by Tom Cain
There were footsteps as the man went by. Carver eased the door open and stepped out into the corridor. He took three quick steps forward. The man heard him on the third step, but it was too late. He couldn't stop, turn, and bring his gun around before Carver raised his left hand, brushed his right arm away and, in the same cobra-fast movement, jabbed two fingers into his eyes.
The Russian squealed in pain, dropped his gun, and held his hands up to his blinded eyes. Carver kept moving. He shifted his weight onto his right foot, rotated his shoulders, and slammed the heel of his right palm into the man's chin. Another shoulder rotation and a shift of weight through the hips brought Carver's left elbow up to crack into the man's cheekbone. Now his right knee piled into the man's defenseless groin. As he doubled over in pain, Carver karate-chopped the back of his neck. The Russian dropped unconscious to the floor. It was the basic five- second knockout-lesson one in the special forces' fighting handbook. Worked every time. Unless the other guy had read the same book.
Carver thought about pulling the man back down the passage by his stupid ponytail, but decided against it and grabbed him under the armpits instead. He dragged the unconscious body into the empty office, then stepped back out into the passage. Now came the interesting bit. He walked to the top of the stairs and peered down into the stairwell. In the dim light from the passage, he could see a flight of steps, then a small landing, then another flight, which turned back the other way and disappeared beneath him.
"Alix?" he hissed.
He wondered if she'd be there. If she'd run he knew for certain he was on his own. If she'd stayed, it wasn't so simple. She might be on his side. Or she could be sticking close so she could help someone else.
Alix appeared on the landing. She looked at Carver.
"So, what are we going to do now?"
"The only thing we can do for now. Disappear."
21
The operations director tried to rub the exhaustion from his bloodshot eyes. The job was falling apart around him. He was standing with Papin in the street outside the mansion. The city would soon be waking up to discover the horrors that had taken place while it was asleep.
"Okay," said Papin. "Let's go through it from the beginning. Forget for the moment whatever happened in the Alma, concentrate on what happened here. No French citizens have been harmed. We will do our best to make it all disappear. But if I am to help you, I must know what happened. And you must deal with any-what do you say?-loose ends. So, to begin. Who owns the house?"
"I don't know. I imagine that when your people start trying to trace the ownership, they will find a mass of shell companies in different tax havens. But I don't know who owns them. And even if I did, I couldn't tell you." "How can I help if you play games with me?" "I'm not playing games. I honestly do not know. And I guarantee that any names I gave you would not appear on any ownership documents anywhere."
"Okay, I understand. Next problem: Who did this?"
The operations director thought for a moment. Then he breathed a plume of smoke into the early-morning air and said, "Carver. It has to be. He knew about the explosives in that flat because he put them there. Kursk had no idea. If he'd gone in, he'd have been killed, and the woman with him."
Papin nodded. "Okay, so we know a man and a woman went into that apartment. We agree the man must have been Carver. So could the woman be Petrova? Are they working together now? If so, they must have come out together too, because no one died in the explosion. Next question: Did they come here? Well, we have evidence of two weapons. The simplest explanation for that is two shooters. Do we have any other suspects? No. Did Carver have any other female accomplice?"
"No."
"Eh bien, let's assume that Carver and Petrova were responsible for the killings here. Clearly, they must be eliminated before they cause any more trouble. We need descriptions. So tell me, Charlie, are you sure you do not know what Carver looks like?"
The operations director ground his cigarette stub under his heel. "We had him watched on a couple of his early jobs. It was an obvious precaution. He's a shade under six feet tall. Call it a meter eighty; maybe seventy-five kilos in weight; dark hair; thin face, intense looking. Other than that, no distinguishing features that I know of. Actually, there is something else…"
"What?"
"Max wasn't wearing his jacket when he died. And it wasn't where he'd left it, the last time I saw him, hanging on the back of his chair. Carver could have dumped the black jacket and taken Max's. It's a gray one, same fabric as the trousers."
"Okay. And the woman?"
"All I know is her reputation. She's meant to be a blond model type."
Papin raised his eyebrows knowingly. "Now we have a reason why Carver might want to be with Petrova. But if she was Kursk's partner, what is she doing on the back of a motorcycle with the man who killed him? Why is she running in and out of apartments with Carver? Why is she joining him in a gunfight?"
"How the hell would I know? She's a bloody woman. Maybe she fancies him. Maybe she changed her mind."
"Or maybe she hasn't." Papin smiled. "What is it you English say about the female of the species?"
"It was Kipling. He said the female of the species is more deadly than the male."
"Alors, an Englishman who understands women. Incroyable!"
22
They were sitting in an all-night bistro, tucked between the sex shops and tourist traps of Chatelet-les-Halles. It was a quarter past five. Even the local hookers had given up for the night and come inside for a nightcap.
Alix looked exhausted, her adrenalin rush long gone. Carver got her a cappuccino with a double espresso and a pain au chocolat to dip into it. It wasn't exactly a healthy diet, but she needed the energy the fat and sugar would provide. Alix ignored the pastry, took a sip of the coffee, then lit a cigarette.
Carver leaned across the table like a lover. "Who was he, that man in the club, the one who sent his goons after us? What's his name? What's his interest in you?"
She took another drag on her Marlboro, made a show of blowing a stream of smoke up toward the ceiling, but said nothing.
"Come on, Alix, don't jerk me around. You knew him. He certainly knew you. Why? And why did he send his men after us?"
She shrugged. "His name is Ivan Sergeyevich Platonov. Everyone calls him Platon. He belongs to what you would call the Russian mafia. But the gangs-we say 'clans'-are not just Russian. They come from every race-Chechen, Azeri, Kazakh, Ukrainian. They have names, like rock groups or football teams. The Chechens are Tsentralnaya, Ostankinskaya, Avtomobil'naya. The Russians are Solnt sevskaya, Pushinskaya, Podolskaya-that is Platon's gang. Every gang hates all the others, but when you are a woman, they are all the same. They all want to fuck you, or beat you, or both. They are all pigs."
"So how do you know so much about this Platon, then?"
"Everybody knows about him. He is a gangster, but the newspapers talk of him like some kind of superstar: how many houses he has, what new car he has bought, who his mistress is this week. And you must understand, he is not the boss of Podolskaya. There are others, much higher up than him. And they have bosses too, men who belong to no gangs, but who control them like, like… puppets."
"Okay, so what's Platon doing in Paris?"
"It could be anything. He could be doing a deal for Podolskaya. He could be paying off a French government minister. He could be taking his girlfriends shopping in Paris. You know, I was looking at them in the ladies' room. I couldn't decide: Are they twins, or did they just have the same surgery? Platon would like that. Take two girls and turn them into Barbie dolls. He would think it was funny."
Carver heard the bitterness in her voice. It sounded personal.
"One more time: How do you know him?"
"How do you think? How does any woman ever know a man like Platon?"
Carver thought of the fat man in the nightclub, his body pressing down on Alix. It wasn't a nice image. "Who was he calling?"
"The man
who sent me here."
"Who is?"
"I don't know. Why should I know? You don't know who sent you. My connection is Kursk."
"Was. He's dead."
Alix shook her head, a mirthless smile playing at the corner of her mouth. "You think? Did you see the body?"
"No."
"You don't know Kursk. Many people have tried to finish him before now. Some even thought they had succeeded. But he is like Rasputin. You have to kill him again and again before he will die."
"If you say so. But in my experience, people only die once. You work together all the time?"
"No. Not before tonight-not as partners."
"What changed?"
She gave another exhausted, heavy-eyed smile. "It was like The Godfather. He made me an offer I could not refuse."
"How do you mean?"
"Oh, long story. And I am not going to tell it now."
Carver looked at his watch, then turned to catch the waitress's eye and made a gesture, as if signing a bill. He turned back to Alix. "I don't need to hear the story, but I need to know how it ends. I need to know if I can trust you. Whose side are you on now?"
She stubbed out her cigarette. "Honestly? I don't know. I am trying to decide that myself. It is the same for me, Samuel. I too need to know who to trust. I will be thirty in September. I left home when I was eighteen, so I have lasted twelve years on my own. I am not a drug addict. I am not on the streets, giving myself to drunks for a handful of worthless rubles. I am not raising three children in a rat-infested apartment. Do you understand what I am saying?"
"That you know how to survive?"
"Exactly. So the question I am asking myself when I look at you is, do I trust this man to keep me alive? Or do I go back to Moscow and take my chances with men like Platon?"
"It's not Platon you have to worry about," Carver pointed out, "it's whoever planned this job tonight. And if you're even thinking of going back to Moscow, you must believe you've got a connection, someone who might be able to keep you safe."
"Possibly. But as you say, they 'might' be able to keep me safe. If I have guessed right. If they want to help me. You see, that is the calculation I have to make."
"Is that all it is-a calculation?"
"When you are trying to stay alive, that is all it ever is."
She was right, of course. Carver knew that. Yet he also knew that he had passed the point where the justifications he gave for her presence weren't much more than a pretense. Sure, they stood a better chance together than apart. He didn't want her running off and telling the world about him. And she might yet give him a lead to the people who'd sent them on their fatal mission. But in the end, he just wanted to be with her. It was as simple as that.
He left money for the bill. "Come on. The metro starts running soon. That's the safest place for us."
"And then?"
"Then we're going to take a train, leaving at seven fifteen."
"Where to?"
"Home," he said.
The direct line from Chatelet-les-Halles to the Gare de Lyon takes exactly three minutes, but Carver went the scenic route, riding all over Paris, switching trains every few stops. It took them over an hour.
He didn't think that the Russians had picked up their trail after they'd left the nightclub. They'd left the back way; the guy who'd been waiting at the front could not possibly have seen them. But he figured there'd be other goons where the first two came from. There was no point taking chances.
Most of the way, they sat in silence. Then they took the final change, getting on the D train that would take them down to the Gare de Lyon.
"There are closed-circuit TV cameras at the station," said Carver, "so we shouldn't be seen together. When we get there, pick up your bag from your locker. Then check the departure board. There should be a train for Milan leaving at seven fifteen. Get on it. Go to the first-class compartment. I'll meet you there."
"Why should I come with you?" Alix asked.
Carver couldn't be bothered to come up with a smart reason. "Because you want to?"
Alix hadn't expected that. This time her smile was genuine, her voice warmer than it had been at any time since they left the club. "I guess I don't have any better offers right now."
"Come on, this is our stop." He handed her a numbered key. "Your locker. See you on the train."
Carver let Alix step out of the train ahead of him, then waited on the platform to see if there was a tail following her. When the next train came into the platform, he joined the trickle of passengers who got off and started walking toward the mainline station. He picked up the computer from a separate locker then went to the ticket office. He was wearing the eyeglasses now, the ones he'd picked up at the all-night pharmacy. They didn't do much to change his face, but every bit helped. He asked for two first-class seats to Milan and paid cash for the tickets.
He left the ticket office and walked across to an automatic ticket machine on the concourse outside. Above him, massive cast-iron beams supported a glass roof, making the whole place seem like a gigantic greenhouse.
A few early travelers were breakfasting beneath the white umbrellas of the station cafe. Behind them, inside the main station building, was the Gare de Lyon's magnificent restaurant Le Train Bleu. Compared to the filthy station buffets in England, where surly staff served tasteless plastic slop, Le Train Bleu was a gourmet's paradise. But Carver had no time to enjoy its pleasures now.
He bought a fistful of tickets to different destinations, all for cash. He reached the Milan train twenty minutes after he had last seen Alix. She was asleep, her head slumped against the side of the carriage.
Carver watched her for a few seconds, taking in the contours of her face. All the tension had slipped away from her features, leaving only vulnerability. He took off Max's jacket, folded it neatly on the seat opposite Alix, then reached out a hand and gave her shoulder a brisk shake.
"Wake up," he said. "We've got to move."
Alix came to. She frowned. "You look different. Older."
"It's just the glasses."
"Where are we?"
"We're still in Paris. But we're changing trains. First, though, you've got to make a call."
She gave him a puzzled frown as he took her phone out of one of his pockets and dialed a number. A ringing came from his money belt. He pulled out a phone of his own and picked up the call. Then he placed the two phones in the luggage rack above their heads.
"Let's go," he said. "Follow me."
Carver picked up Alix's bag. He put it over one shoulder and the computer case over the other. He left the jacket behind. Carver took Alix's hand and practically dragged her out of the compartment, off the train, across the platform, and onto another train. Twenty seconds after they had got onboard, the train started moving.
"Where are we going?" asked Alix.
"Aaah," said Carver. "That's a surprise."
23
Two Russians came for Kursk and bundled him into their car.
"Mother of God, Grigori Mikhailovich," said the driver, "You stink like a Chechen shithouse. It'll cost me a fortune to have the car cleaned."
"Shut it, Dimitrov. I need painkillers. Strong ones. Now."
"Of course, Grigori, whatever you say."
They took Kursk to a cheap hotel. The owner was expecting them. He was a Russian. He would do as he was told and keep his mouth shut. Dimitrov disappeared. Ten minutes later, he returned. The owner told him Kursk was upstairs in his room, having a shower. When Dimitrov knocked, Kursk opened the door wearing nothing but a towel. His body was covered with vivid black and purple bruises, and slashed by bloody abrasions.
Dimitrov followed Kursk into the room. He held out two pills. "Demerol," he said. "My last ones. I will get more as soon as I can."
Kursk washed the pills down with neat vodka, wiping the back of his hand across his face when he'd finished. "Okay, now get out of here," he said. "I need to get some rest."
He'd been out for less th
an an hour when there was another knock on his door. Kursk got up and strode across the room, stark naked. He opened the door.
"I thought I told you not to fucking disturb me."
Dimitrov held out a phone. "It's Yuri," he said.
There were no introductions, just a voice on the other end of the line saying, "Get on the next train to Milan. Take Dimitrov."
Kursk rubbed the sleep from his eyes. "Yeah, sure… why?"
"Your partner kept her mobile on. We have tracked it traveling southeast across France. It looks as though she is on a train bound for Milan. The Englishman-his name is Samuel Carver-is almost certainly with her. They were spotted dancing together at some club in Paris. Platon was there with a couple of his latest women. He called me. And I am told that this Carver is carrying a computer that may contain information I do not wish to be made public. I will make sure we have people to meet the train at every stop. If Petrova and Carver get off, they will be followed until you arrive."
"And then?"
"And then, Kursk, you will kill Carver and get that computer."
"What about the woman?"
"Bring her back. I will decide what happens to her."
24
Alix slept most of the way. Carver sat opposite her. He'd crashed out on the plane on the last transatlantic leg of the flight, waking only minutes before they landed in Paris. But even if he'd been tired, he wasn't in any mood to sleep. So he looked out the window, watching the suburbs of Paris give way to the flat landscape of northern France, then the rich, rolling hills of Burgundy, and finally, past Dijon, the limestone cliffs and gorges of the Jura and the first foothills of the Alps.
He thought about himself and what he'd done, thought about the girl, tried to figure out what he was going to do. His head was swirling with unanswered questions and unresolved emotions. Carver told himself there was no point fretting about things that were done and beyond recall. The princess was dead. Nothing was going to change that. He had to stick to the rules: concentrate on what he could control. But who was he kidding? He'd chosen to complicate his life by bringing the girl, how much control did he have over her?
