by Tom Cain
It is then that the question of shutdown arises. A mind that can no longer make sense of the world around it or order the information it receives into any coherent meaning will eventually abandon the attempt and retreat into itself. Hallucination takes the place of reality. Memory fails. A person's very identity begins to slip away.
Samuel Carver was already exhausted and hungry before he even reached Gstaad. Since then, the successive traumas he suffered had weakened him to the point of collapse. He'd made no attempt to resist when they led him back to the cell and strapped him back on the torture chair. When Titov hit him with a final blast from the stun belt, just for the sheer pleasure of hurting him, there was something strangely lifeless about the spasms that had racked his body, as if he were no longer aware of the pain.
Carver didn't feel the teeth being wrenched from his jaw as his head fought against its straps. When the headphones and light box were switched back on, his overloaded brain rejected the barrage of incoherent stimuli, and Carver drifted into a sort of dream state. His dazzled, dessicated eyes were still wide open, but the blazing whiteness had been replaced by images from his subconscious, long-hidden recollections of people and places fused into a new world of their own.
There were two golden women-at least, he thought there were two: Sometimes they seemed to meld into one, and their bodies and faces were never quite the same from one moment to the next. These women seemed to like him. He sensed their bodies close to him. But when he went to touch them, they drifted away and he couldn't make sense of what they were saying, though their faces seemed kind and their smiles let him know how happy they were to see him. He wanted to talk to them, to tell them he felt the same way. But he couldn't speak. No matter how hard he tried, he could not say a word. His mouth just would not move.
He walked through his old school hallways and then straight into the officers' mess at Poole. All his friends were there. There was an older man-what was he named? Carver loved him very much, but then the older man seemed to be angry with him and Carver was suddenly very frightened, just like he'd been during those first terms at boarding school when the teachers got cross with him and he was all alone, far from home, with no one to comfort him.
And then he was standing in a tunnel, with a car coming toward him, its dazzling headlights filling his eyes, and his eyeballs seemed to burn as if they'd been set on fire and he longed to be somewhere safe and dark, and as he spiraled back through his psyche, he came to a place that was absolutely secure. He was floating in water, only it wasn't ordinary water because it was rich and sweet. Now he was being pulled from this warm safe place and being dragged out into the cold. He fought and kicked, but it made no difference. He was ripped out into the open. He screamed and yelled and for a moment, everything was all right again. He was cradled in two warm arms and his head was pressed against something deliciously soft and safe and his mouth was filling again with sweetness. But that too was lost, because other hands were grabbing him and taking him away and he was crying again because he wanted to keep feeling that softness and tasting that sweetness.
Finally he became aware, as if watching from the far end of an impossibly long corridor, that something new was happening to him. A blissful darkness had descended and he could feel gentle hands, warm hands touching his face, stroking his forehead and cheeks. These hands seemed different from the ones in his dream. They were somehow more substantial, more real. And it struck him that his mouth seemed to be moving again and he wondered if he could talk.
"Who are you?" he croaked. "Who's there?"
82
Andrei Dimitrov was dragged from his deep, vodkasoaked oblivion by the distant sound of gunfire. He propped himself up on his thin horsehair mattress and rubbed a hand across his aching head. He could have sworn he'd heard a pistol being fired, somewhere off in the distance. But now there was nothing but the silence of the early hours.
And then a thought struck him, making his guts swoop like a thrill-seeker on a rollercoaster ride. What was the time? He scrabbled for his watch and tried to make sense of the luminous dial. Ten past four. He was supposed to take over watch duty from Vasili Rutsev at four. If Vasha got pissed off and told Kursk, he'd be in deep shit.
Dimitrov tumbled from his bed and searched around on the floor for his clothes and shoes, trying not to wake Titov, who was snoring and farting in the adjacent bed. His MAC was in a metal cabinet next to the bed. He got it out and stubbed his big toe against the bedstead, adding one more pain to the grim effects of a desperate hangover. Dimitrov groaned under his breath. He was getting too old to drink this much.
He crept past Kursk's bedroom and made it down to the ground floor without getting caught. Still bleary-eyed and aching, he shoved open the door to the basement and headed downstairs.
It was the smell that hit him first, the unmistakable acrid bitterness of a fired gun and the sweet sickliness of spilled blood. Dimitrov woke up fast as the adrenalin hit his bloodstream-the ultimate natural hangover cure. He crept down to the basement corridor.
"Rutsev!" he shouted. "Vasha!"
There was no reply.
Dimitrov made his way to the control room. The door was ajar. He kicked it open, holding the MAC at his shoulder, ready to fire. Then he let the gun fall to his side when he saw the bloody mess that had once been his comrade's face. God knows, Rutsev had been a sadistic bastard and his friendship with Igor Titov got sicker with every day that passed, but they'd fought together in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and on the streets of Moscow. Who'd have thought he'd get blown away in a luxury chalet in the Swiss Alps?
But who'd shot him? Dimitrov racked his brain, trying to recall whether there'd been any signs of forced entry anywhere in the house. He'd swear not. But no one in the house could have done it. The boss was upstairs screwing that stuck-up tart Petrova. Titov was out cold and Kursk had no reason whatever to attack Rutsev. There'd been no arguments, let alone fights, during the course of the evening.
That left just the Englishman. But he was in no state to kill anyone. And anyway, he was strapped to a chair in a locked room.
Wasn't he?
Andrei Dimitrov looked at the monitor that showed the interrogation room. Then he looked again, and his blood ran cold.
The chair was empty.
83
Alix had been weeping as she stuffed her gun into her shoulder bag and ran across the chilly white room to the hellish tableau at its heart. She could barely see through her tears as she loosened the tape from Carver's eyes and brushed her hand over his face to close his eyelids. She pulled the headphones off his head and then set about undoing the straps that tied him to the chair.
She worked her way down from his head, starting where the suffering was worse. The leather binding that had gagged his mouth had wreaked havoc. As she pulled it away a mass of clotted blood came with it. There was a single tooth stuck like some obscene decoration on the surface of the clot. Alix had to look away for a moment to ease the heaving in her throat before she returned to her task.
The stun belt around his waist was padlocked shut, but the battery packs that powered it could be removed, and with them its power to inflict any more pain. By the time she'd finished, she was kneeling at his feet. She kissed the bleeding flesh where the straps and shackles had bitten into his skin-an echo of his own kiss, all those hours ago. It felt like a kind of atonement.
Yet he made no response and when she got to her feet he was still frozen, eyes and mouth wide open, so motionless that for a moment she feared he might be dead. But no, his flesh was warm, his chest still rising and falling with quick, shallow breaths. Alix then leaned forward and took him in her arms.
When Carver finally spoke in a cracked, quavering voice, confessing his blind helplessness, Alix broke down, sobbing against his shoulder. She had never experienced true compassion before. When men had broken down in her arms, she had counted it a victory. Now she felt as though there was no end to what she could give. She longed to care for the man in
her arms, to nurse him and restore him, no matter how long it took.
First, though, she had to get him out of the chair, away from the blazing glare of the light box. She spoke into his ear: "Help me, Carver. We must move you. And I need you to help me."
For the first time, he turned his head to look at her. He blinked several times, trying to restore his vision, then squinted his eyes and peered at her face, searching it for clues.
"It's me," she said. "Alix. I came back for you. I'm so sorry, my darling. I was so cruel to you. But I never meant it. You must believe me. I love you. Now please, please try to walk… Do you understand?"
Another frown, more blinks, and then Carver gave a slow, deliberate nod.
"Can you walk?"
A dry, inarticulate croak emerged from the wreck of Carver's mouth. Then his arms and legs quivered, summoning up the energy and will for a massive physical effort. Alix took a step back to give Carver room as he lifted his hands onto the arms of the chair, then pushed with all his might. Slowly, inch by inch, his face grimacing with strain and concentration, he raised himself upright. Then he collapsed into Alix's arms.
She tried again. "Come on, my darling, walk for me. One step… just one step."
Carver nodded again, then stuck his right leg forward, with all the stiffness of a man trying out an artificial limb. He shifted his weight forward.
"Well done, that was great. Now, another step."
He took another stiff-legged step, this time with his left foot. Then he gave a brusque shake of his arm, brushing Alix away, and took two more ungainly strides before falling once more into her arms.
"Anxsch," he mumbled. He closed his eyes, thought for a moment, then tried again. "Thanxsch." He squeezed out the word past his swollen, lacerated tongue and through his loosened teeth.
Alix laughed and blinked away her tears. "You're welcome. Now, come with me, into this corner, away from the light."
She led him slowly into the corner under the camera and propped him like a broomstick against the wall.
"You okay?" she said, taking her hands off his shoulders and letting them hover right by him, ready to catch him if he fell again.
"Uh-huh."
She brushed a quick butterfly kiss against his parched, cracked lips. Then she reached into her bag for the clothes. As she pulled the jeans out, the SIG-Sauer came with them. It crashed onto the floor.
"Gun…" said Carver, looking at the weapon, but not making any move to pick it up. He nodded to himself. "Good. Need a gun…"
Alix ignored it. She was busy easing the jeans over Carver's feet and pulling them up his thighs and over the vile band of black nylon until, at last, he had a shred of dignity again. There was one last important job to do, but now she felt weirdly shy. Alix couldn't understand it. After all the things she'd done, all the men she'd been with, she was nervous about zipping up Carver's trousers. Why should this seem so much more intimate?
He sensed her unease, and smiled again. For the first time she saw a faint glimmer in his eyes, the merest hint that the real Samuel Carver was coming back to her.
"I can do tha," he mumbled.
She had to help his fingers find the zipper. He gave a tug and got it about halfway up. She shook her head at her own foolishness and finished the job.
"You love me?" he asked her, as if this were a new idea to him.
Alix nodded, biting her top lip.
"Promise?"
"Yes," she whispered, so softly that she could barely hear the word herself. Then, fractionally louder, she repeated, "Yes, I promise."
He nodded. "Tha's good…"
She took him in her arms again. "It's all right, my darling. Everything's going to be all right."
Then the next thing she knew, Carver had grabbed her with unexpected strength and flung her to the ground as the sound of gunfire shattered the room.
84
Carver's vision was still blurred and dotted with dancing lights. His world was like a film that had been partly burned away, so that the picture was scorched with white shafts of pure light. Gradually, though, he was beginning to get some faint sense of connection to the world outside.
He knew now that the woman with him was called Alix, and he was sure that she was one of the two beautiful golden women that he'd been trying to talk to, the ones who'd kept slipping away from him. She seemed upset, very upset, as though she'd done him harm, and as he thought about it, he did remember a terrible hurt, a pain in his heart, but he couldn't remember when or why that had been. It didn't matter, though, because she said she loved him and everything was going to be all right. She'd promised.
And then he'd seen Dimitrov come through the door. He'd known at once that this was a very bad man, one of the men who'd tried to hurt him, and this bad man was holding a gun. He was aiming it at the two of them. Carver did not want the man to shoot Alix, and a deep, untrammeled, allconsuming rage rose within him, sweeping through his consciousness and blowing all the rubble of Samuel Carver's identity away.
He entered some kind of fugue state in which another unknown identity took over, all violence and all control, sweeping him aside. It was this other persona that threw Alix to the ground, that tumbled forward, ignoring the spray of bullets from Dimitrov's MAC-10, that snatched the SIG in one fluid motion from the floor, crouched in the firing position, and slammed three bullets into the Russian's chest.
Without saying a word, Carver got to his feet, walked across to Alix, and brusquely pulled her upright. She looked into his eyes, startled by his sudden, alien roughness, and was shocked to find no sign of recognition.
"Godda gedd out," he said. "Garage. Car."
He took Alix's hand and dragged her from the room with a power and determination that made no sense to her. It bore no relation to the shattered man she had been tending to just seconds earlier.
They ran down the corridor toward the garage. Upstairs, in Yuri Zhukovski's bedroom, the red numerals on his bedside clock clicked over to 4:15, and then the clock was obliterated as the bomb in the computer case exploded, creating a fireball that expanded at supersonic speed and generating a pressure wave that smashed everything in its path before the vacuum that had been left behind sucked it back to its point of origin again.
Zhukovski too was blasted into smithereens and his remains incinerated. One second he was a billionaire oligarch with thousands of workers under his command. And by the end of that same second, he had simply ceased to exist.
The bomb was a small one. The explosion did little structural damage outside the confines of the master bedroom suite. But the fire it started was soon raging through the house. In the basement, Carver stopped at the sound of the explosion and a grin of pure, inhuman triumph spread across his face.
Alix was staring at him as if uncertain what or who she was looking at.
"Bomb," he announced. "Nasty accident. Serve him righ'." He looked up, cocking an ear for any sound of further explosions. "Godda geddout," he repeated. "Now!"
They hurtled down the corridor and into the garage. Carver looked around for the control that would open the door.
"It's okay," shouted Alix. "I know how to do it."
She pressed a button on the wall and the great metal door swung up and then back, coming to rest under the ceiling.
Outside, they looked back at the chalet. Flames were already reaching out of the gaping holes where the master bedroom's windows had been as the fire grabbed at the night sky. Smoke was billowing across the hillside, and the ground beneath them was covered in glass.
Carver started running up the tarmac drive that curved around to the chalet's main entrance.
Alix hesitated for a moment, then followed him. As bizarre as Carver's behavior had become, he was still her best chance of safety.
As he came around the side of the house, Carver left the drive and melted into the undergrowth. Alix almost fell over him as he crouched behind a large bush. He waved a hand angrily at her, ordering her to get back. Carver turned his
head and scowled at Alix, holding a finger to his mouth and shushing her before returning to his position. He was watching the front door, waiting for the remaining inhabitants of the house to appear.
Kursk was first. He emerged from the chalet, gave three or four hacking coughs, expelling the smoke from his lungs, then stood up and looked around him. He was unarmed, Carver noticed, baring his teeth like a predator spotting prey.
A few seconds later, Titov came out. He had rescued his submachine gun from the fire, but the smoke had affected him more than Kursk. Titov was bent double, his hands on his knees, hacking and wheezing. Kursk gestured at him angrily, wanting him to hand over the gun. Titov seemed unwilling to obey.
Carver rose to his feet and made his way stealthily through the undergrowth. He emerged at the edge of the circular driveway in front of the house and walked toward the two men, the left half of his body painted in tones of red and orange by the conflagration raging beside him.
The two Russians were too involved in their own arguments and discomfort to notice Carver until he was no more than five meters away. He was standing quite still, and he waited until Grigori Kursk saw him, recognized him, and acknowledged the gun in his hand before he put two bullets into him, stomach and crotch. Carver didn't want a quick, efficient killing. He was shooting to cause pain.
Kursk shrieked, a high-pitched wail that seemed utterly incongruous coming from his massive frame. He was curled up on the ground, his hands grabbing at his torn entrails.
Titov had looked up at the sound of Carver's gun. The third shot blew the MAC-10 from his hands; the fourth shattered his left knee. Now he was down and howling.
Alix looked on, appalled by a sadism she'd never seen in Carver before. He was repeating the torture he himself had suffered.
He stood over Titov and put another bullet into his thigh, sending a fatal fountain of blood spurting into the air from the femoral artery, black against the brilliance of the roaring flames. Then he turned back to Kursk and kicked him so that for a moment his body unfurled, exposing his chest. Carver shot him in the left lung.
