No Survivors

by Tom Cain

  Other drawers held watches, dark glasses, mobile phones, again with minimal variations. He took one of each, not needing to waste time choosing between styles, plus a couple of spare SIM cards for the phone. Then he noticed a photograph in a frame by the bed. It showed Alix by his chair in the clinic’s dayroom. She had a hopeful smile on her face. He just looked bewildered. He couldn’t remember the photo being taken. He spared it no more thought, but removed it from the frame, folded it in two, splitting himself from Alix and stuffed it in his inside coat pocket. If he wanted to find the woman, a picture would come in handy.

  Larsson was waiting for him by the door of the apartment, carrying the toolbox. When he saw Carver, he said, “Hey, you look like a guy I used to know.”

  “Yeah—what was he like?” asked Carver.

  Larsson was deadpan. “Total bastard.”

  36

  Dr. Geisel had warned Carver he was a long way from being cured. There was always the possibility of a relapse. Short of that, he could expect sudden, violent changes of mood.

  He was beginning to understand what the shrink had meant. It was barely a five-minute drive from his flat to the bierkeller, but as soon as the Volvo got moving, the glorious sense of confidence and self-assurance began to fade and his uneasiness returned, his guts tightening, shoulder muscles tensing. Carver took a series of long, deep breaths and slowly rotated his head, lifting his chin up, then coming around and down till it was almost resting on his chest, breathing out as his head came down, then back in as it rose again.

  “You all right?” asked Larsson from the driver’s seat.

  “Yeah, just trying to get myself level, you know.”

  “You’d better tell me what happened at the clinic.”

  Carver sighed deeply as he lowered his head, eyes shut. He remained like that for a second, screwed his face up in a grimace, then turned his head toward Larsson.

  “Someone tried to kill me.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And someone else will be discovering the body any time now, so just shut up, keep driving, and help me get on with finding Alix.”

  Larsson brought the car to a sudden halt. He sat quite still as Carver snapped, “What the bloody hell are you doing?”

  Without warning, Larsson shot out his right arm and grabbed Carver by the throat, pushing him back until he was forced against the side of the car.

  Carver struggled to free himself, his body impeded by the seat belt, his feet stuck in the passenger footwell.

  “I don’t like people who are rude to me,” Larsson sounded like he was explaining a misunderstanding, getting things straight. “So just stay cool, all right?”

  He let go his grip and gradually brought his arm back, never taking his eyes off Carver.

  “Okay,” said Carver. “I apologize. I just want to get Alix back.”

  “Maybe, but you’re not going after her now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re not in shape. Look at yourself—you let me grab you one-handed. Your mood’s up and down like a yo-yo. You can’t climb the stairs to your apartment without getting out of breath. You’re weeks away from being fit.”

  Carver’s eyelids drooped in tacit acknowledgment.

  “Okay—maybe you’re right . . . maybe. But I can’t just sit around on my arse doing nothing. If I can work out what she was doing, where she was before she disappeared, at least that’s something. Look, this beer place will be closing any minute and I can’t come back tomorrow, because I’ve got to be out of town. I’ll just go in, have a drink, ask a few questions, nice and easy. Trust me—I won’t start any fights.”

  “Thank God for that,” said Larsson as he started up the engine again.

  37

  In that Minnesota loft, Kady Jones felt like an explorer finally about to cast eyes on a mysterious animal species, often written about but never seen. To a scientist from Los Alamos, the suitcase nuke was as potent a myth as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster, and just as irresistible a lure.

  She climbed up the ladder in her inflatable plastic suit, looking like the mutant spawn of a human being and a bouncy castle, buzzing with anticipation and nervous tension. Despite her confident words to Tom Mulvagh, she was only too aware of all the things that could go wrong. If the device was genuine, it could be booby-trapped. Even if it wasn’t, an accidental detonation was not totally out of the question. The likelihood was infinitesimal, but it existed nonetheless, so the protocol was clear: Look but don’t touch. And stay as far away from the device as possible.

  Her head poked through the hatch. The loft was illuminated by a single, bare bulb, whose harsh light revealed the case, lying by the far end wall, wide open, daring her to come and take a closer look. She clambered up onto the floor, dragging an air hose behind her. Then she leaned back down to grab a video camera, passed to her by one of the team. A tripod followed, and a bright orange metal box, with a black handle extending two thirds of its length. A cable ran from the box back down through the hatch.

  She set up the video camera on the tripod, switched it on, and focused on the case. “Are you getting that?” she asked, speaking into the microphone mounted in the headpiece of her suit.

  Her deputy, Henry Wong, was sitting in one of the vans outside, facing a rack of electronic equipment, dials, and screens.

  “Yeah, and it sure looks real to me.”

  “Only one way to find out,” said Kady.

  Leaving the camera, she picked up the orange box. At one end of it were a numeric keypad and a small backlit screen. The box was a handheld gamma-ray spectrometer, an instrument designed to measure and analyze the radiation emitted by whatever objects it was investigating.

  The various nuclear materials that can be used in bombs all decay at specific rates, giving off particular quantities of gamma rays. Some of them, like plutonium, emit enough radiation to be detectable over a considerable distance. Others, however, register only at very short range. Standing by the camera, Kady wasn’t getting a reading on her spectrometer. That immediately ruled out most of the possible suspects, but not all. That case could contain a dummy weapon, yet another false alarm. Or it could be armed with weapons-grade uranium. Kady had no choice. If she wanted to find out the truth, she was going to have to get up close and personal.

  She crept across the floor toward the case, hardly daring to breathe, starting at every creaking board. As a little girl she had loved playing Grandmother’s Footsteps, sneaking up on her dad when his back was turned, her heart thumping as she dared herself to take just one more step before he sprang around and caught her. Now there was a bomb where her father had been, and one wrong move could make it spring into action, too. She was perspiring inside her plastic bubble, unable to wipe away the drop of sweat that was trickling down her forehead.

  She could feel her pulse racing, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps. The spectrometer was quivering in her hand. The way she was now, she might easily trip on a loose floorboard, or drop her gear. If she knocked into the case, and it was booby-trapped . . . She didn’t finish the thought. She knew she had to calm down. She stood still, her eyes half shut, arms down by her side, trying to regulate her breathing and slow her heartbeat. Gradually the frenzied drumming of blood in her ears slowed to a more regular rhythm.

  When she got near the case, she spoke to Henry Wong once again.

  “Okay, here we go.”

  “Be careful, Kady.”

  “You think?”

  She stepped right up to the open case, which was maybe thirty inches long, rectangular, with reinforced corners. The contents were nestled within a thick polystyrene base. The main unit was a metal pipe, which ran for most of the length of the case. One end was thicker than the other, as if ringed by an additional reinforcing band of metal. A wire extended from the other end, and ran to a black control unit, with a series of switches, a keypad, and a digital timer. There were no numbers showing on the timer, no dramatic countdown, just a bunch of con
trols with Russian markings. A single, small red bulb glowed, to indicate that the unit was receiving power from its electric cable.

  Kady pointed the spectrometer at the unit. A series of digits and letters appeared on its display, and, via the cable, on a screen in front of Henry Wong. There was a low, awestruck whistle in her ear.

  “Weapons-grade uranium-two thirty-five. You just found a genuine suitcase nuke, Kady. Man, that is cool.”

  She smiled, the tension momentarily broken. “That’s not the word I’d have chosen. It looks to me like Alexander Lebed was telling the truth. The Soviets really did cache portable nukes all over the Western world. But if this is one of them, where are the rest?”

  “Not our problem,” said Wong. “And nothing we can do till this one’s deactivated. Why don’t you get on down here, we can recheck those readings?”

  “Sure. But not till I get a close-up of this thing on video. We need to have a record of exactly what we’re dealing with.”

  She made her way back to the camera, still taking care over every step, but feeling a fraction more secure now, having faced the weapon once and survived. Now that she knew what she was dealing with, she felt as if she were more in control of the process. As she unscrewed the video from its tripod and carried it back toward the case, she told herself she’d worked on far more powerful warheads, both Russian and American, and never come to any harm. Why should this be any different?

  She didn’t notice the loose nail protruding from the floor till the boots of her suit snagged against it. Her hands were gripping the camera, so she had no way of using her arms to regain her balance or break her fall as she tripped.

  “Kady!” shouted Wong, as she fell on top of the case, becoming hopelessly entangled in her air tube as the light on the control unit began flashing and the bomb emitted a rapid series of high-pitched beeps.

  Like a warning.

  A booby trap activated.

  The tension she had felt since she clambered up into the loft was blown away in an instant by a nauseating, heart-pounding, flop-sweating rush of pure terror. The fear seemed to blur her vision her as she thrashed her limbs, frantically trying to scramble away, as though that would do any good.

  In her ears she could hear Wong’s voice, “Oh, shit . . .”

  The beeping stopped.

  There were no more words in her headphones.

  She lay stock-still, unmoving, unable to breathe in the absolute silence of the loft.

  From somewhere inside the case there came the noise of a feeble detonation, no louder or more powerful than a Christmas cracker. Then silence once again.

  Kady scrambled back onto the floor, trying to get her breath back. Then she noticed the electric plug, sitting at the end of the cable that led from the case. It had been jerked from its socket by the impact of her fall. The flashing and beeping were simply a warning to the bomb’s users that its power had been cut. There was no booby trap.

  But there were Soviet suitcase nukes loose in the world. And neither Kady nor anyone else in America had any idea where they were.

  38

  The staff of the bierkeller weren’t too anxious to let Carver and Larsson in. A waitress tried to tell them the place was about to close. Carver took out a hundred bucks.

  “We’ll only be a few minutes,” he said.

  The waitress took the banknote and nodded toward the empty tables. “Help yourself.”

  They ordered a couple of wheat beers, an authentic taste of Germany, right in the heart of French Switzerland. Carver looked around. There was only one other customer in the place, a bland-looking man in his thirties or forties, sitting in a corner of the room, nursing a glass of whiskey. He was thinning on top, wearing a mass-produced gray suit, just one more lonely salesmen on another solitary night.

  Carver turned his attention to the phony Bavarian decor and the two waitresses in their wigs and costumes, both tired and short-tempered at the end of a long shift. He felt ashamed to think of Alix working in this dump, into the early hours every night. She’d always been at the hospital first thing in the morning—she must have been exhausted. Maybe that’s why she’d run away. She needed a decent night’s sleep.

  He finished his drink and went up to the bar.

  “How much for two beers?”

  “Ten francs,” said the barman.

  Carver paid with a fifty and told him to keep the change.

  The barman thanked him, then regarded Carver, an eyebrow raised, lips pursed, as if to say, “There has to be a catch.”

  Carver caught the look. “You’re right,” he said, slipping into French without a second thought. “I do want something.”

  He slipped his photo of Alix across the table.

  “Do you know this woman? Her name is Alexandra Petrova. She used to work here.”

  The barman said nothing.

  “Look,” said Carver, “I’m not a cop. I’m just a friend of hers. She’s disappeared and I’m trying to find out what happened to her, that’s all.”

  Finally the barman spoke. “You English?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Been in the hospital lately?”

  Carver unfolded the photograph and showed him the other half.

  “Okay,” said the barman. “I heard about you. But I don’t know where Alix went. One night she was here, the next . . . poof!”

  He shrugged and lifted up his hands to emphasize his bafflement, then pulled out a cloth from behind the bar and started wiping the countertop in front of Carver.

  “But maybe Trudi can help you. She was a friend of Alix’s.”

  The barman gestured at one of the waitresses—the one Carver had met at the door.

  “Hey, Trudi! He wants to buy you a drink.”

  The waitress made a show of looking Carver up and down.

  “Do I get another hundred dollars?” she asked and sauntered over.

  The balding man in the corner, attracted by the sound of conversation, watched her as she walked toward the bar. Carver saw him and just for a second thought he caught something in the man’s eye, a way of looking that suggested intense concentration, a kind of professional curiosity. But then Trudi was standing next to him, cheerful, busty, the classic barmaid—her costume laced extra-tight to make her cleavage all the deeper—and the thought vanished.

  “So, are you going to get me that drink?” she said.

  “Sure,” said Carver. “What are you having?”

  “Double vodka and tonic.”

  The drink appeared. Trudi downed half of it in one gulp and gave a contented sigh.

  “I needed that. So, what can I do for you?”

  “It’s Alix. I’m trying to find her.”

  Trudi looked at him for a moment, then a sly smile crossed her face.

  “So you’re her mystery man, huh? She talked about you a few times. Not often, though—it upset her to say too much. I thought you were sick in the hospital.”

  “I was. Now I’m not. What happened to Alix?”

  “I don’t know—she just . . . well, she just vanished.”

  “When? The last time she came to visit me was around the middle of February.”

  Trudi considered for a moment. “Yes, that sounds right. She walked out just before our big Valentine’s Day party. I was cross with her, leaving the rest of us to fill in. It never occurred to me she wasn’t coming back.”

  “Had she been worried about anything?”

  “Sure,” said Trudi. “Paying your hospital bills. She really loved you.”

  “Tell me about the bills. What did she say about them?”

  “Just that she didn’t know where she was going to find twenty thousand francs. It was really on her mind.”

  “And the last time you saw her, the night you say she walked out: Do you remember what happened?”

  Trudi took another sip of her drink.

  “Okay, I remember. I’d been working a couple of hours before Alix arrived, and I was waiting for her to start work, so tha
t I could take a break. I saw her come out from the dressing room, just over there . . .”

  Trudi pointed toward a door set into the wall not far from where they were talking. There was a sign on it forbidding entry to customers.

  “Then what happened?” asked Carver. “How did Alix seem to you?”

  Trudi gave a quizzical little pout. “I don’t know, normal, I suppose—at first, anyway. But then suddenly she stopped completely still, right in the middle of the floor. She was staring at one of the tables, like she’d seen a ghost, you know? Then she turned and walked really fast, right out of the bar, toward our dressing room. I thought it was kind of odd, but I didn’t have time to think about it because I was serving customers. There was a problem because two men got up and left without paying and Pierre, the barman, was giving me shit for letting them do that, but in the end it didn’t matter because a woman paid their bill. Weird, huh?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” said Carver impatiently. “But concentrate on Alix. When did you know she’d left the building?”

  “About ten minutes later. She hadn’t come back and I still hadn’t had my break and I just thought she was being a selfish cow, so I went to look for her. But when I got to the dressing room, she wasn’t there, and her bag and coat were both gone. And that was the last time I saw her.”

  “Go back to when you last saw Alix. She came out of the door. She saw something. What did she see?”