Cronos Rising Read Online Free PDF Page A

felt the small hard shape of the key.
    She’d kept the key with her, never more than a few feet away even when she was in bed or in the bath, for the last six years. Ever since her mother had given it to her, a couple of days before her death. A thin, superficial layer of Rebecca’s mind had told her she’d never have occasion to use it.
    But, deeper, she’d known this day was as inevitable as sunrise.
    She found the locker, an anonymous square block among a grid of identical ones, and inserted the key. Almost surprisingly, the door opened immediately.
    Inside was a small canvas case. Rebecca drew it out, feeling something shifting within. She closed the locker and turned the key again. Then she walked towards the public toilets at the end of the passage and found an empty cubicle and bolted the door shut, before sitting on the lowered lid and unzipping the case.
    Inside, she found a tiny flash drive, a mauve-coloured UK passport, a wad of euro bills – she estimated the total came to at least a couple of thousands’ worth – and a handwritten note, with a photo attached.
    The passport was in her own name, Rebecca Deacon. All the other details were accurate, too: her date of birth, her home address. It was an eerie clone of her own passport.
    The note read: You’re booked on one of the next three British Airways flights to Rome. Find out which one at the BA check-in desk. When you get there, find the man in the photograph. His name is John Purkiss, and this is the address where he’s staying.
    A hotel listing followed, with a room number.
    She read the rest of the note.
    One phrase caught in her mind.
    Do the necessary.
    Rebecca studied the face in the photograph, absorbing the essentials, noting the benign expression, the dark hair, the direct look straight at the camera.
    She tore both note and photo into tiny pieces, and flushed them down the toilet, several times, until every fragment was gone. She pocketed the flash drive.
    Then made her way towards the check-in desks, her heart seeming to pump newly found blood through her vasculature, her entire body tingling as though she’d sloughed off her old dead skin and had been reborn.

Five
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    P urkiss suspected David Billson would go straight back to his apartment, rather than to a hospital. After all, Purkiss hadn’t hit him all that hard, and the last thing Billson would want was staff asking difficult questions, and possibly involving the police.
    So it was to Billson’s apartment that Purkiss himself headed.
    He knew the man had a girlfriend, a local Italian woman who didn’t live with him but had stayed over at least one night since Purkiss had arrived in Rome and had been keeping Billson under surveillance. She might be there tonight, which would complicate matters, but not insurmountably.
    It was after one a.m. by the time Purkiss reached the apartment block. The desultory rain had stopped, the clouds tugged away by a light breeze, and the yellow autumn moon hung three-quarters full overhead.
    Billson’s third-floor apartment was in apparent darkness.
    Purkiss had already established the layout of the building from his examination of it over the last two nights, and he knew the fire escape at the rear ran close to the balcony at the back of Billson’s apartment. He walked round the block a couple of times, satisfying himself that no lights were on in any of the windows. Then he stole up the fire escape, his running shoes making only the faintest sound on the iron rungs.
    His hands were empty. He’d stashed the damaged briefcase with its probably worthless contents beside a dustbin in an alley at the back of the apartment building.
    When he was close to the balcony, he lifted one foot up onto the banister of the stairs. The distance between the fire escape and the railing of the balcony above was approximately ten feet.
    Pistoning his leg out, Purkiss launched himself across the gap, the moment freezing as he hung, terrifyingly,