by Tom Cain
Marchand put down the phone, wiped the sweat off his brow, and told his secretary he would be working late. She, however, was free to go home at the normal hour.
Carver’s recovery had not gone unnoticed in Moscow, nor its possible consequences. Deputy Director Olga Zhukovskaya had made it plain to her staff that she wanted the matter dealt with at once. Now they were obeying her orders.
32
Carver awoke and found to his surprise that he had not been asleep for half the night, as he’d imagined. The clock by his bedside read 23:35-he’d been out for less than an hour. He rubbed his eyes and then frowned. Something was wrong, something out of place, but he couldn’t work out what it was.
Then it struck him. He couldn’t hear the TV. The night nurse on duty this week was a kid called Sandrine, and she always had a late-night movie on in the staff room when she thought the patients were asleep. So why would tonight be any different?
Carver got out of bed and, keeping the light off, padded across his room to the door. He opened it a fraction and paused, listening for any unusual sounds outside. He thought he could hear footsteps down at the far end of the floor. Very slowly, he eased the door open another few degrees, just enough for him to lean around and catch a glimpse down the corridor. He saw the shape of a man, bending over the nurses’ reception desk, running his finger down the top sheet on a clipboard. He was checking the list of rooms and their occupants.
He might have been looking for someone else, but Carver wasn’t going to take that chance. He closed the door and looked around the room, giving himself no more than a couple of seconds to make his decision. Then he went to the bathroom, switched on the light, and turned on the tap, letting it run in a steady dribble that sounded like a man taking a leak. When he quit the bathroom, he left the light on and the door half open, before going to stand to one side of the bedroom door, his back to the wall between him and the corridor.
Steps came pacing down the corridor. The man’s rubber soles squeaked against the vinyl tiled floor. They paused outside the door to Carver’s room and he saw the handle move as it was twisted from outside. The door opened. It was now between Carver and the other man, whoever he was, blocking each of them from seeing the other.
Carver’s bathrobe was hanging on a hook on the back of the door, a cord strung around its waist. Carver gently slid the cord from the robe, then held it in both hands, forming a loop like a lasso. He knew he had only meager reserves of strength and stamina. Whatever he did, it would have to be fast.
The man closed the door behind him. His attention was focused on the bathroom, unaware of Carver behind him. There was something in his right hand, a thin tube that protruded a few inches from his fist. At first glance Carver thought it might be a small flashlight, but then the man’s hand moved and caught the light from the bathroom door. The tube was a plastic injector pen, the kind used by diabetics for their daily doses of insulin.
Now he understood. An overdose of insulin, given to a sleeping patient, would swiftly induce hypoglycemic coma as the neurons in the brain were starved of glucose. Death would follow if the condition was left untreated, and if the injection site itself were not spotted, there’d be no reason to suspect foul play. Insulin was one of the most effective murder weapons a hospital could offer.
Carver had no intention of being its latest victim. He came up behind the intruder, slipped the bathrobe cord over his head, and pulled it tight around the neck.
The man reacted instantly. He brought his left hand up to the cord, trying to pull it away from his throat. At the same time he jerked his head back, hard, hoping to catch Carver on the face.
Carver anticipated the move and swayed back, his own movement adding to the tension on the cord. But now he had another problem to deal with-the man swung his right arm around behind him, jabbing the injector pen at Carver like a deadly snake, with insulin as its venom.
Carver twisted to one side to avoid the pen. The movement shifted his balance and gave his opponent the chance to push backward. Carver was sent crashing into the wall between his room and the one next door. The breath was knocked from him by the impact, but he forced himself to hold on to the cord. Ten or fifteen seconds’ pressure on the carotid artery would be enough to bring on unconsciousness, but fifteen seconds was an eternity when two men were fighting to the death.
They lurched around the room, their bodies linked like two drunken dance partners as they collided with a chair, knocking it over; then the bed; then a side table, sending a glass of water flying. And all the while the injector was jabbing at Carver, searching for his flesh and the moment when it could finally release its deadly cargo.
Groggy calls of complaint started coming from the patients on either side of Carver’s room. One of them started banging on the wall and calling for a nurse. It would not be long before someone came to see what was happening.
As the seconds passed, the fight was becoming a test of endurance between Carver’s enfeebled muscles, desperately hanging on to his improvised noose, and his enemy’s oxygen-starved brain. Whoever gave in first would die. And then came a stroke of luck. The assassin’s flailing hand struck against the iron frame of Carver’s bed and the injector was knocked from his grasp. Desperately, he tried to bend down to pick it up, but that only gave Carver the opportunity to plant his feet and give one last heave of the cord.
He felt the other man slump into unconsciousness and let the cord play out through his hands, lowering the lifeless body to the floor.
Suddenly there was a hammering on the door.
Carver dragged the body into the bathroom, then opened the door. Christophe, the crack-addicted son of a prominent local banker, was standing in the corridor in shorts and an old T-shirt, his usually pallid features inflamed with indignation.
“What the hell have you been doing in there?” he whined, making no attempt to keep his voice down.
Other heads began peering out of doors up and down the corridor.
“It’s okay-I’m sorry,” said Carver, turning to one side and then the other, holding his hands up in apology and surrender.
“I must have been sleepwalking or something. I had one of my nightmares, then I woke up and I was in the middle of my room and it was all smashed up. I don’t know what happened. But I’m really sorry if I woke you guys up, okay?”
He looked around in feigned bewilderment. “Has anyone seen a nurse? I could really use some meds…”
The others shook their heads and retreated back into their rooms, like crabs scuttling back into holes, not wanting to get involved. Carver watched them disappear, then went back into his room. Wherever the nurse had got to, she’d be back at any second. He heard a groan from the bathroom. His assailant was coming to.
Carver’s eyes darted around his room until he found the injector lying on the floor by his bed. He picked it up, strode into the bathroom, sat astride the man’s body, forced his head down with one hand, then jabbed the injector at his carotid artery with the other. As soon as the plastic tube hit skin, Carver pushed the trigger button, sending a dose of insulin straight into the bloodstream. Then he pressed it again, twice more, just to make sure the maximum possible dose had been administered and the injector was completely empty. The man gave a barely audible moan. He wasn’t dead yet. But he was heading that way fast.
Now that the fight was over and his adrenaline levels were plummeting, Carver felt shattered, but he couldn’t afford to let up. He righted the bedside table and put the chair back in its place. Somehow, he found the strength to drag the comatose body back out of the bathroom and across the floor to the bed.
The man had been wearing a heavy overcoat. Carver pulled his arms from the sleeves, then heaved him up onto the mattress and covered him with a blanket and top sheet, leaving just the top of his head exposed on the pillow. The subterfuge would survive only the most cursory look into the room. But it might buy Carver time to get out.
He put on some clothes and shoes, followed by the d
ying man’s overcoat. There were car keys in one of the side pockets, along with a phone. The inside pocket held a wallet. Carver opened it. He found money, credit cards, and an I.D. in the name of Dr. Jean Du Cann, consultant psychiatrist. That would have got the would-be killer past the guard at the gate. He must have used it again at the front desk or slipped in through a service entrance. Those doors were all locked, but they wouldn’t pose any barrier to a professional. They wouldn’t stop Carver getting out, either.
He was about to leave the room when he heard more footsteps: the slightly sharper patter of a nurse’s footsteps. Sandrine had returned. There was a distinct, familiar pattern to the noise she was making: a few paces, then a pause as she looked into the patients’ rooms, through the windows in the doors, just a routine check to make sure they were all okay.
Carver rolled under the bed as her footsteps drew near. He held his breath and remained perfectly still as she stopped outside his room, then exhaled in blessed relief as she walked on. A couple of minutes later, he heard one last, uninterrupted walk down the corridor, followed by the sound of the TV being turned on again. He waited a few minutes, giving the nurse time to fix herself a cup of coffee, kick off her shoes, and relax in front of the box.
He used the time to sort out the dying man’s possessions. Carver kept the coat, the phone, the car keys, and the cash. The wallet, with the doctor’s I.D. still inside, he placed on the bedside table, along with the injector. That would give the police plenty of material to go on when they tried to figure out what had happened-material that should make it obvious that the victim was far from innocent. Finally, Carver slipped out through his door, turned away from the nurses’ room, crept down the corridor, and made his way to the emergency staircase.
Less than a minute later, he was sitting behind the wheel of his attacker’s car. He turned up the collar of his overcoat, then drove toward the barrier, giving the guard a little wave of thanks as he passed. As the barrier closed behind him, he pressed the accelerator to the floor and sped away toward Geneva.
At a quarter past midnight, Clément Marchand came through his front door, an eager, expectant look on his face. “Marianne? Chérie? ” he called out.
Then blood blossomed on his shirt front and spattered his forehead as he died just as his wife had.
The killer let himself out of the apartment without any fuss. As he drove away he called his boss, reporting the situation at the apartment and requesting his next instructions.
33
Carver kept checking the rearview mirror to see if he was being followed. He found himself getting jittery if he saw the same set of lights for more than a mile or two. Whenever a car behind turned off the main road, or overtook him without incident, his shoulders slumped with relief and gratitude, only to tighten up again when another vehicle pulled into view.
He told himself not to be so stupid. He had almost always worked alone. Why shouldn’t the man now lying on his bed have done the same? But his head was filled with fears of pursuit. His body, meanwhile, was exhausted. He’d forgotten how draining a fight could be. It might only have lasted a few seconds, but the fear and tension that preceded it, the intense physical strain of the battle itself, and the release that came with survival had overwhelmed him. His muscles ached. His brain felt sluggish and unfocused. He had reached the outskirts of Geneva when another thought hit him: What if the car had been fitted with a tracking device?
He cursed his sloppiness. It should have been automatic: Check an unknown car for a tracker or booby traps. But that hadn’t even crossed his mind until it was far too late. No wonder he wasn’t being followed. They didn’t need to bother. They already knew where he was.
Then he thought of the killer’s phone, still sitting in his coat pocket. As long as it was on, anyone with access to the local networks could use that to locate him, too. He reached inside the coat and switched off the phone. After one last look in the mirror, he pulled over to the side of the road, stopped the car, got out, and looked around. He was somewhere in the ribbon of suburbs and small towns that sprawled northeast from the city and ran right around the northern shore of the lake to Lausanne and on to Montreux. The road he was on ran parallel to a railway line. Up ahead he could see a sign for a station, barely more than a halt on the line, called Creux-de-Genthod. The name rang a bell. He’d been there before.
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 d
estination, 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.
