Free Cronos Rising by Tim Stevens

nursing a styrofoam cup of coffee. She rose as he approached, put her arms round him in a gesture that combined relief and exasperation.
    ‘Let’s go home,’ Purkiss muttered.
    He felt the officers’ eyes on his back until he and Deacon were through the front doors. Outside, it was early afternoon, the skies clearer than they’d been on his arrival at the airport that morning but still filmed over with a thin cloud layer.
    ‘I rented a car while you were in there,’ she said.
    She’d chosen a VW Passat, solid and unremarkable. Purkiss dropped into the passenger seat and sat with his head pressed back, his eyes open. He waited until she’d pulled out into the light traffic before he said: ‘Who are you?’
    She ignored the question. ‘I presume you held up in there.’
    Purkiss had been questioned by a total of four different people. Two were senior police detectives. The other two didn’t introduce themselves, but were almost certainly BfV, the German domestic intelligence service. He’d explained, in tones that were alternately sheepish and self-righteous, that he’d taken a pill that morning which he’d been given in a club in Rome the previous night. It had made him paranoid, caused him to hallucinate. When he’d seen the two armed policemen at the airport, he’d panicked, and had run.
    They’d studied his passport. Did he have any other ID on him, they’d wanted to know? He said he must have lost his wallet. Which was perfectly true.
    He and his girlfriend, Miss Michelle Havers - Deacon had told him that was the name on the passport she was using - were tourists from London. They’d arrived that morning from Rome on separate flights, because they’d met in Rome a few days earlier and had discovered they were both heading to Frankfurt, albeit at different times. He’d taken the pill just before the flight, and by the time he met Michelle at Frankfurt Airport he’d already started to feel its negative effects.
    The police detectives lectured him on the dangers of illicit substances. Purkiss concurred, said he’d never do anything like it again. By the time the two security agents had questioned him and had left, the detectives’ interest in him was clearly waning. At last, they sent him on his way.
    ‘Yes,’ Purkiss said to Deacon. ‘I held up.’
    As a tactic, it had worked. His arrest had meant he and Deacon had been spirited out of the airport under armed guard. His opponents in the terminal would have been unable to intervene. He’d given them the slip, for now at least.
    Purkiss said again: ‘Who are you?’
    He studied her profile. She was probably a little older than he’d initially thought, maybe thirty-two or -three. Her features were strong, the lines of the nose and chin straight, the eyes dark. Not a conventionally pretty face, but an attractive one nonetheless.
    ‘My name’s Rebecca Deacon,’ she said. ‘I was given instructions yesterday to find you and protect you. I went to Rome, but you weren’t in the hotel. So I was pointed in the direction of a man named David Billson. He told me you’d been to visit him earlier that night, and that you were asking about Quentin Vale.’
    The mention of the name jolted Purkiss, as if the seat beneath him was wired. ‘You know Vale?’
    She shook her head, once. ‘I know of him. The person giving me my instructions is a former associate of his. I say former , because Vale was killed on board Flight TA15. As you already know.’ She paused, as the traffic ahead slowed in the approach to a roundabout. ‘My instructor asked me to go to Frankfurt, because that was where TA15 took off from. He believed you’d head for the airport in search of clues.’
    The four hours in the police room, during which he’d been supplied with coffee and water and a sandwich, had helped clear Purkiss’s head. The nausea, the abdominal cramps, were also much diminished. But this new overload of information took him a while to process.
    ‘Hang on,’ he