Carver

by Tom Cain

‘Grab my hand!’ he croaked, his parched vocal chords now barely able to summon the means to speak.

  Carver felt Schultz’s hand grip his wrist. Somewhere in the distance he heard the tortured scream of failing metal, and the remnants of a distillation tower appeared out of the flame, loomed over the three stranded humans, and toppled towards them with the slow, stately, but crushing inexorability of a felled redwood tree.

  Carver wrapped his fingers round Schultz’s arm and pulled him upright. The two men broke into a ragged, shambling run as the top of the distillation tower crashed down, smashing into the road at exactly the point where they had been huddled less than ten seconds before.

  Carver kept moving, driving himself forward, one desperate step after another. In the near delirium of overpowering heat and oxygen starvation, he felt as though he had been transported back a quarter of a century to the beastings he’d endured as he fought for selection to the SBS: forced marches with full packs in which every man had to complete the course, even if his mates had to drag him over the line. Back then his enemies had been the cold, the rain and the biting wind of the Brecon Beacons, the very opposite of the forces tormenting him here. But the principle was the same. You kept going when every fibre of your body was screaming at you to stop. You kept going when you thought you would die if you took a single step more. You kept going until you got to the end.

  And suddenly Carver was aware that the air was a fraction cooler, and that the smoke had cleared away. He came back to reality to find himself back out on the road beside the refinery. Schultz was standing next to him, coughing and dry-retching. There was a small patch of cool, green grass a few metres away, so Carver walked over to it and laid the woman down. He took off his tie and wound it around the woman’s broken leg to give the shattered bone some small degree of support. He noticed she still had her name badge pinned to her jacket. It read, ‘Nicola Wilkins, Cabinet Office.’ Carver put his finger to her throat, just below the jawbone, and felt a faint, fluttering pulse.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he murmured. ‘You survived.’

  53

  * * *

  Wentworth

  THE BRITISH PRIME Minister had wanted a television spectacular. To Malachi Zorn’s delight, what he got was a live horror show.

  It had all been caught on camera: one helicopter exploding in mid-air; the other in its death-spiral to the ground; the flaming debris raining down upon spectators; the slaughter on the ground; the screams of reporters as they realized that they, too, were as vulnerable as anyone else; the roar of the flames, the volcanic thunder of the explosions, and then the darkness as one by one the TV crews were added to the casualties, their equipment was destroyed and their broadcasts died. For a minute there was nothing but blackness from Rosconway, and panic in the studios of TV channels whose presenters were realizing that they had just witnessed the deaths of old friends and colleagues along with all the other casualties.

  Then the lost BBC van arrived, and a single feed from Rosconway supplied footage that was sent around the world – footage that sent global financial markets into a frenzy as traders tried to digest the implications of a major US oil corporation suffering a terrorist attack on supposedly friendly soil. It showed an attack that had killed three members of the British government, an EU minister, a senior US diplomat, Nicholas Orwell, and, if rumours already surfacing on the internet were to be believed, the Director of British Special Forces.

  Just as on 9/11, the financial implications were immediate, and felt throughout the global economy. Oil prices spiked. So did gold, as investors sought a safe haven. The pound plummeted. Investors started dumping UK government bonds. The Bank of England had not yet raised interest rates, but it could only be a matter of minutes, and that would add further downward pressure to the UK economy. The FTSE index in London plunged almost eight per cent as energy stocks, already softened by recent comments made by Malachi Zorn, collapsed. Insurance companies were hit as the multi-billion cost of rebuilding the refinery became evident. The shares of airlines, airport operators, hotel corporations and online travel agencies on both sides of the Atlantic fell as the markets decided that US travellers, nervous of threats to their safety, would stay away from Britain. Defence stocks, however, rose. It was reasonable to assume that the British government’s savage defence cuts might now be reversed. And since, as Zorn had also pointed out in his BBC interview, Britain’s energy supplies were dominated by foreign-owned corporations, the knock-on effects were felt on the bourses of Europe. And with the New York Stock Exchange due to open at two thirty in the afternoon, UK time, they would hit Wall Street like a tsunami rolling across the Atlantic.

  There was an atmosphere of stunned, speechless despair at 10 Downing Street. There was frenzy in financial institutions. But at Zorn’s hired mansion on the Wentworth estate there was only the exultant laughter of a man for whom Christmas Day has come earlier, and more joyously, than he could have dreamed possible. This was the single biggest financial coup of all time. He had made tens of billions of dollars, pounds, euros, yen and Chinese yuan. Now all he had to do was collect it. If 9/11 was anything to go by, the markets would soon be shut down. He had just a few minutes, maybe less, to get out of all his positions, collecting his winnings on the way. There wasn’t a second to lose.

  54

  * * *

  Kensington Park Gardens

  ALIX COULD SEE Dmytryk Azarov’s lips move. She could hear the words he was saying. She knew – because he’d made a point of emphasizing this fact, as if to prove her importance to him – that he’d cancelled an important business meeting to be with her. But he was wasting his breath, because she felt so totally disconnected from him that none of it made any difference. He was as distant from her, and as unimportant, as the reporter on the screen of the television that was on, but ignored, in the far corner of the sitting room.

  ‘Don’t believe what they say in the papers about these women I was supposed to be seeing,’ Azarov was saying, working himself up into a fever of righteous indignation. ‘These … what do they call them? … party girls, who claim that I slept with them. It is all lies. These women just want money, and journalists are vermin who will spread any slander to sell their filthy rags …’

  He felt he had to persuade her, that much was obvious. But Alix didn’t care if he’d slept with one party girl, or ten, or one hundred. Her head was filled with Carver. Her body was still sending reminders that he had been inside her, like pulsing echoes of their lovemaking.

  ‘All the time I was away, all I thought about was you,’ Azarov went on. ‘You were in my dreams. I missed your body next to mine …’

  He didn’t realize that all he was doing was making Alix think of Carver’s body next to her. The memory of his touch was so vivid that it sent a little shiver through her, and made her catch her breath.

  Azarov saw that tremor of emotion, and, of course, misinterpreted it. ‘You feel the same way, too! I knew it!’

  Alix managed a wan smile as Azarov launched into another declaration of his passion for her. She was wondering how and when she was going to extract herself from Azarov’s life. She couldn’t possibly mention Carver. Irrespective of his own behaviour, Azarov did not take kindly to women who betrayed him, or the men with whom they slept. He would want revenge, and that frightened Alix, not just for Carver’s sake but also Azarov’s. He would not know what he was taking on.

  She wondered where Carver was now. She knew what it meant when he disappeared the way he’d done last night. He was working. And she knew what that led to, too: violence, danger, secrecy and the constant worry of never knowing where he was and when, if ever, he would come home. By making love to him, and making herself so vulnerable to the effect he had on her, she had let that back into her life. She’d broken a vow she’d made to herself and …

  Alix realized that Azarov had fallen silent. He was looking past her with an expression of total incredulity on his face. ‘Mother of God,’ he gasped, regaining the p
ower of speech.

  Alix turned to follow his staring eyes, and saw the television screen go blank, before the picture cut back to a pair of presenters trying to maintain some semblance of professional self-control.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

  Azarov walked across to the remote control that was sitting beside the television, and rewound the picture. Alix watched explosions fall in upon themselves to leave intact metal towers and tanks. One helicopter flew backwards from the ground up into the sky, and another was magically reconstituted in mid-air. Then Azarov pressed play and the action was repeated, this time in the correct direction and at the right speed, ending in that terrible blank, dead screen. And as she watched Alix knew, with an intuitive certainty she could not possibly explain, that Carver was there. That blazing oil refinery had been the destination he had been heading for when he had left her lying in his bed.

  He was there. And now, so soon after she had found him, Alix feared she had lost him for ever.

  But while she worried about the personal cost of what had happened, Azarov was already working through the financial consequences. ‘This is exactly what Zorn said would happen. It’s almost as if … no, that’s impossible.’ He looked at Alix, talking to her now less as his lover than as another businessperson. ‘Do you think he knew this would happen? Or that he made it happen?’

  Whatever Alix’s differences with Azarov, she shared with him the instinctive Russian belief that behind any disaster there was always a conspiracy. ‘That’s possible, of course it is,’ she said, her mind now fully engaged in the question. Carver had talked about Zorn, linking him to the woman she had known as Celina Novak. Now she could see connections starting to form in her mind between a string of previously separate elements: her mistrust of Zorn, her conviction that Carver had been at the refinery, and now the suggestion that Zorn had somehow been the instigator of the disaster there.

  ‘What will you do if Zorn really did plan all this?’ she asked Azarov. ‘I did warn you that I thought there was something suspicious about his scheme.’

  Azarov grinned. ‘And I told you that a man should not pick up the dice unless he has the balls to lose everything on a single roll. I am very happy that I placed my money on Zorn. He has certainly rolled the dice. Surely, too, he will win.’

  A picture of Nicholas Orwell appeared on the screen, as a presenter’s voice announced that he was missing, believed dead at the scene.

  Now Azarov laughed out loud. ‘So he was willing to let his closest ally die to help his plan succeed. Ha! This Zorn is a man with iron in his soul.’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ Alix insisted. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘And you asked the wrong question, my beautiful darling. It should have been: what are we going to do? And I will tell you. We have been invited to go to the tennis at Wimbledon tomorrow with Malachi Zorn. If he still goes – and he will, I guarantee – then we will go with him. I want to take another close look at this man, and I would like you to do the same. I want to know exactly what he is made of, and a woman’s eye will see what a man’s does not. You know the saying: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I do not yet know whether Malachi Zorn is my greatest friend or my most bitter enemy. But either way, I will stay close.’

  Dmytryk Azarov was by no means the only one of Malachi Zorn’s investors to be glued to the TV news. In his suite at Claridge’s, chosen at Charlene’s insistence because it had been designed by Diane von Furstenberg, Mort Lockheimer was cheering every horrific element of the disaster unfolding before his eyes. He had watched Zorn’s BBC interview and been puzzled by the way so much of it had been devoted to the risk of energy terrorism. Now he got it. Zorn had obviously been given some kind of inside information that an attack was imminent – either from the perpetrators or through leaks from the security forces; Lockheimer wasn’t bothered which. Zorn must have set up a bunch of short positions, just like he’d done so many times before. Now he was watching them all pay off in spades. And if Zorn was getting rich, so was Lockheimer.

  Lockheimer was at least forty pounds overweight. His entire body was covered in a thick mat of black and grey hair, and the only thing covering it right now was a white towelling bathrobe. ‘What did I tell you!’ he exclaimed, grabbing Charlene in a gleeful bear hug. ‘That little fucker Zorn just hit the fuckin’ jackpot. Didn’t I say you should blow him … didn’t I?’

  Charlene looked at her husband appraisingly. ‘He made us a lot, huh? Millions?’

  ‘Tens of millions, baby!’

  She reached down and started undoing the knot of the towelling belt that was holding her husband’s robe together. ‘Well, in that case, sweetie, why don’t I just blow you?’

  55

  * * *

  Rosconway

  THE CABINET OFFICE staff had arranged for a St John Ambulance crew to be present at the conference, just in case anyone tripped over a pipe, or was taken ill. Somehow they had survived the blast with their vehicle intact. But Carver only had to take one look at the chalk-white skin and dazed eyes of the amateur volunteers to know that they were too traumatized by the overwhelming violence that they had just witnessed to be of any help. It made little difference: he and Schultz knew enough about basic battlefield medicine to tend to Nikki Wilkins’s immediate needs. They climbed up into the ambulance and commandeered the splints, bandages and morphine shots they needed to stabilize her broken leg and head injury, and reduce the pain of the wounds. Then they carried Wilkins, still unconscious, back to the Audi, laid her out along the rear seat, and strapped her in as best they could.

  ‘Drive,’ said Carver. ‘Head for Pembroke. There’s got to be a hospital there.’

  They were less than a mile down the road, still travelling beneath a pall of smoke that was spreading across the sky as far as the eye could see, before Carver had gone online and found both the location of the South Pembrokeshire Hospital and directions for getting there. He was about to offer Schultz his condolences for Tyrrell’s loss – nothing too overwrought, just a simple acknowledgement that a good man had gone – when the phone rang. It was Grantham. His first words were: ‘You’re alive.’

  ‘Don’t sound so disappointed,’ Carver replied.

  ‘You know, for once, I might actually be pleased to hear your voice,’ said Grantham. ‘So what the hell just happened?’

  ‘Someone stuck a dozen home-made mortar barrel tubes in an old Hiace van, loaded them with explosive shells, and blew the shit out of an entire refinery. And I should have stopped them.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I wasn’t at the refinery when the shells hit. I was at the launch site.’

  ‘What do you mean? Had you found out what was happening?’

  ‘No, I’d worked out what might happen. I didn’t think there’d actually be anything there.’

  ‘Well, that’s as clear as mud.’

  ‘Sorry …’ It struck Carver that he might not be as out of it as that St John Ambulance crew, but his mind was still reeling as it struggled to process what he had just experienced. It was time he pulled himself together.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Here’s how it was done. The van that contained the mortars was parked inside an old barn, at a deserted farmyard about a kilometre from the refinery. The weapon was set to a timer, along with some kind of incendiary device – petrol by the smell of it. The moment the mortars fired, the van was burned out, removing all trace of the people who’d driven it or worked on the weapon. This was a professional job, straight out of the old IRA manual.’

  ‘Really? You think there were Paddies involved?’

  ‘Maybe … but it could just as easily have been one of ours. Anyone who served in Ulster during the Troubles, or even did bomb disposal work on this side of the Irish Sea, would have seen things like this.’

  ‘But how could they have known about the conference today?’

  Carver thought for a moment: no, it was out of the question. ‘They could
n’t,’ he said, definitively. ‘Look, this was a totally last-minute event. No one had any warning. That’s why it was such a dog’s breakfast. The organization, the security, the media coverage – it was all a total joke. But this attack was the exact opposite. It was very carefully calculated. Whoever hit the refinery had every single one of those launcher tubes calibrated to the last millimetre, the last bloody fraction of a degree. Each of those things hit a target. And making the launch tubes, the framework to hold them, all the projectiles … getting hold of the explosives … no, there wasn’t anything last-minute about that. I’d say weeks of preparation, even months, went into this.’

  ‘So what are you saying – that it was just a bloody coincidence? I’m not buying that.’

  ‘Why not? Stranger things have happened. But even if it was a coincidence that the attack and the conference were planned for the same place at the same time, I don’t think there was anything remotely coincidental about the time and place of the attack itself. Come on … someone blows the crap out of a massive oil refinery the day after Malachi Zorn’s told the whole world that eco-terrorism is the big new threat … What do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s a bit bloody adjacent, certainly.’

  ‘Exactly, so what are the markets doing right now? Let me guess: oil price rocketing, stocks crashing, pound through the floor …’

  ‘All of that and more,’ Grantham agreed. ‘It’s a total nightmare. The economy was weak to begin with. An event like this could send it over the edge.’

  ‘Meanwhile Zorn’s cashing in. He’s got to be. The whole thing was a set-up.’

  ‘Except for Orwell … how do you explain that? Are you seriously saying Zorn deliberately sacrificed his own right-hand man?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Carver admitted. ‘He could have done. The amount of money he stands to make, my guess is he’d do just about anything. But you’re right … I don’t have any concrete link between this and Zorn.’