The Accident Man (32 page)

Carver went back over all that had been said and he knew that he had been betrayed. He wondered whether both of his old comrades had been in this together. One of them he knew now was an enemy; the other might yet be an innocent dupe. So what did that make him? A dupe, certainly, but hardly innocent. The pieces of a puzzle that had been jumbled in his mind began to fall into place and a picture emerged. It was a portrait of himself, but it was hardly flattering. It showed a man who had been fooled, not once but repeatedly, a man who had extended his trust to a tiny handful of people and chosen the wrong ones every time. One of these days, if he lived that long, he would go back over it all in his mind and work out, not where he had gone wrong — that was now obvious — but why. These men had been his friends, his brothers-in-arms. Once they had been willing to risk their lives for him. What had he done since then to make them want to betray him? Perhaps you didn’t have to do anything. His mother had given him up just for being born.

He’d dealt with that. He could deal with this.

So where would the battle take place? A yacht in a storm was a lousy place for a fight. It was cramped, it was constantly pitching and rolling, and everyone onboard was wearing wet, bulky clothing. Sticking a gun in a set of waterproof pants was no problem. Getting it out in a hurry was a lot trickier. And standing steady enough to take an accurate shot would be damn near impossible.

The key point was the hatch and the ladder between the cockpit up on deck and the cabin down below. Anyone caught there would be a sitting duck. The next few hours would consist of an unacknowledged jockeying for position in which two, maybe all three of the men onboard would silently compete to be in the right place when the moment finally came for one of them to show his hand. Meanwhile, Carver intended to stack the odds in his favor.

Stashed away in the same storage space as the weatherproof clothing, Carver found what he’d need later. For now, though, he was going to keep things nice and civil, as if he still thought they were all good friends. Them against the world, just like the good old days.

He walked back to the cockpit hatch and stuck his head through.

“Anyone fancy a cup of coffee?”

He took the orders and put the kettle on the galley’s gas stove. He filled three mugs, added milk and sugar, and went back up on deck. Now there was one last task.

The yacht’s mast was supported by ropes, or shrouds, that stretched up to its top from the side of the hull. They were kept taut, away from the side of the mast, by two horizontal spars, or spreaders. A white plastic pot, about eighteen inches high, had been hoisted up to the port-side spreader. The pot was a radar reflector, designed to ensure that the yacht’s position was known to passing vessels. It was secured by a line tied to a cleat at the bottom of the mast.

Carver made his way over to the cleat. He loosened the line, held it in his hand, and called back to the cockpit, “Sorry, Bobby, this has got to go.”

“What are you talking about?” shouted Faulkner.

“I can’t be on anyone’s radar screen.”

“Have you gone totally mad? We’re about to do a night crossing of one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Five hundred ships sail along or across the Channel every day, and if any one of them so much as touches us, it’ll be like an elephant stepping on a matchbox. We’ll sink. And then you’ll never enter the bloody country at all. Nor will the rest of us.”

Carver gave an affable, who-cares grin. “Then we’ll just have to keep our eyes open, won’t we?”

Alix was alone in the darkness. They had treated her well enough so far. The first night, Yuri had let her sleep in peace. That had surprised her. It wasn’t his usual technique. During the day that followed, the questions were insistent but polite, even civilized. How did she meet the man? Why did she go with him? Why hadn’t she killed him? Had she even tried? Since she had let him live, what had she learned from him? Where was the computer? And what had she given away?

Only that last question had been asked with any undercurrent, Yuri barely bothering to disguise the implication that more than information was at stake. Still, she had not been mistreated. The chalet staff had treated her with a distant familiarity, more like an occasional guest than a prisoner. She had been served the same food as everyone else, been allowed to drink the same wine.

But all the while she’d known it couldn’t stay this way forever. Sooner or later, Yuri Zhukovski’s patience would run out. He’d want answers to darker, deeper questions and he wouldn’t care how much he had to do to her to get them. Sooner or later, he would grow bored of simple conversation and resort to the physical methods that would tell him what he needed to know.

Yuri was operating under intense pressure, that much was obvious. A crisis was brewing somewhere in the vast web of corporations that formed his business empire. He had spent hours shut away in his study calling his most senior associates and negotiating with clients, while Alix was left under Kursk’s icy supervision, his eyes following her every movement with an unbroken, implacable hatred, not just for her personally (though that was enough) but for everything she represented.

Whenever Yuri emerged to continue his interrogation, she could see the stress that gripped him in the grinding tension of his jaw and the obsessive clenching and releasing of his fists. She would pay for that tension, she was certain. He would let it loose on her.

Eventually she had been ordered upstairs and left by herself in a heavily shuttered room until he was ready to deal with her. She had little idea how long she had spent trying to prepare for what was bound to come. It might have been one hour, it might just as easily have been three. Time seemed to move at a different speed in that velvety darkness.

And then she heard footsteps in the hallway outside. She knew what they meant. She took a deep breath, forcing herself to stay calm, focusing on her pounding heart and slowing her pulse as she let her breath go. She must stay still now, stay silent. There would be screaming enough in the hours to come.

Magnus Leclerc had been given a number to call in case of emergency. He’d been told it was very unlikely that anyone would complain about the phoney money transfer. But just in case, there were people who’d want to know about it. And they’d be very grateful for the information.

It wasn’t easy to summon up the courage. He’d had a lot to think about.

If he were exposed, as Vandervart had threatened, it would destroy his marriage. The more he thought about it, the less that looked like a problem. He’d be rid of Marthe for good, and the only thing he felt about that was relief.

He’d lose his job too, of course, and the status that came with it. There’d be a certain amount of humiliation, even mockery, to be endured. But underneath, he knew, plenty of his banking peers would be thinking that they’d have liked a crack at the bombshell in the white lingerie. They’d say old Magnus was a sly old dog, didn’t know he had it in him. He’d be back in business within months.

Or maybe not. Maybe he’d just give them all the finger and fly away to the Cayman Islands. He’d spent years quietly saving, skimming, and pocketing money. He could spend the rest of his life on a beach if he felt like it.

Put it like that, and there didn’t seem much to be lost by talking. But what if he kept his mouth shut?

There was a reason Vandervart had wanted Malgrave’s number. He obviously wanted his money, by any means necessary. That would mean big, big trouble. Sooner or later, people would work out that Leclerc had been the root cause of that trouble. And they wouldn’t be happy. He did not like to think how they would react. On the other hand, Vandervart would not stop at sending a few videos to the media if he felt he had been betrayed.

Leclerc spent a sleepless night in the spare room, then went into work still unsure of his next move. Finally, he dialed two numbers. One was the number Malgrave had given him.

A woman’s voice answered. “Consortium. How can I help you?”

He was put through to a man who spoke in a courtly English accent. The man thanked Leclerc profusely for his information, then asked him where he could be contacted later in the day, “just in case we need to ask you any further questions, check the details of what this man Vandervart was after, that sort of thing.”

Leclerc was eager to be as helpful as possible. He provided his phone numbers and his home address. He wanted the man to appreciate how sorry he was about the Vandervart problem. He would do everything he could to make up for his carelessness. The man was most understanding. “I sympathize with you, monsieur,” he said. “You have been through a terrible ordeal. Anyone would have reacted the same way.”

When he put down the phone, Leclerc was sweating. He wiped his forehead and loosened his tie. Then he called a second number. It belonged to a travel agent. He asked for the earliest flight to Miami. The agent booked him first class on the next morning’s British Airways flight to London, Heathrow, connecting there with the lunchtime departure for Miami. Leclerc used his company credit card.

He went home that evening after work and tried to act normally. The arguments were no worse than usual, the silences between them no more deafening. They were sitting in the living room after dinner, Leclerc lying back in his leather recliner watching a badly dubbed American cop show on TV, when the doorbell rang.

He grabbed the remote control and turned the sound down on the TV. The bell rang three more times, harder and more insistently. “Go and answer it,” he ordered Serge, a sullen, gangly boy of seventeen who was the younger of his two children. The kid remained motionless in his chair, letting everyone know how much he resented this intrusion into his busy schedule of sitting around, before hauling himself to his feet. He slammed the door as he left the room and stalked into the entrance hall.

Leclerc craned his head in the direction of the front door. He heard it open. He heard his son say, “Who—?” Then he heard a cracking sound like a cross between a bat hitting a ball and an eggshell cracking against a bowl. Next came the muffled thud of something heavy flopping down onto the floor.

Marthe was the first to react. She leaped from her seat and was halfway to the door to the hallway when it opened and two men walked into the room. They had pump-action shotguns in their hands. There was blood on the butt of one of the guns.

The first man through the door had fiery, spiky orange red hair. He almost collided with Marthe in the middle of the living room floor, barely breaking stride as he swung his knee into her midriff. Marthe bent double, soundlessly, the air knocked out of her, and he shoved her backward, sending her skittering into the wall.

Leclerc’s daughter, Amelie, a thin, plain young woman of nineteen, screamed. The second man, round-faced and full-lipped, punched her in the mouth to shut her up, then threw her across the room. She ended up in a heap next to her mother.

No more than five seconds had passed since the men had entered the room. Leclerc was still stuck in his recliner, watching helplessly as his womenfolk were attacked. He struggled to his feet, his eyes widening as one of the men swung his shotgun around until it was pointing at his guts. The other had his weapon aimed at the two women, huddled together against the far wall.

The two men glanced at each other. The red-haired man gave a quick, commanding jerk of his head. And then they both started firing.

The cold front hit just after midnight, the weather changing as suddenly as the channels on a TV. One moment they were sailing smoothly toward their destination with a fresh, mild wind blowing on a beam reach from the west, directly across their northerly course; the next, the air was ten degrees colder and the wind had shifted forty-five degrees to the north, picked up speed, and filled with stinging rain that beat down with an incessant intensity.

The angry new wind picked fights with everything it met. It drove into a sea that was flowing down the Channel on an ebb tide, piling the rolling swell into shorter, steeper waves that crashed into the boat, tossing it, bouncing it, dropping it like a toy.

There was no point in all three of them staying on deck, so they agreed on a roster of two-hour watches. The course was set by auto helm. Whoever was topside simply had to keep an eye out, ready to override the system and take the helm if the need arose. Carver went first; Trench volunteered to go second. That way, Faulkner could take an uninterrupted break till it was time for his watch. He needed the rest. He’d spent well over twelve hours at the helm. By the time his watch was over, it would almost be dawn. They’d all get up then.

Carver didn’t expect any trouble during his time on duty. When he was standing in the cockpit, anyone wanting to attack him would have to climb up a ladder and through the hatch, coming out of the light into the darkness. Unless he fell asleep at the tiller, no one was going to overpower him that way. He’d be vulnerable only when he went back down below deck.

At the end of his watch, Carver stepped up to the hatch, gripped the top, then swung his legs through, missing the ladder completely and jumping straight down into the cabin. He landed in a crouch on the heaving floor. Trench was sitting on the edge of the main table in the center of the cabin.

“Bloody hell,” he said coolly. “That was a bit dramatic.” There was a mug in his hand. “Hot toddy,” he said, holding it up appreciatively. “You should try some. We left some for you in a Thermos. It’s in the galley.”

Trench nodded to his left, where Bobby Faulkner was stretched out on a settee. “Fast asleep. Poor chap was absolutely shattered.”

“Think I’ll crash too,” said Carver. “Anyway… your turn. Good luck. It’s bloody cold and wet up there.”

Trench grimaced and went, “Brrrr…,” just like any man about to go out into foul weather. He made his way past Carver and put his mug in the galley sink. He showed no outward signs of tension or even alertness, yet he never completely turned his back as he scuttled up the ladder and out into the cockpit, pulling the hatch closed behind him as he went.