The Accident Man

by Tom Cain

  He had around twenty seconds before the Scandwave Adventurer smashed into the side of the yacht. Carver gathered his senses. It wasn’t too late. If he could start the engine and loosen the sails, he could steer straight into the wind, maintain his speed, and twist away from the onrushing mass. The two boats would end up side by side, the container ship overtaking him like a juggernaut passing a moped. Even a glancing blow from the container ship would still be fatal, but at least there was a chance it might miss.

  He dashed to the engine’s starter button. He pressed it. The engine coughed, spluttered, and died. He pressed again. Nothing. Five seconds had elapsed. The boat was still sailing directly toward its gigantic executioner.

  Samuel Carver was not a yachtsman. But he was an exmarine. He’d spent years studying, planning, and executing waterborne operations. He’d attended the military sailing courses with which the British armed forces, steeped in the nautical traditions of an island race, were obsessed. Now he prayed he could remember everything he’d ever been taught.

  Carver disengaged the auto helm and crouched by Tamarisk’s tiller, the wind in his face, sea spray foaming around him, the rain beating against him so hard he had to screw his eyes into slits to maintain any vision at all. The massive hull was no more than a hundred meters away now, still traveling just as fast, still on course, still oblivious of the yacht’s existence. He could now see flecks of rust on its hull, the white depth markings running down from its Plimsoll line.

  He breathed hard and pushed the tiller away from his body, directly toward the Scandwave Adventurer. For a long, endless, agonizing second nothing happened. Then the bow of the yacht turned into the wind, began to swing around, and the boom bearing the mainsail rushed across the boat, over Carver’s head. The jib at the front was jammed tight against the mast. The wind was pushing it over to the far, port side of the boat. But the sail was held back by the taut rope holding it in its previous position to starboard.

  Moment by moment, the Tamarisk shifted its course. It slewed anticlockwise in the water, turning three-quarters of the way around the dial, till it was no longer running broadside to the container ship but pointing almost directly at the vast black-painted behemoth. And then the turning stopped and the Tamarisk lay there, dead in the water.

  The container ship was now no more than fifty meters away. As the Tamarisk had completed its tack, Carver had frantically worked the rope holding the jib sail, fighting against the tension generated by the wind in the sail.

  The line loosened and the jib flapped helplessly in the wind. The boat would not move again until Carver reversed the procedure. He had fewer than five seconds till impact.

  He dashed to the jib winch on the port side of the boat, frantically turning the handle to tighten the line and heave the jib around the mast to the point where it could once again catch the wind that would power the Tamarisk.

  The Adventurer was now so close that Carver could not even see the top of its hull, which loomed over the yacht, twice as high as its mast. Every second brought it another ten yards closer. There was no time left, nothing more he could do. And then, somehow, the jib caught a gust of wind, filled for a moment, and gave the Tamarisk a little push—no more than a few feet of movement, but just enough to bring the boat around a fraction.

  Then Carver felt the craft being gripped by a far mightier force. Below the waterline of the container ship, the bow flared out in a great, round, bulbous protrusion, like the head of an oversize whale. It was designed to push water away from the ship in such a way that it minimized the wake left behind it. It was so effective that the Adventurer, like most modern megaships, generated less of a wake than a forty-foot cabin cruiser. The water was displaced in a huge, rolling swell that picked up the Tamarisk and flung it up and away from the container ship.

  Now Carver was in the lee of the Adventurer, which put a block of steel as high as a church steeple and as long as a suburban street between the wind and his yacht. It was like sailing into the eye of a hurricane. The air stilled. His sails flapped emptily. He was completely helpless once again, bobbing on the water like a rubber duck in a bathtub. To his left, the huge hull of the container ship went by for ten, twenty, thirty seconds, as if it filled the entire ocean, one vast ship that never seemed to end.

  Suddenly the current of the bow wave took hold once again, swinging back toward the ship’s hull and taking the Tamarisk with it. Now the yacht was propelled directly toward the flank of the ship, which came closer and closer, looming higher and higher until Carver could almost stretch out his left arm and touch the cold, wet steel.

  Then the current swung again, flinging the yacht back out to sea. The container vessel was passing by, fifty meters away, and Carver could see the giant capital letters that spelled out its name emblazoned on its stern like a giant farewell as it powered into the distance. The words grew smaller and less distinct until the ship was swallowed up by the darkness and the rain.

  There was no sign of the flare now, no indication of where Trench’s body was floating.

  Carver briefly considered looking for it, but the wind, waves, and current would already have washed the charred corpse away from its original position. He had no searchlights to sweep across the surface of the water, no engine to carry the Tamarisk back and forth. He could waste hours without finding anything. When morning came, the body would be spotted and hauled aboard whatever ship had discovered it. The coastguard would be called, an investigation begun. That would inevitably lead to the Tamarisk and Bobby Faulkner.

  So now another clock was ticking. All Carver could do was press on. His back and legs were aching. The sweat was chilling against his skin. Fatigue washed over him like the waves that surrounded the boat.

  He was still slumped over the tiller, two hours later, when he heard a coughing sound over the howl of the wind and the beating of the rain. He looked up and saw Bobby Faulkner’s head and shoulders emerge through the hatch.

  He looked around, sleepily. “Where’s Quentin? What’s the daft old bugger got up to now?” He paused, and gave Carver a ragged, doped-up smile. “Have I missed all the fun?”

  65

  It took Bobby Faulkner a couple of minutes to get his drugged head around the fact that Quentin Trench was dead. Then he spent another couple shouting at Carver, his voice slurred, his thoughts disordered, blaming him for what had happened, calling him a murderer. He said his wife had been right. He said he should have stayed at home and gone to work. “Brother-officer my bloody arse!” he ranted. “You’re nothing but bloody trouble. Should’ve left you in France. Let you sort your own sodding problems out, none of my business. Now Quentin’s dead, best commander a man ever had. And it’s all your bloody fault.”

  Carver let Faulkner say his piece. He considered his options as the other man ranted. He could either suck it up and say nothing. Or he could rip right back at him.

  He thought about going for the strong, silent option. It would probably be the more mature response. But he couldn’t be sure Faulkner wouldn’t try something stupid as long as he saw Carver as a murderer and Trench as the innocent victim. Plus, he was tired and hacked off and he’d taken about as much as he could stand tonight—and the night before, and the ones before that. So he grabbed Faulkner by the neck, hauled him close till his face was just a few inches away. Carver stared into eyes still bleary with chemicals.

  “Listen,” he said. “Listen very hard, because I’m only going to say this once. Quentin Trench was a lying, treacherous bastard who tried to kill me and would have killed you next. He stuck something in that hot bloody toddy you guys made, knocked you out. For God’s sake, you’re a big boy, you must know you’ve been drugged. And it couldn’t have been me, could it? I was up on deck, on watch.”

  Faulkner shrugged noncommittally, unable to argue but unwilling to agree.

  “He shot at me,” Carver continued, “but he missed. Look.” He pointed to the frame of the hatch. “There are the bloody holes. And none of this would
have happened if you hadn’t got him on this boat in the first place.”

  Carver let Faulkner go and moved across to the tiller, steering the boat north, waiting for the first faint glimmer of dawn.

  “Why would Quentin want to kill you?” Faulkner asked. “He loved you like a son. Told me so himself.”

  “He sent me on a mission I wasn’t supposed to survive. And when I did, he wanted me dead. Look, I’ve spent the past five years working off-the-books, black ops, jobs that never happened. I never knew who gave me the work. I didn’t think they knew who I was, either. Better that way, for both our sakes. Turns out I was wrong. One of my bosses knew exactly who I was, because he was Quentin. I’ve been working for him all along, I just didn’t know it.”

  Faulkner frowned. “Hang on. It was you that called me first about Quentin. That’s why I thought of him when you called again about the boat.”

  “That’s right. I thought he could help me. Pretty stupid, right?”

  “So how did you find out he was out to get you?”

  “Because he made some stupid crack about Alix, the girl I told you about, being a Russian mail-order bride. How did he know she was Russian? I didn’t tell you or him that. He had to be on the inside. All I needed to know then was whether you were in on it too. And I knew you were in the clear once I saw you lying there unconscious.”

  Faulkner was trying to work it all out, struggling against the numbed synapses in his brain.

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth, Pablo? How do I know you’re not going to kill me too?”

  “Because I would have done it already. You’ve been unconscious or incapable for hours. I could have tipped you over the side anytime. Anyway, you know the truth yourself. What was the last thing you remember before you went out?”

  Carver watched Faulkner squint up his eyes, trying to create a picture in his head. He took a couple of deep breaths, expelling the air through his nose. He muttered to himself. Then his eyes opened and he shook his head sorrowfully. “You’re right. It must have been him. We were down there. I was sitting down, thinking about getting some rest. He came over. There was a mug of something in his hand. . . . I don’t remember anything after that.”

  “He knocked you out. Then he came after me. But he forgot how good I am at my job. So he died.”

  Faulkner leaned forward. “What, precisely, is your job, Pablo?”

  Carver said nothing.

  “Come on,” Faulkner insisted. “You turned my boat into a battlefield. I’ve got a right to know.”

  “I told you already,” said Carver. “Black ops, accidents. Like, say, a veteran marine officer with years of experience at sea who runs into a storm on a night crossing of the Channel and gets fatally wounded by a distress flare. It goes off too early while he’s trying to warn an oncoming container ship of his presence and blows him overboard. That kind of thing.”

  “So what was this job Trench sent you on, the one where you met this girl? The one you weren’t meant to survive?”

  “Don’t ask,” replied Carver. “We’ll both be happier if we drop the subject right now. So, take the tiller for a while. I’m going down to the cabin to check a couple of things out. Do you want a cup of coffee to help you wake up?”

  He went below. The ship’s radio was mounted on the wall of the cabin by the chart table a couple of steps away. Carver ripped the radio from its mounting and smashed it against the side of the table.

  “What’s going on down there?” Faulkner called down from the cockpit.

  “Sorry,” said Carver. “Think I might have knocked something over. Don’t worry. No harm done.”

  He made the coffees and took them back up to the cockpit.

  Carver stood with his mug in his hand looking at the southern shore of the Isle of Wight, which lay straight ahead of them a few miles off, a black outline against a dark gray sky, the bottoms of the clouds streaked by the first orange rays of the rising sun.

  “What was that all about?” asked Faulkner.

  “I was putting your radio out of action. When we get to shore you’re going to need a reason why you didn’t radio for help when you discovered your two crewmates were missing.”

  “There’s only one lost.”

  “I’ll come to that. Here’s what you’re going to do. The moment you get ashore, get the harbormaster to call the coastguard. Then tell the truth. You were drugged. You’ll still have traces in your bloodstream. The mug Trench used will still be rolling around the cabin somewhere.

  “When you woke up, you clambered up on deck, and both your crew members, Trench and Jackson, were missing. So was the ship’s dinghy—don’t worry, it will be. Naturally, your first instinct was to call mayday, but the radio was kaput. They’re not going to know when that happened. Now you’re frantic because two of your oldest friends have disappeared overboard and you haven’t got a clue what happened. You certainly haven’t got a clue why there are bullet holes all over your boat. I mean, there’s no gun anywhere, is there? Now, think you can manage that?”

  Faulkner considered for a while, then answered, almost reluctantly, “Yes, I suppose so.”

  They weren’t far from the English coastline now. Poole lay on the far side of the Solent, northwest of the Isle of Wight, to the left as they were looking. There was just a chance Trench had ordered a welcoming committee to greet them, in case he hadn’t got the job done at sea.

  Carver turned his head right, to the northeast, gazing at the horizon. Then he turned back to Faulkner.

  “Change course,” he said. “We need another harbor.”

  66

  Yuri Zhukovski told his people to give Alix breakfast. He’d gone at her for hours. Now he was satisfied that she had nothing more to tell him. He just had to decide what to do with her next. He would use her to get what he needed. It was simply a matter of how.

  The servant said nothing as she went into the room, but her presence was enough to wake Alix from a fitful sleep that was really nothing more than a semiconscious doze. She winced as she propped herself up and watched the servant carry the tray toward her. The restraints that had tied her were gone, but the bruises showed up inky blue against the skin on her wrists and ankles. There’d been violence too, and the memories of what he’d done to her were as vivid as the welts on her body.

  She looked at the servant, another Russian, as she placed the tray on the table beside the bed. The woman’s face was masked in the mute, dead-eyed blankness that had disguised the true feelings of a thousand generations of serfs. But Alix could still feel the contempt radiating off her.

  She collapsed back onto the bed. She knew she had to eat, she just didn’t have enough strength left to lift the food to her mouth. Later, she thought. Later, maybe she’d try again.

  67

  Jack Grantham met Dame Agatha Bewley for an interagency breakfast in the Coffee Room at the Travellers Club in Pall Mall, London. Housed in Charles Barry’s 1832 pastiche of an Italian renaissance palace, it had long been the traditional London meeting place for diplomats, ambassadors, and visiting dignitaries.

  As an MI6 officer, Grantham was, in theory, an employee of the British diplomatic service, the foreign and commonwealth office. His Travellers membership made a useful addition to that cover, but he was not by nature a clubman and he despised the atmosphere of entrenched, inherited privilege that hung over the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall like an old London fog. He had to admit, though, that the place came in handy. He didn’t have to worry about finding restaurants or booking tables. He simply ate at the Travellers. That saved time, avoided waste, and increased efficiency. And those were principles Grantham liked.

  “I was sorry to hear about your two people in Geneva,” said Dame Agatha, breaking a piece off her croissant and covering it in thick, dark marmalade. “It’s never easy to lose staff like that, particularly when they’re young. No children involved, I gather. That’s a blessing, at least.”

  Grantham stuck his fork into a sausage. H
e’d gone for the full English breakfast, same as always.

  “I suppose so,” he agreed. “Anyway, something good may have come of it all. We’re starting to get names and faces. We’re just not sure how they all fit together.”

  Dame Agatha was a fastidious woman. She chewed carefully, swallowed, and then, having made sure her mouth was empty, asked, “Anything you’d like to share with us?”

  Grantham had just filled his face with fried egg and bacon. “Mmm,” he managed, with a nod.

  Dame Agatha put down her knife and ignored her food. She sat very still, looking at Grantham over the top of her glasses.

  “Go on,” she prompted.

  “You seem skeptical,” Grantham said. “Don’t be. There’s no hidden agenda here.”

  “So what do you have so far?”

  “Two names: an English male called Samuel Carver and a Russian female, Alexandra Petrova.”

  “Where do these names come from?”

  “Let’s just say Percy Wake pulled a few strings, called in some old favors. I asked him, he delivered. At this point, I don’t care how.”

  Dame Agatha gave him a look that suggested she’d noted Grantham’s response but had yet to accept it.

  “Carver and Petrova—what do we know about them?” she asked.

  “Not a lot. Carver has to be an alias. There is no record of any UK passport in his name—not a genuine one, anyway. He has no credit cards, appears on no airline databases, and we can’t find any bank accounts. Petrova used to be a low-ranking KGB agent, Moscow-based. She started work just before the wall came down. They used her for honey traps.”