No Survivors

by Tom Cain

  He started jogging along the road toward the station and had almost reached the entrance when he remembered that there was a restaurant on the far side of the road, down by the lake. He’d taken women for lazy meals by the water. Sometimes he’d hire a boat for the day and sail there, mooring at the jetty just along from the terrace where they put out tables in the summertime. He had a vivid impression of walking up to the place and seeing blue parasols and striped awnings, the girl he was with squeezing his arm, happy to be arriving for a meal by boat. Then he remembered something else, the way he’d felt at times like that: not sharing the other person’s pleasure, but cut off, his mind still processing the death he’d just inflicted, or planning the one to come.

  Carver thought about going down to the restaurant to use the phone. It was past midnight and they’d be closing up, but he’d say his car had broken down. He wanted to get in touch with Thor Larsson. He felt badly in need of an ally. But then he saw a flash in the corner of his eye, the gleam of a train’s headlights coming down the track. If he ran, he could catch it and go all the way into town. The journey would take less than fifteen minutes. He’d call Larsson when he arrived.

  On the train, he found a seat at the far end of a carriage, from which he could easily monitor anyone who came in through the sliding door beside him, or moved down the aisle between the rows of seats. This probably was the last train of the night; there weren’t too many other people onboard. Still, he couldn’t relax. He stared at the other passengers, trying to work out which of them might pose a threat. He told himself to stop—they’d think he was a nutcase. But he kept doing it anyway. It had been months since he’d been out in the world, surrounded by strangers. It was hard to fit back in.

  As he left the train at Geneva, he kept darting glances at the other people walking down the platform. A teenage boy, out with his mates, caught his eye.

  “What are you looking at?” the kid shouted.

  One of his friends, made bold by the presence of his gang, joined in. “You some kind of pervert or something?”

  “He’s a pedophile,” said one of the others, and they broke into a jeering chorus: “Pedo! Pedo!”

  Carver turned away from them, his shoulders hunched. By the time he reached the public phones, he was sweaty with embarrassment and shame. He called Larsson.

  “Carver?” Larsson sounded like he’d just heard a ghost. “That’s not possible. I mean . . . how . . . what happened?”

  “I got better. Look, we need to meet. My flat, soon as possible.”

  “Hold on,” said Larsson. “Where are you calling from? How come you’re not at the clinic?”

  “Had a bit of trouble there. I’m in town now. I need to leave tonight, get right away from here. But there’s a couple of things I’ve got to do first.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Nothing dramatic. I just need to start looking for Alix. Look, can you get to the flat or not?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Great. And bring the keys. You’ve still got them, right?”

  “Yeah. Alix had the original set, but I’ve got copies.”

  “See you there.”

  Carver took a cab, looking out of the window all the way, getting used to the sights of the city again. He made the cabbie drop him off a couple of blocks away from his apartment, started walking off in the wrong direction, then corrected himself and made his way through the warren of narrow, twisting streets at the heart of the Old Town. He was constantly looking back over his shoulder, checking out the parked cars, twitching with nerves at every unexpected movement or sound.

  A few doors down from his destination, Carver stopped for a moment outside a small café whose front door was set a few feet below ground level, just down a short flight of steps. The building looked familiar, but there was something out of place. It was the sign over the café door—he was sure it had been changed. He tried to recall what had been there before, or what the significance of the café had been, but this time the image wouldn’t come. He stood there for a second, frowning in concentration, trying to get at the memory that was still so tantalizingly out of reach. He wondered what had happened here that was so bad his brain still refused to acknowledge it. Then he turned away and walked on, cursing himself for standing like that, stock-still, out in the open, where anyone could get at him.

  On the other side of the city, a Russian FSB field agent named Piotr Korsakov, the man who had just killed Marianne Marchand and her husband, Clément, hailed a taxi. He gave the driver precise directions to his intended destination: a place to which, his superiors had decided, Carver would most likely head. His next target was on the move. There was no time to waste.

  34

  On the shores of Gull Lake, Minnesota, with the last traces of daylight fading from the iron-gray sky and the trees on the far side of the lake barely visible, Dr. Kathleen Dianne “Kady” Jones got ready to meet her first live nuclear bomb.

  A research scientist at the Los Alamos nuclear facility in New Mexico, Kady was one of the volunteers on call to a unit of the U.S. government’s Department of Energy known as NEST. The initials stood for Nuclear Emergency Search Team and they precisely described the unit’s task, which was to cope with national security’s worst nightmare: a bad guy with a nuke.

  Since NEST had been founded in 1975 there had been more than one hundred reports of possible threats. Of these, around thirty had been investigated. They were all hoaxes. Homemade portable nukes made great storylines for movies. A team of seventeen government scientists even tried to build a bomb as an experiment, just to see if it could be done. But in actual fact, there had been no unauthorized nuclear weapons of any kind on U.S. soil.

  Until now.

  The call had come in from the FBI in Minneapolis-St. Paul to the Department of Energy’s Emergency Operations Center in Washington, D.C. From there, it was routed to the NEST headquarters at Nellis Air Force Base northeast of Las Vegas. Within minutes, Kady had been assigned to lead a seven-person NEST team. Within the hour, they had taken off from Los Alamos County Airport, on the way to Minneapolis.

  The team’s destination was a waterside vacation property on the shore of Gull Lake, a popular destination for city dwellers seeking fresh air, good fishing, and fun on the water. The FBI had cordoned off the area with the help of local police. Floodlights had been brought in to light up the modest timber cabin. The special agent in charge was named Tom Mulvagh.

  “So what’s the story?” Kady asked, as her team began unloading gear from one of the two black Econoline vans that had transported them to the site. She was holding a gloved hand across her brow to keep the rain out of her eyes. A bright-red fleece hat was jammed down over her chestnut hair.

  “The owner here, name of Heggarty, bought the place four years ago,” said Mulvagh, his face half in shadow beneath his hooded parka. “Now he’s looking to convert the loft space, fit in an extra bedroom. Anyway, he’s measuring up and he can’t figure it right. The interior dimensions of the loft space don’t match the exterior dimensions of the building. He keeps coming up three feet short. Then he realizes that the end wall of the loft is really a partition, with space behind it. So he knocks it down and that’s when he sees a large, brown leather suitcase—he described it as kind of old-fashioned, not like a modern style. He looks closer and there’s an electric cable coming from this sack, connected to a power supply in the wall.”

  Kady grimaced. “Tell me he didn’t open the case.”

  “Sure he opened the case—human nature. That’s when he saw a metal pipe, a black box with a blinking red light, and what he called, and I quote, ‘That damn towel-head writing.’ ”

  She frowned. “Arabic?”

  “Don’t think so. From his description, we concluded it was Cyrillic script—Russian.”

  “Okay, so now did he keep his hands off the pipe and the box?”

  The special agent grinned. “Yeah, he was smart enough to get scared at that point. He called up t
he PD in Nisswa, and they passed him on to the Crow Wing County sheriff ’s office in Brainerd. They contacted us, and here we all are.”

  “Better check it out, then.” Kady looked around. “We’re going to be wearing protective suits. I guess we can change in the vans.”

  “Sure,” said Mulvagh, “but do it quick. Makes me nervous standing around here, thinking about what’s in there.”

  She gave him a reassuring pat, as if she were his protector, even though Mulvagh looked a decade older than she, and was six inches taller and probably fifty pounds heavier.

  “Trust me—it’s okay. If that device really is some kind of Soviet bomb, it’s almost certainly got a permissive action link—that’s a specific code to be entered before it’s armed. Without that, nothing’s going to happen. My guess is it’s been in position for a decade, probably more. And if it hasn’t gone off in all that time, why’s it going to blow now?”

  “Because it doesn’t like being disturbed?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be extra polite.”

  35

  Larsson’s battered Volvo station wagon was already waiting outside Carver’s building when he finally arrived. The Norwegian got out and looked Carver up and down appraisingly, looking for any visible signs of trouble.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Get us inside,” Carver replied. “I don’t like being stuck out on the street—too exposed.”

  His voice was tense, strung out.

  “You all right, man?” asked Larsson. “You don’t sound so good.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Carver hurried into the apartment building and started making his way up the stairs to his top-floor flat. Larsson let him get ahead a few paces, watching him skeptically, then followed on up the old wooden staircase that wound up through five stories, creaking under his feet with every step. When he got to Carver’s flat, the door was already open. Carver was standing in the living room, looking around, aghast at what he saw—or, rather, didn’t see.

  “Where is everything?” he asked.

  The room had been stripped bare of furniture.

  “We sold it,” said Larsson. “We had to.”

  Carver calmed down for a moment as he accepted the truth of what Larsson had said. Then a look close to horror crossed his face, and he dashed off into the kitchen.

  “Christ, you didn’t . . .”

  Larsson hurried after him. “Didn’t what?”

  “It’s okay . . .”

  Carver was standing by the kitchen island. The wine racks were empty. The low-level built-in fridge had been taken from its housing. All that was left was the carcass. But he didn’t seem too bothered by that.

  “I suddenly thought you might have sold the kitchen units,” he said.

  Larsson grinned for the first time that night.

  “Who’d buy that shit?”

  Now it was Carver’s turn to smile, if only for a moment. He leaned down and reached inside the wine rack, in the middle of the second row, three spaces along. He grimaced for a second as his fingers groped blindly, and then his smile reappeared as they found their target.

  “Watch,” he said.

  There was a barely audible humming sound. Larsson looked in amazement as the center of the granite work surface rose from the island. Its smooth ascent revealed a metal frame, within which was fitted a large plastic toolbox, arranged in half a dozen clear plastic-fronted trays of varying depths.

  “Unbelievable!” Larsson gasped.

  “Looks like my kit is still in one piece then,” said Carver. He was calming down, reassured by familiar surroundings and the presence of the toolbox.

  “Okay, the top two trays should be filled with regular gear. . . .”

  He opened it up to reveal a thick pad of charcoal-gray foam, within which a series of custom-cut openings housed a selection of immaculately shiny wrenches, screwdrivers, saws, and hammers. The second tray was devoted to miniature power tools and soldering irons.

  “It’s all there,” he said. “Next two trays, I think, are gadgets, electronics, that kind of stuff.”

  Larsson sighed contentedly as a selection of timers, detonators, brake and accelerator overrides, and radio remote controls were presented to view.

  “Oh, yeah, I recognize some of these babies. Nice to know you gave them such a good home.”

  “Okay, next down there should be . . .”

  Larsson was confronted with blocks of plastique and thermite.

  “And finally . . .”

  Carver slid open the last, deepest tray. It contained a Heckler & Koch MP5K short-barreled submachine gun, with a suppressor and three magazines, plus a SIG Sauer P226 with the same essential accessories. Larsson gave a knowing nod. Both weapons were standard equipment for British Special Forces.

  “There’s something else,” said Carver.

  He pulled the toolbox out of its housing and placed it on the floor in front of him. Then he got down on his haunches. The lid of the toolbox was a couple of inches deep. He lifted it to reveal another compartment, inside the lid itself, accessed via a hinged plastic hatch. He opened that to reveal a fat, padded brown envelope, roughly twelve by eighteen inches.

  “Little did you know . . .” he said.

  Carver took out the envelope and shut the hatch again. Then he removed the SIG, the suppressor, and two magazines from the bottom tray. He closed up the toolbox, keeping it on the floor as he pressed the button inside the wine rack again. The empty housing disappeared back down into the island. Carver put the envelope and the gun back on top of the work surface.

  “That got money in it?” asked Larsson, nodding at the envelope. Suddenly he didn’t feel quite so cheery.

  “Yeah.”

  “Enough to pay the bills?”

  “Easily.”

  “And you remembered about it when, exactly?”

  There was a bitter, sarcastic edge to the words.

  “A few weeks ago, pretty soon after I started coming around.”

  “So you didn’t need her money at all, then?”

  “Sure I did. As long as it was coming through, I knew she was still alive.”

  Larsson was forced to accept the logic of Carver’s argument. But he had a legitimate grievance of his own.

  “You owe me, too. More than twenty thousand bucks.”

  Carver nodded silently. He reached in the envelope and took out an ornately engraved document. It was a fifty-thousand-dollar bearer bond, registered to a Panamanian corporation and signed by him on the reverse. Effectively, it was as good as cash. He gave it to Larsson.

  “Thanks, but that’s way too much,” the Norwegian said.

  “It won’t be,” said Carver dryly. “Not in the long run. Look, I’ll pay Alix back, too . . . but first I’ve got to find her. We should start at the last places she’d have been seen. I know she was working at some late-night place. Do you know where it was?”

  “The bierkeller? Of course—I used to give her a lift to work sometimes.”

  “Fine—you can give me a lift, too. I just need a couple of minutes to get fixed up.”

  Carver picked up the envelope, the gun, and the magazines and left the kitchen. Walking through the living room, he saw the picture of Lulworth Cove on the wall, the only one of his most valuable possessions that hadn’t yet been sold. He remembered talking to Alix about it. She’d been wearing his old T-shirt, curled up in the chair, her body fresh from the shower. He could happily have stood there, eyes closed, just wallowing in the thought of her, but not tonight. He had to keep moving.

  In his bedroom, he opened up his closet. His gear was still hanging there, pushed over to one side to make way for Alix’s pathetically small collection of clothes. He picked out a jacket from her end of the clothing rod and held it up to his face, catching a faint trace of her scent, savoring it like a dog about to be let loose on a trail. Then, quite unexpectedly, something clicked inside his brain—an automatic, unbidden
reflex that switched off the emotional, indulgent, inefficient side of his consciousness and left him suddenly cold and clearheaded.

  The panic and uncertainty had gone. There was no heavy, sickening ache of fear in the pit of his stomach, just a strong sense of urgency and purpose.

  He reached up to a shelf above the rod and pulled down a leather traveling bag. Then he strained his arm farther into the shelf and extracted a shoulder holster and a broad money belt. It took him barely thirty seconds to pack the bag with two plain white T-shirts and two pairs of socks and underpants, followed by one pair of jeans and a lightweight fleece, both black. Another minute was spent getting dressed in a set of clothes identical to the ones he had packed, except with a charcoal-gray, V-necked pullover instead of a fleece. He chose a pair of plain black lace-up shoes, with thick cushioned soles.

  The money belt went around his waist. From the envelope he took a block of one-hundred-dollar bills and another two bearer bonds, identical to the one he had given Larsson. He also extracted two passports, one Australian, the other Swiss. They were both in different names but bore his photograph. He peeled a few of the bills off the top of the block and stuffed them in a trouser pocket, along with the Swiss cash he’d taken from the hitman at the clinic. Everything else went into the belt. Then he closed the envelope, which was still more than half full, and placed it in his bag.

  He strapped on the shoulder holster. When the SIG went in, it felt entirely familiar, the holster already adjusted to fit it and him perfectly. There was a short black wool coat hanging in the closet, and he put that on last. The coat covered the holster without any apparent bulge. The spare magazines slipped right into its pockets. It was elegant enough to get him into any hotel or restaurant, but sturdy enough to keep out the cold. There was another coat exactly like it still hanging there, along with more black jeans and three apparently identical dark-blue suits. The drawers from which he’d taken the T-shirts, underwear, and tops had been equally repetitive. So this was how he had been: methodical, functional, finding something that worked and sticking to it.