by Tom Cain
“I understand. Five o’clock this afternoon at the cathedral. I will have someone there. Thank you, Monsieur Papin.”
“On the contrary, Monsieur. Thank you.”
Papin put down the receiver, raised his eyes to the ceiling, then let out a long sigh of relief. He rubbed the back of his neck as he pondered his next move. He had the money in the bag. He didn’t need another bidder. But what if there was a way to make more than one deal? He might yet be able to double his money. Yes, that would be something. And if he played it right, he could get the killers and their bosses off his back for good.
42
Deep inside the futuristic, postmodernist ziggurat on the south bank of the river Thames that had been the headquarters of MI6 since 1995—and which its more cynical inhabitants, unimpressed by the building’s expense, vulgarity, and sore-thumb prominence, had dubbed “Ceauşescu Towers”—Bill Selsey was sitting by a telephone receiver, waiting for a call. Beside him were other secret service officers wearing headsets, operating digital audio recorders, and monitoring the connection between their lines and the tracking equipment at GCHQ. Jack Grantham was sitting at the same table as Selsey, ready to listen in on whatever Pierre Papin had to say.
The phone rang. Selsey paused for the technicians’ thumbs-up, then picked up the receiver.
Papin was all apologies. “I am so sorry, Bill, but I already have a buyer for my information. We are meeting at five p.m.”
“Well, I’m sorry too, Pierre. Maybe we could have done some business.”
“Maybe we still can.”
“How would that be?”
“You could buy my buyer.”
Selsey rolled his eyes across the table at Jack Grantham. What was the Frenchman playing at now?
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Simply that I can now provide you with a complete package: the people who killed your princess and the people who hired them.”
Selsey couldn’t help it. He laughed out loud. “So you shaft the people you’ve just done a deal with and sell them out to us?”
“Exactly.”
“Bloody hell, Pierre, you’ve got a nerve! Presumably you’d like to be paid by us too.”
“But of course. The price is the same: five hundred thousand U.S.”
“Yeah, well, there’s just one problem. We don’t have that kind of money lying around. You know how it is, endless bloody budget cuts, every penny has to be justified in triplicate. Probably the same with your lot, right?”
“Yes, it’s true. We cannot afford to be extravagant. But this is not extravagance. This is a small outlay for a huge return.”
Across the room a signals tech gestured at Selsey to keep talking. He mouthed the words “almost got it.” Selsey nodded. He kept talking.
“I agree. If we did get that entire crew, it would be good. But to be honest, that’s what concerns me. You’re planning to deceive a group of known killers. I’m not sure you want to be doing that. In fact, I’d say we’re the only people you can trust. We’re pros, like you. We’re not in the business of harming our allies’ agents. So why don’t you come in with us? We’ll keep an eye on things, cover your back. I mean, even if your clients don’t discover you’re about to rat them out, they may decide they don’t want to pay your money after all. They may try to get it back . . . over your dead body.”
“But it would be of no use to them. That is why I demanded endorsed bearer bonds. They can only be cashed by me. No, Bill, your offer is very kind, but I’m sure I can look after myself. And also I would be safer without you. If I do not sell my clients to you, they have no need to harm me. And if I do sell them, and they find out, then I do not think you would be able to save me. So I want money to cover the extra risk, or no deal. What is it to be?”
Selsey looked across at the signals tech and got a thumbs-up. “Then I’m sorry, Pierre, but it’s no deal.”
“I’m sorry too, Bill. Another time.”
And the line went dead.
“Good work,” said Jack Grantham, leaning across the table to give his colleague a supportive pat on the arm. “So, where is the treacherous little sod?”
“Geneva,” said the signals tech. “Public phone on the Rue Verdaine, right by the city cathedral.”
“Damn!” muttered Grantham. “We can’t get there in time from here. We’ll have to use someone local.” He picked up a phone and dialed an internal number. “Monica? Jack Grantham. Something urgent’s come up in Geneva. Who do we have in the UN mission there? . . . What do you mean one of them’s on holiday? It’s September, people should be back at work. . . . Okay, well, get the chap—sorry, the woman, my mistake—get the one who isn’t busy lying on a beach and tell her to give me a ring asap, would you? And see what we can rustle up from the embassy at Bern—that’s not far from Geneva, right? . . . Excellent. Well, tell them to call me once they’re on their way. Coordinate with the girl in Geneva. . . . Yes, Monica, I know she’s a grown woman, it’s just a figure of speech. . . . Well, whatever this female is, I want to talk to her. Now.”
He put down the phone with exaggerated care, shook his head silently, then turned to Bill Selsey.
“Right, Bill, this is strictly a surveillance job. I don’t want people running around the streets of Geneva firing guns and playing at double-o-seven. I just want every scrap of information we can get on the killers Papin claims to have found. And I want to know about every phone conversation, every e-mail, every text message in and out of Geneva this afternoon. And do me a favor, Bill. Get onto Cheltenham and Menwith Hill. Tell them we need saturation coverage.”
43
Grigori Kursk put down his mobile phone, kicked the hungover blond out of bed, and threw some money after her as she grabbed her clothes and scuttled from the room. He reached for the empty vodka bottle on the bedside table and held it up to the light to see if there were any dregs left at the bottom. He needed something to kick-start his day. He’d been given new orders and was getting back to work.
He called Dimitrov’s room, just down the hall of their two-star hotel in the center of Milan. “Wake up, you lazy cocksucker! Yuri called. We’ve got a job, Geneva, three hours’ time. . . . Yeah, I know that’s not enough time. That’s why you’ve got to get your ass out of bed and down to the lobby. Tell the others. By the front desk, five minutes. Anyone who isn’t there, I will personally ram an Uzi up their backside and let rip. Got that?”
Five and a half minutes later, Kursk was at the wheel of a BMW 750, forcing his way into the lunchtime traffic on the Via de Larga. He had 330 kilometers between himself and Geneva, and the cars around him were moving slower than a legless man in a tar pit. He pressed his fist to the horn and kept it there, screaming locker-room obscenities at every other driver on the road. No one around seemed too impressed; in Milan that passed for everyday behavior. Kursk slumped back in the driver’s seat. “Fucking Italians. They move fast enough when there’s an army after them.”
Finally, the lights ahead turned green, the traffic began to move, and they started to make progress. Kursk relaxed a hair. He took a pack of Balkan Stars from his shirt pocket, pulled one out of the pack, then reached for the car’s lighter. He took a deep drag and kept driving, one hand on the wheel, the other holding the cigarette.
Sitting next to him, Dimitrov decided it was safe to risk a question. “So, what are we doing in Switzerland?”
Kursk blew smoke toward the windshield. “We’re meeting some French bastard and he’s going to take us to that whore Petrova and her English lover boy.”
“And then?”
“Then we kill the Frenchman and we take the other two back to Yuri. And then, God willing, we kill them too.”
Kursk rolled down the window and yelled at the car ahead of them. “Get that useless pile of crap out of my way, you spaghetti-eating son of a whore!”
“Forget it, Grigori Mikhailovich,” said Dimitrov. “He doesn’t understand Russian.”
Kursk pulled his head bac
k inside the car. “Oh no, Dimitrov, that gutless bastard knows exactly what I’m saying.”
44
Carver had been impressed by the way Alix had shopped. On the rare, very rare occasions he’d allowed himself to be dragged along behind a woman on a retail expedition, he’d been bored, exhausted, and massively irritated by the endless trail from one crowded, overheated rip-off joint to the next; the constant riffling through rack after rack of clothes that looked identical to him; the relentless questions—“Does this make me look fat?” “Which do you prefer?” “Will this go with those boots we saw?”—to which he could only silently contemplate the same, unchanging answer: “How the hell would I know?”
But Alix was different. She bought clothes the way he bought munitions. She had a purpose in mind. She knew the effect she wanted to create, and she supplied herself accordingly.
Now she was preparing for her mission with the same professionalism. She showered. She toweled herself off, blow-dried her hair, and came back into the bedroom, where Carver was still lying on the bed, draped in a thick terry-cloth hotel robe, waiting for his turn in the bathroom.
Alix got out her underwear and took off her towel. Carver was intoxicated by the intimacy of watching her as she slipped into her panties and bra. He relished all the sights and sounds that are so normal, even banal, to a woman, yet so fascinating to a man: the slither of fabric over skin, the snap of elastic, the little twists and adjustments of her body, the self-absorption as she examined her appearance in a full-length mirror inside the wardrobe door. Yet there was nothing showy about her actions. She seemed indifferent to Carver’s eyes washing over her, as if, like a dancer or model, she were so used to being naked in the presence of other people that any modesty or coyness about her body had long since evaporated. Nor was there any vanity in the way she looked herself up and down. Her expression was serious, her self-examination meticulous. She was getting ready for work.
As she stepped away from the mirror, she finally glanced at Carver.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’d better get dressed fast before I lose all self-control.”
“No,” she said. “Fun is over. Time for business.”
She walked across to the dressing table, which was already dotted with bags of makeup, pots of skin cream, a can of hair-spray, brushes, combs, and a couple of paper shopping bags. One contained a skullcap made of some kind of nylon that looked like thick pantyhose. She put it on, pushing her hair beneath it until every strand had disappeared. As she worked, she caught Carver’s eye in the dressing-table mirror.
“So, were you always rich?” she asked.
He looked at her with eyebrows raised, taken by surprise by her question. “Rich? Me? Christ, no! Far from it.”
“But you were an officer. I thought in England only the upper classes became officers.”
Now he smiled. “Is that what they told you in KGB school?”
“You can tease me, but it’s true. The rich lead the poor. It’s like that everywhere.”
“Maybe, but I didn’t become an officer because I was rich. I became an officer because I was adopted.”
Now it was her turn to be surprised. She stopped her handiwork and turned her body to face him.
“How do you mean?”
“My mum gave me away. She was just a kid who got pregnant. She came from the kind of family where abortion wasn’t an option, but they weren’t going to have a teenage daughter pushing a pram around, either. So they sent her to a home for unwed mothers, told everyone she was visiting relatives abroad, and then got rid of the baby as soon as they could.”
Alix had turned back to the table and was rummaging through her makeup as she listened to Carver’s story. Now she looked into the mirror again, frowning this time.
“Who raised you, then?”
“A middle-aged couple. They’d never had children of their own. They were nice enough and they meant well, but they couldn’t cope. In time they realized that they wanted a quiet life more than a scrappy little rascal running around the place, making a racket all day. So they sent me off to boarding school. They felt it was the best thing for me.”
“Did they love you?” She was powdering her face.
“I don’t know. They never said so, not out loud. But I think they cared for me. You know, in their own way.”
“And what about you? Did you love them?”
Carver sighed. He got up off the bed and walked over to a chair, near to the dressing table. “Well, I didn’t dislike them,” he said as he sat down. “And I was grateful to them. I knew they were making sacrifices for me; I appreciated that. But I don’t think I really knew how to love, not from the heart. I mean, why would I? If you don’t get that from your mother, you never find out about love until much, much later and then, suddenly, it’s like, oh . . . right . . . so that’s what they were talking about. Comes as quite a shock.”
“And then you lost her too.”
“Yeah. Not so good, that.”
Alix twirled her mascara brush through her eyelashes.
“So, how old were you when you went away to school?”
“Eight.”
“Bozhe moi! . . . And the English think they are civilized!”
“You don’t know the half of it. The school was in this ancient country house, miles from anywhere. The first morning, we all got woken up at seven o’clock. We got dressed and the dormitory captain led us downstairs to the lawn at the back of the school. And we did drills, proper military drills. Quick march! Left turn, right turn, stand to attention, stand a-a-a-t . . . h’ease! It makes me laugh now, it was so bloody mad.”
“Yet you became a soldier?”
“Well, schools like that have been churning out upmarket cannon fodder for centuries. They were specifically designed to produce reasonably intelligent, physically fit, emotionally screwed-up young men who’d travel to the world’s hottest, nastiest places, do their duty, and lay down their lives when required.”
“And you are one of these people?”
“When I’m working.”
“And when you’re not working?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to sort out.”
For a few moments they were silent. Alix concentrated on her lipstick. With her newly painted face, done in a style unlike anything Carver had seen on her before, her bald head, and her half-naked body, she looked oddly impersonal, like a showroom dummy waiting for its costume. Then she reached for the other bag and took out her wig. She pulled it over the skullcap, brushed it and sprayed it, and suddenly Carver was looking at a completely different woman.
He expected her to get straight up and cross the room to the closet where her clothes were hanging. Instead she sat there hesitantly, her eyes vague and unfocused, as if her concentration had been broken by some inner uncertainty.
“There was something I didn’t tell you yesterday, about my past,” she said.
Carver sat back in his chair, caught her eye in the mirror.
“I said that everything about it was bad. But that’s not true. I had special privileges because of what I did for the State. At home in Perm, women wore horrible, shapeless sacks. They ate stale food that tasted of nothing. They worked so hard. When my mother was only forty, she was already old, like a woman of sixty in the West. But in Moscow I was dressing in Armani, Versace, Chanel. I had never before owned more than two pairs of shoes, always made of plastic. Now I had a closet filled with shoes from Paris and Milan.
“Sometimes I would take men back to my apartment. There were beautiful Italian sheets on my bed. There was Scotch whisky in the drinks cabinet. You cannot imagine. No one in Russia lived like that—no one outside the highest levels of the Party. I loved those things. It did not matter what I had to do, I would never have given them up. I sold my soul.”
Carver leaned forward. “Did you like my flat?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Did you like my flat? I mean, it’s nice, i
sn’t it? You haven’t seen my car, but that’s pretty nice too. So’s the boat I keep on the lake. And I think you know how I paid for them.”
“So what are you saying, that you are as bad as me?”
“I guess. But who’s to say what’s good or bad? People get on their high horses. They sit in their comfortable, safe little lives and they talk about moral standards. But any idiot can come out with this week’s socially acceptable bullshit when they don’t have to face any consequences or get their hands dirty. I spent years watching good friends get blown to pieces, their guts torn apart for politicians who lied through their teeth. I know there are bad guys out there and I know what they can do. That changes your perspective, big-time.
“Sorry, got a bit carried away,” Carver offered, grimacing.
“No,” she said, “I understand. And I like it when you get passionate. I like seeing who you really are.”
“Christ, do you think that’s the real me?”
She was about to reply when there was a knock on the door. Carver went to answer it, picking up his gun from the bedside table along the way. He opened the door a couple of inches and then relaxed when he recognized who was on the other side.
“Thor! Good to see you. Come in.”
Larsson’s tall, gangly figure—all arms, legs, and hair—ambled into the room. He was carrying two large nylon bags, suspended from his shoulders. He saw Alix getting up from her makeup table and stopped.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I had no idea.” A shy smile spread across his face and his blue eyes creased in private amusement. “Am I interrupting?”
“Not at all,” said Carver, “We were just getting ready. So, Thor Larsson, this is Alexandra Petrova.”
