No Survivors (28 page)

“You’re joking.” Grantham gave a short, irritable sigh.

“Well, you can argue that out with him. All I know is, I’ll be aiming to make the handover sometime in the early evening. The location is the Hotel du Cap, same as our lunch. I’ll give you the precise time tomorrow. Within fifteen minutes of that time, I aim to be walking out of the hotel with the woman and, if possible, the document. I told Vermulen I didn’t want any of his men there when the deal went down, but I can’t believe he’ll keep to that. He’ll want to protect his investment. So I’m going to need extraction—a car, maybe even a driver, someone good—and a safe house for the night.”

Grantham gave a snort of disbelief. “Would you like me to lay on a private jet as well? You seemed to like those, as I recall.”

“Or I could just give Vermulen’s goons the document in exchange for Alix . . .”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

E
ven the powerful have bosses. And just as Olga Zhukovskaya could make her subordinates quake, so even she felt twinges of anxiety when calling her agency’s director in his bed to tell him bad news. She reported everything Novak had told her, stressing the urgency of the matter. In her view, the list of nuclear weapons and their precise whereabouts had to be recovered within twenty-four hours. After that, it could be lost forever.

“We know the whereabouts of a document that is of enormous military and political significance to the Motherland,” she concluded. “We should make immediate plans to seize it.”

The director had not survived a life of secrecy, infighting, and continual, often deadly regime changes by being rash or lacking in calculation. His immediate response was cautious.

“Can we be sure that this list really exists, or has the significance Novak claimed? The deployment of those weapons was under KGB control, their locations are still known to us alone, and I am not aware of any documents missing from our files. I suppose, theoretically, that Defense Ministry operatives might have found a way of copying or stealing our documentation . . .” He paused to contemplate the disturbing possibility that another agency might have outwitted his own, however temporarily. “In any case, Novak was a traitor who became a profiteer. All good reasons to disbelieve anything he says.”

“Quite so, Director. In any other circumstance I would agree with you on all counts. But I sat one meter from Novak when he was talking. I am certain that he was telling the truth.”

“Feminine intuition?” sneered the director.

“No, sir—twenty-five years of experience in the conduct of interrogations.”

“Very well, let us assume, hypothetically, that this list is as dangerous as you claim. Another problem arises. It is located in a foreign, sovereign nation and we do not wish to provoke a diplomatic incident by undertaking a violent action against armed criminals, who would have the advantage of a defensible position.”

Zhukovskaya countered that.

“But, Director, we undertake violent actions on foreign countries all the time—”

“So you proved—with regrettable lack of success—in Geneva recently,” her boss snapped. “Our coverup may have fooled local police and media, but do not suppose that our enemies were deceived. The operatives chosen were far too easily identifiable as our assets. In any case, we have a further difficulty. As you know, all government agencies are facing severe financial restrictions at the moment. We are no exception. . . .”

“It is very sad, Director,” Zhukovskaya murmured, keen to get him off his hobbyhorse and back to the matter in hand. “But I do not see the relevance here—”

“The relevance,
Deputy
Director, is that I have no money to pay for the operation you propose. I have already funded an undercover operation on your behalf.”

“Which has led to our discovery of Novak and his document—”

“At the cost of sending men to America and Switzerland, arranging contacts across the whole of Europe, not to mention the American dollars spent on Miss Petrova’s cover, which apparently involved buying clothes no good Russian woman could afford, and primping herself in beauty parlors. . . .”

As the old man ranted, a smile slowly spread across Zhukovskaya’s face. She had just seen a way in which she could carry out the operation, recover the document, save the state money, create total deniability in the event of anything going wrong, and cause maximum embarrassment to the outmoded dinosaur who stood between her and the top job she craved.

“Are your official instructions that I should not expend any agency resources on this matter?” she asked dutifully.

“Indeed they are,” said the director. “And as for Miss Petrova, I must say that I am amazed that you are prepared to have anything to do with her, given her role in your husband’s death. If I were in your place, I should have taken great pleasure in killing her.”

“Perhaps, in due course, I will. For now, though, I am happy to use her talents to advance our interests.”

For the first time the director’s voice was laden with genuine admiration.

“I must say, my dear, that is admirably cold-blooded, even for you.”

I
t was another perfect spring morning in Provence. Carver met the baker’s decrepit old van on the street, half a mile from the house, and thumbed a lift. Now it was chugging and clattering up to the gate. The gang member he had christened Ringo appeared in the driveway, signaling for them to stop. Up close, where the tufts of hair on his back and chest sprouted over the neck of his T-shirt, he looked even less appealing. But he was carrying a combat shotgun, and from the way he carried it, angled across his body—the stock nestled in the crook of his right arm, right hand on the trigger, the barrel pointing down—someone had trained him to use it properly.

Ringo glared at the baker, ignoring the tradesman’s polite
“Bonjour, m’sieur,”
offering not even a grunt by way of acknowledgment that he recognized his face. He just pointed at the keys in the ignition and flicked his fingers, indicating that they should be handed over.

Once the van had been immobilized, he walked around the vehicle and opened the rear doors. With an air of infinite suspicion, he examined the rows of baguettes, round loaves, cakes, tarts, and croissants arranged in the back of the van, seemingly immune to the temptation posed by their crisp brown crusts, succulent fillings, and mouthwatering aromas. So far as he was concerned, every
pain au chocolat
was a potential booby trap, every quiche a hidden hand grenade. He looked inside the plastic bags filled with meat, vegetables, and booze. Finally, he satisfied himself that the contents of the van posed no danger to anything other than the arteries and brain cells of the people who consumed them.

The bull-necked gangster closed the doors, then resumed his circuit of the van. He came to a halt by the passenger door. He signaled for the window to be wound down. When it had been, he pointed the gun through the opening, bent his head, looked along the barrel, and stared Carver full in the face.

Ringo’s single eyebrow knitted even more tightly as he considered the threat posed by this unfamiliar individual wearing white housepainter’s overalls. He took a step back, positioning himself just to the rear of the door, making sure his field of fire was unimpeded, then motioned with the gun barrel, telling Carver to get out of the van.

Carver stepped out into the warm, scented sunshine, putting his hands up as he did so, the natural reaction of an innocent, inexperienced civilian confronted by a man with a gun. The Georgian pointed his gun at the worn, khaki canvas shoulder bag on the floor of the passenger compartment. He wanted Carver to retrieve it. Once again, Carver did as he was told. He carried out the apparently simple task in slow, distinct stages, making it clear at every point that he was doing nothing untoward.

Once he was standing upright again, with the bag in his hand, he opened it up for inspection. There were two cans of paint inside: one white gloss, brand-new and unopened, the other empty and stuffed with old rags. Alongside the cans lay three brushes of varying widths, a large can of paint thinner, a packet of potato chips, a glass one-liter bottle filled with orange juice, and a small, greaseproof-paper package.

“Sandwiches, for my lunch,” said Carver in French, holding it up. He strongly doubted that the guard spoke the language, but he kept going anyway.

“I just came to do some painting. My
patron
said the woodwork in the kitchen and lounge needs touching up. Told me he’d spoken to the man that’s renting the place . . .
comprenez
?”

Ringo glowered some more before he got out a phone and, still keeping one hand on his gun, hit the speed dial. He had a brief conversation in a language Carver had never heard before, but assumed must be Georgian. Then he signaled to Carver to get back in the van, and jerked his head in the direction of the house.

The baker started up the rackety engine once again and they headed up the hill, around the building to the parking area at the rear. There, the baker got out and walked toward the kitchen door, carrying a couple of shopping bags filled with provisions. He glanced nervously at the two dogs, standing by the wire cage, growling and barking at his approach as he knocked on the door. It opened and the brunette woman, Yoko, stuck her head out. She shouted at the dogs, who lowered their barking to a mean, resentful grumbling and backed away a few paces from the wire. Then she let the baker into the building.

Carver hung back, as if waiting his turn to say his piece. He was standing about fifteen feet away from the kitchen door, by the pile of firewood, under its wooden shelter. He looked around. There was no one watching him. He crouched down at the back of the log pile by the wall of the house and opened up his bag.

Over the next few seconds, he carried out a series of quick, precise actions. First, he took out the small packet of sandwiches and placed them in his pocket. Then he gently slid out a small log at the back of the pile, as if he were removing a brick from a Jenga tower, and shoved the bag of chips and the bottle of orange juice into the gap where the log had been. The canvas bag was tucked out of sight on the ground, in the shade of the shelter, right by the wall of the house. Carver left the bag open, with the can of paint placed across the top of the used paint can stuffed with rags.

Then he walked past the kitchen door. Inside, the baker was holding out a tray of pastries for Yoko to inspect. Again making sure that no one could see him, Carver opened his packet and lobbed the two sandwiches into the dogs’ cage, where they were instantly devoured. He turned back again and hovered outside the kitchen door while the woman made her selection and the baker noted it down on a pad before picking up his tray again and going back to his van.

When it was his turn to speak, Carver stepped into the doorway and launched into the same garbled explanation of his presence that he had given the guard at the gate. Yoko looked puzzled at first, then anxious. She looked behind her, into the house, clearly trying to decide whether it was worth waking her boss. To Carver’s relief, she concluded that it was not and started shooing him away, gabbling indignantly as she did so.

He took the hint and walked back to the van, where the baker was waiting with a grin plastered all over his face—the delighted smile of a man who has just seen another male getting it in the neck from an angry woman. As he got into the passenger seat, Carver shook his head ruefully and blew out his cheeks.

“Les femmes, hein? ”
he sighed.

The baker laughed, then started up the van, and they rattled away down the hill.

I
van Sergeyevich Platonov, commonly known as Platon, was the man entrusted with expanding the Podolskaya crime clan’s activities in Western Europe. He had been in bed in his Paris apartment with one of the women whose bodies provided so much of his gang’s revenues when Olga Zhukovskaya called.

“How are you, Ivan Sergeyevich?” asked Olga Zhukovskaya.

“Very well, thank you, and you?”

“Also well. You know, my husband always spoke very warmly of you. . . .”

“He was a great man. My condolences. You received my wreath, I hope.”

“Yes, thank you, very impressive. I’m not disturbing you?”

The girl had woken up, yawned, and then dutifully started running her fingers down Platon’s stomach. He shooed her away.

“Of course not. What can I do for you?”

“I need something collected, or perhaps
retrieved
would be a better word. . . .”

While Platon listened, occasionally breaking in with specific, practical questions, the deputy director explained about a missing document, the property of the Russian people, that was currently sitting in a safe in a house in the South of France, about 550 miles from where he now lay. It was currently guarded by four Georgians, led by a low-rank gang leader named Bagrat Baladze. Within the next twenty-four hours, it would be either sold to a filthy Arab terrorist or stolen by the agents of an even more despicable American, unless Platon and his men could get to it first.

“You have fought for the Motherland in the past,” said Zhukovskaya. “Now she calls you for one more mission.”

There was something almost seductive in her voice; it was less the command of a senior officer than the request of a vulnerable woman made to a mighty warrior.

Platon wasn’t falling for it.

“Naturally, I am a patriot,” he said. “Even now, when I live as a peaceful businessman, I am willing to do my duty. But there will be costs. Men may die. Their families must be considered.”

He had never paid a single ruble to a widow or orphan in his life, a fact of which Zhukovskaya was fully aware.

“Of course, you must be compensated,” she agreed. “I was thinking, you may be aware that my late husband was involved in the production and sale of certain munitions, on behalf of the state.”