It was another perfect spring morning in Provence. Carver met the baker’s decrepit old van on the street, half a mile from the house, and thumbed a lift. Now it was chugging and clattering up to the gate. The gang member he had christened Ringo appeared in the driveway, signaling for them to stop. Up close, where the tufts of hair on his back and chest sprouted over the neck of his T-shirt, he looked even less appealing. But he was carrying a combat shotgun, and from the way he carried it, angled across his body-the stock nestled in the crook of his right arm, right hand on the trigger, the barrel pointing down-someone had trained him to use it properly.
Ringo glared at the baker, ignoring the tradesman’s polite “Bonjour, m’sieur,” offering not even a grunt by way of acknowledgment that he recognized his face. He just pointed at the keys in the ignition and flicked his fingers, indicating that they should be handed over.
Once the van had been immobilized, he walked around the vehicle and opened the rear doors. With an air of infinite suspicion, he examined the rows of baguettes, round loaves, cakes, tarts, and croissants arranged in the back of the van, seemingly immune to the temptation posed by their crisp brown crusts, succulent fillings, and mouthwatering aromas. So far as he was concerned, every pain au chocolat was a potential booby trap, every quiche a hidden hand grenade. He looked inside the plastic bags filled with meat, vegetables, and booze. Finally, he satisfied himself that the contents of the van posed no danger to anything other than the arteries and brain cells of the people who consumed them.
The bull-necked gangster closed the doors, then resumed his circuit of the van. He came to a halt by the passenger door. He signaled for the window to be wound down. When it had been, he pointed the gun through the opening, bent his head, looked along the barrel, and stared Carver full in the face.
Ringo’s single eyebrow knitted even more tightly as he considered the threat posed by this unfamiliar individual wearing white housepainter’s overalls. He took a step back, positioning himself just to the rear of the door, making sure his field of fire was unimpeded, then motioned with the gun barrel, telling Carver to get out of the van.
Carver stepped out into the warm, scented sunshine, putting his hands up as he did so, the natural reaction of an innocent, inexperienced civilian confronted by a man with a gun. The Georgian pointed his gun at the worn, khaki canvas shoulder bag on the floor of the passenger compartment. He wanted Carver to retrieve it. Once again, Carver did as he was told. He carried out the apparently simple task in slow, distinct stages, making it clear at every point that he was doing nothing untoward.
Once he was standing upright again, with the bag in his hand, he opened it up for inspection. There were two cans of paint inside: one white gloss, brand-new and unopened, the other empty and stuffed with old rags. Alongside the cans lay three brushes of varying widths, a large can of paint thinner, a packet of potato chips, a glass one-liter bottle filled with orange juice, and a small, greaseproof-paper package.
“Sandwiches, for my lunch,” said Carver in French, holding it up. He strongly doubted that the guard spoke the language, but he kept going anyway.
“I just came to do some painting. My patron said the woodwork in the kitchen and lounge needs touching up. Told me he’d spoken to the man that’s renting the place… comprenez?”
Ringo glowered some more before he got out a phone and, still keeping one hand on his gun, hit the speed dial. He had a brief conversation in a language Carver had never heard before, but assumed must be Georgian. Then he signaled to Carver to get back in the van, and jerked his head in the direction of the house.
The baker started up the rackety engine once again and they headed up the hill, around the building to the parking area at the rear. There, the baker got out and walked toward the kitchen door, carrying a couple of shopping bags filled with provisions. He glanced nervously at the two dogs, standing by the wire cage, growling and barking at his approach as he knocked on the door. It opened and the brunette woman, Yoko, stuck her head out. She shouted at the dogs, who lowered their barking to a mean, resentful grumbling and backed away a few paces from the wire. Then she let the baker into the building.
Carver hung back, as if waiting his turn to say his piece. He was standing about fifteen feet away from the kitchen door, by the pile of firewood, under its wooden shelter. He looked around. There was no one watching him. He crouched down at the back of the log pile by the wall of the house and opened up his bag.
Over the next few seconds, he carried out a series of quick, precise actions. First, he took out the small packet of sandwiches and placed them in his pocket. Then he gently slid out a small log at the back of the pile, as if he were removing a brick from a Jenga tower, and shoved the bag of chips and the bottle of orange juice into the gap where the log had been. The canvas bag was tucked out of sight on the ground, in the shade of the shelter, right by the wall of the house. Carver left the bag open, with the can of paint placed across the top of the used paint can stuffed with rags.
Then he walked past the kitchen door. Inside, the baker was holding out a tray of pastries for Yoko to inspect. Again making sure that no one could see him, Carver opened his packet and lobbed the two sandwiches into the dogs’ cage, where they were instantly devoured. He turned back again and hovered outside the kitchen door while the woman made her selection and the baker noted it down on a pad before picking up his tray again and going back to his van.
When it was his turn to speak, Carver stepped into the doorway and launched into the same garbled explanation of his presence that he had given the guard at the gate. Yoko looked puzzled at first, then anxious. She looked behind her, into the house, clearly trying to decide whether it was worth waking her boss. To Carver’s relief, she concluded that it was not and started shooing him away, gabbling indignantly as she did so.
He took the hint and walked back to the van, where the baker was waiting with a grin plastered all over his face-the delighted smile of a man who has just seen another male getting it in the neck from an angry woman. As he got into the passenger seat, Carver shook his head ruefully and blew out his cheeks.
“Les femmes, hein? ” he sighed.
The baker laughed, then started up the van, and they rattled away down the hill.
Ivan Sergeyevich Platonov, commonly known as Platon, was the man entrusted with expanding the Podolskaya crime clan’s activities in Western Europe. He had been in bed in his Paris apartment with one of the women whose bodies provided so much of his gang’s revenues when Olga Zhukovskaya called.
“How are you, Ivan Sergeyevich?” asked Olga Zhukovskaya.
“Very well, thank you, and you?”
“Also well. You know, my husband always spoke very warmly of you…”
“He was a great man. My condolences. You received my wreath, I hope.”
“Yes, thank you, very impressive. I’m not disturbing you?”
The girl had woken up, yawned, and then dutifully started running her fingers down Platon’s stomach. He shooed her away.
“Of course not. What can I do for you?”
“I need something collected, or perhaps retrieved would be a better word…”
While Platon listened, occasionally breaking in with specific, practical questions, the deputy director explained about a missing document, the property of the Russian people, that was currently sitting in a safe in a house in the South of France, about 550 miles from where he now lay. It was currently guarded by four Georgians, led by a low-rank gang leader named Bagrat Baladze. Within the next twenty-four hours, it would be either sold to a filthy Arab terrorist or stolen by the agents of an even more despicable American, unless Platon and his men could get to it first.
“You have fought for the Motherland in the past,” said Zhukovskaya. “Now she calls you for one more mission.”
There was something almost seductive in her voice; it was less the command of a senior officer than the request of a vulnerable woman made to a mighty warrior.
Platon wasn’t falling for it.
“Naturally, I am a patriot,” he said. “Even now, when I live as a peaceful businessman, I am willing to do my duty. But there will be costs. Men may die. Their families must be considered.”
He had never paid a single ruble to a widow or orphan in his life, a fact of which Zhukovskaya was fully aware.
“Of course, you must be compensated,” she agreed. “I was thinking, you may be aware that my late husband was involved in the production and sale of certain munitions, on behalf of the state.”
Platon knew that, all right. Zhukovski had made a fortune flogging land mines until that English princess had stuck her interfering nose in his business. That had been the death of her… and of him, too. Since then, as political pressure against them grew, the mines had been rotting in warehouses all over Russia. But the illicit demand for them was unabated. Mines sold by the tens of thousands, and each one was worth three hundred U.S. dollars in pure profit. If he could secure the concession, there was a massive fortune to be made.
“I would be proud to assist my country, but it will not be easy,” he said. “I must take my best men away from their current assignments. They will need equipment. And of course we must all get to the property as fast as possible. A helicopter will be the fastest method. The French make one called a Dauphin. It will easily seat six men and take us all the way there, right to the front door, with just one refueling stop. If I can charter one this morning, I can be at this place by early afternoon.”
As it turned out, Platon’s takeoff was delayed. The chopper he hired had technical problems. It was not until lunchtime that the Eurocopter Dauphin left the Paris heliport and began the three-hour flight south.
There had been a number of problems confronting Carver as he tried to work out how to get the document Vermulen wanted from the house where Bagrat Baladze was keeping it. For a start, he was not a professional thief, unlike Kenny Wynter, the man he was impersonating. He did not know where in the building the document was hidden, and the only method he knew of opening a safe was blowing it up: not such a smart idea if you wanted to preserve a flimsy cardboard folder filled with bits of paper. And, of course, there were six potential opponents-because he couldn’t assume that the women would be useless in combat-and only one of him.
Of these considerations, the last was the least significant. Given the element of surprise and a properly planned assault, he could soon even the odds. He’d done it often enough before. But he wasn’t there to kill people. He was there to steal. So he worked through the problem logically, considering all the possible permutations, until he came to a solution that made sense. Which was why he needed his shopping list. That, and a working knowledge of basic chemistry as it applied to the art of sabotage.
The logic was simple. The simplest way of getting the document out of the house was to make Bagrat Baladze do the work for him. Pondering that led Craver inexorably to the chemical properties of the substances on his list.
Linseed oil, for example, is prone to spontaneous combustion, as painters and decorators-not to mention their clients-sometimes learn, at their own cost. When the oil is exposed to air, it oxidizes and releases heat. The greater the exposure, the greater the heat generated. If the linseed is spread thinly across a relatively large area of cotton rag, that maximizes exposure, and so the heat rises. Over a period of approximately six hours, the rags can reach a temperature of more than 430 degrees Centigrade, some 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is enough to produce a flame.
But there’s a catch. If there’s too little ventilation, the oxidation process is greatly reduced. If there’s too much, the flow of air around the rags simply disperses any heat it creates. It’s just like blowing on a fire. Stifle it and it dies. Blow too hard and you blow it right out. You’ve got to get the balance just right.
The ideal between too much and too little air is to place linseed-soaked rags in an open container. An empty paint can is perfect.
Aquarium pellets have equally potent chemical properties. Their job is to freshen up water by producing oxygen, and their active ingredient is potassium chlorate, an extremely efficient oxidizing agent. Just as with linseed oil, this oxidization produces energy in the form of heat. If the release of energy is sufficiently powerful, it creates an explosion. Potassium chlorate is a very effective oxidizer, which explains why it is also an active ingredient in many homemade explosives, whether formulated by fireworks hobbyists or homicidal terrorists. Carver had ground down the tablets using a pestle and mortar and then mixed the resulting powder with sugar, which would burn to produce a bigger, brighter bang.
He had poured the mix into the bottom of an opened, emptied bag of potato chips, replaced the chips, and glued the bag back together. Then he prepared the bottle of “orange juice,” which actually consisted of acetone-bought from the same hardware store where he’d found the rest of the painter’s supplies-orange food dye, and, once again, sugar. Acetone is an extremely highly flammable liquid whose vapors can explode on exposure to a spark. Among sugar’s properties is that it caramelizes under heat, becoming extremely sticky. So the addition of sugar to this sort of bottle bomb, or Molotov cocktail, causes the flame to adhere to its target, much like napalm.
Carver didn’t have to add anything to the paint thinner or the oil paint. They would be fine just as they were.
His painter’s bag and its contents were, essentially, a self-detonating incendiary bomb. Once they were in place, Carver had ridden back to the village in the baker’s van, checked out of his hotel, and driven back up the mountain, this time by the scenic route. He made a second trek across the mountainside to his observation post, now carrying the equipment that Vermulen’s people had delivered to the poste restante, as per instructions. After that, he’d just waited.
By midday, the air temperature had risen into the high seventies. The women sunned themselves with the gratitude of northern Europeans released at the end of a cold, dark winter. The men went shirtless, revealing torsos covered in the tattoos that are an essential mark of status in Russian gangland culture. The dogs lazed in their cage, their laid-back demeanor caused less by the hot sun on their fur than the large quantities of Valium-fifty milligrams crushed and mixed with the pâté in each of their sandwiches-coursing through their bloodstreams.
The humans lunched late, at around two in the afternoon. They drank heavily with their meal. By half past three, George had taken over sentry duty by the gate. Bagrat and Linda had gone back indoors for sex and a snooze. Everyone else was flopped semicomatose by the pool. That was when Carver saw the first wisps of smoke coming from his canvas bag.
He texted Vermulen’s number: “Delivery 19:00 in bar as planned.” Carver spelled the words in full. He regarded text-speak as infantile twaddle and presumed a retired general would feel the same way. Thinking about it, he doubted whether Vermulen had ever before in his life been obliged to use text at all.
By the time he’d finished, a flame was clearly visible. He’d painted the inside of his bag with linseed, too, just to add to the effect. Once the spark caught, it would quickly spread.
There was a sudden, sharp crack, a shattering of glass, and a whoosh of flame as the bottle of cleanser cracked open and its contents ignited. From there it was a chain reaction. The flame from the cleanser lit the bag of chips, which then went off with an explosive fizz, like a Roman candle. That shattered the drink bottle, releasing a fireball of acetone and sugar, which in turn set the bone-dry logs aflame.
Carver was already wearing his bulletproof vest, with his pistol holstered below it. The loaded grenade launcher was slung around his back. The baton was in his hip pocket. The wax plugs had been stuffed deep into his ears. His hands, encased in tight leather gloves, were holding his gas mask. It would be the last thing to go on.
By now the woodshed was completely ablaze, the flames dancing up the side of the house. A first-floor window was open, and the fire caught on the wooden shutters and window frames and the nylon net curtains rippling in the hot currents of air generated by the fire. The flames slipped into the room beyond as stealthily as a cat burglar. Above them, the massive oak beams under the eaves of the tile roof began to smolder. It would not be long before they, too, added to the conflagration.
It was the sentry, down by the gate, who realized what was happening first. Carver watched George’s reaction as he saw the smoke rising over the top of the house and dashed back up the hill, shouting at the top of his voice. By the pool, Paul slowly raised himself to one elbow to see what had caused the commotion, took a few seconds to process what he was seeing, then sprang to his feet and screamed at Ringo to wake up. Yoko started shrieking. The three men raced around the side of the house. They disappeared from Carver’s view for a few seconds, then reappeared on the ground behind the house, where they stood, pointing at the fire, backing away from the flames and shouting at one another.
A window was flung open above the kitchen and Bagrat stuck out his head. Carver could see the look of horror on his face as he saw the blaze and then watched the expression turn to panic as the Georgian looked down at the propane-gas cylinders beneath him. If they exploded, they could take half the building with him. He screamed a series of orders at the three men, threw a set of keys out of the house onto the ground in front of the men, then ducked back inside.
Carver’s entire plan hinged on what Bagrat did next, but he didn’t have time to wait and see what would happen. He had to get moving and hope that his enemy’s logic was the same as his own.
Down below, the men had split into two groups. George and Ringo were frantically trying to disconnect the propane cylinders and drag them away from the fire. This wasn’t good. Carver wanted the men well out of the way. He’d assumed they’d make a dash for the front of the house, away from the threat of the fire. Paul had picked up the keys from the dirt and was moving toward the Shogun. Carver had planned to hit the Georgians when they gathered together in a group in front of the burning house. As any normal people would do.
Time for an instant rethink.
He pulled on his gas mask and scrambled down the hillside, charging through the undergrowth as fast as he could, heedless of the noise he was making. He knew the men’s attention would be fully focused on the fire.
He was making for a point on the boundary wall halfway between the gas tanks and the carport, almost exactly opposite the fire. The wall was about seven feet tall. It felt just like being back on the marines’ assault course as Carver leapt up, grabbed the top of the wall, scrambled for purchase with his feet, then propelled himself, rolling over the top and down the other side.
The moment his feet touched the ground, he reached for the grenade launcher and fired twice: the first round toward the car, the second at the canisters. Two plumes of white gas belched from the grenades, trapping the three men in thick clouds that burned their eyes and rasped their throats. The Georgians staggered, dizzy, disoriented, and retching, as Carver came at them out of the smoke, swinging his steel riot baton at their defenseless skulls and necks with ruthless brutality.
The men by the canisters were his first targets. When they were downed and unconscious, he went for the one by the car, beating him to his knees, where he doubled over with coughs and dry vomits until Carver laid him out on the ground with a vicious kick to the side of the head.
But where were the car keys? They weren’t in the hands of the unconscious gang member, nor the lock of the car. Now Carver had to fall to the ground and fumble around in the smoke, staring through the clear plastic bubble of his gas mask as his hands scrabbled across the dust and debris on the ground. It seemed an age before his fingers closed around the plastic key ring and he could get back up to his feet and make for the Shogun.
He turned on the ignition and gunned it, accelerating down the drive and then slewing left into the small graveled forecourt in front of the house. Bagrat was waiting there, with the two women. Yoko was still in her bikini, while Linda had fled the bedroom in nothing more than a pair of panties and a blanket, which was draped over her shoulders and clutched tight in front of her breasts. Bagrat was only marginally less exposed. Bare-chested and shoeless, he had nothing on but a pair of jeans. His right hand was clutching a gun. But the good news for Carver was the briefcase chained to Bagrat’s left wrist.
He saw it as he came around the corner and knew at once what had to be done. With his right hand on the wheel, he brought the Shogun to a skidding halt in a shower of gravel. At the same time, his left hand ripped one of the stun grenades from his vest. He pulled out the pin with his teeth and threw the hexagonal perforated-steel tube out of the car window, ducking his head, and closing his eyes tight shut as he did so.
The British Special Forces, for whom stun grenades were originally designed as means of overcoming hostage takers, always called them “flashbangs,” a name that means exactly what it says. The grenade detonated in front of the three Georgians with a scorching dazzle of light, equivalent to the glow from more than 100,000 standard sixty-watt domestic lightbulbs, just a few feet from their unprotected eyeballs. At the same time it emitted a sound blast eight times as loud as a fighter plane’s jet engine. Carver was expecting it and had taken precautions, but even he was stunned for a few seconds. Bagrat and the two women were poleaxed.
The two women were sitting on the ground with vacant, zombielike expressions on their sightless, deaf faces. Linda’s blanket had fallen from her body, but she was completely indifferent to or simply unaware of her exposure.
Bagrat was barely any better. He was on his knees and trying to get to his feet, though his limbs seemed unwilling to obey his instructions. His gun was weaving to and fro in his hand as he swung his torso around from one side to the other, blindly trying to seek out his attacker. Suddenly, the gun went off and a bullet smashed through the Shogun’s rear windows. Carver came to his senses fast, kicking open the door and falling to the ground. He scrambled across the gravel toward Bagrat, keeping as low as he could as the gun fired three more random, aimless shots. One fizzed over Carver’s head. Another ricocheted off the steps that led from the house down to the pool. The third caught Linda full in the throat, ripping through her windpipe and lodging in her spinal cord. She was thrown onto her back by the impact and lay there helplessly as the blood spurted from her gaping, gurgling wound.
She was going to take a while to die, but there was nothing that Carver or anyone else could do to save her. He concentrated on Bagrat, feeling enraged that his attempts to avoid any fatalities had been frustrated, a fury that emerged in the venom with which he whipped the baton back and forth across his head three times in quick succession. Once he’d knocked him out, Carver picked up Bagrat’s gun hand, pointed the pistol at the dying woman, and, keeping the other man’s finger on the trigger, squeezed it once more. The shot hit her in the skull, killing her instantly and putting her out of her misery.
Carver was tempted to turn the gun on Bagrat himself. But he had been sickened enough by the woman’s unnecessary death. He had no desire for more cold-blooded slaughter. Instead he held the gun, still in Bagrat’s right hand, against the chain that connected the briefcase to his left wrist. He fired one last time, breaking the chain, then grabbed the barrel of the gun and threw it into a clump of weeds and scraggly shrubs over by the pool. If the police ever turned up, they would find it there, with Bagrat’s prints all over it, gunshot residue on his hands, and two matching bullets in the dead woman’s corpse.
He reached for the case and got up. Roughly fifteen seconds had passed since the flashbang’s detonation. The grenade’s effects would persist for about a minute more. The other three men would be impaired by the CS gas for up to twenty minutes. But when they all got to their senses, they would be four angry Georgians. In the meantime, there would soon be police cars and fire engines coming up the road from Tourrettes-sur-Loup, attracted by the flames that were now tearing through the whole house, sending dirty black smoke high into the clear blue sky. It was time to get out.
Carver grabbed the grenade launcher from the Shogun and slung it around his back again. He collected the used flashbang casing and ran back around the burning house. The CS gas had cleared, but the three men were still incapable of stopping Carver as he dashed past them. He managed to pick up the grenade that had gone off by the carport, but the other one, by the propane canisters, was too close to the flames, which were now beginning to lick around the two red metal tubes. It would be only seconds before they blew, and that realization hit Carver with a surge of adrenaline that sent him flying up and over the wall and hurtling across the mountainside, away from the house.
He had got about a hundred yards through the trees when the canisters exploded. The deafening blast seemed to turn the air itself into a solid, unstoppable force that hit Carver in the back, picking him up off his feet and throwing him into the trunk of a nearby tree, where he lay, bruised and winded, while a flurry of twigs and leaves blew at him. Then the blast reached the outer extent of its radius and imploded back in again, rushing back over him, sucking the air from his lungs until finally the storm had passed.
Every inch of his body hurt. His brain felt as bruised and battered in his skull as if he’d just fought ten heavyweight rounds. As he got to his feet, watching a fireball that dwarfed all the previous flames ascending over the scorched ruins of the house, he tested his limbs for broken bones and was amazed to find he could still walk and even run, tentatively at first and then with growing confidence.
Carver was just about okay, but he didn’t like to think what had happened to the helpless, incapacitated men who had been caught just a few feet from the explosion, or the dogs lying drugged in their wire cage. There would be no trace of them left upon the earth.
Kurt Vermulen had been talking to the mayor of Antibes when his cell phone bleeped loudly and a message appeared on its screen, telling him that he had a text. He apologized to the mayor, who indicated that he was not in the slightest bit offended, certainly not by such a distinguished guest as monsieur le général.
Vermulen jabbed helplessly at the telephone keypad before giving up, with a sigh that conveyed the absolute impossibility for a civilized man of keeping up with all the latest gadgets. The mayor chuckled sympathetically.
Alix took the phone from Vermulen’s hand, with a look of womanly amusement at the failings of helpless men.
“Here, let me,” she said. Her fingers moved expertly over the phone and a message flashed up.
“It’s Wynter,” she said. “He says he’ll be ready for drinks at the hotel at seven.”
Vermulen looked at his watch.
“Well, that’s not a problem for time,” he said. “But I’m still not happy about it. Are you sure you want to go through with it? He can’t complain if I meet him instead. Today, of all days…”
He looked out of the window of the mayor’s office. The town hall, with its sandy pink walls and white shutters, looked down on the Cours Masséna, right in the heart of the oldest part of town. Every day, the square was filled with market stalls selling freshly caught fish, or fruit and vegetables that had come direct from the farms up in the Provençal hills. The Cathedral of Notre Dame stood across the way. The sea was just a skipping stone’s flight away.
Alix slipped her arm through his and gave a reassuring squeeze.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I can cope. That’s why I’m here, after all…”
Vermulen’s smile lit up his eyes with genuine affection. The mayor, seeing its sincerity, smiled, too.
“Yeah,” said Vermulen, holding Alix to his side, “I know. You can cope with just about anything.”
Then he looked at his watch again.
“Well,” he said, “I guess we better get going…”
“Bien sûr, mon général,” agreed the mayor.
The view from the Dauphin helicopter toward Tourrettes-sur-Loup, three miles away, was spectacular: a jumble of rough stone walls and tiled roofs jammed on to a V-shaped promontory. The buildings clung to the very edge of the cliffs like a herd of lemmings, daring one another to make the jump. But sitting in the copilot’s seat, Platon had no interest in the aesthetic appeal of the place. His only concern was correlating the landmarks ahead of him with the map in his hands. He’d been given coordinates for the house where the Georgians were hiding out. Now he just had to find the place.
Then he saw the plume of black smoke halfway up the mountainside, looked down at the map, and that problem was solved. The fire was a beacon, exactly where he’d expected to find their destination. But they’d arrived too late. Unless those peasant scum had somehow set their own house on fire, the American’s hired thief had got there first.
“Aim for the smoke,” he told the pilot. “Fast!”
They’d been flying parallel to the valley at the foot of the Puy de Tourrettes. Now the helicopter banked hard to the right as the pilot changed course and began his descent. They were heading directly for the smoke when it was obliterated by an explosion that launched a fireball into the sky in an eruption of twisting, bubbling, rocketing flame.
Platon spat a string of Russian expletives into his headset microphone, then twisted in his seat so that he was facing the five men in the passenger compartment behind him. They were all wearing bulletproof vests and carrying automatic weapons equipped with bulbous silencers. These were Platon’s best men, hardened veterans who had fought with him in Afghanistan, or served in the savage campaigns against the guerrillas of Chechnya.
“We’ll be there in thirty seconds. You two, out first, find cover, and be ready to lay down covering fire. The rest of you, come with me.”
The pilot slowed down as he approached the house, looking for somewhere to land his machine, nervously skirting the fire and smoke that had engulfed the house. Close up, Platon could see that a gigantic bite had been taken from the rear of the building, where the explosion must have taken place. He could see only three people, two women and a man, scattered across the ground at the front of the house, not far from a four-wheel-drive SUV.
The man was crouched over one of the women, shaking her shoulders. He seemed completely unaware of the helicopter’s approach. Finally, when it was barely two yards above the ground and thirty yards away from him, he turned his head, screwing up his eyes, and jerking his mustachioed face from side to side. He got to his feet, but made no attempt to run away. He looked bemused by everything going on around him.
The Dauphin had come in with its cockpit pointing toward the building and the nose wheel touching the ground. Because the land fell away so steeply, the pilot had kept the rotors turning, half hovering, so that his craft remained completely horizontal, with the rear wheels off the ground.
The first two men jumped down from the sliding passenger door and ran across the ground at a crouch before flinging themselves flat, their guns pointing toward the man. Their three comrades followed, moving forward up the hill to the nose of the helicopter, covering Platon as he got out of the copilot’s door. Then all four walked forward toward the man, the front three holding their guns at their shoulders, ready to fire.
The man up ahead wasn’t carrying a weapon. Yet they could see now that the woman beside him was dead, shot in the throat and head. She was naked but for a pair of panties. The other woman, who seemed as oblivious to their arrival as the man had been, was wearing a bikini. The man had on nothing but a pair of jeans. He looked at them for a few seconds, blearily, as if he could barely focus, and then, quite unexpectedly, he bent forward, put his head in his hands, and began to sob.
“Mother of God…” muttered Platon, whose years of exposure to the effects of combat had not made him any less disgusted by those who fell apart under pressure. Now that he was close to the blubbering wreck he could see that he answered to Bagrat Baladze’s description. So this sniveling wretch was supposed to be a gang leader. No wonder he’d been such an easy target. He’d given up easily, too. Someone had given his head a good beating, but aside from that, there wasn’t a scratch on him.
Platon grabbed him by the throat.
“Are you Baladze?” he asked.
The Georgian gave him a blank stare, then frowned and tried to shrug his shoulders.
Platon slapped him across the face.
“Are… you… Baladze?” he repeated, his voice tensing with anger.
Panic returned to his captive’s eyes. He raised his forefingers to his ears and shook his head.
“Can’t hear…” he whimpered, and then, “I think I killed her. But I don’t know how… I don’t know… oh, God…”
He began weeping again, his face crumpled in Platon’s hands, as tearful and snot-ridden as a little child’s.
When Baladze had raised his hands, Platon had noticed the cuff still attached to his left wrist, with its chain hanging loosely down his arm. He grabbed the chain and yanked it upward, bringing the wrist with it. He had to get it within inches of Baladze’s nose before the Georgian could see it.
Platon gave the chain a shake. His unspoken question was obvious.
“It’s gone,” said Baladze. “Someone took it. Didn’t see him. Couldn’t see… couldn’t hear… so loud…”
Platon gave an order to one of his men.
“Ask the bitch. Maybe she saw what happened.”
The brown-haired woman was no more use than her boss: just as deaf, just as blind. When she realized her blond friend was dead, she started wailing, too.
Next, Platon turned his attention to the four-by-four. It had left a clear trail behind it, showing that it had come downhill at speed, turned hard, and then slewed to a standstill. Whoever had driven it must have taken Baladze by surprise: He would not have expected an attack from uphill, inside his own property.
Platon realized that the attacker must have used a stun grenade to disable Baladze and the two women while he took whatever had been attached to that handcuff: a case of some kind, presumably. If Baladze had cared about it enough to chain it to his body, its contents must have been valuable. That document Zhukovskaya wanted had to have been in there. Platon would get to that in a moment, but not before he had secured the rest of the property. The first two men out of the helicopter were still in position. Platon signaled to them with quick hand movements, indicating that he wanted them to flank around the side of the house and report back what they found. Then he focused on Baladze again.
The effects of the grenade should be wearing off by now. He put his mouth close to the Georgian’s ear and then shouted: “Can you hear me?”
Baladze tried to look blank and uncomprehending, but a flicker in his eyes, an involuntary admission that he’d understood Platon’s words, gave him away.
“Thought so,” said Platon. “So… what was in the case?”
“What case?”
Platon punched him, very hard, in the stomach. Then he pulled his head up by the hair.
“The case on the other end of that chain,” he said.
Baladze was still winded, wheezing and gasping for breath. Platon had not let go of his hair. He gave it another hard tug, jerking Baladze’s head up and back.
“Well?”
For the first time, Baladze showed some defiance. He spat at Platon, leaving a dribble of spittle and phlegm on his chest. Platon smiled.
Then he kneed Baladze in the crotch.
Platon had retained his hold on the other man’s head. When Baladze automatically doubled up, his head was held, agonizingly, in place.
The pain was about to get worse. Platon whipped a two-fingered jab into Baladze’s eyes. Three of the most sensitive areas of his body were now all in agony, simultaneously. Baladze howled and writhed, which only increased the tugging on his scalp. His knees gave way, but Platon yanked him back up. He screamed again.
When the noise had died away, Platon repeated his question. “What was in the case?”
“A list…” Baladze whined.
“What kind of list?”
“List of bombs.”
Platon’s eyes narrowed. He leaned forward, pulling Baladze’s head toward him until their faces were barely a hand’s breadth apart.
“What kind of bombs?”
Baladze’s shoulders slumped.
“Nuclear bombs, old Soviet ones… all over the world… a hundred of them.”
Platon let go of his grip in sheer astonishment. No wonder that dried-up old witch had been so secretive. They must be shitting on themselves in Moscow. The former rulers of a mighty empire, so humbled that they had to call on gangsters to rescue their dirty secrets: If ever you wanted a sign of how things had changed, that was it. Still, it gave him an opportunity. If he could get the briefcase back, or even destroy it and then bluff that he had it, he would be in a very powerful position.
But where had the thief disappeared to?
Ignoring Baladze, who was now lying in a fetal position on the ground at his feet, Platon put himself in the attacker’s position. He had come from the back of the house: Why? Because he’d been watching from up on the hill-that was obvious. So where had he gone? Platon looked down the drive to the front of the property. The gates were still closed. So he hadn’t gone out that way. That made sense: Why head toward any oncoming cops? The obvious way out was back the way he’d come. Judging by Baladze’s condition, it can’t have been long since he’d been attacked. And barely three minutes had passed since he’d seen that explosion rip through the sky.
Platon stared up at the slope of the Puy de Tourrettes. The man was up there somewhere, or running like hell to get off there, more likely. He could still be caught.
“Kill her,” he said to his soldier, standing over the brunette.
There were three quick pops as the silenced burst of nine-millimeter bullets ended her life.
Platon put two shots of his own into Baladze.
By now, all his men had gathered alongside him in the forecourt.
“Nothing there,” said one of the men who’d been sent to scout around the back.
“We’re out of here,” said Platon. “Get back to the chopper. Fast!”
He ran back to the helicopter, yanked open the door, pulled himself back up into the copilot’s seat, and put on the headset.
“Go!” he shouted. “Up the mountain. We’re going hunting!”
Carver did not hear the helicopter until it was almost on top of him, just a couple of hundred yards away. Those bloody earplugs! He pulled the lumps of wax from his ears and was almost deafened by the clattering rotors. He dashed for the shelter of the nearest tree, pressing himself against the trunk and standing stock-still as the chopper flew overhead and disappeared again from view.
As it had passed him, Carver had seen the open copilot and passenger doors and the men leaning out, scanning the ground beneath them. They were looking for him. But who were they? The helicopter had civilian markings, not police or military.
It had to be Vermulen. That slimy Yank bastard had reneged on the deal. He wanted to save himself half a mil and remove any security risk by getting rid of a hired hand he couldn’t trust. Well, Carver had been there before.
Ahead of him, the sound of the helicopter diminished, then grew in volume again as it turned and came back again over the tree-strewn slope, slightly farther uphill this time. It was traversing the ground, to and fro, like a gardener mowing a lawn.
Whoever was up there, they knew he was down here. As soon as they spotted him, the hunters would be dropped and come after him on foot. Vermulen had commanded a U.S. Army Rangers regiment, so he’d hire only the best, and then equip them with the finest equipment. Carver had been very, very good in his day, but he was still short of full fighting fitness. Unless he was extremely fortunate, or they suddenly forgot everything they’d ever learned, they would get him in the end.
He did, however, have one advantage. Vermulen could not afford to lose the document that was, he fervently hoped, tucked away in Bagrat’s case. So he was, effectively, holding a precious paper hostage. He had to put himself in a situation where he could not be attacked without the safety of that hostage being threatened. Somewhere like his car.
He waited, motionless, as the noise of the helicopter diminished again, then sprinted, flat out, toward where the Audi was waiting for him, parked just off the path, facing back toward the base of the mountain.
Twice he had to stop and wait again as the helicopter patrolled above him. But then he was there, chucking the bulky grenade launcher onto the passenger seat and getting behind the wheel.
When he floored the pedal, the 4.2-liter engine roared into life. The four wheels spun on the soft earth for a fraction of a second, then found their grip and shot the car forward, rocketing onto the trail that sloped across and down the hillside before reaching the level where it became a proper road.
Carver had arrived at his car just as the helicopter was at the farthest reach of its patrol area. He’d barely gone four hundred yards before it turned, facing in his direction once again. Seconds later he was seen. The helicopter dashed forward like a predatory bird, spotting its prey. Carver saw it looming in his mirrors as it swooped low over the tree line and felt a surge of adrenaline as he forced his rally-bred machine even faster over the rutted, crumbling surface of the path.
Even with his belt on, he rattled around like a dried pea in a whistle as the Audi crashed into potholes, slewed from side to side, and leaped into the air as it hit exposed boulders and tree roots or raced over sudden dips in the road. The hammering impacts of compacted earth, stone, and wood against the bottom of the car created a deafening percussive clamor that almost drowned the howl of the engine, the agonized grind from the overworked transmission, and the whomping of rotor blades just a few feet above his head.
But not the sharp crack of gunfire, or the sound of bullets smashing glass and ripping through the bodywork: Carver heard that, all right.
The pilot was swooping over and around the car, trying to find the best firing position. His guns were all concentrated on one side of the chopper, firing broadside like an old-fashioned battleship. But as long as he flew alongside Carver’s car, parallel to the path, the trees on either side denied the shooters a clear line of fire. But there was another way. The pilot put on speed, racing a few hundred feet ahead of the car, before turning his helicopter ninety degrees and bringing it to a dead stop, hovering directly above, and across the line of the path, directly ahead of the onrushing car.
The windshield seemed to fill with the sight of the helicopter, its open doors, and the men lining up a volley that would hit Carver head-on. He was doing over eighty miles per hour, closing on the hovering chopper at almost 120 feet per second. The mouths of the submachine gun barrels ahead of him lit up like a barrage of paparazzi flashlights. The earth in front of the car was torn apart by the impact of gunshots. He heard and felt the impacts as other rounds ripped out a headlight, demolished a sideview mirror, and ricocheted off the Audi’s flanks.
Miraculously, Carver had not been hit, but his good fortune would not endure much longer. As a futile dash toward certain death, this was right up there with the Charge of the Light Brigade. So Carver did what the Light Brigade could not. He stopped charging.
As he yanked the steering wheel hard left, he slammed on the brakes, but kept the power full on as the rear end of the car fishtailed around, skidding on the trail for a fraction of a second before the rear wheels recovered their grip. In an instant, the car had turned ninety degrees and was now pointing straight downhill, into the trees.
Carver released the brakes and sent the car racing away again. For now the helicopter could not get him. But the trees that gave him shelter were a deadly threat of their own. Forcing himself not to take his foot off the gas, overriding every instinct that told him to slow down and take care, he plunged into an automotive slalom down the face of the mountain, slewing one way and then the other as he zigzagged between the trunks that offered certain death as the price for any miscalculation. Now the ground beneath him was even rougher and less secure, offering precious little traction for his wheels to cling to. His steering wheel was all but useless. He had to navigate with his brakes and gears alone, ignoring the low branches that whipped across the windshield and roof and praying that none of the bushes and saplings through which he drove could offer any serious resistance.
And then ahead of him he saw that the trees were thinning and clear sunlight was shining beyond them, and he knew that his problems had only just begun.
It would have been bad enough if this were the light from a clearing, an open glade in which he would be a sitting target for the helicopter, still pursuing him above. But what lay before him was not a woodland glade, but the near-vertical drop of a deep mountain gorge. A hang glider could swoop from the lip of the cliff and descend in graceful spirals to the river valley below. For a car, the plunge would be fatal.
Carver gave himself one chance of survival. The road up the mountain clung to the side of the gorge, twisting up the rockface in a concertina sequence of hairpin turns. But the road was only a few yards wide and offered no hope of a safe landing for a car traveling across its path at high speed. Carver slewed the Audi left again, changing the angle of approach, so that he came at the road diagonally.
There were just a few more trees to negotiate, a last tangle of brush-wood to charge through, and then the afternoon sun burst through the windshield and Carver was flying through the air, less like a driver than an airman trying to land his plane on the safety of an aircraft carrier’s deck, with an ocean of death all around it.
Beneath Carver’s wheels, the road plunged downhill toward a 180-degree bend. He had to get down onto the pavement in time to be able to brake and turn, but he had too much momentum through the air, and the car would not fall fast enough.
He could see over the corner now, to the drop beyond.
Still the car refused to obey the laws of gravity.
The steel safety barriers guarding the curve were getting closer and closer. They seemed only inches away.
And then the wheels hit the road surface.
Carver turned hard right, hit the brakes, heard the rear wheels scream in protest again as they slewed around the bend, and offered up a prayer of thanks to the inventor of four-wheel drive as the car responded to his commands and clung to the oh-so-welcome pavement. He had made it onto solid ground. He could drive hard and fast down a proper road.
But the helicopter was waiting for him.
It was hanging in the air, perhaps fifty yards from the mountainside. And to judge from the blazing guns, the men inside it still had plenty of ammunition.
Once again, however, the trees came to Carver’s rescue. They ran along both sides of the road, uphill and down, giving him cover. And this time, the chopper could not come in close enough to cut off his path. If it did, the rotors would hit the rock face. For about half a minute, the two machines were locked in a stalemate, as Carver negotiated four more dizzying turns. But both sides knew that it would soon end. For the mountain was flattening out and soon Carver would be spat out into more open country, where the pursuit would begin in earnest again.
He knew now that whoever was in the helicopter, they had nothing to do with Kurt Vermulen. They did not want to retrieve a stolen document. They wanted to destroy it, and him, too.
Carver asked himself who had an interest in destroying valuable papers originally stolen from the Russian government. He thought about the only known traitor in Vermulen’s organization, and the agency she had worked for-was most likely working for now. Then he gave a wry smile at the irony of it all. Here he was, risking his neck to get to Alix, and she was, unknowingly, helping to kill him.
In the cockpit of the Dauphin helicopter, Platon was beating his left hand against the top of the control panel as he vented his anger and frustration. This whole mission had been a screwup from start to finish. It had all been done in too much of a hurry, with too little information. No one, including him, had thought anything through, and now it was turning to shit in front of his eyes.
Whoever was driving that car was a maniac, whose appetite for taking risks was equaled only by his will to live. By now he should have been blasted to pieces by bullets, pulverized by a tree, or obliterated by a two-hundred-yard fall, yet there he was, racing between the villas and farmhouses dotting the lower slopes of the mountainside like a man possessed. But where was he racing to? Surely he must know that he could not hope to outpace a helicopter.
As the road down from the mountain hit the main route from Vence to Grasse, the Audi had turned right, westward. Now there was plenty of other traffic on the road, passing in both directions. Platon was tempted to blast away regardless, reckoning the loss of the other drivers’ lives would be worthwhile if he could take out the target vehicle as well. In Russia, he might have acted on that logic. Gang warfare was so much a part of life there, the police so hamstrung by lack of resources, and his clan’s connections with the state so powerful that he could probably have got away with it. But this was France, where the forces of law and order were strong and his political influence weak. Up on the mountain, with no one around, he and his men had been able to blaze away. Down here it was different. He could not afford collateral damage.
And the man they were after was being canny, too. Instead of racing flat out along the road, risking an accident and exposing himself to fire, he was using other vehicles as shields. He would hide behind a car or truck going in the same direction until a line of traffic approached, coming the other way. Then he would dash ahead at top speed, using the oncoming vehicles as his shield.
Sooner or later, however, he would find himself out in the open. For Platon, it was just a matter of holding his patience until the moment came, and the road builders of Provence had conspired to make his life easier. For now the road formed a massive hairpin. It swung north along one side of a valley before crossing the river that ran along the valley floor and then turning back on itself and proceeding south along the far side of the valley. If the helicopter hovered in the middle of the hairpin, it could cover the car all the way around.
Half a dozen times, Platon’s men opened fire as the Audi bobbed and weaved along the road. Each time, the car kept going, hit but not mortally wounded. And then, just as Platon’s frustration was mounting again, a miracle happened.
The road was approaching another absurdly picturesque little town, crowded onto a cliffside promontory. Platon looked at his map. The place was called Le Bar-sur-Loup. Just outside the village, there was a viaduct that cut across a spur of the river valley in a rhythmic, marching line of stone arches. There were no cars on the viaduct, but a handful were scattered about a parking lot at one end. Platon could see a few people strolling out over the valley to admire the view.
He also saw the Audi pull into the parking lot. He saw the driver get out, carrying something close to his chest, something bulky. His head looked misshapen, covered in some way. The man started running, turning his shoulders, so that the package in his arms was half hidden and impossible to identify from the helicopter. Platon reckoned it must be the missing case.
For a few seconds the running man was masked by a clump of trees, but then he reappeared, right out in the open, racing toward the very middle of the viaduct.
The man stood right by the stone parapet. Now it was evident that he was wearing a gas mask. Platon assumed he did not want to be identified by the people around him. The Russian smiled: Well, they’d leave identification to the pathologist.
The man placed whatever he had been carrying on the ground, behind the parapet, then raised a gun in the air. Platon could not hear any shots over the sound of the helicopter, but he assumed some must have been fired, because the other people out there on the viaduct started running away to either side.
Platon tried to work out what the man thought he was doing. Did he think he could bring down a helicopter full of armed men with a mere pistol? Or was he hoping to cut some kind of deal? If he really did have the case that had been attached to Bagrat Baladze, maybe he’d threaten to throw it off the side of the viaduct, hoping that might save him.
Either way, he could go screw himself. Platon was sick of playing games. He intended to wipe this infuriating thief off the face of the earth.
“Go down,” he said to the pilot. “Get us as close as you can.”
Standing on the viaduct, Carver saw the helicopter turn toward him and smiled. He stood tall as it approached, knowing that he was not in any danger until it turned its side to face him.
He was counting on that.
He also reasoned that the helicopter was a lot bigger target than he was. And he was the one standing on the solid surface of an earthbound structure, while his enemies were being jerked around in an airborne craft that was never perfectly still, even when hovering.
He hoped that would count for something. If it didn’t, he was screwed. At best, he’d get only one shot.
So he stood, and he waited, as still and straight as a prisoner in front of a firing quad. The helicopter was barely a hundred yards away now and still nosing toward him. As it came ever closer, the sound of the rotors slicing through the air was deafening and the downdraft beat on him like a man-made gale.
They thought they had him-that was obvious.
Finally, the chopper’s forward movement ceased. In the moment of stillness that followed, Carver thought he recognized the man in the copilot’s seat, but then the thought vanished from his mind as the tail of the predator swung around, bringing the guns in the open doors to bear on him.
And as it did so, he picked up the grenade launcher that was lying at his feet and, in the same movement, brought it to bear on the helicopter. Then, with the ice-cold patience of the well-trained soldier, he waited the extra fraction of a second needed to present the biggest possible target. The helicopter finished its rotation and, just as the first bullets shot past him, with that terrible, insect whine, the full width of the door was opened to him and he pulled the trigger.
The very instant that the grenade left the barrel, Carver was hit in the chest by two rounds, knocked off his feet, and thrown across the full width of the viaduct, crashing into the opposite parapet. The impact of the stone against the back of his head dazed him for a couple of seconds, so that by the time he was able to focus on his target, the gas had already formed an impenetrable cloud inside the Dauphin’s cabin and the machine was lurching and pitching in the air as the pilot was overcome.
Carver saw one of the men who had been firing at him emerge from the billowing smoke, blindly walking right out of the open door and tumbling to his death, his throat too scarred by gas to scream as he fell.
Then the helicopter started moving and Carver realized to his horror that it was heading right for him. Fear swept the dizziness from his head and he scrambled to his feet and ran for his life as the helicopter collided with the side of the viaduct in a cacophony of roaring engines, screaming metal, and blunt stone, its rotor blades gouging into the parapet and sending projectiles of stone flying through the air in every direction. One hit Carver on the back, and once again he thanked the sheer chance that had spared him any time since he’d left the burning house in which to take off his bulletproof vest.
Behind him, the helicopter had lost its grip on the viaduct, first sliding off its stonework and then plunging down to the valley floor, where it landed with a final, metallic crunch, a moment’s silence, and an explosion of flames.
Carver walked back to where he had been standing, picked up the grenade launcher, and threw it into the inferno below. He checked to see that there was no one nearby, and then pitched the gas mask over, too. Then he looked at his watch. It was half past five. That gave him an hour and a half to drive to Cap d’Antibes, check into the Hotel du Cap, grab a shower, change into whatever clean clothes he could find, and get ready to see Alix again.
That sounded just about perfect.
It was half past eleven in the morning in Washington, D.C., and they were back at the White House, in the Woodshed meeting room. Leo Horabin wanted an update on the investigation. The story was told from the beginning, with Kady Jones screening Henry Wong’s photograph of Vermulen and Francesco Riva, and explaining the potential significance of their meeting. Tom Mulvagh then described his investigation into Vermulen’s movements in Europe and the death of his personal assistant Mary Lou Stoller.
“I began a detailed analysis of Mrs. Stoller’s replacement as the general’s assistant, Ms. Natalia Morley, in conjunction with Ted Jaworski. Ted, perhaps you’d like to present the findings of that analysis.”
The CIA man took over.
“Certainly. The bottom line is, Natalia Morley does not exist. It’s a false identity, prepared well enough to stand up to the level of investigation an employer makes into a secretarial hiring. There was a birth certificate, marriage license, and divorce papers, references from prior employers, credit-card records, and so forth. But the moment I started looking deeper and wider, it all fell apart. I could find no trace of her supposed husband, Steve Morley. The couple’s home addresses in both Russia and Switzerland were phony. Ms. Morley had given a name and number for the human-resources department of the Swiss-based bank that had employed her, but when I called that number it had been disconnected and no one at the bank had ever heard of her.
“So if this woman isn’t Natalia Morley, who is she? Since she claimed to be Russian, that was the first place to look. I had my people secure security footage from Dulles International the day she and Vermulen left for Amsterdam, and compare it with known KGB and FSB operatives.”
He called up a picture, covering half the screen at the far end of the room.
“Okay, then, this is ‘Natalia Morley’ a month ago at Dulles. And this…”
The other half of the screen was filled by a second shot. The two faces on the screen had been taken many years apart, but they unmistakably showed the same woman.
“… is former KGB agent Alexandra Petrova. She is age thirty. She was born in the city of Perm, several hundred miles east of Moscow, and began work in Moscow about nine years ago. The KGB used her in honeytraps. Her specialty was seducing powerful, middle-aged Western males. She’s not been involved in any intelligence activity that we know of in the past five years. But it looks like she’s gone back to work.”
“You’d think a man as experienced as Kurt Vermulen might know better,” Horabin said. “Do we warn him he’s been compromised?”
“No, sir,” retorted Jaworski. “On the contrary, I propose we find out why the Russians have gone to so much trouble to compromise him. They think General Vermulen justifies their attention. We think he may be involved in some kind of project that involves miniaturized nuclear weapons. Put those two things together and what you get looks very much like Russian suitcase nukes. We’ve been tasked to find those nukes. I think this is the lead we’ve been waiting for.”
“Dear Lord,” muttered Horabin. “What’s Vermulen doing now?”
Jaworski grimaced.
“That’s the problem. We don’t know. We don’t believe he’s still in Rome. He left his rental car at Leonardo da Vinci International Airport, but he hasn’t taken a commercial flight out that we know of, and there’s no record of him chartering any private aviation. There is one other possibility, though. Da Vinci’s located at a place called Fiumicino, about eighteen miles out of town. It’s right by the coast and there’s also a harbor there, with a yacht marina. It’s possible he could have departed Italy by sea.”
“What do you mean ‘it’s possible’?” rasped Horabin. “Are you telling me you don’t know?”
“ ’Fraid so,” said Jaworski. “I haven’t had the resources to uncover that information. For security reasons, and frankly for political reasons, too, our investigation of this matter has been limited to a very small number of people. General Vermulen is a decorated war hero who has never been suspected of wrongdoing, let alone arrested or indicted.”
“I’m well aware of that,” snapped Horabin.
Jaworski kept going.
“My view, and I think I speak for Tom, too, is that if we’re going to commit ourselves fully to this investigation, with the resource allocation that would entail, and the strong possibility of political fallout, we need authorization… from the top.”
Horabin was about to speak, but was interrupted by a cough from halfway down the table. It came from the uniformed colonel representing the Defense Intelligence Agency.
“Excuse me, sir… but before anyone makes that determination, there’s something else you should know. It’s a matter whose relevance only became apparent once I’d heard today’s briefing.”
“Go ahead.”
“Thank you. It concerns a former Czech military intelligence officer named Pavel Novak. Back in the day, Novak was a double, worked as an agent for us. Late last night, Novak fell to his death from the roof of his apartment building in Vienna. Now, Tom mentioned General Vermulen had been in Vienna recently. I don’t know-maybe it’s just coincidence. But when the general was attached to the DIA, he was Novak’s handler.”
Tom Mulvagh muttered, “Holy shit,” under his breath. There were similar murmurings right around the table. Leo Horabin brought the meeting back to order.
“Thank you, Colonel,” he said. “I will take all this under advisement. And yes, Ted, it will go right to the top.”
Samuel Carver got out of Le Bar-sur-Loup and drove the car down a zigzag succession of country lanes to the southeast of town before finding a field where he could park without being observed. A quick change of clothes-ironically, back into the suit he’d worn for Kenny Wynter’s lunch with Vermulen-a pair of shades, and suddenly he looked a lot less like the madman who’d just shot down a helicopter from the old viaduct.
He took the bag with Wynter’s remaining clothes and toilet kit out of the trunk of the car. That, and the jerry can that held all the acetone that had been left over after he’d finished his homemade bomb. He left the can open on the driver’s seat. On top of it, he placed the car’s red-hot cigarette lighter. Then he closed the door and started running. He got about two hundred yards down the road when the can exploded, followed, shortly afterward, by the gas tank, still three quarters full. There was no one else on the lane to watch as he dusted himself off, wiped a trace of sweat from his brow, then strolled about half a mile back up to the main road. Not long after that, he found a Bar Tabac, where he ordered a well-earned glass of ice-cold beer and called for a cab. He took his time over his drink, finishing it just as the cab pulled up. Half an hour later, he was standing in the shower of his junior suite at the Hotel du Cap.
It was only after he’d washed that he finally prized open Bagrat Baladze’s briefcase to discover what he’d gone to so much trouble to steal. There it was, a brown file folder, just like countless others. It had the tired, flimsy look that comes with passing time, and the Russian script written across it had faded. The seal was still intact. Vermulen would be happy with that. Though what it was that he hoped to find inside this sad bureaucratic relic, Carver couldn’t imagine.
Not that he gave a damn at this point. His mind had turned to Alix. He examined himself in the mirror. Considering what he’d just been through, he didn’t look too bad. A hell of a lot better than the last time she’d seen him-that was for sure. As he put on his jacket and straightened his shirt collar, he felt as excited as a kid on Christmas morning, and he couldn’t wait to open his present.
He looked at his watch. Seven o’clock precisely.
Showtime.
The bar opened right off the hotel lobby, in one continuous, airy, white-painted space. Carver spotted two men sitting in the lobby, another leaning oh-so-casually against the paneled-wood bar counter, a black dude the size of a wardrobe. He realized it was Reddin, the man from the Venice photograph. Vermulen had ignored Carver’s instructions and sent some muscle to watch over his courier and the package she was collecting, just as Carver had anticipated.
And then there was Alix, sitting in a soft white armchair at a table for two, a posy of yellow flowers in a small glass vase in front of her, waiting for him.
He had a couple of seconds to pause in the doorway and look at her before she spotted him. She looked fantastic: not wearing anything fancy, just being the woman he loved.
There was something that nagged at him, something out of place. But the thought vanished as she heard him coming across the marble floor, looked up, and for a fraction of a second the expression on her face was… absolute horror. Shock. As if she’d seen a ghost. As if she weren’t just surprised to see him, but appalled.
She forced a smile across her face.
Carver had seen Alix play a part before. He’d seen her pretend and dissimulate. But he’d never seen anything as phony as that smile.
He didn’t have any time to think about it, because she’d got to her feet and put her arms around him, like one old friend meeting another, air-kissing either side of his face and whispering two words. “I’m wired.”
They sat down. Carver hadn’t been sure how it would be when the two of them finally met, but he hadn’t expected this terrible discomfort, almost embarrassment, a tension filling the air between them.
“So… Natalia.” He put a heavy emphasis on the name, thinking himself back into the part of Kenny Wynter, remembering Vermulen would be listening somewhere. “How’s life with the general? Hope he doesn’t work you too hard…”
“No, he doesn’t… In fact, I don’t really work for Kurt at all anymore.”
“Really? Has he fired you?”
He didn’t have to fake the sly grin on his face as he said the words, or the gently teasing note in his voice.
“No,” she said, and the next words were so quiet that Carver thought for a second that he hadn’t heard them properly. “He’s married me.”
“I’m sorry…?”
“My name is now Natalia Vermulen,” she said, in a voice whose cheerful intonation was utterly contradicted by the devastation in her eyes. “We were married this afternoon… by the mayor of Antibes.”
Carver wanted to be sick. He felt as though someone had stuck a fork in his guts and was twisting his intestines like strands of pasta. Still, he had to be Kenny Wynter, the callous thief who couldn’t care less if a Yank general was daft enough to marry his sexy secretary just to get into her knickers.
“Congratulations, love,” he said, and then glanced at the ring-the one he’d refused to acknowledge when he first set eyes on her. “Nice rock.”
“Thank you… Kenny.”
“Don’t thank me, darling. Keep flashing that around much longer, I might be tempted to nick it.”
She giggled politely.
“I’m sure you’re not really like that.”
Her voice had the sound of casual conversation, but her eyes were pleading. For what? Understanding? Forgiveness? As if Carver should be considering her problems, putting himself in her position.
She was still talking.
“We only decided to get married on the spur of the moment.”
“Good of you to waste your wedding day on me.”
“Well, I’d promised Kurt…”
“And you didn’t want to let him down. He’s an impressive bloke, your general, got a bit about him. Special, right?”
“Yes he is, very special.”
Carver assumed that was for Vermulen’s benefit, and now she was trying to explain what had happened.
“Spending so much time together, over the past few weeks, I’ve got to know Kurt very deeply. He’s a remarkable man, and he was so kind to me. You see, I was told that someone close to me, someone I loved, had died. Kurt was there for me. He made me feel life was worth living.”
Suddenly Carver realized that he’d only half understood. She was trying to explain, all right. But she wasn’t explaining a terrible mistake they could find a way to put right. What he heard now was: You’re history.
He felt humiliated, stripped of all pride. The anger and hurt were filling his skull, building up pressure that must surely crack him open, till he just lashed out at something, anything-smashed the glasses from the table and threw the bottles at the bar; took out his gun and started firing at everyone around him, going for body shots, so they’d all hurt as much as he did. He wanted to kill Alix. He wanted her back. He didn’t know what he wanted… Somehow he summoned up a faint trace of professionalism.
“Yeah, that must mean a lot, a bloke doing that for you…” he said, responding the way he always did to emotional pain, by forcing himself to detach, shutting down his emotions.
“Tell you what-why don’t I tell you what I’ve been up to while you’ve been busy getting married. I’ve found a property that’s well worth investing in. I reckon your old man’d be interested.”
She could play that game just as well as him. In an instant she was Natalia Vermulen, the untroubled new wife of a wealthy, powerful man.
“Really? That sounds fascinating. Do you have anything you could show me?”
“Here, check it out…”
He handed over the file and she examined the Russian script on the cover and the seal keeping it closed, the design a simple cross of Saint George: the symbol and the saint shared by Georgia and England alike.
“That certainly looks like something that Kurt would want to get involved in,” she said. “Let me call him.”
She took out her phone and pressed the speed dial. “Hello, darling…”
She smiled, and stifled a giggle at something Vermulen said.
“Yes, I’m looking forward to that, too, darling… Anyway, Mr. Wynter is right here. He has something to show me that I think you’d like to see. Why don’t I hand you over to him?”
“Evening, Wynter.”
It was obvious from Vermulen’s tone that he’d not picked up the undertones of Alix and Carver’s conversation. He gave no sign of the arrogance of a man talking to his defeated rival, nor the insecurity of a lover under challenge. He was just doing business.
“Good evening, General,” Carver replied. “And congratulations-your new missus is certainly an extraordinary woman… full of surprises.”
Now it helped to be Wynter. He’d not bother to be polite for long.
“You got the money? Let’s just get it done so we can all get out of here.”
The money was transferred. Carver’s bank confirmed receipt of half a million pounds sterling, then immediately moved the money to another account. Carver had made a million pounds in less than a week. He’d have happily lost it all, and every penny deposited in every one of his accounts around the world, just to have arrived back at the hotel a couple of hours earlier, before Alix had walked into that mayor’s office, when there was still a chance to change her mind.
Maybe even now it wasn’t too late? He took her face in his hands, gazed longingly into those intoxicating blue eyes, and put his lips to her ear.
“Come with me-please, I’m begging you…”
She pulled her face away from his, and when she looked at him again it was as though a transparent barrier had descended between them, as if he were a prisoner and she his visitor, separated by bulletproof glass.
“It’s been a pleasure seeing you, Kenny,” she said.
The worst moment of his life, his heart being broken, and he couldn’t even be himself.
She was looking him right in the eye, without a trace of emotion.
“I must go now. Good-bye…”
At some point in their conversation, more of Vermulen’s men must have slipped into the bar, because now they were forming a protective group around her as she walked from the room. When Carver tried to follow her, Reddin blocked the door and prevented his getting out.
“Wherever you think you’re going, man, you ain’t,” he said.
Reddin was big, he had a voice like Barry White, and he looked as if he could handle himself. Even so, Carver felt sure he could take him down, and chase after Alix as she left the hotel. But what was the point? He could beat up as many bodyguards as he liked, shoot them if he had to, but they weren’t the problem. She was. And she was gone for good.
As he sat down, Carver thought of the car that was waiting for him and Alix outside. His mission for MI6 had failed; the document had not been secured. Jack Grantham would not be a happy camper. Right now, that was the least of his worries.
Many months ago, overwhelmed by guilt at her part in a murder, and shocked by Carver’s apparently callous indifference to what he had done, Alix had cried out, “Don’t you think at all about what you’ve just done?”
He replied, “Not if I can help it, no.”
Carver saw no point in worrying about things that had already happened and couldn’t be changed. He believed that sort of thing could drive you crazy-far better to deal with the here and now. As one of Reddin’s men drove her away from the Hotel du Cap, Alix thought about that conversation and realized Carver had been wrong. Sometimes you could change the past. Sometimes you had no choice.
The knowledge that Carver was alive and well, that Olga Zhukovskaya’s claim he had died was nothing but a vicious lie, had all but overwhelmed her. She had found herself telling lies of her own, leading Carver to believe that she no longer loved him. Her mind had been reeling: confused, uncertain, barely conscious of what she was saying, torn apart by the pain she was so cruelly inflicting upon him. And it had to be that way.
She knew that if she had given Carver any reason to hope, he would have tried to take her there and then. She also knew, because she had been present when Vermulen gave his orders, that her bodyguards would not have hesitated to use lethal force against the man they knew as Kenny Wynter. There were four of them against one of him. Carver would always favor himself against those odds, but she could not afford to take the risk that he would lose. She had suffered the pain of his death once. She could not bear it again, nor the guilt of knowing that she had been its cause.
Somehow she had to find a way of letting Carver know the truth: She was his, she always would be, and she would find a way of getting back to him, no matter how long it took. If he knew that, he would wait for her-she was sure of it.
Meanwhile, she had another, more immediate problem to resolve. As of this afternoon, she was committed to Vermulen. She had sworn a vow of her own free will. Now she had to be seen to keep it.
“You all right, Mrs. V.?” the driver said, looking at her in the rearview mirror. “You don’t mind me saying, you look a bit shook up. Don’t blame you, doing a pickup like that. Must be kinda stressful if you’re not used to it.”
“Yes, it was,” she said, without thinking. All she’d really heard was the name “Mrs V.,” and it came as such a shock, the reality of it, that the rest of his words had been little more than an indistinct blur.
She forced a smile and added, “I’m all right now, thank you.”
“Don’t you worry, ma’am. We’ll get you back to the general safe and sound, so you can enjoy the rest of your wedding night. You know what I’m saying?”
The driver’s name was Maroni. He’d given her a saucy smile and a wink with that last remark. Then he looked more serious, almost embarrassed by what he was about to say.
“Just want you to know, I served under the general, and it’s great to see him looking good again, y’know, like the old days. That’s because of you, ma’am. All of us guys, we appreciate what you’ve done for him. Anything you need, you name it-you only have to ask.”
“Thank you, Mr. Maroni,” she said. “That’s very kind of you.”
He gave her a little nod of the head, as if it were nothing, but she could see he was delighted by the fact that she’d acknowledged him, remembered his name. She was suddenly struck by the bitter irony that her new husband did not even know her real name. He had fallen in love with a woman named Natalia, and so, for the time being, she would have to become Natalia Vermulen for him.
In a way that made it easier. Natalia didn’t know Samuel Carver.
The MI6 agent in the car behind Alix had finally got through to headquarters. His boss didn’t bother with pleasantries. “Have you got the document?” Grantham asked.
“ ’Fraid not. Carver never left the hotel. The woman, Petrova, came out with a group of men. She didn’t appear to be under any duress. She was holding a sealed file. I presume that was what we were after.”
“Sod it… where are you now?”
“Trailing Petrova. She’s in a car with one of Vermulen’s men. The rest are in a van, immediately ahead of her. Hang on… they’re turning off the road, entering Cannes Mandelieu Airport. Most of the traffic here is private, or charter aviation. Do you want me to follow them in?”
“Absolutely. If she’s flying out, I want the registration number of the plane. We’ll track it from here.”
The agent ended the call and drove into the airport complex.
In London, Grantham put a call through to the assistant cultural attaché at the Russian Federation Embassy. Regular diplomatic and consular business ended at 4:30 p.M. on weekdays, but the assistant attaché wasn’t a regular diplomat. As the FSB resident in London, his country’s most senior agent in the United Kingdom, he was open all hours.
“Koyla,” said Grantham, “I need you to do me a favor. Get me a number for Deputy Director Zhukovskaya. Tell her we need to speak personally. It’s a matter of extreme importance for our two services. And it requires immediate action.”
Vermulen’s yacht had left Antibes thirty-six hours before, bound for southern Italy, but he was waiting for her by the plane that would take them to meet it. Alix ran to him, wrapped her arms around him, and pulled their bodies tight, crushing her breasts against his chest, feeling him hard against her. She looked up at him, eyes half closed, lips fractionally parted, and he kissed her with a fierceness that filled her senses with the smell, the taste, the feel of him.
Vermulen let go of her, and looked for the nearest one of his men.
“ Maroni.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Tell Mr. Reddin that the men can stand easy for the next fifteen minutes. Then come back here and assume sentry duty at the foot of these steps. No one gets in the plane till I say so. You got that?”
Maroni grinned. “Yes, sir!”
Vermulen led Alix up into the plane. In the cramped cabin, he gave a crooked, apologetic smile.
“Not very romantic, I’m afraid. I’ve got champagne and flowers waiting on the yacht.”
She leaned forward, brushed his cheek with her lips, and whispered in his ear, “I don’t care.”
He had no idea she was faking.
The first sensation that hit Carver once Alix had left the hotel was one of vast, aching emptiness, an absolute loneliness, a chasm in his life where her love for him had been. The second was a sharp spasm of fear. He thought of Dr. Geisel’s warning that a traumatic event could send him back to the hellish limbo of madness. The shock of losing Alix once had jolted him into recovery. If he now had lost her again, would that reverse the effect?
Carver was a brave man. He had faced death more times than he could count. But the prospect of insanity, a lifetime trapped in an unending cycle of forgetting, was far, far worse.
Screw that. He needed a drink.
He headed up to the bar and ordered a double Johnnie Walker Blue Label. Then he remembered the last time he’d drunk it, with Alix, the night of the killing. Christ, why did everything have to remind him of her?
“So it didn’t work out, huh?”
It was a woman’s voice, American. She was sitting a few feet down the bar. Her long, glossy hair, as rich and dark as bitter chocolate, fell to her shoulders and swept across her forehead, almost covering one of her pure brown eyes. She had high cheekbones and her lips were painted with a sparkling pink gloss that made them look as though she’d just licked them. Her dress was draped over one shoulder and then swooped low enough to show off a spectacular pair of breasts. The skirt was slit up the thigh, and she was perched on a bar stool with her legs crossed, leaving plenty on display.
His look was a frank appraisal, the calculation every man makes, balancing the desirability of what’s on offer against the chances of success. As if reading his mind, she held up her left hand to display the diamond on her fourth finger. Then she shrugged in a what-the-hell way.
Carver had to laugh. Every woman he met tonight seemed to be showing off a ring. This one didn’t seem quite so married as the last one, though. He took his drink over to her, absorbing every detail of the way she looked. She smelled pretty good, too, a rich, spicy, super-female scent that made him realize just how long it had been since he’d been laid. Maybe he should remedy that. They could have a few drinks, take dinner in the restaurant down by the sea, and screw each other’s brains out all night-see if that made his pain go away. It wasn’t the most mature response to a broken heart, but it certainly beat going crazy.
“Hi,” he said. “My name’s Samuel Carver.”
She held out a slender hand with long scarlet nails.
“Madeleine Cross-pleased to meet you.”
“And you, Madeleine. So, are you going to introduce me to Mr. Cross?”
“I sure as hell hope not.”
“Don’t tell me he’s left you all alone, in a strange hotel, in a foreign country. That sounds risky.”
She laughed. “Who for?”
“All three of us, quite possibly.”
She looked Carver up and down. “No, I reckon you could handle him.”
“I don’t doubt that,” he said. “But can I handle you? That’s the question.”
It was bullshit; he knew it, and so did she. But it was what he needed, and maybe she did, too. She was a big girl; she could make her own decisions.
He ordered them both another drink and Madeleine told him her story.
Her husband made a fortune selling medical supplies. She’d been a clerk at a hospital that was one of his biggest clients, a girl from Boise, Idaho, ten years in Chicago, still single, struggling to make ends meet. He took her away from all that and stuck her in a fancy house in Winnetka to shop, decorate, and bitch with other bored suburban women. Now here they were on this fancy European vacation and he’d gone off to the casino in Cannes, leaving her behind, all dressed up with nothing to do but get drunk.
“The casino sounds pretty exciting. Why didn’t you go, too?” Carver asked.
“Believe me, it’s not so good. He spends all night at the blackjack table, playing three hands at a time, cursing every time he doesn’t get the right card. He doesn’t pay a bit of attention to anything else. Or anyone else, either.”
Carver looked suitably appalled.
“Any man who’d rather spend a night looking at playing cards when he could be looking at you needs his head examined.”
“Well, you know what? I think so, too,” she said. They laughed and leaned a little closer together. Carver felt her hand on his knee, that lightness of a woman’s touch that feels so good to a man.
“You want to get something to eat?” he said.
She looked him right in the eye.
“I’d rather work up an appetite first.”
Carver woke with the sun streaming in through the windows and the bedside clock reading 9:17.
There was a note on the bedside table, with a telephone number and the message If you’re ever in Chicago… Maddy xox.
Then he noticed the red light flashing on his phone-he must have been woken by the ringing. Carver picked up the handset and pressed the button. He screwed up his face when he heard that familiar, angry voice.
“Carver, you useless sod, it’s Grantham. I’m downstairs in the foyer. Get your lazy arse down here, now, before I come up there and kick the bloody door down.”
“Shit,” said Carver, and heaved himself out of bed.