Assassin

by Tom Cain

  ‘He’s just chasing rabbits,’ she said, kicking her horse into a walk. She called the dog. Reluctantly, Buster stopped his digging and trotted after them. A minute later, the whole episode had been forgotten and the main thing on his mind was trying to work out exactly what he had going with Maddy. Whatever it was, pretty soon he’d have to leave. It was going to take three flights and the best part of twenty-four hours to get him to Norway and Thor Larsson’s wedding.

  Standing in the kitchen a few hours later, watching Maddy cook supper, a thought struck him.

  ‘I’ve been invited to a wedding,’ he told her. ‘Would you like to come?’

  ‘OK, weddings are good, so long as they’re not mine…’

  ‘No, it’s a mate of mine called Thor Larsson. He’s this ridiculously tall Norwegian with a big mop of ginger hair. He looks like a Viking Rastaman. We’ve done a lot of work together.’

  ‘Really? What kind of work?’

  Carver shrugged. ‘Hard to describe – security consultancy, that sort of thing. Anyway, Thor’s lived in Geneva for years, like me, but he’s Norwegian and so’s Karin, the girl he’s marrying. The wedding’s going to be in Oslo. Do you want to come?’

  ‘Of course I’ll come, that would be great. I guess I’ll have to get someone in to look after the horses, but, oh my God… what am I going to wear?’

  She was laughing as she said it, but Carver kept his face deadpan.

  ‘We have to change planes in Paris,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘If we left early we could stop off for a night, do a little shopping in the morning. I need a suit. Maybe you could find something too. My treat.’

  She sighed happily, then wrapped her arms around him. ‘You just earned yourself a really fun night,’ she said.

  18

  Damon Tyzack was in the field next to the house, spying on the lovers through high-powered binoculars. They’d been standing right in front of the kitchen windows, without any inkling that they were being observed, when the Cross woman took Carver in her arms.

  The neckline of her thin cotton top was elasticated and she had pulled it over her shoulders, leaving them bare, so that her sleeves were puffed around her upper arm. He imagined what it would be like to stick his fist in her face, put a knife to her throat, hear her begging him to stop.

  Tyzack had never caught quite such an intimate glimpse of Carver and his piece before, but he knew all about their little love nest. One afternoon, when the pair of them were off on yet another ride, he’d left his hide among the trees and come down for a tour of the place.

  ‘My God, it’s the little house on the prairie,’ Tyzack had muttered to himself, examining what struck him as a distinctly modest, unimpressive property. It was wood-built, with an awning surrounding it on all four sides, supported by rough-cut timbers and hung with baskets of mountain flowers. Inside, the ground floor was all stone-flagged. The walls were treated with some sort of wash to make the wood seem paler. Vases, knick-knacks and piles of embroidered cushions proclaimed that the place belonged to a woman. But it wasn’t hard to see that there was a man about the house.

  A big, brass-framed double bed stood in the bitch’s room upstairs. A pair of men’s trousers was draped over one end of the frame. A five-blade razor rested in a mug by the bathroom sink. Carver had made himself right at home.

  Later, Tyzack had gone down to the garage where Cross kept her gaudily painted old truck and slipped a small, magnetized tracking device inside one of the rear wheel arches. He wanted to be able to follow the lovers if they ever left their little nest. He, meanwhile, would remain completely undetected, just as he had been when the two of them had been up in the woods, sitting on their horses just yards from his hide, babbling inanely about the trees smelling of vanilla.

  The worst of it was, Tyzack could see that Carver was having a high old time. He’d tucked away a nice little pile of cash. He had a pretty girl making goo-goo eyes at him. He was getting his meals cooked. Oh yes, our Samuel was as happy as a sandboy. That happiness angered Tyzack more than anything. It wasn’t right that the man who had wrecked his life should be so at peace with the world. He couldn’t just lie there doing nothing about it. The situation demanded a fly or two in the ointment.

  Tyzack put away his binoculars and went back up to the woods. Then he cleaned up his hide, covered his traces and went on his way.

  19

  Jake Tolland drove past the endless blocks of Dubai’s building sites, each tower higher than the last, its design more flamboyant, its promises to prospective tenants more outrageous. Yet many of those glittering towers lay empty; many of the building sites were idle. The boom was over, the miracle exposed as a financial sleight of hand. The giant steel skeletons looked like a dinosaur graveyard, Ground Zero for the global economy.

  Tolland turned into a quiet residential street in the Jumeirah district, parked his car and approached a metal door set into a high concrete wall. He pressed the button on the intercom and then said, ‘Hello? This is Jake Tolland, from the London Times. I have an appointment to see Mrs Khan.’

  There was no response, just a buzzing sound as the door unlocked. Tolland, a tall, bespectacled stringbean in his mid-twenties, with the first signs of hair loss already eating away at his temples, made his way across a dusty yard, dotted with spindly trees. Three small children were playing a game in the dirt, scattering the ground with cheap, brightly coloured plastic toys. A flight of concrete steps led up to a small, boxy, modern villa.

  Tolland rang the bell beside the glass front door and watched as a woman, dressed in a plain black trouser suit, her head covered by a grey scarf that wrapped around her neck, crossed the tiled floor of the hallway and opened the door.

  He gave a friendly, ingratiating smile. ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I’m-’

  ‘I know who you are, sweetie,’ said the woman in the hallway, in an accent that came direct from the back streets of Brooklyn. ‘I read you all the time online. Why don’t you come right on in?’

  Jake Tolland had always wanted to be a foreign correspondent. Reckoning that a significant proportion of all the bad news – and thus good stories – in the world came from a bloodstained smear of revolution, war, disorder and crime that stretched from Russia, through the Balkans and into the Middle East, he had studied Russian at Cambridge University and then learned Arabic at the Language Centre of London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Armed with these two qualifications and an inquisitive nature, Tolland soon amassed an impressive portfolio of freelance articles and a couple of well-received books that earned him a contract at The Times.

  His work also brought him to the attention of talent scouts at MI6, who have long used Fleet Street journalists as auxiliary spies. For the past three years, Tolland had been carrying out low-risk intelligence jobs, gathering information and acting as a conduit between field agents and London. So he had not been in the least surprised to get a call from Bill Selsey, tipping him off to a juicy little yarn about a mysterious Englishman who had been buying and then freeing trafficked prostitutes in Dubai.

  ‘Go to a place called the House of Freedom,’ Selsey had told him. ‘It’s a refuge run by an American woman called Sadira Khan. She’s married to a Pakistani, hence the name. We think there’s a girl at the refuge called Lara. She was sent there by an Englishman, who appears to have bought her at some sort of slave auction and then freed her – proper Scarlet Pimpernel stuff. We’re interested in him, so be a good chap, see what you can find out, pass it all on to us, and get yourself an exclusive. All I ask is have a word with me before you file. Let me run an eye over what you’ve written, make sure there’s nothing in there we’d rather keep private.’

  Like any refuge, the House of Freedom was filled with vulnerable, traumatized women. It had taken Tolland an hour of patient persuasion on the telephone to arrange an appointment, and still more negotiation, sitting around a dining table in a bare, magnolia-painted room, before Sadira agreed to speak to Lara Dashian on hi
s behalf.

  ‘But I’m not promising anything,’ she said. ‘If Lara doesn’t want to talk, that’s it, you leave. And even if she does talk, there are no names, no photographs, nothing that could identify her. I don’t know how much you know about the men who traffick young women like Lara, but there is nothing, absolutely nothing they won’t do. Her life is at stake.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Tolland, cheerfully imagining how well Sadira Khan’s warning would read, suitably framed by his own dramatic prose, right up at the top of the piece. For the next twenty minutes, he waited in the room before Sadira Khan reappeared with a tiny slip of a girl whose dark, almost black hair framed a pretty, fine-boned face. Two huge brown eyes peered out from beneath her fringe. They were lovely eyes. They should have shone with life. But all Tolland could see was a veneer of blank numbness, stretched tight over a limitless depth of pain. In that moment all his professional, cold-hearted objectivity disappeared through the window. He could understand precisely why the man Bill Selsey had described as a Pimpernel had paid so much to free her. Tolland would happily have done the same himself. He wanted to take her under his wing, to be her knight in shining armour. And because he was above all else a reporter, he wanted to tell her story.

  Gradually, gently, with infinite care, Tolland led Lara down the road from innocent schoolgirl to brutalized prostitute. He made no attempt to hide his shock at what he was hearing, his anger at the vile obscenities of which his fellow-men were capable, or his compassion for the suffering Lara Dashian had endured. Yet all the while, another part of him was exulting. He knew that she was telling a tale that would make his name. And now they came to the final act.

  Lara told him about the nightclub. She described her encounter with an Indian, Tiger Dey, and an Englishman who called himself Pablo. She talked about the moment she knew she had been bought and the walk up to the Englishman’s suite.

  ‘Did Pablo ever tell you his full name?’ Tolland asked. ‘What was he called?’

  Lara chewed at her lips. It was obvious that she had been given a name.

  ‘You can tell us, it’s all right,’ said Tolland, his voice reassuring yet quietly insistent.

  ‘He was kind to me. I do not want to get him into trouble with the police.’

  ‘But I am not a policeman. I will not tell them anything.’

  Tolland saw Lara looking at Sadira Khan, silently begging for her guidance. He willed himself to stay silent, not even turning to see the older woman’s response.

  ‘It’s all right, honey, you can tell him,’ she said.

  Lara looked once more at her protector, seeking a last iota of reassurance, then her eyes returned to Tolland. He could tell she was still nervous, not yet quite convinced that it was wise as she murmured, ‘He said his name was Carver.’

  20

  As soon as he had returned to his car, Jake Tolland got out his BlackBerry and sent a brief summary of the conversation to MI6. Selsey mailed him back with congratulations and one simple instruction: ‘Essential NO mention name Carver in story.’ Minutes later, Selsey was in Jack Grantham’s office.

  ‘It was Carver,’ he said. ‘I just heard from Tolland. She also said he told her to call him Pablo.’

  ‘You hadn’t primed him in advance?’ Grantham was groping for straws.

  ‘No,’ Selsey insisted. ‘I gave him the names of the woman who ran the refuge and the girl. But I didn’t say a dickie-bird about Carver, or Pablo. The only way he could know that name is from the girl.’

  ‘And the only way she could know…’ Grantham conceded.

  ‘I’ve managed to get the bank information out of the Swiss,’ Selsey went on, ramming home his advantage. ‘A man answering Carver’s description recently opened a new account. He gave his name as Dirk Vandervart, which is-’

  ‘Another one of Carver’s known aliases,’ Grantham cut in.

  ‘Exactly. And four hundred thousand US dollars have been deposited in that account, in two payments. The first, two weeks before the Dey poisoning, the second on the day he died.’

  Grantham nodded. ‘OK, you win, Carver’s gone back on the game. I can’t say I’m too bothered about him hitting a piece of work like Tiger Dey. And I don’t foresee a problem with the Dubaians, not in the short-term, anyway. We’ll just tell them we have no criminal records for a James Conway Murray. But I don’t want Carver running around bumping people off whenever the mood takes him. So I’m going to tell you what my mum used to tell my dad when she thought I was up to no good.’

  ‘What was that, then?’

  ‘Find out what that boy’s doing. And tell him to stop it.’

  21

  Sooner or later they had to leave the ranch, and Maddy insisted on making a day of it. She told Carver she’d figured out an itinerary. He couldn’t think of any good reason to say no, other than bone idleness, so he went along for the ride. Maddy drove them up to Lake Cascade, where they swam in cold, fresh water and lay on the shore, side by side, letting the sun dry their bodies. Carver had to admit the itinerary was working well so far. He couldn’t work out why he’d not spent more mornings like that. What had he been doing all his life that was so much better?

  Afterwards they headed into Cascade itself, a low-rise cluster of homes, stores and business units either side of the broad, dusty highway. Maddy parked next to a hot-dog stand: a caravan with fabric awning stretched over it, sheltering a bunch of green plastic garden chairs and camping tables. ‘Make mine a chilli dog,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Carver got out of the Bronco and walked over towards the caravan. There was a counter with a middle-aged woman in a floral top standing behind it. From the corner of his eye, Carver saw another car pull into the lot, a silver-grey sedan. He had a feeling he’d seen it on the road earlier that day, but maybe not. It was just another boring car, there must have been millions just like it.

  ‘What can I get you?’ the woman asked.

  ‘One chilli dog, please, and I’ll have…’

  There was a man getting out of the car. He was heading towards the Bronco. Carver couldn’t see the man’s face: he was bearded and wearing shades and a New York Yankees baseball cap. But there was something about him that seemed to nag at his memory. The way he walked, maybe: Carver couldn’t place it.

  ‘You made up your mind, hon?’ said the woman, putting the chilli dog on the counter in front of him.

  Carver frowned, sighing, trying not to lose the path back to his memory of this man. It was there somewhere, he was sure. But no, too late, it had gone.

  ‘Ah… give me another just like that,’ he said, pointing at the chilli dog.

  The man was talking to Maddy. What the hell was going on?

  Tyzack had used the tracker to follow the lovebirds out to the lake and then into town. The moment he saw Carver get out of Cross’s truck, he decided to make his move. He walked across to the Bronco.

  ‘G’day,’ he said. His Australian accent wasn’t the best in the world, but he was sure it was good enough to fool a Yank. He walked alongside the car and sidled up close to the woman still sitting in the driver’s seat, leaning forward a little to invade her personal space and make her nervous.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Her voice was steady, just an edge of irritation. She wasn’t the kind to panic. Tyzack liked that: made her more of a challenge, more enjoyable to break.

  ‘Yeah, I just wondered… I’m trying to get up to Meadows, is this the right road?’

  ‘Sure. Just keep right on up through Donnelly and McCall, it’ll take you straight there.’

  ‘Thanks, love.’

  He didn’t move, just stood there, looking at her.

  ‘Anything else?’ she asked. ‘ ’Cause my boyfriend’s just about to come back with our order, and you wouldn’t want to upset him.’

  ‘Strewth, is he a fighter? Glad you warned me, love. And listen, if he ever gets bored with you, the sloppy seconds’ll see me right.’

  �
��Get lost, jerkoff.’

  ‘Don’t spit the dummy, I’m going. Don’t want any aggro with that bastard boyfriend. Cheers!’

  Then Damon Tyzack turned and strolled back to his car, barely able to keep the grin off his face.

  ‘What was that about?’ Carver asked, handing Maddy her dog.

  ‘Just some creep. Forget about it.’

  Maddy took a bite out of her hot dog, floored the accelerator and swerved out of the parking lot with one hand on the wheel, racing away like a getaway driver leaving a bank-job, taking her anger out on the road. Carver couldn’t help but notice that as furious as she was, she remained in total control of the car. Maybe her dad had taught her that, along with the mechanics. Or maybe she’d learned from someone with a professional interest in developing her skills.

  They were heading south out of town, back towards the ranch, when Maddy shouted at him over the roar of engine, tarmac and wind, ‘I thought we’d start the day nice and easy. You ready for some action now?’

  * * *

  They rafted the North Fork Payette River down from Cabarton Bridge to Smith’s Ferry, riding rapids that provided the perfect amount of heart-pumping, drenching excitement to put smiles back on both their faces. The wooded banks of the canyon ran with wild deer. Bald eagles and osprey wheeled in the sky above the near wilderness. By the time they got back to the car, they were mellow with the contented exhaustion induced by hard but pleasurable physical activity. Carver had a powerful urge for a cold beer and a big, fat cheeseburger. They pulled into the first roadside place they could find. It didn’t look fancy, just a windowless one-storey unit surrounded by a parking lot, but he wasn’t feeling choosy.

  Maddy went to the ladies’ room while Carver went to the bar, ordered two beers, a burger and a chef’s salad, then took the drinks over to a quiet table in the corner. Maddy returned, they chinked their glasses together and sat for a while in what seemed to him like companionable silence till she asked him, ‘OK, what’s the matter?’