by Tom Cain
‘I hope you shopped around, Smethers.’
‘Oh yeah, we went to at least ten different garden centres, looking for the best value. And meanwhile the ladies, God bless ’em, are hard at work making the cakes.’
‘Good, sounds as though we have everything we need for the party. I’ll see you at the farm, then.’
‘Oh yeah, this is going to be fookin’ great. It’s really going to go with-’
‘Don’t say it,’ Gryffud interrupted.
There was a laugh at the other end of the line. ‘Take it easy, Taff. I was just winding you up.’
Gryffud ended the call.
‘… a bang,’ he murmured to himself, finishing the other man’s sentence.
Then he pulled up the blinds and opened his office door to the world once again.
9
The Old Town, Geneva, Switzerland
Shafik had a helicopter waiting to take Carver the eighty-five miles across the Aegean Sea from Mykonos to Athens. ‘Don’t worry,’ Ginger had said. ‘I’ll get the hotel to send you your luggage.’
‘Will you, now?’ thought Carver, wondering how many bugs and tracking devices would have been tucked away among his possessions by the time he saw them again. Thinking also, ‘Funny, I haven’t told you where to send them…’
Thanks to the mid-afternoon Swissair flight, Carver reached Geneva within three hours, but it was long enough to consider a number of different options for extricating himself from the Malachi Zorn hit. Forty minutes later his cab was pulling up on a narrow cobbled street in the Old Town district, beside the four-hundred-year-old building where he had a top-floor apartment.
There was a cafe next door, with a few plastic tables and chairs on the street, and steps down to a tiny, low-ceilinged basement room within. Years before, it had belonged to a friend of Carver’s called Freddy. Two nights after Carver’s fateful assignment in Paris, a Russian psychopath, Grigori Kursk, had forced Freddy to lie face down on the floor, then shot him through the back of the skull at point-blank range. Now the cafe was run by Freddy’s widow, Marianne, and her nineteen-year-old son, Jean-Louis.
Marianne had insisted on staying on, despite the terrible memories. To leave, she said, would be an act of desertion. At first she had struggled to keep the cafe going and pay the rent. Then, about nine months after Freddy’s death, her lawyer had called to inform her that a life insurance policy of which he had not previously been aware had just paid out, enabling her to buy the lease outright.
Marianne was certain that there was no such policy. It seemed clear to her that Carver was the source of the money. Kursk would never have walked into the cafe that night had he not been looking for Carver and Alix; this was a private act of atonement, and it was accepted, graciously, without a word on either side. Had Marianne asked, Carver would of course have denied having anything to do with it. But in his own mind, this was just one of a number of debts of honour he chose to pay: no different, for example, from the two teenagers in southern Africa — the son and daughter of a man who had saved his life — whose education he was funding.
Carver had more money than he needed for himself. There was no point hiding it away in a bank if it could be useful. And it made it easier to sleep at night knowing that something he did, however tiny in the great scheme of things, was unequivocally good.
‘Sam!’ Jean-Louis said, seeing him come through the cafe door. ‘I thought you were going to be away for a month?’
‘Me too.’
‘So the vacation, it was not fun?’
‘It started well.’
‘But turned to shit?’
‘Something like that.’
‘You want a coffee, a cup of your English tea, a glass of wine, maybe?’
Carver was still a Royal Marine at heart. He rarely said no to a brew. ‘Tea would be good. Thanks.’
Silence descended as Carver drank and Jean-Louis busied himself with other customers. When the cup was empty, the boy came over to take it away. Carver reached for his wallet.
‘ Non! Don’t be crazy… I will put it on your account,’ Jean-Louis loudly insisted. Then, as he bent forward to take the mug, he added, much more quietly, ‘There is a man at the front, by the window.’
‘Dark-blue business suit, playing with his phone, yeah, I spotted him,’ Carver murmured back.
‘I think he has not just played with his phone. I am certain he has taken a photograph of you.’
Carver nodded fractionally, then got up from his seat. ‘See you tomorrow. Give my regards to your mum,’ he said, clearly enough to be heard.
Yes, the man with the phone had looked up. And it hadn’t just been idle curiosity.
Carver gave the man a good long look on the way out, letting him know he’d been made.
The man with the phone looked right back, letting Carver know that he didn’t give a damn.
Carver walked out, feeling the man’s eyes on his back, listening for the slightest sound of movement behind him. None came.
Outside, on the street, he turned into a cobbled yard. On all four sides stood centuries-old buildings whose floors were linked by a complex web of external staircases and covered passages that wound around their walls like the endless, logic-defying stairs in a Maurits Escher drawing. Carver made the way to the top of his building and let himself in. Within seconds, his landline started ringing.
He picked it up. ‘Carver.’
‘Check your email.’
The voice was Shafik’s. Carver got out his iPhone and touched the mail icon. He had a new message with two jpeg files attached to it.
‘Open the files,’ Shafik said.
Grinding his teeth in silent irritation, Carver did as he was told. The first photo showed the body of the man he had killed on Mykonos, lying in the restaurant dumpster. The second had been taken in the cafe within the past five minutes. So Jean-Louis had been right.
‘And your point is?’ Carver asked.
‘I was concerned that you might have had a change of heart about our agreement. As you flew away from our meeting, you might have imagined that you were escaping my sphere of influence. I wanted to impress upon you that this was not the case. I know where to find you, Carver, and my intention remains the same as before. If you fulfil our agreement, I will reward you very handsomely. If you do not… well, I don’t like making threats. I’m sure I don’t have to.’
‘I don’t do threats, Shafik. I don’t pay any attention to the ones people throw at me, and I don’t bother making any of my own. But since you’re on the line, I remembered something while I was flying home-’
‘And what was that?’
‘I remembered what happened to Quentin Trench. He double-crossed me: set me up on a job and then tried to have me killed. Clearly he didn’t succeed. In fact, the last time I saw him, he was bobbing up and down in the middle of the English Channel, dead as a doornail, with a distress flare blazing away where the middle of his face used to be… Do you see what I’m getting at here?’
‘Absolutely.’
Carver frowned. He could swear there was a smirk in Shafik’s voice. ‘Glad we’ve got that sorted,’ he said, ignoring it.
He hung up and walked through his apartment to the kitchen. The fittings along two of the walls had been updated a couple of years ago, but the granite-topped island unit in the middle of the room was the same as when he first moved in.
One side of the island was given over to a wine-rack. Carver got down on to his haunches, reached in, and removed a bottle of St Emilion premier cru claret from the second row down, three bottles along. He put the bottle down on the floor beside him, then reached into the space where it had been. At the very back was a small, round, rubber-topped button. Carver pressed it.
There was no other noise in the flat. So it was just possible to hear the soft hum of an electric motor as the centre of the granite top slowly rose from the island, eventually revealing a chromed steel frame within which were fitted six plastic drawers of varyin
g depths.
A thick pad of charcoal-grey plastic foam filled each drawer, with specifically shaped openings cut to fit the different contents: precision tools in the top drawer; specialist power tools in the second; circuit boards, timers, detonators, remote controls, automotive brake and accelerator overrides and explosive tyre valves in the third and fourth; then blocks of explosives, arranged by category, in the fifth. The final and deepest drawer contained the two brands of firearm to which Carver had been loyal since his days in the SBS: the Heckler and Koch MP5K short-barrelled sub-machine gun and the Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with accessories and ammunition.
Tucked in next to the firearms was a bundle of yellow plastic handcuffs that looked like oversized cable-ties. Sometimes it came in handy, being able to immobilize a man without having to stop him permanently. Carver never left home without them.
These were the basic tools of his trade. In his wardrobe he kept a safe containing a variety of passports and credit cards in different identities, plus cash, diamonds and bearer-bonds. These were intended to fund any mission he was likely to undertake and, in the event that he had to disappear fast, get him anywhere in the world and fund a modest lifestyle for the next year or two. If he needed specialist equipment or materials — drugs and poisons, for example — he went to one of a small and very discreet group of expert suppliers. If security measures and customs barriers made it im possible to carry weapons across borders, he specified what he would need from his clients as one of the conditions of his employment.
Still, he found that it helped him to look at his gear when he was contemplating the practicalities of a job. The contents of those foam-lined drawers spoke to him, giving him ideas about the how, what, where and when of what he had to do.
Although, in this case, there was something else for Samuel Carver to consider. Because he hadn’t yet decided who his target would be.
10
London N1
Jack Granthamwas having a hard time relaxing. On the surface, everything appeared to be going well. He was sitting in the living room of his Islington flat. He had a glass of Scotch on the table by his side. The TV was on in the background, and he was reading a hardback spy thriller, set in the early eighties, about a KGB sleeper who had penetrated British intelligence. Grantham wasn’t a big fan of spy novels. He spent too many hours dealing with the realities of secret intelligence to bother with the fiction. This, however, was the debut effort by Dame Agatha Bewley, the one-time Head of the Security Service, known as ‘SS’ to Whitehall insiders, and MI5 to the rest of the world. He’d always admired Dame Agatha, despite their regular inter-service disputes, and was now smiling to himself as he enjoyed the characteristically canny ways in which she’d managed to convey a sense of absolute authenticity, while leaving out any unduly revealing insights into how the job was actually done.
It was very nearly an enjoyable experience, spoiled only by the thought that niggled and itched at the back of his mind. The Malachi Zorn investigation was bothering him. By any logical analysis of the threats facing the United Kingdom, Grantham had been right to make it a low priority. Still, that throwaway remark about Zorn bringing down Lehman Brothers Bank as a rehearsal for a far bigger stunt wormed away at him, making it impossible to relax.
Grantham tried to distract himself by looking at the news. A TV production company, working on some kind of Candid Camera — style reality show, had caused a riot at a restaurant on the Greek island of Mykonos by staging a fake attack by a couple of gunmen. By pure chance — in no way connected with the TV people’s desire for global publicity — a passing tourist just happened to have been filming the scene using a high-definition video-camera.
Grantham glanced up at the sound of gunfire and watched as two men appeared, blew the head off a live pelican (the bird’s death, the newsreader solemnly intoned, had caused outrage and controversy around the world), and then appeared to kill a woman in cold blood. Grantham watched the panic that ensued, while the voice-over described how a British tourist had been injured in the melee and was now threatening to sue both the restaurant owner and the TV company. Grantham was just about to switch channels when something caught his eye.
He rewound the scene, then watched it again twice more. On the second time through, he froze the image at a particular point. Several hours earlier he had done exactly the same thing with the feed from Malachi Zorn’s Italian party and spotted Alix. Now here was another face with which Grantham was all-too familiar: her ex-boyfriend Samuel Carver. And however much trouble she brought into Grantham’s life, Carver brought infinitely more.
‘That’s all we need,’ Grantham muttered to himself. He ran through the scene a couple more times, just to make sure that his instinctive reaction to it had been correct. Yes, there was no doubt: Carver had tried to make his escape and been pursued by the gunmen. Grantham couldn’t believe Carver would ever have consented to clown around for the benefit of a TV camera. He was genuinely running for his life.
‘Well, so what?’ Grantham told himself. Carver was no more a concern of his than Malachi Zorn. And yet, like Zorn’s ‘rehearsal’, Carver’s image on that TV screen kept gnawing away at him.
He spent a moment or two wondering what, if anything, he should do, then called the office. A junior officer, assigned to night-duty, picked up the call.
‘This is Grantham,’ his boss informed him. ‘Get me passenger manifests for all flights in and out of Mykonos, Greece, in the past, oh… seventy-two hours. Ferry traffic, too, if you can get it. And CCTV footage. Then cross-ref it with our databases: names and faces. I want to see if anyone we’re interested in has paid a visit there recently.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And if you find anything, call me. I don’t care what time it is. Call anyway.’
Grantham put down the phone. He gazed at the frozen image on his TV screen, then turned off the set. He put the book down on the side-table next to the now-empty whisky glass. Then he hauled himself off up to bed.
11
Kensington Palace Gardens, London
As she stood at her bathroom mirror wiping the make-up from her face, Alix knew that she had just lost the argument that would almost certainly end her relationship. But at least no one could say that the subject-matter had been trivial. She and her current partner, Dmytryk Azarov, had not fought over some insignificant domestic quibble. They’d been debating what to do with a billion dollars.
Azarov intended to borrow the money against the value of his massive agricultural, food-processing and supermarket holdings in Eastern Europe. The exact figure he had in mind was $1.35 billion, all of it intended for Malachi Zorn’s new investment fund. The contracts had been drafted and awaited his signature. His bankers were arranging the transfer of funds. The entire deal would go through within twenty-four hours.
And Alix had done everything she possibly could to stop it.
Two weeks earlier, Azarov had been ecstatic when the invitation to join the fund had been presented to him in person by Zorn’s right-hand man, Nicholas Orwell, the former British Prime Minister. They had met over dinner at the Sommelier’s Table, which sits in a private underground dining room in Mayfair, next to the wine cellars of the Connaught Hotel. Azarov had insisted that Alix should accompany him to the meal; whether to show her off to Orwell or him off to her, she had not been entirely sure.
Either way, it was the sort of occasion to which she had become accustomed since she had first arrived in Moscow almost a quarter of a century earlier, a gawky, unsophisticated, acutely shy teenager from the distant city of Perm. In those days she’d been anything but a beauty. She wore shapeless clothes and thick spectacles that failed to disguise the squint for which she had been mocked throughout her childhood and adolescence. Yet one woman, a KGB officer called Olga Zhukovskaya, had spotted Alix’s potential. Thanks to her, she had been transformed by a combination of surgery, diet and arduous training into a professional seductress. By the age of twenty-two she’d been able to co
nverse in English as easily as in Russian; to charm a man into bed; to give him the erotic experience of a lifetime once he was there — and to extract whatever information her masters required from her pathetically grateful target.
Orwell, Alix concluded, was little different from the diplomats, politicians, military attaches and businessmen who had been the victims of the honeytrap operations on which she’d once been sent. For all his stellar political reputation, all his familiarity with the most elevated corridors of global power politics, he was now essentially a salesman. Over dinner he had come out with slick, persuasive patter about the genius of Malachi Zorn and the huge returns to be had from his fund, being careful never actually to say that profits were guaranteed, but making sure that vast returns were clearly implied. He had been well-briefed for the meeting, and displayed his knowledge well. He showed a keen, flattering interest in Azarov’s commercial prowess and took care to compliment Alix not just on her beauty, but also on the success of the Washington DC military and political consulting business she had inherited from her late husband, General Kurt Vermulen, and subsequently run herself.
‘This Nicholas Orwell is a fine man,’ Azarov had reflected, as the chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce took them back to his red-brick Queen-Anne-style mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens, or, as London estate agents liked to call it, ‘Billionaires’ Row’. ‘He understands how the world works. For a socialist, he appreciates the value and power of money.’
‘His was not the kind of socialism that you and I learned when we were growing up,’ Alix remarked.
