Samuel Carver’s room had a million-dollar view, clear across the water to the snowcapped peaks that rose in serried ranks beyond the southern shore. While the mountains stood solid and immutable, the skies above them displayed an infinite variety of light, color, and temper, concealing the glorious landscape one moment, illuminating it the next. On a clear day, a man could stand at that window and see all the way to Mont Blanc. He could practically reach out and touch the black runs.
But Carver wasn’t standing. Having visited death upon so many, he was now condemned to a half-life, trapped in a solitary purgatory. He was lying in bed, his body twisted in a fetal curl. The room was centrally heated, but his shoulders were hunched against the cold. It was silent, yet the palms of his hands were cupped over his ears, his fingers clawing at the back of his skull. The light was gentle, but his eyes were screwed tightly against a scorching glare.
Then he began to stir. He jerked his back straight, then arched it, throwing his head up the bed and opening his mouth, uttering soft, wordless moans, while his limbs thrashed in random, spastic movements. His twitching became more frantic and his cries grew in volume.
By the time Carver woke, he was screaming.
“Wake up, wake up!”
Alexandra Petrova placed her hands on Carver’s shoulders and tried to free him from the nightmare’s grip, gently shaking him back into consciousness. His body felt weak and flabby, softened by months of inactivity. His face was rounder, his features less clearly defined as the bones disappeared behind pouches of flesh. His eyes were red-rimmed and fearful.
The screams petered out, replaced by a confused, semiconscious muttering and then the familiar sequence: the panicked, darting looks around the room, his body half raised from the bed; the gradual relaxation, sinking back onto his pillows as she stroked his hand and reassured him; finally the answering squeeze, the attempt at a smile, and the single whispered word, “Hi.”
And then another, “Alix.”
It was Carver’s name for her, the one he’d used in the days they’d spent together, before his months of confinement in this private clinic on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was a sign that he recognized her, and was grateful for her company, though he could not yet recall what she had meant to him before. But then, he did not know who Samuel Carver truly was, either: what he had done and what others had done to him.
“Still the same dream?” she asked.
He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment as if to drive the last fragments of the horror from his mind, then answered, “Not the same dream. But the same ending, like always.”
“Can you remember what happened at the beginning of the dream this time?”
Carver thought for a while.
“I don’t know,” he said.
He sounded indifferent, not quite seeing the point of the question.
“Just try,” Alix persisted.
Carver screwed up his face in concentration.
“I was a soldier,” he said. “There was fighting, in a desert… then it all changed.”
“You were probably dreaming about something that actually happened. You really were a soldier.”
“I know,” said Carver. “You told me before. I remember that.”
He looked at her with eyes that sought her approval. For the umpteenth time, she tried to persuade herself that the man she loved was still in there somewhere. She imagined a time when the blankness in his eyes would be replaced by the fierce intensity she had seen in them on the night they met, or the unexpected tenderness he had revealed in those stolen hours when they had been alone together, keeping the world at bay.
They’d both been in Paris, working the same assignment, the night of August 31, 1997. Carver had been standing at one end of the Alma Tunnel, waiting for a car. She had been riding pillion on a high-speed motorbike, firing her flashing camera at the Mercedes, goading the man at its wheel to drive ever faster, whipping him on toward death in Carver’s hands.
The moment they met, she was pointing a gun in his direction. Seconds later, he’d pinned her to the pavement, his knee in the small of her back. Half an hour later, she’d followed him into a building, knowing he’d rigged it with explosive charges, knowing that those bombs were about to go off, but trusting absolutely in his ability to get them both in and out alive.
Now here they were in Switzerland, almost five months later, two people who had been forced into acts of terrible violence, but who, in their few precious moments of shared tranquillity, had each seen in the other a hope, not just of love, but of some small measure of redemption.
For Alix had secrets of her own. On her journey from the drab provinces of the Soviet Union to the gaudy luxuries of post-Communist Moscow, she, too, had compromised her soul. Just like Carver, she longed for an escape. But the past had clung to her and Carver alike, and it had exacted a bitter price on the night of torture and bloodshed that had subjected Carver to agonies so extreme that they had ripped his identity away from its moorings and buried his memories too deeply to be retrieved.
Alix had even begun to wonder if she really did love him anymore. How could you love a person who no longer knew who you were, or what you and he had meant to each other? She had once loved Samuel Carver-she was sure of that. She would still love that man if he were with her. But was he that man any longer? Was he any kind of man at all?
Alix fiddled with Carver’s pillows, plumping them up and rearranging them, pretending to make him more comfortable but really just trying to distract herself from her thoughts, and the guilt she felt for even allowing herself to consider them.
From behind her came the sound of a discreet cough.
A man was standing in the doorway, wearing a somber dark-gray suit and a tie whose pattern was so muted as to be virtually invisible.
“Mademoiselle Petrova?” he said.
“Good afternoon, Monsieur Marchand,” Alix said, making a conscious effort to stand up straight and smile as cheerfully as her stress and fatigue would allow.
She spoke French. That at least had been one positive achievement over the past few months. She had a third language to add to her native Russian and the English she’d been taught by the KGB a decade ago. The same agency had trained her to charm any man she wanted, but Marchand seemed resolutely immune to what was left of her old powers. He was the clinic’s finance director. His sole concern was the bottom line.
“Could you spare me a moment, Mademoiselle Petrova?” he said, managing to combine an obsequious, oily politeness with an unmistakable hint of menace. He waited until she had followed him out into the corridor, out of Carver’s hearing, then spoke again.
“It’s about Monsieur Carver’s account. The payment for last month will soon be overdue. I trust there is not a problem. You should be aware that if patients are unable to settle their accounts, it is the clinic’s policy to terminate their treatment.”
“I quite understand,” said Alix. “There is no problem. The account will be settled.”
Marchand gave a curt nod of acknowledgment and farewell. Alix watched him walk away down the corridor. Only when he had turned the corner and was out of sight did she go back into Carver’s room and slump down in the visitor’s chair, holding her head in her hands.
Somewhere Carver had a fortune, the profits of his deadly trade, banked in an anonymous offshore account, or stashed in safe-deposit boxes and private hiding places. The money would keep Marchand satisfied for years, but only Carver had ever known where it was. And now he had no clue that it even existed.
He had at least been blessed by one benefactor. Thor Larsson, the tall, skinny, dreadlocked Norwegian who was Carver’s technician, computer expert, and closest friend, had given Alix access to Carver’s flat. Using money paid to him by Carver, he had done his best to meet the sanatorium bills. But now that money was running out and Larsson had nothing more to give.
Alix would happily have paid her share, but she had no formal identification papers and no work or residency permits, and thus no way of getting a respectable job. In any case, she spent every day at Carver’s side. All she’d been able to find was a late-night waitress gig in a sleazy bierkeller, whose owner was only too happy to turn a blind eye to Swiss employment law if he could hire pliable, immigrant women on the cheap. As he liked to remind his girls, Switzerland had no minimum wage. Alix just about made ends meet from her tips, but she couldn’t hope to pay Carver’s bills as well. Not if she stuck to waitressing.
Lev Yusov was fifty-two years old, though to Western eyes he would have seemed at least a decade older. He smoked too many coarse, unfiltered cigarettes. He drank too much cheap vodka. His single-room apartment lacked ventilation in the summer and heating in the winter. The walls were peeling and the window frames were rotting. But Yusov was no worse off than anyone else in the 12th GUMO.
The workers of Russia ’s 12th Glavnoye Upravleniye Ministerstvo Oborony, or Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, were just like every other employee of the once-mighty state. Their wages were pitiful, when they were paid at all. Their living conditions got worse by the day. The staff at one 12th GUMO base had recently gone on a hunger strike, demanding to be paid the money and benefits that they had been owed for months. Even officers had started protesting that they couldn’t get by without taking a second job.
This dissatisfaction was significant for one very simple reason. The 12th GUMO was the organization responsible for the administration, storage, security, and safety of Russia ’s nuclear weapons. When its people became angry and resentful, they were in a position to cause serious trouble. And for Lev Yusov, anger and resentment were his default states of mind.
A lifetime spent in the service of the Motherland had left him little more than a glorified filing clerk, sitting behind a counter in a provincial depot, checking papers in and out, taking orders from officers no better than him, or-which was even worse-their stuck-up personal secretaries. He knew he was just an anonymous old drudge in their eyes, an insignificant functionary whose only means of exercising power lay in his ability to be unhelpful. Yusov exercised that power to the full.
Woe betide the request that was not made exactly as the regulations required, or the form that was incorrectly filled in. His capacity for nit-picking, obstruction, and sheer bloody-mindedness, honed by decades of experience, had become legendary. No one went down to Yusov’s grim, windowless basement kingdom if they could possibly avoid it. No one socialized with him or passed the time of day. And so, when Alexander Lebed went on American TV, talking about missing nukes, and set off a frenzy of backside-covering within the 12th GUMO, as senior officers desperately strove to find out whether these bombs existed and, if so, what had actually happened to them (before passing the buck as far and as fast as they possibly could), no one thought to ask Lev Yusov whether he had any files on the subject, tucked away on the rows of shelves that stretched into the darkness behind him.
This exclusion was just one more drop in the acidic lake of Yusov ’s bitterness. The more he was ignored, the more he sat and pondered about all the documents that had passed before his eyes, documents that he cherished as his most precious, meticulously cared-for possessions. Something was nagging at the corner of his mind, an uncertain memory of a computer printout handed to him many years before, when half the ambitious young whippersnappers who now bossed him around were still in short trousers. It had contained a stream of numbers, and had been folded up and put in a cardboard envelope. This file had no name, just a reference number. Nor had there been any description of its contents. The man who had handed it to him had insisted he had no idea what it might be-just another piece of bureaucratic flotsam that had washed up in his department.
Four months of furtive but infinitely patient rummaging passed by before Yusov found the envelope. It was marked TOP SECRET and date-stamped with the 12th GUMO insignia.
He took out the computer printout. The paper was flimsy, the dot-matrix printer ink fading to pale gray, but he could still make out 127 entries arranged vertically over six pages. Each entry consisted of three number groups. The first two groups contained either ten or eleven digits, divided into three subgroups, of degrees, minutes, and seconds. The third group contained eight digits in a single sequence. One complete entry read: 49°24’29.0160”94°21’31.047”99875495.
Lev Yusov had spent his entire working life in the 12th GUMO. The first two number groups were easily understood: He knew a set of map coordinates when he saw them. Normally, such coordinates would describe a weapon’s target: either the location at which it was aimed or the one it had actually hit. But what if these numbers referred not to targets, but locations? The missing weapons described by Alexander Lebed were portable. They must have been taken somewhere. Perhaps these numbers revealed where.
As for the last eight digits, Yusov assumed they referred to some sort of arming code. He knew that no nuclear weapon, be it an intercontinental missile or a single artillery shell, could be detonated without specific instructions. These numbers would provide the correct combination for each individual bomb.
Late at night, his hand clutching a half-empty bottle, Yusov considered the significance of what he had found. If he was right about the meaning of those numbers, then they were his way out of his shit flat and his shit job, and the shits he had to work with.
Someone, somewhere would pay a fortune for that list. For anyone who possessed it and the means to get at the bombs would have the whole world at his mercy.
War in the desert was supposed to be all about heat, sweat, and choking clouds of dust. But that was when the sun was up. This was a winter’s night. Carver felt deep-frozen, colder than he had ever been, and the chattering of his teeth drowned out the scrabble of steel against dirt from the spades of the men digging down into the earth.
From where Carver stood, the holes were simply patches of blackness in the blue-gray expanse of the starlit desert.
There were seven of them, the size and depth of open graves awaiting their coffins. Or maybe this was what a goldfield looked like when the first prospectors arrived and started burrowing down for their fortunes. Carver and his men were prospecting, too, searching for the fiber-optic cable, buried somewhere beneath their feet, that kept the Iraqi dictator in touch with his troops.
Carver’s team from the Special Boat Service had been allotted two hours on the ground to break that link. There were fifteen minutes left. And still no sign of any cable.
Carver shook his head in helpless frustration. There was just time to dig one more hole. He was trying to work out where to put it when there was an explosion of deafening white noise, hissing, and crackling in his ear. He could just make out a voice, almost buried beneath the distortion: “We’ve got company, boss. Couple of companies of mechanized infantry, heading directly at us.”
“Do you think they’ve seen us?” Carver asked.
He was already on the run toward the perimeter, needing to see for himself, but the ground seemed to have softened, sucking at his feet like quicksand. His progress was way too slow. He wasn’t going to get there in time. Meanwhile the noise in his ear was getting louder. He wanted to tear off his headphones, but now the lookout’s voice was bursting into life again. “They’ve got mortars. Here we go…”
The desert silence was broken by a series of distant percussive crumps, followed by whooshes, like fireworks streaking into the sky. A few seconds later, magnesium parachute flares burst over the landing zone, scorching Carver’s eyes and leaving the fifty-foot-long Chinooks as exposed in their burning white light as a pair of naked lovers surprised by an angry husband.
Now there were mortar rounds falling all across the landing zone and cannon fire cracking through the night air. Carver could hear a new voice now, one of the chopper pilots, his voice tightening as adrenaline flooded his nervous system: “We’re like coconuts in a shy here. I’m starting up the rotors. You’d better get your men aboard sharpish.”
Carver started issuing orders. He was shouting into his intercom, but he must not have made himself heard because the men weren’t moving and even though the chopper rotors were turning at top speed, they didn’t seem able to lift off the ground, and suddenly the whole landing zone was filled with Iraqis. He couldn’t work out how they’d got there so fast, or why they were speaking Russian at him. He thought he recognized their faces, but they kept blurring out of focus. He pulled the trigger on his submachine gun, but no bullets came out, even though the magazine was full.
This wasn’t right. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. The Chinooks were meant to take off with all his men aboard. Then the explosives would blow and cut the cable, turning an imminent fiasco into a last-minute triumph. But that wasn’t happening at all, because now his men had all disappeared and he was alone with the Russians, and they were taking him through a door into a room where there was a log fire burning in an open grate. And he didn’t have his combat gear on anymore, in fact he was stark naked except for a black nylon belt strapped around his waist.
There was a man in front of him, sitting in a chair, and next to him there was a woman, an incredibly beautiful woman in a silver dress. Carver cried out to the woman to help him, but she couldn’t hear him, either. And that was wrong, too, because she was supposed to love him. But she didn’t love him at all. In fact she was laughing at him, and all the men around her were laughing at him, too, and now the woman was looking at him with a new face, twisted, ugly, and hate-filled, and she was screaming, “Hurt him! Hurt him! I want him to suffer!”
The laughter was getting even louder and one of the men was pointing a small black box at Carver, holding a finger above a single white button. And suddenly Carver was filled with a fear that tore at his guts and dropped him to his knees, begging for mercy, though his pleas came out as wordless whimpers because he knew what was coming now-the same thing that always came at the moment that the man with the box pressed the button.
Then the finger moved down. And the agony began again.
“You must let me help him, you know.” Dr.Karlheinze Geisel was the psychiatrist assigned to Carver’s case. He turned away from the bed where his patient was writhing in torment, and spoke to Alix in a voice whose overlay of sympathy could not disguise his frustration.
“Come,” he said, and led her out through the clinic to his consulting room.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked, when the door had closed behind them.
Geisel did not answer until they were both seated. Then he said, “You already know the answer to that question. You must tell me exactly what happened to him. How else can I provide the best treatment?”
Alix said nothing. She glanced away, brushing a strand of blond hair away from her face. Finally she turned back toward Dr. Geisel, looking directly at him.
Geisel was all too accustomed to the effects on those whose loved ones suffered serious illness. Miss Petrova had been worn down by the months of worry and uncertainty. Her face was thinner, more drawn than it had been; her complexion was pale, the skin dry and unattended; there were deep, dark rings around her eyes. But, my God, he thought, what eyes.
They were pure sky-blue, but as he looked more closely-purely in the interests of dispassionate analysis, he told himself-Geisel noticed a slight asymmetry. One lid was very slightly heavier than the other and the two eyes were fractionally out of line. This imperfection in an otherwise flawless assembly-her lips were full, her cheekbones high, her nose straight and neat-served to add to, rather than detract from, her beauty. Without it, she would merely have been very pretty. With it, she was mesmerizing.
“I understand,” she said, “but I can’t discuss it…”
“Let me be frank,” he said, steeling himself. “For months you have refused my questions. But if Herr Carver is to have any hope of a recovery, I must have the information I need to treat him. You must understand-I am very used to dealing with patients who require extreme discretion. What you say to me goes no farther. But I need to know.”
“If I tell you, can you make him get better?” she asked.
“No, I cannot promise that. But I can promise you this: If you do not tell me, I have no hope of helping him. The longer you remain silent, the more certain it is that Herr Carver will remain like this forever.”
“I’m only trying to protect him.”
Her voice was little more than a whisper. She was trying to persuade herself as much as him. Her anguish was so stark that Geisel’s human instinct was to reach out and comfort her. But his professional self knew that he must do and say nothing. She had to have the space to find her way to her own decision.
Alix suspected that the timing of his approach was no accident. He must have known that she had been visited by Marchand yesterday, and had realized at once what that must mean. Carver’s bills had not been paid. Unless they were, he would surely be forced to leave. So now there was a ticking clock counting down to Carver’s expulsion, making the need for a cure even more desperate.
Alix struggled to defy the inexorable logic of her situation. Finally, she came to her conclusion.
“All right,” she said. “I will tell you… I tried to escape from a man, a Russian, like me. He was very rich, very powerful.”
“Was?” asked Geisel.
Alix ignored the interruption and what it implied. “He sent his men to take me back. Carver… Samuel found out where I was and came after me, to Gstaad. He hoped to exchange me for… certain information. The man who had taken me had no intention of making the deal. His men took Samuel and…”
She seemed unwilling or unable to finish the sentence.
“He was harmed?” asked Geisel.
“Yes. They stripped him, blindfolded him, and put him in handcuffs. Then they… excuse me…”
She stopped for a moment to compose herself, blinking rapidly and clearing her throat.
“Sorry,” she said.
“You were saying…?”
When Alix spoke again, she sounded dispassionate, almost matter-of-fact. “They placed a belt around Samuel’s waist. It was linked to a remote control. When the remote control was switched on, the belt gave him an electric shock, very strong, enough to make him fall to the floor and jerk around, with no control over himself. They made him do this in front of me, at my feet, to make him ashamed.”
“How many times did this happen, the shock?”
“Three or four times for sure, maybe more that I didn’t see.”
“Was that all?”
“No, that was just the start. Afterward, they took him down to a room and tied him to a chair. The room was painted white: every wall, the floor, the ceiling, all white. It was very cold, too. They gagged his mouth with a leather strap. They taped his eyes open, so that he could not close them or even blink. They put headphones over his ears. Then they turned on lights, bright lights, right in front of his eyes. And they put noise through the earphones, so loud, without stopping. That was how I found him. He had been like that for almost four hours…”
“I see…” murmured Geisel, thoughtfully. The story was horrific, but he tried not to be shocked by what he had heard. At that moment, in the context of his consulting room, it all had to be looked on as information that might help him reach a more accurate diagnosis. Only that evening, sitting at home with a drink in his hand, might he go back and contemplate Carver’s ordeal in more human terms.
“Now I understand the fear that consumes him,” he continued. “His conscious brain has blanked the torture from his mind, but his subconscious dreads its repetition. Still, there is one aspect of your story that puzzles me… If he was tied to this chair, completely unable to move, how did he escape?”
“I cut him from the chair,” said Alix.
“But there was this man you spoke of, with other men under his command…”
“Yes.”
“So how did you…?”
“I am not your patient,” said Alix. “Our conversations have no legal privilege.”
“Quite so… Still, with one woman and many men, I’m sure that whatever you did, it must have been in self-defense.”
“Exactly. It must have been like that.”
Geisel nodded to himself, coming to terms with what he had just heard.
“There’s something else,” Alix added.
“Yes?”
“I want you to understand the man he was… before all this.”
She paused for a moment, trying to find the right words. Then she remembered that night in Paris again, and looked away from Geisel, her eyes unfocused, her concentration turned inward.
“When I first met Samuel Carver, I was trying to kill him. An hour later, I followed him into an apartment. We both knew that it had been booby-trapped. The explosives were set to detonate within thirty seconds. But I followed him into that apartment, I chose to do that, because I trusted him completely to keep me safe, and I wanted to be next to him…”
Alix turned her eyes back on the psychiatrist, then glanced away again. She was almost talking to herself when she said, “I just want to be next to him again.”
“I understand,” Geisel replied. “And thank you, Miss Petrova. I know how hard it must have been, summoning up such painful memories.”
He stood up and held out his hand to her as she rose. They shook. He did not move away, though, but kept looking at her, as if she were his patient.
“You have been through a deeply traumatic experience, too,” he said. “You will need to talk to someone. Please, if you wish to arrange a consultation, do not hesitate to ask.”
He smiled. “Then you will be my patient, and you can speak as openly as you like.”
“Thank you, Doctor. I’ll bear that in mind. Now, if you will excuse me, Samuel will be waking soon. And he needs to see me there when he does.”
Far away in Russia, Lev Yusov was sitting in a dingy bar called Club Kabul trying to explain the significance of an apparently worthless strip of computer paper covered in numbers to Bagrat Baladze, a swarthy, mustachioed, shiny-suited psychopath in his early thirties. What with the noise in the club and the significant quantities of vodka that both men were consuming, it was not easy to convey the value of this document, particularly since Yusov was not willing to reveal its physical whereabouts until Bagrat committed to the deal.
“How can I agree to pay without seeing what I am paying for?” asked Bagrat.
“If the document is real, what will you pay me?”
“Five thousand, U.S. ”
Yusov had hoped for more. He knew the list would be worth millions by the time it reached its final destination. But in a land where American currency held far more value than local rubles, five thousand dollars was more than he would earn in ten years.
“Ten thousand,” he said.
“Don’t waste my time, old man,” said Bagrat, getting to his feet. “You asked what I would pay. I told you. Go screw yourself if you’re not interested.”
“All right, all right!” yelped Yusov, watching his jackpot leave the table. “Five thousand.”
Bagrat turned to one of his henchmen. “You see? He has the wisdom of the old.” He sat back down and pulled a wad of cash from his jacket. He placed it on the table between them.
“Here is the money. Now where is the list?”
Yusov reached a hand behind his back and pulled the envelope out of his trousers. He opened it and took out the list.
“Look,” he said. “First the latitude, then longitude, then arming code. You could fight a world war with the weapons on this paper.”
Bagrat considered this proposition, then nodded. “Okay, we have a deal. Take your money.”
He pushed the wad of cash toward Yusov, who grabbed at it with an eagerness that betrayed his desperation. He looked as if he wanted to make a run for it before the gangster could change his mind. But Bagrat put a hand on his shoulder.
“No need to rush,” he said. “I have more business to do, but you should stay and celebrate. Enjoy yourself… on the house.”
Bagrat picked up the envelope and left. On his way from the table, he shouted at the barman. “Bring vodka for my friend… the special vodka, got that? The best!”
Moonshine vodka, or samogon, is a noxious spirit, brewed in illegal stills all across Russia. Its ingredients include (but are not limited to) medical disinfectant, brake fluid, lighter fuel, cheap aftershave, and even sulfuric acid. Thousands of Russians have died over the years from drinking it, and many more have suffered blindness and chronic liver disease, so that doctors and coroners are not in the least surprised when they come across another case.
Bagrat Baladze had therefore thought twice before throwing away a particularly evil batch of samogon, acquired from a local bootlegger, even though its excessive toxicity had made it unsalable, even to the most desperate drunk. It occurred to him that he had stumbled on an ideal murder weapon.
When Yusov collapsed, an empty bottle at his side, he was carried to a waiting car, which drove to a quiet back street near his block of flats. The American currency was recovered, then he was dragged from the car and deposited on the pavement. The following morning, when his dead body was reported to the police, Yusov was carted off to the morgue. The postmortem was barely even cursory. No police investigation was made. The death of another insignificant drunk was not exactly a priority.
At the 12th GUMO offices, Yusov’s passing was celebrated, rather than mourned. A new, younger, more cooperative clerk took over his duties.
The clerk had no idea that the missing file had ever existed, let alone been sold to an ambitious gangster who was, even now, trying to work out how he could use it to leapfrog several rungs up the criminal ladder. There were, Bagrat knew, middlemen who specialized in setting up deals between Russians in possession of weapons-conventional, chemical, biological, and nuclear-and the wealthy customers who craved them. It was his task now to find one of these traders without alerting other, more powerful criminals to the item he was trying to sell. If the word got out, they would dispose of him as swiftly as he had dealt with Yusov.
So Bagrat Baladze began making inquiries. And the world took a first, blind step on the road to Armageddon.
Alix took the bus back into Geneva after another long day at the clinic, then walked across the Rhone River and uphill, through the narrow, cobbled streets of the Old Town, lined with centuries-old houses as tall and thin as books on a shelf. The windows of the chocolate shops were filled with heart-shaped boxes. The boutiques and designer stores were given over to lingerie and seductive dresses. The banks watched over them all, knowing, as always, that everything, including love, had its price.
She stopped for a moment to look at a mannequin in a short black party frock and shoes that were little more than a pair of teetering heels and a couple of slim leather straps.
She had once dressed like that, choosing her clothes with the confidence that came from being sure of their effect. She wanted to be that woman again, with a drink in one hand and her handsome man in the other. But the reflection in the shop window showed a sorry creature, wearing a charity-shop coat and cheap, unflattering denims. Somehow, in the next hour or so, she had to paint on a facsimile of what had been her natural beauty, a fake that would be good enough to fool the bierkeller customers, drunken men with groping fingers who expected a visual treat to accompany their overpriced drinks.
She got back to Carver’s flat. The rooms were emptying fast as the furniture was sold to meet the sanatorium’s endless demands. She missed the huge Chesterfield sofa and the antique leather armchairs that had been all the more inviting for being softened and worn by decades of use. His beloved widescreen TV and hi-fi system were gone, too, along with all the paintings, save one. It hung above the fireplace in the living room, a bright, impressionistic depiction of a Victorian day out at the beach, the women lifting their skirts and the men rolling up their trousers, a tableau of innocent pleasures.
Alix only had to look at the picture to remember the afternoon when she had first seen it. She’d been wearing one of his old T-shirts and had curled up in an armchair as cozily as a sleepy cat, watching Carver as he walked through the dusty beams of afternoon light that angled in through the windows of his top-floor flat. He’d walked with an easy, animal grace, then leaned across her chair. She’d felt his eyes skimming over her before he handed over one of the cups of coffee he’d been holding. He’d seen her looking at the picture.
“It’s Lulworth Cove,” he said, “on the Dorset coast, west of my old base.”
“It’s very beautiful. What was this base?”
Carver had laughed. “I can’t tell you that. You might be a dangerous Russian spy.”
She’d smiled and said, “Oh, no, I’m not a spy. Not anymore.” She was telling the truth. That afternoon in Carver’s flat, for once in her life, she’d been a normal woman, surrendering to the blissful indulgence of falling in love.
That dream had been torn away from her. There was no point in clinging to some pathetic, girlish illusion of romance. In the real world there was no such thing, just an endless fight for survival, a fight that had no concern for scruples or principles. When everything else was stripped away, there were only two issues to consider: how badly she wanted to survive, and what she was prepared to do in pursuit of that survival.
Kurt Vermulen’s cell phone started buzzing right in the middle of dinner. He flipped it open and took a look at the name on the screen. Then he turned to the three other people sharing the table at an Italian restaurant in the Georgetown district of Washington, D.C., a rueful half-smile on his face, and said, “I’m really sorry-got to take this one.”
Yet, as he said, “Hang on,” into the phone and got up from his place, making his way to the door, the truth was he felt relieved.
Bob and Terri had meant well, setting him up at a dinner for four with Megan, a single, thirty-nine-year-old lawyer. She was a hot date: attractive, smart, and happy to leave her litigator’s aggression in the court-room. He was pretty sure she liked him, too. That was the problem.
Eighteen months had passed since Amy died, and he still couldn’t get his head around the whole dating game. They’d met the summer before they went to college, 1964; two kids who’d bumped into each other in a Pittsburgh music store, both trying to buy the last copy of A Hard Day’s Night. And that was that-the start of thirty-two years together, their one regret that they hadn’t had children, till Amy got breast cancer and suddenly, the one thing he’d never expected, he was the one left alive and alone.
All that time, her presence in his life had been one of the things that defined him, as much a part of his identity as his blue eyes or his sandy hair. Now that she was gone, he felt incomplete. But even worse than that, he couldn’t figure out how to make himself whole again. With Amy, everything had been natural. So much was understood, unspoken. But now it all had to be explained from scratch, and he wasn’t sure he was up to that just yet. Sure, he’d been with a couple of women. He wasn’t a monk. But someone like Megan deserved better than a casual fling. And Kurt Vermulen didn’t know that he could give it.
Not when he had the fate of the world on his mind.
He was outside the restaurant now, stepping onto Wisconsin Avenue, feeling the quick chill of a January night. “Okay, Frank, I can talk now-what’s the news?”
“Not good, Kurt. I raised your concerns with the Secretary of State, but the feeling, right around the department, is that they just flat-out disagree with your assessment. Don’t get me wrong-everyone really respects what you’ve accomplished, but they just don’t see the situation the way you do.”
“What? Don’t they believe what I’m saying?”
“Not really. But even if they did, no one wants to know. I mean, we’ve made our position clear, as an administration. We’ve picked the horse we’re going to ride and it’s too late to change it now.”
“Well, you picked the wrong one.”
“Maybe, Kurt, but everyone’s happy with the decision-State, the Pentagon, Langley-you’re the odd one out on this. Look… we all know you’ve had a rough time the past couple of years, so why beat your head against the wall on this one issue? No one sees it as a priority going forward. Don’t throw away a reputation you’ve spent decades building up over a bunch of crazies. Trust me, man, they’re not worth it.”
“Thanks for the advice, Frank,” said Vermulen. “Give my regards to Martha.”
He snapped the phone shut, as if that physical act of closure could contain the frustration burning inside him. All his career he’d been an insider, a man whose analysis was respected, whose judgment was trusted. Now he was out in the cold, saying things that no one wanted to hear. Sometimes he felt like one of those movie characters who get shut away in an asylum, even though they’re sane. The more he shouted he wasn’t crazy, the more everyone thought he was. Was this how Winston Churchill had felt, telling his people that the Nazis were a deadly menace when all anyone wanted was peace at any cost?
He shook his head at his own presumption. Comparing himself to Churchill: Maybe he was going nuts. Meanwhile, there was a good-looking lawyer waiting inside the restaurant, expecting him to make some kind of sophisticated, grown-up pass at her. Screw global security-that was the first problem he had to solve.
Vermulen was about to step back inside when a man caught his eye across the far side of the road. He was medium height, skinny build, wearing a brown leather jacket, the gray hoodie underneath it hiding his face. There was nothing unusual about that, not in January. Nothing unreasonable about him walking fast, either, keeping the blood circulating. There was just something about the way he was doing it, pushing past people on the sidewalk. He didn’t look like he had anything good on his mind.
Vermulen saw the glint of steel in the streetlight as the man pulled a knife from his pants. He saw the woman looking at some shoes in a store-window display. He knew at once, with absolute certainty, that she was the reason the man had drawn his knife.
And then he was running across the road, dodging the traffic, praying he could get there in time.
The man had come up to the woman and grabbed her arm and was snarling threats and obscenities in her ear. Vermulen saw the shock take hold, leaving her wide-eyed and paralyzed, unable to obey the mugger’s instructions, her mouth open but no sound emerging.
He shouted out, “Hey!” Just a noise to distract the guy.
The cowled head turned and Vermulen felt the raw, drug-fueled rage in the man’s eyes, then the jittery panic that filled them as the mugger realized he was under threat.
The man slashed with his knife, slicing through the strap of the woman’s handbag and the sleeve of her coat. He grabbed the bag and started running.
There were people all around. They were looking at what was happening, shying away, not wanting to get involved, some scattering as Vermulen burst through them, carried on past the woman, and pursued the man up the street.
He took maybe twenty quick strides down the sidewalk, then pulled up. It would make him feel good to catch the dirtbag and teach him a lesson. But there was a woman standing frightened, alone, and quite possibly wounded. She was the priority now.
He turned back to her, walking slowly, trying not to add to her fear and distress.
“Are you okay? Here, let me look at your arm,” he said, when he reached her.
And that’s when she burst into tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said between sobs, as though it were she who had done something wrong.
Gently, he helped her ease her arm from the sleeve of her coat. Her blouse had been cut right through and there was a little blood on her arm, but it didn’t look too serious.
“You’re lucky-just a scratch,” Vermulen said. “We can get you to an emergency room, to be on the safe side. Or would you rather go straight home?”
“I just want to get back to my hotel,” she said, and started crying again. “I’m sorry,” she repeated.
“Don’t be. You’ve had a shock. It’s natural. Where are you staying?”
“The Georgetown Inn,” she said. “It’s only a couple of blocks. That’s why I thought it would be okay to take a walk, you know? I mean, just around the corner, get some fresh air… Oh, God… My bag, I had everything in there…”
“Here, I’ll walk you back,” he said, taking her good arm.
It took only a couple of minutes. Along the way they exchanged names. The woman was Sandra Marcotti, in town for a meeting with a firm of lobbyists. At the hotel, Vermulen spoke to the front desk, explained what had happened, and left his contact details. Then he gave the woman his business card, and shook her hand, quite formally.
“Good night. You take care now, ma’am. If there’s anything you need, anything at all, just call.”
As he left, Sandra Marcotti looked at his card for the first time. At the top it said, VERMULEN STRATEGIC CONSULTANCY and then, below that, LT. GEN. KURT VERMULEN Dsc, PRESIDENT.
My God, she said to herself. He’s a general.
Back on the street, Vermulen got out his phone, intending to call his friends and explain his absence. Before he could dial, he noticed a flashing icon, telling him he had a message waiting.
It was a woman’s voice, a southern accent: “Hello, Lieutenant General Vermulen? This is Briana, from the president’s office at the Commission for National Values, here in Dallas. I know you expressed an interest in addressing our organization. Well, we have a meeting of our charter members coming up in Fairfax, Virginia, day after tomorrow, and one of our speakers has dropped out. I appreciate it’s awful short notice, sir, but if you could take his place, we sure would be grateful.”
Vermulen listened to the rest of the message, which gave contact details for confirming his appearance. As he walked back toward the restaurant, he looked a whole lot happier than he had walking out.
Finally Carver was making progress. The last few mornings he’d managed a short stroll around the gardens that surrounded the clinic. Alix went with him, patiently telling him the names of all the people they met, the same names she’d told him just the day before. They played little games to see if he could find his way back to the main entrance from different parts of the grounds. On the rare occasions he succeeded, or recognized a passing face, Carver lit up with boyish glee at his own achievement. But just as often, something or someone spooked him. All that was needed was a sudden loud voice, a car backfiring, even the low winter sun dazzling his eyes, and he was plunged into a cowering, weeping anxiety that had nurses dashing over to administer sedatives and return him to his room in a wheelchair.
There came a point, as she watched his slumped body being wheeled away after another panic attack, when Alix realized she couldn’t go on like this, doing nothing. It wasn’t just the need for money, however acute; it was a matter of self-preservation. She had to find a way to make him better, not just for him, but for her, too: for them. With every day that went by, she could feel herself falling a little more out of love, and she hated it. Her feeling for Carver was the one true emotion in her life. To lose that would be to lose everything.
She left Carver unconscious in his bed and went back to the apartment, determined to take charge of her destiny and maybe to take charge of his. As she washed the smell and depression of the clinic from her body and hair, she reminded herself of the well-trained, resourceful agent she had once been. What would that woman do? Simple: She would steel herself, and get on with her job.
By the time she’d made lunch, she’d decided.
She dressed in the cleanest, least shapeless pair of jeans she could find, a plain white T-shirt, and her winter coat, with a scarf around her neck and a beret over her hair. She slipped her only pair of shades alongside her purse in her shoulder bag. She took a small pair of wire cutters from the household tools Carver had left in a kitchen drawer. She was ready for action, she had a plan, and just having that sense of focus, the spur of determination, made her feel better than she had in months.
Her first KGB operations had taken place in smart hotels, whether in Moscow or Leningrad. She knew how those places worked, and felt at home amid the flow of workers and guests. That’s where she’d go to work now.
Her first choice was the Impérial, one of the city’s classiest establishments. It attracted wealthy foreign tourists and businessmen to its rooms, and the bankers and diplomats of Geneva to its bars and restaurants. It was the perfect environment for Alix to rediscover her old magic. First, however, she had to dress for the performance, and since she lacked the means to buy the right clothes, she would have to find another way of acquiring them.
She walked right by the front of the hotel and went around the block to the staff entrance at the rear. The entrance was wide enough to admit vans into an unloading bay. To one side there was a small hut. Time clocks were fixed to the wall beyond it, where the cleaners and catering and maintenance staff clocked in and out. Alix went up to the porter standing guard in the hut and spoke in her worst French and strongest Russian accent.
“Excuse, please,” she said.
The porter was reading a tabloid newspaper. He ignored her.
“Excuse,” she repeated. “Have appointment with housekeeper, fifteen hours, for get job chambermaid.”
The porter reluctantly dragged his eyes to the date book in front of him.
“Name?”
“Yekaterina Kratochvilova,” said Alix, speaking quickly in an incomprehensible gabble of syllables.
The porter gazed helplessly at the open page, an angry frown on his face. He clearly hadn’t a clue what she’d just said.
“Not here,” he said. “Come back another time.”
“Impossible! I make appointment. Please to look again, Yekaterina Kratochvilova.”
A couple of uniformed maids walked by, turning their heads to see what the fuss was about. Alix caught their eye.
“Maybe you help,” she called to them. “I come see housekeeper, have appointment. She can see me now, yes?”
The maids looked to the porter for guidance.
“It’s not my decision,” he insisted. “There’s nothing in the book.”
Alix gave the two women another pleading stare. She’d timed her performance carefully. By three in the afternoon, any guests that were leaving a hotel would have checked out and their rooms prepared for the next occupants, but few of the coming night’s guests would have arrived. It was the quietest time of the working day, when even the busiest housekeeper might be able to see an unexpected job applicant.
One of the maids took pity.
“I’ll go and get her,” she said.
“Thank you, thank you,” Alix gushed, while the porter looked on indifferently.
The maids disappeared.
Alix took a couple of steps backward, out of the light.
The porter returned to his tabloid.
A middle-aged woman appeared at the far end of the passage, tight-lipped and stern-eyed, her steel-colored hair pulled back in a bun, reading glasses hanging from a gold chain around her neck. She was talking to the chambermaid, clearly irritated by the intrusion.
It took Alix no more than a couple of seconds to fix an image of the housekeeper in her mind’s eye. Then she slipped away from the entrance, unseen by anyone as she left. By the time the housekeeper got to the hut, she was long gone.
Kurt Vermulen looked around the banquet hall where the Commission for National Values was holding its private meeting. The room was located on the fifth floor of a modern hotel close by a shopping mall on the outskirts of Washington. The interior designer had gone for a gentlemen’s club effect, with dark paneling, lights in ornate sconces, and vintage oil paintings in gilt frames. Vermulen hoped the men he’d come to address weren’t equally phony.
The meal had been cleared away, and the speeches were about to begin. Vermulen, however, would have to wait his turn. For now a stocky, pugnacious man, in a sober black suit, his shock of silver hair glinting in the glow of the chandeliers, was making his way to the podium, which had been placed on a low stage just behind the top table.
His name was Reverend Ezekiel Ray. Across a swath of states in the South and Midwest he could draw crowds to hear him preach that would put platinum-shifting rock acts to shame, but today there were no more than eighty men present. No women had been invited, and the only brown faces in the room belonged to the waiters.
This select congregation belonged to the innermost core of a secretive organization, invisible to the public eye. Its membership constituted some of the heaviest hitters in American conservatism: politicians, preachers, lobbyists, strategists, lawyers, academics, and business leaders. Their congregations ran into millions, their fortunes to tens of billions. They could bankroll candidates, or boycott TV stations. Though they were, for the time being, denied control of the White House, they still wielded enormous, if well-disguised influence on their nation’s politics.
The “national values” with which the commission was concerned were defined in a very particular way. They felt that it was immoral, even blasphemous, to keep God out of government. Their God, however, was a very specific, Baptist Christian deity, and they regarded the followers of Islam with a fear and hatred equaled only by the loathing that Islamists felt toward America ’s satanic, crusader culture.
These were not Kurt Vermulen’s values. He believed in God, but his faith was a personal, private affair. When it came to the country for which he had so frequently risked his life, he believed that the Constitution was a more important document than the Bible, and that the nation’s Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they argued for the separation of Church and State.
At this moment, he wasn’t in the position to debate such philosophical niceties. He needed every friend he could get, and if that meant talking to his audience in their own language, he would do it. So Vermulen aimed to pay careful attention to Ezekiel Ray: to both what he said, and how.
For a while, Ray stood in silence, acknowledging the applause that had greeted his arrival at the podium. He waited till it had risen to a crescendo before he bowed his head and clasped his hands in front of him, murmuring the words of Psalm 19: “ ‘Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.’ ”
His audience responded with a murmured “Amen.” Again, the preacher let the silence build, holding himself in a pose of prayer and contemplation until he suddenly stood tall again and flashed a smile that lit up the room as brightly as the chandeliers.
“My friends,” he began, “I bring you joyous news of our Savior’s return! This is news of exultation for those who are brothers and sisters in Christ. But it is news of pain, and death, and eternal torment for those who have turned away from Christ, those unbelievers who mock the Lord and wallow in the sin and temptation offered by the Antichrist.
“You know the news I’m talking about. You have the words of the first letter to the Thessalonians, chapter four, verses sixteen and seventeen, engraved upon your heart. ‘For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:
“ ‘Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.’ ”
Many of the congregation had mouthed the words as they were spoken, and murmurs of approval greeted their conclusion.
Ray nodded in acknowledgment. “Gentlemen, we only have to look around us today to see those who are pious, God-fearing, and living a life of decency and morality. But if we turn on the television, or read the poisonous words of the media elite, we see those who mock the word of God… who sneer at those who believe… who degrade the holy institution of matrimony… who wallow in decadence and fornication.
“Believe me, they will soon be cut down by the sickle of Christ, and all the followers of the Antichrist with them. For their day of reckoning is coming soon, as the word of the Lord makes plain.
“Consider the second epistle of Timothy, chapter three: ‘In the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection… despisers of those that are good… lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.’
“The Gospel of Matthew, chapter twenty-four, warns that ‘nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom… And many false prophets shall rise… iniquity shall abound.’
“Sounds familiar. Sounds like the world today. So now we wait for the final warning that the end is nigh, the arrival upon the earth of Satan himself. Gentlemen, you must be on your guard. For Satan will come soon, and when he does come we must make ready for war.
“We know where that last, great battle will take place, for it is written that ‘he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.’
“As you know, this place truly exists. It is the hill of Megiddo, which stands in the land of Israel. And you can visit this place. You can see it with your own eyes.
“But do not be afraid of this great battle. For the Christ who will return in glory is a mighty Christ, a warrior Christ, riding on a white charger, a Christ who will make His enemies tremble. So be joyful that He comes. Be happy that you will be saved. But be prepared for that final conflict between good and evil.
“For He is Christ…
“He brings us rapture…
“And He is on His way!”
As the shouts of “Amen!” rang around him, and the Reverend Ezekiel Ray settled back down in his seat, accepting handshakes and backslaps from the men on either side, Kurt Vermulen clapped politely. He was assessing the room as he’d so often assessed a battlefield, looking for strong points and weaknesses, calculating threats and opportunities, seeking out hidden dangers. Above all, he was considering the men he was about to face. He knew now exactly what his audience wanted to hear. But could he give it to them?
He was about to find out.
It was half past six, and Alix was sitting on a bus, three rows behind the housekeeper, as she made her journey home. She would, Alix knew, be carrying her own personal set of keys to virtually every working room in the hotel, as well as a pass card guaranteeing access to every guest room. Chambermaids had pass cards, too, but they were kept on cords tied around their waist so that they could not possibly be dropped or mislaid. Only staff as senior as a housekeeper were entitled to put their keys in a handbag. Somehow Alix had to get inside that bag.
It happened in a neighborhood supermarket. Alix watched as the housekeeper paused by the first aisle, reached into her bag to get her shopping list and left it open as she put on her reading glasses, then ran her finger down the piece of paper, mentally ticking off everything that she had to buy.
Alix walked by her, glancing down at the bag. There were two sets of keys clearly visible: a small ring with her car and front-door keys, and a much larger bunch of hotel keys, one of which looked like a credit card. That was the one Alix wanted.
But for the next ten minutes she had to wait, her frustration growing, unable to find an opening. The housekeeper had almost reached the checkout when she suddenly stopped dead in the middle of an aisle. She replaced her glasses on her nose, consulted her list again, hissed crossly at her own forgetfulness, and scuttled away to another aisle, leaving her cart behind her.
Alix walked steadily toward the cart. Making no sudden movements, she reached into the bag with her wire cutters and snapped the link that attached the housekeeper’s pass card to her key ring. She palmed the card and put it in her own shoulder bag. At the checkout she paid for a lettuce and a jar of Bolognese sauce, then disappeared into the night.
Kurt Vermulen looked out from the glare of the podium into the darkness of the room beyond. He had one last chance: one shot at getting the backing he needed to make his country aware of the threat building against it in mountains and deserts thousands of miles away. The nervous energy was building inside him, adrenaline parching his mouth. Then he began.
He delivered a warning of a war that could engulf the world, a conflict to the death between religions and civilizations. And it was, he said, a war that America had brought upon itself.
“I was there when it all began,” he said, his voice low-pitched but intense. “I saw our fatal mistake.”
He took them back to the late summer of 1986 and the first secret shipments of Stinger antiaircraft missiles by the United States to the mujahideen, the resistance fighters battling the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “They called this fight the jihad, which literally means ‘the effort,’ or ‘the struggle.’ To them it was a battle against the enemies of Islam. It was their duty to fight in the service of their God.”
Vermulen was not an orator. He was a man of action, and he spoke simply, without any of the vocal flourishes of a preacher like Ezekiel Ray. But he could feel the atmosphere in the room change as he talked about men who fought for God. This was language that the men in front of him understood, even if theirs was a different deity.
“These jihadists were given our most deadly weapons, and they were trained to use them by U.S. military advisers under my command. We thought we were teaching them to beat Commies. We forgot that we were also training them to beat us. And it wasn’t till the Red Army was finally kicked out of Afghanistan in 1989 that we figured out that these warriors of the jihad didn’t like Americans, or Christians, any more than they’d liked Russians. And by that point, a register had been taken of all the men who had fought as mujahideen. It was a list of names and contact details, and it was called ‘the base,’ or in Arabic, al-Qaeda.
“A year later, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein, dictator of Iraq, the Muslim leader of a Muslim nation, invaded Kuwait, another Muslim nation, and took his armies right up to the borders of Saudi Arabia. And I guess you all know how they worship there.”
There was a ripple of laughter through the room, a relieved release of tension. When it died away, Vermulen said, “We beat the bad guy, gave the Kuwaitis back their country, and helped our Saudi allies. But the men of al-Qaeda and their allies in Egyptian Islamic Jihad didn’t care about that. Far as they were concerned, the presence of infidel Americans in the same country as the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina was a sinful pollution. They hated us for being there and they have never forgiven us.
“So, we know these folks are out there. We know their stated intentions to fight against us, our faith, and our way of life. They have already attacked U.S. forces in Sudan, Saudia Arabia, and Aden. But it was not enough for them to kill Americans. They wanted to strike directly at America itself. You know that on February 26, 1993, Islamic terrorists detonated a fifteen-hundred-pound bomb underneath the World Trade Center in New York City. The guys who carried out that bombing had links to al-Qaeda and also to our own intelligence services. The Trade Center conspirators used a bomb-making manual originally supplied to them by the CIA. They also had access to combat manuals from our own Special Forces Warfare Center. We taught these guys to blow us up and we’re still doing it.
“Just look at the civil war that has torn apart the European nation that was once Yugoslavia. Islamic jihadists trained and armed by U.S. corporations were active in Bosnia, and are joining the conflict currently starting in Kosovo. Al-Qaeda and Egyptian jihadists are operating in Albania and throughout the former Yugoslavia. Their aim is to use that war as a means of opening a back door into Western Europe. Yet the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA remain in total denial about the threat they pose. Gentlemen, this is madness.”
For the first time, Vermulen was raising his voice and putting extra emphasis into his words. He had paced his speech like a long-distance runner waiting till the final lap before he put in his big effort.
Sitting at a table in the far corner of the room, Waylon McCabe was impressed. He was beginning to understand how Vermulen had earned three stars before his fiftieth birthday.
“I fear that we are witnessing the first skirmishes in a great war between faiths that could determine the state of the world for decades, even centuries to come,” the general continued. “The soldiers of Islam won’t use tanks or rockets, but bombs, strapped to their own bodies. For they are prepared to sacrifice everything, including their own lives, while too many of us lack the courage or the will to sacrifice anything at all.
“Our society is soft. Our leaders dare not confront the electorate with the truth. They do not even want to hear the truth themselves. And so I come to you, the members of the Commission for National Values, because I know you will appreciate the stakes for which we are playing.
“We are sleepwalking toward disaster. And if we do not wake up, our values, our freedom, and our faith will be murdered while we sleep.
“Thank you.”
As Vermulen stepped away from the podium, he sighed with relief, and felt his shoulders drop inches as the tension finally drained away. He’d been back at his table for a couple of minutes, sitting silently, too mentally spent to make conversation with the other men at his table, when he felt a tap on his shoulder.
He turned in his seat to see an elderly man in a suit. But this was no amiable, silver-haired geezer. The face that looked down at Vermulen was as tanned and desiccated as a headhunter’s trophy, pierced by eyes that burned with a feverish intensity. And though the body beneath was clad in an expensively tailored suit, Vermulen could sense that it was as lean and tough as beef jerky.
The man bent down and spoke in a rasping, dry-throated Texas accent.
“Liked what you had to say, General. The name’s McCabe. I believe I could help you some. Maybe we could talk about that.”
Then he turned away with a hurried “ ’Scuse me,” and hunched over with a hand to his mouth as his whole body was wracked by a fit of coughing that seemed to tear at his lungs like a ravenous predator, ripping his chest apart.
Alix put on her shades, then strode right into the Hotel Impérial as if she owned the place. Confidence was the key to acceptance. Aside from the occasional casual glance as she went by, no one paid the slightest attention as she walked toward the main staircase and made her way to the first floor of guest rooms.
She walked to the end of the corridor, checked to see that there was no one else around, and knocked on a door.
“Entrez!” came the voice from within, the word spoken in a British accent: “Orn-tray.”
Before she could get away, the door opened. A middle-aged man was standing there, fresh from the bathroom, a towel around his waist. He raised an eyebrow and looked her up and down.
“Yes? Can I help?”
“Sorry,” she stammered. “Wrong room.”
“Well, do come in anyway,” he said, oozing an unwarranted confidence in his powers of seduction.
She shook her head and scurried away. The man stood and watched her, then retreated into his room.
She tried a second time, at the other end of the corridor. There was no reply. She slipped the pass card down the slot in the lock and a green light appeared by the door handle.
The room was unoccupied, the beds undisturbed, the closets empty.
The third room’s guest wasn’t in, but he was a lone male, with nothing that Alix could use.
Finally, in the fourth room she tried, she struck gold. A couple was staying there, the name SCHULTZ inscribed on their luggage tags. It looked as if they’d already gone out for the evening. There were daytime clothes scattered on the bed and chairs, damp towels on the bathroom floor, and Chanel makeup strewn around the marble basin. The woman had packed for a busy social life, because whatever she was wearing this evening, there were two more evening gowns hanging in the closet. The frocks weren’t Alix’s style, but the pretty pair of high-heeled black leather sandals, perched on a rack below them, fit just fine. By the time she left, five minutes later, the shoes were in her bag and her face had a freshly applied coat of foundation and blush.
On the second floor, she knocked on a door, received no answer, walked in, and found a couple making love. They had the lights down low and soft music playing. She’d raced from the room before they’d even realized she was there.
Five rooms later, she emerged with a black silk corset on under Carver’s coat, and glossy scarlet lips, courtesy of another woman’s Christian Dior. On the third floor Alix made excuses to an African woman about her own age and, a few doors down, a Chinese businessman hard at work at his laptop. But another room she tried provided a black skirt that clung to her in all the right places and a pair of sheer black stockings to wear beneath it.
She had been pondering the question of jewelry as she worked her way up the hotel. In one of the rooms there were a pair of simple diamond studs that would have finished her outfit off perfectly. But stealing someone’s diamonds seemed a step too far, both morally and practically. You don’t call the police if you can’t find a skirt. But you press the panic button when your rocks go missing.
She went up another floor. When she got there, she had to use the housekeeper’s card just to get out of the elevator.
On the ground floor, in the office behind the main reception desk, the hotel’s duty manager was checking the latest telephone logs, trying to sort out a complaint from a guest who swore he was being overcharged. A computer printout monitored all guest-room activity, including the use of phones and key cards. The duty manager couldn’t help but notice that one staff pass card was being used to gain access to numerous rooms, on at least two floors. The printer chugged and spat out another entry. The same card, this time exiting the fourth-floor elevator.
The manager sighed irritably. This distraction was the last thing he needed. He checked the pass-card number. It belonged to Madame Brix, the senior housekeeper. She had left work almost two hours ago, and it was unthinkable that she would knowingly allow anyone else to use her card.
He picked up the phone and called for the head of security.
As she looked in the full-length mirror, plumping up her freshly sprayed hair, adjusting the way her breasts sat in the corset, and examining the cut of the waist-length black jacket she’d just purloined, Alix felt reborn. For the first time in months she recognized the face looking back at her in the glass and took pleasure in her appearance. It was like meeting a bunch of long-lost friends, not just her looks, but her feelings of self-assurance, and even power. The dowdy, downtrodden woman she’d been that morning had vanished. This was the real Alexandra Petrova.
Satisfied that her makeover was complete, she put her old jeans, T-shirt, scarf, hat, and bag into one of the hotel laundry bags that were hanging in the suite’s closet. She couldn’t really afford to let them go, but they were a necessary sacrifice. Only her coat, and the purse she’d stuffed into one of its pockets, would stay with her. Next, she went into the suite’s bathroom, took a tissue from the dispenser, wiped down any surfaces she had touched, then flushed it down the lavatory. She pulled out one more tissue from the dispenser, to use on the door handle, then left the suite, carrying her coat and the laundry bag.
The suite was right at the end of the corridor, by the emergency exit. As she passed it, Alix thought she heard footsteps. She opened the door a fraction and listened. Yes, there were definitely footsteps, several of them, coming up the stairs, still some flights below. She muttered a Russian expletive under her breath. The housekeeper must have reported her missing key. They were after her.
She glanced down the corridor. If there were men coming up the stairs, others would be using the elevator. She prayed she had enough time. Leaving the coat and bag by the door, she dashed back into the suite. A pair of French windows led from the sitting room to a balcony with views across the city. She flung the glass doors wide open, then ran to the bathroom, wrapped the key card in toilet paper to make it sink, and flushed that, too. Then she bolted to the door, leaving it open as she went.
The footsteps from the stairway were much louder now. They couldn’t be more than a floor below her.
Alix started walking toward the elevator. Along the way, she draped the laundry bag around the door handle of another room. The housekeeping staff would pick it up and clean everything inside, removing any trace of her identity.
When the elevator doors opened and the hotel security chief and his men stepped out, she was there to meet them. Every single one of those men saw a hot blonde casually leaning against the corridor wall with her hands behind her back and her tits poking out of a sexy corset. Not one of them saw a thief holding a coat. By the time the doors of the elevator had closed behind them, she had slipped by and was pressing the button for the ground floor.
Alix sauntered into the hotel bar. The men’s gazes warmed her like sunlight, making her blossom. The women’s eyes were a challenge she was ready to overcome. Her back was straighter, her head held more proudly, her walk just a twitch more flirtatious in her tightly cut skirt and teetering heels. She thought of the last time she’d done this and the night that had followed. Then she ordered a kir royale.
“Please charge it to Room one thirty-eight,” she told the barman as she took a stool by the counter. “The name is Schultz.”
She cast a practiced eye around the bar, looking for the best marks. A man sitting alone at a table, just across the room, caught her eye. His dark hair, slicked back across a tanned but balding crown, was just graying at the temples. His dark-blue suit was immaculate, his silk tie perfectly chosen to complement the sky-blue cotton shirt. The watch was a gold Mariner model, on a polished brown leather strap. He was, in short, the epitome of sophisticated, middle-aged European wealth. And he was looking at Alix with a smile playing around the corner of his mouth that suggested he knew exactly what she was up to. And he didn’t mind at all.
She pretended not to pay him any attention. But from the corner of her eye, she saw him summon a waiter and hand him a piece of paper. Half a minute later, a freshly sparkling glass of kir appeared beside her. Slipped beneath the glass was a note. It simply read, Ponti, 446, 10 mins. By the time she turned around to acknowledge the message, his table was empty. She was impressed. This man was as practiced as she was.
So now the deal was on the table. All she had to do was go upstairs and fulfill her side of a civilized, adult transaction. All her years of experience, and his own calm assessment of the situation, suggested that Ponti would prove an adept, experienced lover. He would not be grudging or ungenerous. If the night went well and he was a regular visitor to the city, he might very well suggest a more regular arrangement. Her financial security would be assured, and with it Carver’s treatment. As these arrangements went, it would be as good as she could possibly expect.
And that was what made her realize that she simply could not go through with it. She couldn’t fool herself anymore. Even more important, she couldn’t save Carver on those terms. She tried to imagine what he would think if he knew what she was doing. Would he tell her to go ahead?
The question was no sooner asked than answered.
She left the bar, picked up her coat from the cloakroom, and walked from the hotel, feeling utterly deflated.
All her newfound confidence had disappeared, leaving her even more bereft than before. She had tried to determine her own future, and save the man she loved, but her efforts had been futile. Her defeat was absolute.
The years since Waylon McCabe’s fall from the sky had treated him well. His image had been transformed by his religious conversion. Gone were the accusations of brutal business practices, political corruption, and environmental vandalism. Now McCabe was hailed as a philanthropist, donor to a billion-dollar charitable endowment, and a man of profound religious principles. In the official report, compiled by Canada ’s Civil Aviation board, the crash had been classified as an accident. But McCabe didn’t believe that for one second. Someone had been out to get him, and they’d damn near succeeded.
If he had to put money on it, he’d bet it was that mechanic-LUNDIN was the name on his badge-coming into the airport lounge, practically begging him to get on that plane. He’d been up to Inuvik plenty of times, but he’d never seen that mechanic before. Probably never see him again, either, which was a pity.
He’d have liked to shake the man’s hand.
Recently, however, things had changed. Now he wasn’t feeling quite so charitable. A shadow had fallen over his life, casting him in a darkness that filled him with dread. Just thinking about it made his heart pound and his mind panic. He was glad of the distraction when he heard the knock on the door. By the time he opened it to greet Kurt Vermulen, McCabe was back in control, displaying no signs of unease, his usual, impregnable self once again.
He motioned Vermulen to sit down and poured him a whiskey. Then he served himself and relaxed into the chair opposite. As he sat, his trouser legs rode up to reveal the ornate leatherwork on his five-thousand-dollar custom-made black boots from Tex Robin of Abilene. His suit might come from some fancy tailor in New York City, but his boots were pure Texas.
“So, you think this al-Qaeda is a real threat?” McCabe asked, opening the conversation.
Vermulen nodded. “I think it constitutes a clear and present danger to the security of the United States and our allies, yes.”
McCabe had been born-again for five years now, but he had never stopped thinking like a businessman. He still saw the world in terms of transactions.
“So why don’t we sit down with them, figure out what they want, try to make a deal?” he asked.
“There is no deal to be made,” said Vermulen, with absolute certainty. “They aren’t interested in negotiations. You can’t reason with them, can’t appease them or change their minds. They know what they want and they won’t settle for anything less.”
“And that is…?”
Vermulen had the list hardwired: “The removal of all U.S. troops from Saudi soil, the destruction of Israel, the toppling of all Middle Eastern governments with friendly ties to the West, and the setting up of a global Muslim state governed by Muslim religious law. They call it the Caliphate.”
“These people must have a leader,” said McCabe. “Who is he, what’s he like?”
“They call him the Sheikh.” Vermulen swirled the whiskey in his glass, contemplating the patterns of light shining through it as he collected his thoughts.
“When I knew him, back in Peshawar, he was about thirty, still a young man. He had dark hair, a thick beard. He was tall and very slim-very rich, too, a sophisticated, educated guy, with relatives who are living, right now, right here in the States. But he dressed in simple robes and barely ate anything: A loaf of unleavened bread, some yogurt, and a handful of rice-that was like a feast. His people knew that if they were going hungry, so was he. He’s an inspirational orator, a natural commander, strong and fearless in combat. I mean, I believe he’s evil, all right, but I’ve got to tell you, this is one impressive individual.”
McCabe’s face gave nothing away. Inside, though, he was exultant. His instinct had been right: Vermulen was describing the Antichrist. The prophecies were coming true. A path was lighting up before him, a route to salvation and immortality.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “This Sheikh has a personal army. He can bend people to his will, he wants to destroy the Jews, he hates Christianity, and he aims to see the rule of Allah across the world. Is that what you’re saying?”
“That would be a fair summary. You see, to a devout Muslim, the earth is divided in two. First, there’s the Muslim world, where they can pursue their religion in safety and follow Islamic law. They call that Dar al-Islam, which means the House of Peace. The rest of the world, that’s Dar al-Harb, the House of War. And the radical, fundamentalist Islamic scholars maintain that those who live in the House of War have no right to live. In fact, it’s a religious duty to kill them. And what they mean by that is, kill us, Americans.”
“But you’ve tried to warn people…”
“As much as I can. I speak to contacts in Washington, the people I do business with every day. I just lay out the evidence, Mr. McCabe. Try to persuade them to see things the way I do.”
“It ain’t workin’, though, is it, General? You’re tryin’ to make your case, but you don’t have enough to convince the jury.”
Vermulen grimaced. “Seems like it.”
McCabe gave a sympathetic shrug, drawing Vermulen in, painting himself as the ally he needed.
“Well, I guess that’s their problem, ’cause you sure convinced me. I can feel that war comin’, and I want to help you raise the alarm. But you’d better think about how you’re gonna make folks come around to your point of view. I mean, if you can’t find the evidence you need, you’re gonna have to go right ahead and create some. Wouldn’t be the first time. Johnson did it with the Gulf of Tonkin, draggin’ us into Vietnam. Hell, I’m old enough to remember when Roosevelt did it at Pearl Harbor.”
“I don’t think that was anything other than enemy action.”
“Whatever you say, General, but plenty of folks say otherwise. Fact remains, you need a Pearl Harbor of your own, somethin’ spectacular, a moment of revelation that’s gonna make the whole world sit up and focus on the threat we face.”
McCabe was focusing the entire weight of his personality on Vermulen, bringing to bear all the persuasive, almost seductive powers of negotiation acquired over a lifetime of buying low, selling high, and always coming out on the right side of the deal.
“You know, General, you’ve got me thinkin’-heck, you’ve inspired me. We’re gonna do somethin’ great, you an’ me, and I’ll tell you when it’s gonna happen: Easter Sunday, the day we celebrate the conquest of evil and death. If you’re lookin’ for a time to strike back at the Antichrist, go ahead and name me a better one.”
McCabe did not wait for a reply before he went on.
“Let me see,” he said, pulling a slim black appointment book from a jacket pocket and flicking through its pages. “Here we go… this year, Easter’s April the twelfth, more’n two months away. So I suggest you think awhile on what I said. When you figure something out that can suit both our purposes, come and tell me about it. If I like what I hear, I’ll pay whatever it costs to make it happen.”
As he showed Vermulen to the door, McCabe said, “We’re gonna work well together, General, I can feel it. That Sheikh’s about to find out he ain’t the only dog in this fight.”
McCabe had said his final words with a grin, and ended them with a wheezing cackle, but as he closed the door behind Vermulen, his good humor vanished as if it had never been.
Alone in the room, with nothing and no one else there to distract him, the darkness fell on him again. His mind was filled with a secret terror as powerful as anything he had experienced as his plane fell from the Canadian sky.
Just a few weeks before, unable to shake the cough that had dogged him all winter, he had finally gone to see his doctor. Within hours he’d been referred to an oncologist at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. By the end of the week he’d got a second opinion, just to make sure, from the top man at Sloan-Kettering in New York.
Both said the same thing. McCabe had two inoperable tumors on his lungs. The cancer had also spread to his brain. The doctors weren’t certain, but they thought the cancer might have been caused by the chemicals he’d inhaled inside that burning plane. McCabe could see the bitter irony in that: His assassin had got him after all. He had only months to live, nine at the outside, but he’d be hospitalized in six. He was heading downhill toward a yawning grave. And so the fear that gripped McCabe’s heart and ate away at his mind was that he might pass before the great day came.
Of course, he believed in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. He reaffirmed that faith every week in church. But his faith was no defense when the thought of his own nonexistence gripped him in the darkest hours of the night. Despite the comforting words of the creed, he could not be certain of being woken from that last, great sleep. He wanted, more than anything else, to be alive, with his eyes wide open, on that great day when the Lord returned to His people. He longed to see the holocaust of which the Reverend Ezekiel Ray had spoken, when Christ would crush the grapes of wrath and the blood of His enemies would fill the valleys of Israel to the brim.
If that holocaust wasn’t going to happen of its own accord, well, Waylon McCabe was damn well going to make it happen, even if it cost him every last dime he had. And Lieutenant General Kurt Vermulen, whose passionate conviction and desperate need to be believed had left him hopelessly vulnerable to McCabe’s manipulation, was just the man to help him do it.
Mission Date: September 25, 1995
Location: Riverview Towers, Charoen Nakorn, Bangkok, Thailand Target: Wu Chiu Wai, alias Tony Wu
Mission Statement: To eliminate a major drug trafficker, with established ties to U.K. and European heroin trade
Operative: Samuel Carver (Fee: US $350K)
Report: The target was known to play a regular weekly mah-jongg game with three of his closest associates, gambling for significant sums of money, with US $1m or more regularly changing hands in a single night. The participants also laid six- and seven-figure bets with one another on the results of soccer matches in Asia and the English Premier League, and horse races in Bangkok, Macao, and Hong Kong. It can reasonably be inferred that both match- and race-fixing took place as a direct result of these wagers.
The location of the game was a luxury penthouse apartment, on the twenty-fifth floor of a newly built apartment complex overlooking the Chao Phraya River, chosen by Wu for security purposes. It was the sole property on the top floor of the complex. The only internal access to the apartment was provided by a non-stop express elevator, with armed guards at both the ground and top floors. The apartment also possessed its own private water, power, and air-conditioning facilities, separate from those of the complex as a whole.
Freelance operative Carver determined that these security measures in fact made the apartment more, not less, vulnerable. He made his assault via the roof of the building, at approximately 1:45 A.M. on the morning of September 25. The weather conditions that night were severe, with thunderstorms and torrential downpours. These made the initial stages of the operation far more hazardous, but also provided useful cover.
Carver made his initial approach via helicopter (see separate accounts sheet for detailed cost breakdown of this and other expenses). It hovered over the Riverview Towers for less than five seconds. Using an SBS-standard two-inch hemp rope affixed to the roof of the helicopter, Carver descended to the roof at high speed, braking with his hands, clad in heavy-duty leather gloves, immediately before impact. Donning protective equipment, he then proceeded to the rooftop vent used to feed the apartment’s air-conditioning system and inserted a canister of fentanyl gas, a fast-acting opium-based sedative.
Allowing five minutes for the gas to take effect, Carver climbed down to the external terrace running along one side of the penthouse and, having checked that Wu and his associates were sedated, used a glass cutter to break in through the plateglass doors leading from the main living area, where the men had been gambling.
The only armed men on the premises were Wu, who carried a Glock 22 pistol, and his bodyguard, who was armed with a Steyr MPi69 submachine gun. All the other players had been searched prior to being allowed into the apartment.
Carver first ensured that all four gamblers were sitting upright around the gaming table. He then proceeded into the apartment’s entrance hall and dragged the bodyguard, who was also unconscious, into the living area.
Next, Carver extracted Wu’s Glock pistol from his shoulder holster, placed it in Wu’s hand, and fired three shots: two into the wall directly behind the bodyguard’s unconscious body, and one into the bodyguard’s skull, where, being a low-caliber round, it lodged, killing the bodyguard instantly.
Using the bodyguard’s submachine gun, Carver then fired a series of short bursts around the mah-jongg table, terminating all four men. He also ensured that a number of rounds missed their apparent targets and hit the plateglass doors, thereby destroying any trace of the hole he had made to gain access.
Having signaled to the helicopter that he was ready to make his exit, Carver then used the gamblers’ cigarettes (all four had been smoking heavily) to start a fire in the apartment. He retraced his steps back onto the terrace and up to the roof. He had been winched back up into the helicopter before the fire alarm sounded in the apartment, triggering automatic sprinklers, which drenched the living area with water, greatly impeding the subsequent work of forensic investigators.
When police detectives were called to the scene, they concluded that the bodyguard had been hired to carry out Wu’s assassination, but had been killed in the attempt. One zealous forensics officer has attempted to point out various anomalies in the blood-spray patterns and body positions of the victims, but his observations have been ignored. Local police authorities and politicians have been far too busy gloating over the death of a major gangster to worry about the finer details of his demise.
Conclusion: This was a daring plan, executed with exemplary resolve and thoroughness by an operative who acts calmly and with extreme ruthlessness in high-pressure situations. My judgment is that Samuel Carver can be trusted with our most important and sensitive operations, and I would not hesitate to call upon his services in future.
Quentin Trench, Operations Director
“Well, you called upon him, all right, didn’t you?” muttered Jack Grantham to himself, as he put down the report, just one of the files seized when the Consortium had been discreetly, but permanently, shut down.
Grantham was a rising star in the British Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6. His official record was one of constant achievement, flawless political judgment, and immaculate career management. He had, however, made one decision that could, if publicly revealed, ruin his career. That did not make it a bad call, simply one that had unavoidable downsides.
On September 3, 1997, Grantham had captured Samuel Carver, with the help of a colleague in MI5. By then he’d been fully aware of what Carver had done a few nights earlier in that Paris underpass. He knew, however, that a public trial was in nobody’s interest. So he had taken another route. Like a bureaucratic Mephistopheles, he had taken possession of Carver’s soul.
“I own you,” he said. “You have a debt against your name that can never be redeemed. But you can make reparations. You can do things for me, for your country. If you get killed along the way, tough. If you succeed, you’ve done some good to set against the harm.”
Next, he let Carver fly to Switzerland to confront Yuri Zhukovski, the Russian oligarch who had been the silent force behind the Paris attack. Now Zhukovski was dead, and Carver had lost his mind.
It was, in some respects, disappointing that he had been placed so firmly out of action. It would have been useful to have a man like that available: off the books, and totally deniable. Then again, something would have gone wrong. Something always did. Meanwhile, Carver was in no state to tell anyone anything.
On balance, Grantham concluded, that was an excellent result all around.