by Tom Cain
‘Unless he actually is Carver,’ mused Selsey, delighted that Grantham had given him an opening. ‘We wouldn’t necessarily want him falling into anyone else’s hands, would we? Not with what he knows.’
‘No, we bloody wouldn’t…’ Grantham muttered. He had made deals with Carver, deals that would be very embarrassing indeed were they ever to be made public. It wouldn’t be good for a senior MI6 officer to be exposed as a close associate of a paid killer. He shook his head. ‘I still can’t work out what’s really happening here. I mean, what if someone’s framing Carver, using him as camouflage to hide what they’re up to?’
‘Seems a bit elaborate,’ said Selsey, trying to sound a lot more relaxed about the speed of Grantham’s thought processes than he actually felt.
‘Maybe, but even so, I’m not entirely sure about this.’
‘Still, there’s no harm in looking a bit deeper, eh? We might as well find out what’s going on, just to keep our own back well covered.’
‘That’s always worth doing,’ Grantham agreed. ‘All right, Bill, dig around. Tell me what you find. And don’t tell anyone else.’
‘Of course not,’ said Selsey. ‘You can count on me.’
15
Harrison James put the phone down on a furious senior senator from Florida, having just informed him of the cancellation of a planned presidential trip to Miami. Officially the President had been going to visit the National Hurricane Center and lunch with local business leaders; unofficially he was repaying the senator for his endorsement early in the primary season. James had given the senator a vague explanation of the President’s change of plans, saying that he’d be making an overseas trip with significant national security implications that made his destination confidential for the time being.
When the pork-barrelling old bastard asked, ‘Are we talking Afghanistan, here, Hal?’ he’d replied, ‘Well, I can’t comment on that, Javier. But I’ll tell you this, the President has dynamic, far-reaching plans for the projection of US power around the world. If you can help make those plans a reality, he will not forget your sacrifice.’
Christ, the shit you had to talk just to smooth old men’s egos, James thought, putting down the phone. Seconds later, the red light was flashing again.
‘It’s the British ambassador,’ James’s personal assistant informed him. ‘He wants to talk about the Prime Minister’s role in the President’s visit.’
‘I’ll bet he does,’ muttered James, then forced a smile into his voice as he said, ‘Sir Michael, good to hear from you. What can I do?’
‘Morning, Hal, it’s just this whole Bristol business. The PM’s delighted the President is coming to see us, naturally. Can’t wait. And, of course, bearing in mind Britain’s historic role in the abolition of slavery, he’s absolutely supportive of any effort to stamp out this vile business today. He’s just concerned that our presence is acknowledged, as it were.’
‘You mean he doesn’t want to be totally upstaged in his own back yard.’
‘Absolutely, Hal, I knew you’d understand. And if you need a royal or two to greet the President off the plane, or host a spot of lunch, you only have to ask.’
‘That’s great, Sir Michael,’ said James, wondering how the Brits managed to sound so damn condescending, even when they were kissing your ass.
No sooner had he got rid of the ambassador than the light went on again.
‘It’s Bobby DiLivio in the speechwriters’ office,’ came his assistant’s voice. ‘He wants to know if you can spare him five minutes to look over the opening paragraph of the President’s speech.’
The men who make tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars a year from organized crime do not possess the intelligence agencies – with electronic infrastructure capable of spying on virtually any communication, anywhere – available to the world’s richest nations. They can, however, pay for the very best private-sector specialists in every form of surveillance and investigation. They also have the advantage that they do not even have to pretend to be bound by the law. They are thus free to bribe, blackmail, coerce and otherwise extort information. They routinely use assassination to further their aims. And they can, like any other spy network, insert their people as sleeper agents into legitimate occupations.
Bobby Kula, for example, was a highly regarded computer wizard who played an invaluable role developing and maintaining the operational software that enabled the Department of State to do its job. He was an Albanian-American, a fact of which he was proud, having arrived in the US with his parents when he was just four years old. He was equally proud of his doctorate from ‘Course 6’, otherwise known as the Electronic and Computer Science department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His security-clearance procedure had shown no record of any criminal activity; no predisposition to aberrant behaviour of any kind; no reason at all to suspect that he posed any risk to the security of his adopted country. It would have taken a detailed understanding of Albania’s clan-based culture to understand that Bobby Kula was distantly related on his mother’s side to a senior member of a gang run by the Visar clan, which had become one of the biggest international players in the trafficking of drugs, weapons and, above all, people. The importance of this family tie had been drummed into him from his earliest boyhood: both the advantages that it offered and the duties it involved.
It was pure chance that Kula overheard two State officials talking about the President’s proposed war on slavery while sitting in a men’s room cubicle, invisible to the officials standing at the urinals. His response was anything but random. He understood at once how the new policy could impact on the family business and conducted a private trawl through the department’s computers, easily bypassing the security systems that he himself had helped develop and install, to find out more about it.
Having come up with a date and a place for the President’s announcement, Kula called a friend at the Albanian embassy in DC and asked him and his family over for a barbecue he and his wife Cindy were having that Sunday afternoon. The invitation would have aroused no suspicion, even if Kula were being watched, which he was not: Albania is an ally of the US and it is perfectly normal for diplomats of all nations to make social contacts in the cities where they are posted. It is, in fact, their job. That this particular diplomat was also connected to the Visar clan was a detail of which the American security agencies were unaware. But even if they had been, there are few agents able to speak Gjuha shqipe, the language of Albania, particularly not in the colloquial north-western Geg dialect in which Bobby Kula and his contact were chatting over the franks, slaw and Coors Lights. The contact used the same dialect when passing the news on to the palatial villa in the hills of Nueva Andalucía, looking over the Spanish resort of Puerto Banús, where Arjan Visar was spending the weekend.
Visar was an intellectual among gangsters. He had a chess-player’s mind, was able to think several moves ahead, devising strategies of his own and anticipating those of his opponents. He came to a swift conclusion about the implications of the information he had received and what needed to be done, but not wishing to act rashly, he gave himself a further hour to let his mind settle. Then he reconsidered the problem and concluded that his initial response was the correct one. Only at that point did he start giving orders.
16
Damon Tyzack was invisible to anyone driving by less than fifty yards from where he lay on the grassy slope. But he could see the cars and trucks on the narrow local road, just off Highway 88 in Amador County, northern California. And he could hear the tyres whispering on the blacktop, like waves on a shingle beach. The landscape, too, possessed a gentle, rolling swell, and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada were softened to a smoky grey by the dying light of a summer dusk. The tourism people hereabouts called their patch the Heart of the Mother Lode, in memory of the forty-niners who’d thronged there during the Gold Rush. These days the mines were gone, or converted into visitor attractions, and the land was given over to vineyards
and ranches, like the one that sprawled for a couple of thousand acres on the far side of the road.
The owner was a financier by the name of Norton Krebs, whose business was based in San Francisco, 125 miles away. For the past five years, Krebs had handled investments for corporations controlled by Tyzack and his associates. These investments had lost a great deal of their value and the kind of clients Krebs had cultivated took a less forgiving view than the average investor of a financial adviser continuing to pay himself large fees while delivering poor performance. They saw the destruction of their wealth as, in every sense, a capital offence. So Krebs was marked for death.
The hit would go down within the next few minutes, but the hard work had been done over the past several days. The morning after he’d arrived in San Francisco, Tyzack had ridden Amtrak’s California Zephyr train to Salt Lake City, then caught a bus to Boise. There he’d bought a second-hand Toyota Tacoma truck, for cash, using fake ID in Carver’s name. He drove it back down to Amador County and spent three full days familiarizing himself with the details of Norton Krebs’s life, movements and environment. He took care to speak to people in the towns of Jackson, Iona, Sutter Creek and Amador City, nearest to the Krebs ranch, both to gain information and leave a memory in their minds – a memory of a dark-haired, green-eyed Englishman.
Late on Saturday night, he’d driven across northern California and into Nevada, to the parking garage of the Lake Tahoe casino where Krebs was spending the weekend. That was where Tyzack had replaced the tyre-valves of Krebs’s Escalade with valves that looked identical to any casual inspection, but which contained a radio-activated explosive filament. When triggered, they were enough to cause a blow-out that would, if carefully timed and located, cause any but the finest driver to lose control of their vehicle.
The booby-trapped valves were an old Russian trick, but Tyzack had been taught about them when he had served in the British Special Forces. Tyzack hadn’t spent long serving Her Majesty. But he’d learned a very great deal.
Beneath him the road curved sharply to the left, following the line of the valley. Just before the turn, the land fell away from the road into a minor ravine around thirty feet deep. A live oak tree grew by the side of the ravine, centuries old to judge by the mighty girth of its trunk and the spread of its evergreen branches.
Between the road and the ravine stretched a barbed-wire fence. Norton Krebs was a perfectionist. He prided himself on demanding nothing but the best. He’d spent a fortune upgrading the boundary of his land with wire that was strong enough to stop a charging bull, stretched tight between posts bedded firmly in the ground. Tyzack was counting on that perfectionism to kill his target.
Krebs, he calculated, was going to approach the lefthander with the confidence and speed of a man who knew the route so well his driving was virtually automatic. His concentration would be impaired by fatigue and the after-effects of the alcohol, cocaine and ecstasy he’d been consuming through most of his waking hours since Friday evening.
Now a car was coming down the road towards Tyzack. Its Xenon headlights were on, but there was still enough ambient light for him to be able to see beyond them and make out the domineering bulk of the Escalade, the Diamond White paint-job and 22-inch chrome wheels identifying it as Krebs’s.
Tyzack took his time. He waited until Krebs was just fractionally short of the point where he would have to brake, the car’s speed up around 70 mph, before he depressed the control that sent a radio signal to the explosive valves. Then he just let events play out of their own accord.
Just two of the charges detonated. The driver’s side tyres remained intact. But that only added to the catastrophic effect of the other explosions, as the functioning wheels kept driving, pushing the car away from the centre of the road, towards the hazards beyond.
Krebs’s reactions were as sluggish as predicted. He’d been driving along a dry road on a warm, clear evening with very little traffic about, so there’d been no reason to anticipate any problems. The simultaneous disintegration of two tyres and the immediate, total loss of steering and brakes took him entirely by surprise.
His eyes widened, his mouth dropped open and the Escalade swerved across the tarmac, its high body lurching from side to side. It rocketed off the road and hit the cattle wire at full tilt. The fiery rasping of wheel rims on the road was replaced by the screech of the wire on the car’s bodywork as it rode up the radiator grille then over the high, bulbous bonnet, stretching like a bowstring as the nearest fence-posts were torn from their footings.
Then, as the massive white machine approached the edge of the ravine, an invisible hand seemed to let the bowstring loose and it cut through the first six feet of the Escalade’s cabin as easily as a wire through cheese, slicing Norton Krebs clean in two below the shoulder. Only then did the barbed wire snap. The release of tension catapulted the Escalade towards the oak tree and then sent it pinballing off its trunk into the ravine, where it finally came to rest, as ripped and lifeless as its owner.
Tyzack let out his breath and gave a slight shake of the head. Then he turned away from the scene of the crime. The unexploded tyre-valves were still down there in the wreckage, but Damon Tyzack did not make any move to retrieve them. He walked away down the road, towards the truck he’d parked half a mile away, without a backward glance.
17
Carver was not a horseman. He’d always left that kind of thing to the fancy-dressed toy soldiers in the Household Cavalry, keeping the tourists happy at Buckingham Palace with their shiny breastplates and plumed helmets. But since arriving at the ranch he’d grasped that if he wanted to know Madeleine Cross and understand who she really was, he’d have to change his ways.
One morning, lying in bed with her head nestled on his shoulder and her legs wrapped around his, the heat of her on his thigh, she started telling him about her childhood.
‘We were absolutely blue-collar,’ she murmured. He could feel her breath on his skin, and her own skin was smooth and warm against the arm he’d draped around her. ‘My father took jobs wherever he could find them, working the fields as a farmhand, or on construction sites. I wore hand-me-downs from the families Mom cleaned for.’
‘If you were so poor, how come you learned to ride?’ Carver asked.
‘I had a horse called Blaze. Well, he belonged to our neighbour, but to me he was mine. I used to ride him bareback in the summer. When I’d dismount you could see the sweat-prints from my legs on his back. You know, it’s crazy, but even now, when I talk about Blaze, or just think about him, I can smell him, that horse-smell, the leather and sweat.’
‘There you go,’ said Carver, ‘horses smell. No wonder I can’t stand them.’
She propped herself on her elbows and he shifted under her, so that they were face to face.
‘But you can stand me, right?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes,’ he said, a greedy smile on his face, his hands moving down to her buttocks, pushing her closer to him.
‘And you desire me very much…’
‘I think that’s pretty obvious.’
She gave a little wriggle. ‘Mmm… seems to be.’
‘So are we going to do something about that?’
He moved his mouth towards hers, closing his eyes, expecting her to meet him. Instead, she pushed away with her hands, slipped out of his grasp and off the bed. By the time he looked up, she was standing several feet away, her naked body glowing in the light that filtered through the bedroom curtains.
‘No!’ she said. ‘We don’t do anything until you at least try to ride one of my horses.’
‘You’re kidding…’
‘Not at all,’ she insisted, opening her underwear drawer and pulling on her knickers.
Carver got out of bed, never taking his eyes off her and stood in front of her, half a head taller and sixty pounds heavier. She remained motionless as he ran his strong hands down the sides of her body, pausing for a moment on her waist before continuing downwards, his fingers spreadi
ng over her hips and sliding under the flimsy strips of fabric they found there.
‘I could rip these off right now,’ he said.
‘Don’t,’ she said, quietly, but with absolute seriousness.
Carver’s pulse was racing, his breathing heavy. His hunger for her was overwhelming and he was certain that she wanted him just as much. If he took her now there would be absolutely nothing she could do to stop him, but her trust and faith in him would be lost. Without that, they would have nothing.
So he stepped away from her, slowed his breathing and even let a wry smile play across his mouth as he said, ‘All right then, where are the gee-gees?’
Carver fell off more than his jarred bones, aching backside and injured dignity would have liked, but Maddy taught him to ride Western-style, leaning back in the saddle, the reins in one hand, his stirrups so long that his legs fell straight down the flanks of his horse. With Buster bounding along beside them, they rode out across the open land that took up most of the ranch’s 120 acres and picked their way uphill between the pine trees, where the air was cool. In the early morning, with the dew still glistening under the horses’ hooves, the pines gave off a scent that was as sweet as a pina colada. Carver could smell vanilla, too.
‘Some folks call them Sugar Pines,’ Maddy said.
While they’d been riding through the woods, Buster had suddenly started barking. He’d dashed away into the undergrowth, stopped dead, and then begun digging at the earth with his front paws, growling excitedly. Carver had felt a tremor of danger from a source he could not place, an indeterminate, undefined threat. But then Maddy smiled at him, and the feeling vanished like the shadow of a cloud when the sun comes out, burned away by her presence.