interrogation exercises, it had stretched Purkiss to the extremes of what he had considered himself capable of. Once - just once - he’d thought he’d reached his limit, and couldn’t make the cut. But he’d overcome the final barrier his psyche had thrown up. Two of the other people on the course had dropped out, one of them with a broken femur, the other in a state of abject, gibbering panic from which Purkiss doubted the man would ever fully recover.
    Purkiss was approaching the end of his fortieth year. He was still young enough to function with a high level of proficiency in his field, but he was at an age where the first slowing of the reaction times began to manifest, where the connections between mental and physical action weren’t made with the same lightning-quick immediacy.
    He’d taken a full twenty-four hours at the end of the course to rest, in a tiny cottage near Ghent. He’d slept, he’d stretched and soothed his punished muscles, he’d spent long periods with his mind emptied of all thought.
    He ached still, and the horrors to which he’d been subjected danced and cackled on the periphery of his memory, part of his consciousness for ever.
    But he felt good. Refreshed. Recharged.
    ‘Yes,’ he said to Vale. ‘Top condition.’
    Vale needed to know that Purkiss was ready, which meant he had work for him.
    Vale’s car was parked in a restricted area. A Volvo saloon, it was neither flashy nor decrepit. He got behind the wheel, Purkiss dropping in beside him. The interior smelt strongly of stale cigarette smoke.
    As Vale started the engine, he said, ‘We’ve got a problem.’
    Purkiss listened, hard.
    In the course of the last six years, Vale had sent him to avert an attack on the Russian president. He’d despatched him to the nightmare of the Siberian tundra. He’d even placed Purkiss in the way of an assassin, in order to draw out the ringleader.
    But he’d never once described anything as a problem .
    When Vale didn’t venture anything more, Purkiss said: ‘By we , I take it you mean the Service.’
    Both Vale and Purkiss had previously worked for the Secret Intelligence Service, known more popularly as MI6. Purkiss had left six years earlier. He still wasn’t entirely sure whether Vale was independent of the