The Accident Man (37 page)

Wake held out the phone. Carver grabbed it.

“Have you got her?”

There was silence for a moment on the other end of the line.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Carver. My name is Yuri Zhukovski.”

‘So, we’ve been introduced,” said Carver. “Now prove that she’s still alive.”

“Of course,” said Zhukovski.

Carver heard the sound of scuffled footsteps, then Zhukovski said, “As you requested…” and he heard an unmistakable voice cry, “Carver! Don’t—” Then there was a slap, a muffled female cry of pain, and more scuffling as she was dragged away.

Zhukovski returned to the phone as if nothing had happened, his tone as even as before. “So, Miss Petrova is in my hands. To be frank, I had expected you to contact me sooner. I know all about your adventures with Monsieur Leclerc in Geneva.” He let out a contemplative sigh. “I hope you enjoyed watching Petrova at work. I always used to. In any case, I take it you want her.”

“Of course.”

“Very well, what will you offer me in exchange? Please bear in mind that I require a high price. My men wish to let her know what they think of her treachery. I need hardly describe what that will entail. If you want the woman, you must give me a very good reason for denying them their amusement.”

“The computer,” said Carver. “I have the laptop on which Saturday night’s operation was planned and controlled. The firewalls are down. The files have been decrypted. And the man who had it was very efficient. He kept records of every order, every transaction, every detail of the project.”

He was trying to work out how far to take the bluff. He had nothing in his hand, but he didn’t have an option. He had to go all-in.

“This man did some digging of his own,” Carver continued. “He must have had a suspicious nature. Two people he’d never heard of were dumped on him. He wanted to know who they were, where they were getting their orders. He followed the trail all the way back to Moscow. Trust me, Zhukovski, you need that computer. You certainly don’t want me to keep it.”

“What’s to stop you from copying the hard drive?” the Russian asked.

“What’s to stop you from killing the girl and taking the computer anyway?” Carver retorted. “But you want to get on with your business, I want to get on with my life. Neither of us has any interest in seeing any of this go public. Let’s just do the trade and be done.”

“Very well, be at the main entrance of the Palace Hotel, Gstaad, Switzerland, at seven p.m. this evening, with your precious computer.”

“That’s less than five hours from now,” snapped Carver.

“Yes,” the Russian agreed, “it is a tight schedule. But if you start now and do not waste time — for example, by trying to double-cross me in any way — it should be possible for you to make it. And of course, you will come alone and unarmed. I do not need to explain what will happen if you break either of those conditions. Beyond that, I make no promises. If you can convince me that you have something to offer, perhaps I will let you take the girl. If not, well, my people feel as strongly about you as they do about her.”

The line went dead. Carver handed the phone back to Wake.

“Call your secretary,” he said. “I need to get on an afternoon flight to Zurich or Geneva. Now.”

There was only one flight that could possibly get him to Switzerland in time to make the deadline, and even that would be tight. The plane left Gatwick Airport, roughly thirty miles away to the south of London, at 2:50. He should be checking in now. It got in at 5:20 local time, which would leave him an hour and forty minutes to get through passport-and-customs control, meet up with Thor Larsson, pick up the computer, and drive 150 kilometers to Gstaad.

By any rational analysis, Carver didn’t stand a chance. But if he ran flat-out to Victoria station and caught the next airport express; if there were no delays in London’s notoriously inefficient train system; if he could pick up his ticket and dash to the gate; if the plane was on schedule and the customs quick; if Larsson’s Volvo had full tanks and the roads were clear… well, maybe he could make it. Just.

He put the handset back on the receiver. Wake was still sitting, unmoving, behind his desk, drained of animation.

“I suppose you’re going to kill me now,” he said.

“I’d love to, old boy,” said Samuel Carver. “But I really haven’t got the time.”

They caught Carver as he sprinted down Eccleston Street, just outside an Italian restaurant. He was going at full pelt, jinking between pedestrians like a rugby player evading tackles, his concentration focused on getting his exhausted body the best part of a mile through a crowded city in seven minutes flat. The only other thought on his mind, the one that was giving him the energy to keep going, was the nagging fear of what was happening to Alix, and what might be done to her if he did not make that evening deadline.

So he didn’t notice the black Ford Mondeo that dropped one passenger off behind him, sped up the street, and deposited another two some fifty yards ahead before coming to rest double-parked by the curb. The first he knew of any of it was when a heavily built man in a black donkey jacket stepped sideways right into his path, bodychecking him.

Carver was sent sprawling onto the pavement, the breath knocked from his lungs. Instantly, the other two men joined their pal in the donkey jacket, picked Carver up, dragged him to the car, and threw him into the back. By the time he woke up to what was happening, the doors on both sides of him had been closed, there were guns pointed at him left and right, and a tough-looking bastard in a Chelsea Football Club sweatshirt was holding out a pair of cuffs.

Carver cursed his carelessness, his stupidity, and the fatigue that had caused both failings. The kidnapping had been handled with practiced precision. But no matter how good the people who’d grabbed him had been, he should have been paying attention, he should have seen them coming.

He wondered whether Percy Wake had sold him out, but he couldn’t work out why. The old man must have known that if Carver went down, he’d be dragged down too. Maybe his Whitehall connections were so strong, he thought he couldn’t be touched.

Or was there another possibility? Maybe this had nothing to do with Wake. Carver looked at the two men sitting next to him in the back of the Mondeo, and the other two in the front. They were calm. They hadn’t said a word apart from a quick radio message, indicating that they’d got their man and they’d be back within five minutes. They didn’t act like criminals of any kind. They didn’t look tense, and they weren’t screaming threats or smacking him around unnecessarily.

Carver thought about the organizations based within five minutes of the Vauxhall Bridge Road that had well-trained men, capable of seizing a dangerous man in broad daylight, right in the middle of London. There were three possibilities. It was just a matter of where the driver went next.

He didn’t make the early left that would take them to New Scotland Yard. So it wasn’t the cops. When they made their way down toward the river Thames, he didn’t go straight over Vauxhall Bridge, so that eliminated MI6. Instead, he turned left onto Millbank and drove along the river till he arrived at the big pale gray building with its cast-iron ornamental lamps and decorative statues dotting the bland facade like hopeful dabs of makeup on the face of an unattractive woman.

Now Carver knew who’d taken him.

It was hardly a formal interrogation. They were in a regular office, rather than an interview room. There was no tape machine or video camera. This wasn’t a conversation anyone wanted on record.

“What a very complicated man you are,” said Dame Agatha Bewley, casting an eye over several sheets of paper and a series of photographs bundled in a plain brown folder. “Your adoptive parents raised you as Paul Jackson — their surname and the one under which you served in the royal marines and special boat squadron. You were awarded a Military Cross and three Queen’s Commendations for Bravery, as well as numerous minor awards and campaign honors. A very distinguished career — I congratulate you.

“Your birth name was Carver. That, of course, is your professional identity today. The passports found in your possession, however, make no reference to Jackson or Carver. They name you as a South African called Vandervart, a Canadian called Erikson, and a New Zealander, James Conway Murray. That’s odd, because not one of these gentlemen has entered the United Kingdom at any time in the past month. Yet here you are, large as life. And here” — she picked up a sheet of fax paper from the table in front of her — “is a reservation on the two fifty from Gatwick to Geneva in the name of Mr. Murray. Interesting. Do you go to Geneva a lot? Were you there on Monday? Do you, perhaps, own property there?”

“I’d love to help, but I’ve got a plane to catch,” said Carver, trying not to display the anxiety and tension ripping through his guts and grasping at his throat. There was a clock on the wall. It had a red second hand that swept around the dial, pulling Alix farther away from him with every completed rotation.

“Dashing off to rescue your Russian girlfriend, are you? The KGB tart?” Grantham spoke without any of Dame Agatha’s pretense of polite, civilized inquiry. He was playing the bad cop.

Looking at him, Carver wondered whether it was really his style. Grantham could handle himself, that much was obvious. But he didn’t have the oppressive reek of excess testosterone that oozes like rank body odor from the kind of man who likes to throw his weight around. Grantham’s natural instinct would always be to use a stiletto rather than an ax, a sniper’s rifle rather than a blunderbuss. He wasn’t convincing as a bully.

“Miss Petrova,” Grantham went on. “Let’s talk about her. Let’s discuss what the two of you were doing in Paris on Saturday night.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Carver.

“I’m talking about the murder of the Princess of Wales.”

“Murder? It said on the news it was an accident. The driver was drunk. He was driving too fast. An accident.”

Grantham got up from his seat, walked around to where Carver was sitting, and bent down till his mouth was right by Carver’s ear.

“Don’t piss around, Carver. You’re just a squalid, loathsome murderer. You don’t care about anyone. If the money’s right, you’ll kill them in cold blood.”

Carver looked at him and smiled. “That’s a nice pen you’ve got in your jacket pocket,” he said, as if he were paying a compliment.

Grantham looked down, puzzled. His jacket was hanging open. There was a gold-capped Waterman in the right-hand inside chest pocket.

“You’ve seen my service record,” Carver continued. “Forget the handcuffs, I could have stuck that pen in your throat, straight through the carotid artery, at any time during your moving little speech.” He waited a beat, then added wearily, “But I didn’t, did I?”

Grantham stood up, straightened his neck, and buttoned his jacket. He looked down at Carver, opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind and stalked back around the table to his chair.

The second hand swept past twelve once again.

“Now…” Carver looked across the table at Dame Agatha. “You operate according to the laws of the United Kingdom.”

It was a statement of fact, not a question. She nodded in agreement.

“So a man is innocent until he is proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That proof requires evidence — witnesses, forensics, a weapon. Is there any evidence whatever linking me to the death of the princess?”

This time it was Dame Agatha’s turn to stay silent.

“I thought not,” said Carver. “And even if there was, there’s never going to be a trial, not of me or anyone else. No one wants it. Everyone’s happy with the accident story. So there’s just one thing I want to say. I swore an oath to serve Her Majesty the Queen when I joined the royal marines. I took that oath seriously. I consider myself bound by it still. Do you understand me?”

Dame Agatha assessed the man in front of her through shrewd, narrowed eyes then said, “Yes, I believe I do.”

“Does the chimp?” asked Carver.

Grantham was breathing heavily. His anger wasn’t an act anymore. He was barely in control of his temper. Dame Agatha laid a hand on his arm, “Don’t let him provoke you,” she said, almost maternally, as if preventing a fight between two squabbling sons.

Then she spoke to Carver. “As you say, you have been very well-trained. You are familiar with covert operations. Let us imagine, purely for the sake of argument, that the tragic events in Paris were not an accident. Suppose foul play were involved. Why don’t you tell me, purely hypothetically, what you think might have happened?”

Carver shrugged. Fighting these people hadn’t achieved much. The only remote hope he had of getting out of this interview room anytime soon was to cooperate, as fully and quickly as possible.

“Well, if I were planning that operation, I’d want someone really good to do the job. Problem: No one reputable would knowingly accept it. Only a psycho would get a kick out of killing the world’s best-loved woman. But a nutcase like that would be too unreliable. So to get someone good, you’d need misdirection. You’d feed them a pile of crap about taking out a car carrying, say, a radical Islamic terrorist planning a major atrocity. Because that would seem like a job worth doing.”

“Yes,” said Dame Agatha. “I can see that.”

“Now you’ve got another problem. If this professional ever finds out what he’s really done, he’s going to be seriously pissed off. No one likes being lied to, right? So you’ve got to kill him before he knows what’s really happened.”

“A double cutout,” said Grantham. “Eliminate your own operative.”

“You got it,” said Carver. “But if the man’s any good, he might get away. He might do serious damage to the people who’ve been after him. And he might protect himself by, say, taking a computer that has details of the entire operation stored on it and putting that computer somewhere safe, so that if any harm comes to him, the computer’s contents can be made public.

“That’s the sort of thing that might happen. You know, hypothetically. Now, can I catch my plane?”