The chairman sat perfectly still, letting the finance director say his piece. Then he continued as if the words had never been spoken. “As I was saying, there are a few loose ends. My information suggests that the security services are under extreme pressure to find out what happened. The PM’s pet hooligan, Trodd, has declared that he does not want a newspaper beating him to the truth. This administration is obsessed by headlines, of course. . . .”
A third voice, its accent Australian, entered the conversation. “Mate, you can hardly blame them. Headlines don’t get any bigger than this.”
“Indeed not, Communications. News management will play an extremely important role over the next few days and I’ll be looking to you to make sure that we don’t see any unwelcome headlines. It’s in no one’s interests for the actual events or their participants to be made public. I’m sure we can reach some kind of discreet, even anonymous accommodation with the government. If they are given Carver’s name, and a credible assurance that he has already been dealt with, that should keep the wolves from our door. Perhaps the operations director would like to update us on his progress.”
“I’ve spent the day trying to put a crew together. It hasn’t been easy to get people of the caliber we’ll need. As you know, we exclusively use freelance operatives, hired at arm’s length, and we lost a number of our best contractors over the weekend, but I’m confident that we’ll be ready to move within the next twenty-four hours. First we’ve got to find him, of course.”
“Well, that should be a cinch,” sneered the finance director. “I’m sure he’ll send us a postcard to let us know where he is.”
The chairman frowned at the consortium’s moneyman, wondering whether it was time to replace him. He would put his mind to the problem once the Carver issue had been resolved.
He turned back to the operations director. “Are we any closer to tracking him down?”
“Yes, chairman, I think we are. He left Paris yesterday morning by train from the Gare de Lyon. He may well have been accompanied by one of the Russians, who had, of course, been ordered to kill him—a woman, Alexandra Petrova. If she is indeed with him, it’s not clear whether she intends to carry out her assignment or has genuinely defected, as it were. Either way, I’m certain Carver’s still in Europe. He bought tickets for Milan but didn’t take that route. I’d guess he’s somewhere in eastern France, or maybe Switzerland. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t think he’ll try to run. I’d expect him to be much more assertive.”
“By which you mean . . . ?”
“That he’ll try to come after us before we can get to him.”
“You don’t sound too concerned about this prospect.”
“Well, he doesn’t know who we are. And it’s going to be very hard for him to find out without alerting us to his presence. Besides, I may have a lead on his precise whereabouts. I have a contact in Paris, name of Pierre Papin, works for French intelligence. He has been tracking Carver and Petrova’s movements using railway-station surveillance systems. He says he knows where they went.”
“So why hasn’t he told you?”
“He wants money for his information.”
“How much?”
“Half a million U.S. dollars. I think we should go for it.”
“That’s ridiculous!” exclaimed the finance director.
“Really?” replied the chairman. “What makes you say that? Some would call it quite a modest price for keeping us all alive and getting the government off our backs.”
The man in the pin-striped suit took a deep breath and smoothed back his hair, clearly embarrassed by his loss of control. When he spoke again, his voice was calmer, more assured, the voice of a man used to giving orders rather than taking them.
“I simply question whether we can afford to expend many more resources without being certain that the benefits justify the cost. The Paris operation involved a significant financial downside. Of course, we were able to save a great deal by withholding fees from some of the personnel involved. But even so, there were major logistical outlays, not to mention considerable sums spent purchasing influence within a number of French institutions. We lost several men, whose families will have to be compensated and kept quiet. Massive damage was sustained to two properties, which will have to be repaired at great cost. I therefore believe that any further expenditure should be considered very carefully.”
The chairman nodded. Perhaps the finance director was not beyond salvaging after all. “A very persuasive argument. As you said, Operations, Carver will be obliged to show himself. So make sure that when he emerges from hiding, we are ready and able to deal with him.”
The operations director glared at the moneyman, who had undermined him, then turned back to his boss. “But what are we going to do about Papin? If we don’t pay him, he’ll try to give Carver to someone else. And there’s another thing. He’s got our computer. It’s protected by passwords, encryption, and firewalls. There’s no way Carver’s broken into the files just yet. But he’s a resourceful individual. He’ll find a way of cracking them eventually. And we can’t let that happen.”
“No,” agreed the chairman, “We certainly can’t have that.” He thought for a while, tapping his fingers against the surface of the desk, then continued. “How are we supposed to make contact again?”
“He’s calling at twelve thirty our time.”
“Fine, then have his call patched through to me. I shall persuade our French friend that he has more to gain by keeping us happy in the long term than by making a fast buck now.”
“And if he isn’t persuaded?”
“I shall make him pay for his stubbornness.”
39
Bill Selsey, a twenty-two-year veteran at MI6, a man whose chief ambitions were a steady career and a solid pension at the end of it, sidled up to Jack Grantham’s glass-fronted office at the far end of one of the open-plan offices that lent MI6 headquarters a deceptive appearance of corporate normality.
“Busy, Jack?”
Grantham looked up from the screen where he was checking files on the world’s professional hit men and wondering why so many of their whereabouts were listed as “Unknown.” What was the point of knowing about the bad guys if you didn’t have the resources to keep proper tabs on them?
“Nothing urgent. What can I do for you?”
Selsey parked his ample backside on the edge of Grantham’s desk, ignoring his colleague’s disapproving frown.
“There’s an interesting development in the Paris investigation,” he said. “We just received a call from one of our European partners—Papin, one of the more interesting characters in the French intelligence community. He seems to float around without any formal job title, but he has a habit of popping up in unexpected places.”
“So?”
“So, he says he knows where to find the people responsible for the crash in the Alma Tunnel.”
Grantham sat up in his chair, his mood changing in an instant from polite indifference to total concentration. “Really? Where does he say they are?”
“Well, that’s the catch. He wants us to pay for the information. Says he won’t consider anything under half a million dollars.”
“He wants us to pay? Bloody hell, even by French standards that’s a bit steep. Whatever happened to interservice cooperation?”
“He’s not doing this for his service, Jack. This one’s strictly off the books.”
“Do we trust him?”
“Of course not, he’s French. Which means he’s self-centered, unscrupulous, and couldn’t give a monkey’s about anything except his own immediate advantage.”
“But is he any good?”
“Not bad. Yeah. If he says he knows where these people are, I believe him.”
“All right, but if he thinks we’ve got half a million dollars to chuck his way, he’s obviously not been informed about our budget cuts. Can we get to him for free?”
Selsey’s hangdog face brightened. “Ah, that’s the
good news. Not only is he working off the books, he’s sending his message from a humble payphone rather than one of DGSE’s secure lines—presumably doesn’t want any record of his communications with us and the other bidders appearing on their logs.”
“Bit amateur. We’ll have much less trouble tracking that.”
“Perhaps greed is getting the better of him. It’s amazing what the prospect of easy money does to the human brain. And he probably underestimates our ability to track him. We only let the Frogs see a fraction of our signals intelligence, after all. Their officers won’t necessarily realize just how powerful Echelon and GCHQ really are.”
“Can we find him?”
“Working back to the site of his call is tricky but not impossible. We may manage it. But our real chance will come when he calls back. We’ve got to conduct some sort of negotiation. If we keep him talking, we’ll get an exact position.”
“He’s not going to be that daft, surely?”
“He stands to make half a mill. He might take a risk for that.”
Grantham frowned. “I can see why he’s not worried about us. Even if we don’t shell out any cash, we’re hardly going to hurt a fellow professional from a country that’s one of our allies.”
“Even if he is French?”
“No, not even then. But there’ll be other people out there who are a lot less scrupulous. Papin’s got to get his money, take his clients to the killers’ location, then get out in one piece himself. Tell you what, Bill, you said this guy’s not bad.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, he’s going to have to be a hell of a lot better than that to pull this one off.”
40
Alix watched Carver as he worked his way through an enormous helping of venison stew and noodles in the restaurant of the Hotel Beau-Rivage. It was called Le Chat-Botté.
“That means Puss in Boots,” Carver had said with a cheeky, naughty schoolboy glint in his eye. There was something boyish about the gusto with which he attacked his food too, as though he didn’t have a care in the world, nothing to think about except for the plate in front of him and the glass of red wine at its side. His appetite seemed completely unaffected by the prospect of what they had to do in a few hours’ time. Then again, he wasn’t the one who’d have to squeeze into a tight-cut skirt.
Even as they went upstairs to his suite, she was still trying to figure Carver out, to uncover the true self he kept so carefully hidden—from himself as much as everyone else. So many men she had known had struggled to be even one-dimensional, but not this one. He was so assured in his own world, so uncertain in hers; so cold at some moments, so emotional at others. Yet it sometimes seemed to her as though Carver’s emotions were obvious to everyone but him.
She wondered if he knew how powerfully his eyes expressed his feelings. In the short time she had known him, she had seen icy rage and aching tenderness, ebullient laughter and exhausted vulnerability. She thought of the books, records, and paintings in his apartment, the consideration he could show when he was at ease. Then she thought of him walking into the mansion in Paris, gunning down two men, finishing them off with a shot to the head, and walking away from their bodies without a second glance. She remembered lying on the ground by that bus stop, her face pressed against the sidewalk, his knee digging into her spine. How could she reconcile that man with the one who had lain beside her that morning, who was taking her in his arms again this afternoon?
She pulled away a fraction. “Should we be doing this? I thought we were here on . . .” she tried to find the right words. “On business.”
“We are,” he replied. “We have one chance to find out what we need to know. In a few hours, Magnus Leclerc is going to walk into the bar downstairs. You are going to seduce him. I am going to scare him witless. Then I’m going to start asking him questions. Leclerc is our only lead. If we can make him talk, we can find the people who betrayed us. If not, well, it’s just a matter of time till they find us, no matter how far or fast we run.”
“So shouldn’t we be doing something else? You know, something useful or important?”
“Such as what? This is like any other operation. Most of the time you spend just waiting around. We don’t know if the operation’s going to work. We don’t know if we’ll be alive tomorrow. What could be more important than seizing every moment we can?”
She considered what he had said, weighing the merits of his case. Then she smiled. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s seize the moment.”
41
Pierre Papin was dog tired. He had worked for almost forty-eight hours, virtually without a break. His eyeballs felt like sandpaper and his brain had been coshed. With every passing minute, thought became more of an effort and his tension and uncertainty increased. And yet, for all that, he was making progress.
Some of the locals had been uncooperative, but even dumb insolence provided a form of information. He’d gone into a small café, demanded to see the owner, flashed his ID, and shown him the pictures of Carver and the girl. The man had shrugged and said, “Never seen them before in my life,” but the answer was too quick. He’d not even bothered to examine the photographs.
There’d been a small boy in the café, six or seven years old. Papin had got down on his haunches, held out the picture of Carver, and put on his most wheedling voice: “Have you seen this man come into the café?” But before the boy could answer, the café owner had picked him up and stuck a finger in Papin’s face, hissing, “Leave my son out of this!”
Papin knew he must be getting really close. He knocked on doors, approached women taking dogs for walks or bringing shopping back to their homes, made inquiries with impeccable politeness and a dash of charm. Soon he had discovered Carver’s address. But he did not know whether his quarry had returned to his apartment while he’d been making his inquiries.
The Frenchman needed to answer that question before he made his next move. He slogged up the endless stairs to the fifth floor of an ancient apartment building and knocked on the door. The sound of a lock opening was followed by the sight of a very respectable-looking woman of pensionable age peering around the half-open door with the look of disapproval that was clearly her default expression.
Papin showed her his card and, adding an enticing note of intrigue to his voice, explained that he was deeply sorry to disturb madame, but there had been reports of an illegal immigrant settling in the apartment level with hers in the adjoining building. Before taking the appropriate action to rid the neighborhood of such an undesirable, he wished to discover whether the individual in question was currently in occupation.
He produced a device that looked like a doctor’s stethoscope attached to a microphone. This seemed to convince the old lady, or at least to arouse her curiosity. She let Papin in, offered him coffee and biscuits (he declined with profuse thanks for her kind hospitality), then watched, in fascination, as he placed the microphone against several points on the wall abutting Carter’s apartments, listening intently each time. Finally, Papin stepped away from the wall, folded up his listening device, and shook his head. “The individual in question is not in residence, madame,” he said, sounding suitably frustrated. “But have no fear. I will be maintaining a vigil all day. He will not escape.”
A few minutes later he was standing on the top-floor landing of the building next door, facing a simple dark blue door.
So this was where his quarry hid from the world. Papin was tempted to break in and grab the laptop. It must be in there; Carver hadn’t been carrying it when he left that morning. But there were bound to be security measures— Carver was not the type to leave himself unprotected—and even if there were not, Carver would know that someone had been there the moment he stepped through the door, and he’d be off like a startled gazelle. It was far better to keep a low profile. Papin was certain the two of them would be returning to the apartment that day. They’d been walking through town like lovers on a day off, not fugitives on the run—they weren’t going anywhe
re. He’d save them for the highest bidder.
It was time to call Charlie. But when he dialed the number, Papin was put through to another phone and a voice he didn’t recognize.
“To whom am I speaking?” he asked.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Then this conversation is over.”
“Wait a moment, Monsieur Papin. I am Charlie’s superior. You are talking to me because he does not have the authority to deal with your financial conditions, and I do. I’m afraid that I cannot accept your demand for five hundred thousand dollars.”
Papin had expected some form of negotiation. “Alors, monsieur, I am sorry. If you will not pay me the required sum, I will find a client who will.”
“Three hundred. And that is my final offer. Not a penny more.”
“No, I will not lower my price. But I will make you a deal. You pay me two fifty up front, I take you to the location. From there it will be one twenty-five if you find the people, one twenty-five for the computer. You will not pay in full unless you have everything you need. Fair?”
There was silence at the other end of the line while the man considered the offer. Papin wondered what the counterbid would be. But then came a grunt of assent: “Fair enough, monsieur. So what are the arrangements?”
“You will send one man to the front entrance of the Cathedral of Saint Pierre in Geneva, Switzerland. I will be there for precisely five minutes, starting at five p.m. local time. I will be wearing a dark blue suit and holding a rolled-up newspaper. I apologize for the cliché, monsieur, but it will suffice. Your representative will say, ‘Charlie sends his regards.’ I will reply, ‘I hope Charlie is well.’ He will say, ‘Yes, much better now.’ He will then hand me the first half of the payment—remember, bearer bonds, endorsed in my name. I will give further instructions at that time. Your man may have backup for any action that is required, but he will only call for this backup when I give permission.”
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