by Tom Cain
They’d eaten their starters and finished the first bottle of wine when Carver’s phone trilled, letting him know that he had received a text. He grimaced apologetically and checked it out. The message read: ‘Go to hotel lobby. Internal phone. Dial Room 570. Urgent. Grantham’.
The name and number of the sender were withheld. Carver looked up at Thor and Maddy. ‘Excuse me one second,’ he said.
He tapped out a two-word reply: ‘Prove it’.
Less than a minute later a new message arrived: ‘M25 McCabe breakfast Mrs Z. Now do it. Fast’.
‘Are you OK?’
Carver looked up to see Maddy’s concerned expression. He gave an irritable sigh: ‘Just a voice from the past,’ adding, ‘No, not her,’ to prevent Maddy jumping to the wrong conclusion. ‘Just business.’
The combination of keywords could only have come from Grantham. They referred to a series of events: a road accident engineered by Carver; a fundamentalist maniac Carver had prevented from exploding a nuclear bomb over Jerusalem’s most sacred religious sites; and a breakfast meeting with Grantham and Deputy Director Olga Zhukovskaya of the Russian FSB, successors to the KGB, just before he’d taken out McCabe. The tone of the message certainly sounded like Grantham. The snide irreverence of calling Zhukovskaya ‘Mrs Z’ and the blunt arrogance of his commands were typical of the man. So, for that matter, was his habit of turning up unannounced and unwelcome in Carver’s life.
‘I’ve got to take this,’ he said. ‘Won’t be long.’
Carver got up and walked away from the table, leaving his jacket draped on the chair behind him. He passed the bar on his left as he left the café and walked down a winding corridor that opened out into the lobby. It was an automatic reflex for Carver to scan the area, noting the elderly couple pottering in from the street; the businessman making a complaint of some kind to the front desk and the blonde receptionist patiently indulging him; the family looking through the rack of tourist brochures by the concierge’s desk.
The concierge directed him to an internal phone placed on a reproduction antique table up against the far wall. As Carver crossed the lobby towards it, he had another flicker of intuition: that same sense of something or someone just beyond his field of vision, perceived but not identified. He drove it from his mind as he reached the phone and called the room.
He heard one ring of the bell.
And then the very air around him seemed to be ripped to shreds as the thunderous reverberation of a massive explosion shook the old hotel, followed a second later by the tinnitus trilling of fire alarms, the shouts of men and screams of women. The lobby, which had been so peaceful just a second earlier now became consumed by chaos as guests rushed out of nearby hotel rooms and restaurants, a smattering at first and then a flood. More people appeared on the stairs, some stumbling as they hurried down. An elderly lady lost her footing in the mêlée and fell the final half-dozen steps to the ground. She struggled to get up, but no one stopped to help her.
Amidst the panic and desperation, Carver stood still, looking around, his concentration intensified and his focus sharpened. The blast had shattered a large mirror and filled the air with plaster dust, but he saw that there was no structural damage to the area in which he was standing. For most of the hotel’s occupants, the greatest danger now lay in being trampled in the rush to escape. Carver, however, had a more pressing issue on his mind.
He’d been set up. The call had been a trigger, he was sure of it. He had no proof, but he’d bet everything he possessed that Room 570 had just been obliterated along, presumably, with its occupant. And he was the patsy who had dialled the fatal number.
He scanned the lobby, searching for security cameras through the dusty air. None were visible. But he was working on the assumption that there would be pictures of him somewhere, complete with date and time-code, standing with the guest-phone in his hand. He had to get out, that second.
But what about Maddy? Carver did not fear for her immediate safety. The blast had come from the far end of the hotel, well away from the café, which had its own separate exit, far from the stampede in the lobby. She should have escaped unharmed, but she’d also be worried sick about him. He wanted to go to her and let her know he was fine, but there was no time. In any case it would be better for Maddy and Thor not to know what had happened to him. That way they would have less to give away, if and when the police caught up with them, and less chance of incriminating themselves along with him. He would find a way of getting word to them later. For now, all that mattered was escape.
He looked around, trying to pick the best way out through the crowd, and then he saw, by the now-abandoned concierge desk, flickering in front of him as people ran across his field of vision, the mocking smile, the pale blue eyes and the flame-red hair of a man who was holding up a phone, clearly enough for him to see; turning it round so that he could clearly see the lens of the camera; taunting him as it flashed.
Only then did Carver become conscious of the weight in his hand. He glanced down and realized that he still had the handset in his hands. Barely ten seconds had passed since the detonation. He hadn’t even thought to put it back down.
He flung the phone away, furious with himself. By the time he looked up, the face had gone.
Carver turned towards the door, letting himself be carried along with the torrent of people, out through the hotel’s glass doors on to the street.
The pandemonium was even worse out there. The blast had bombarded the area in front of the hotel with a deadly eruption of brickwork, glass, wood and metal. Dead bodies were strewn across the road, bloodied and half buried by falling rubble. Between them, the fatal shards of razor-edged glass glittered in the late evening sun, the prettiness of the flickering light incongruous, even obscene, amidst the slaughter.
Up above a gaping black emptiness had been punched into the hotel. It was fringed at top and bottom by sagging floors and ceilings, their loose planks and beams flopping like unbrushed strands of hair. Yet as shocking as the sight of the atrocity was, the blandly imperturbable look of the untouched façade to either side of the wound was almost as bad. It was as if the rest of the building were simply ignoring the damage that had been done.
Carver heard sirens in the distance as the first police units and emergency services made their way to the scene. He saw a milling group of bemused, leaderless people as the guests fleeing the hotel met both the survivors of the carnage outside and the first rubber-neckers making their way from the neighbouring streets and the great open space on the far side of the road. And then all that was forgotten as he felt the prick of a knife-point in the small of his back, the choking grip of an arm around his neck, and the hot breath against his left ear, as intimate as a lover.
He heard a man’s voice, halfway between a whisper and a hiss, ‘Hello, old chap… remember me?’
And then it all came back to Carver: the voice, the face, the memories.
‘Tyzack,’ he croaked. ‘It’s been a while.’
‘Hasn’t it just. Feel this?’ Tyzack pressed the knife a little harder, just enough to draw blood. ‘You do know I could kill you, right now, if I wanted, if you tried anything stupid?’
Carver did not respond. Tyzack jabbed the knife again, making him wince.
‘I asked you a question. Answer it.’
‘I know you could kill me, yes,’ Carver muttered.
‘Good,’ said Tyzack. ‘But I’m not going to… not yet. I want to have some sport first, a bit of fun, just like you did with me. I assume you recall the occasion. You thought you were so much better than me. Well then, prove it. I’ve dumped you in the shit, see if you can get out of it. You see, the police know you did this. I just sent them the picture. So they’ll be after you. And I’ll be after you. And when I’ve finished with you I’m going to do a job that is so far beyond anything you’ve even attempted, you’re not even in the same league.’
Tyzack paused. It was plain to Carver that he was longing to be asked what th
e job was. So Carver kept silent. He didn’t want to give Tyzack the satisfaction. And anyway, he wasn’t interested. He’d never possessed any regard for Tyzack and didn’t give a damn about his desperate attempts to compete.
‘Aren’t you curious to know what I’m doing?’ said Tyzack, betraying a trace of frustration that his achievements still went unrecognized. ‘Oh well, mustn’t dally. As you once said to me: “What are you waiting for?” Well, come on… get on with it!’
The blade flashed across Carver’s lower back, cutting through his T-shirt and slicing open his skin in a horizontal line, right above the kidneys. He winced, took an involuntary step forward, away from the blade, but there was no second thrust. He turned round to face Tyzack, but he had disappeared again, swallowed in the crowds. When Carver’s eye caught a flash of red hair, it belonged to Thor Larsson, maybe thirty yards away.
Larsson’s head turned and his eye met Carver for a second. He shouted out, ‘Carver!’ But Carver had already broken eye contact, as furtive as a petty thief, and was dashing away from Larsson, pushing past anyone who got in his way, oblivious to the broken glass and blood beneath his feet. He knew that Damon Tyzack was right. He had to get out of it. Now.
36
Damon Tyzack’s eyes had never left Carver. He wanted to wallow in every second of his misery and confusion. Carver had been kippered and he knew it. He’d been framed good and proper, caught red-handed, still holding on to the phone like an absolute idiot. Back at the hotel, Tyzack had made sure that Carver had seen his smile, just to rub it in, let him know who’d set the trap he’d so kindly walked right into. And then he’d stuck the knife in Carver’s back and said his piece, though the words, like the blade, just scratched the surface of what Tyzack had in mind.
Watching him spot Larsson, though, that had been good. Tyzack had read Carver like a book, as even his mediocre mind grasped that he couldn’t go back to his American tart and his hippy chum. Tyzack smiled to himself. There was plenty about those two that he knew and Carver didn’t; lots more nasty surprises still to come; surprises that would knock that smug, superior expression off his face for good and all.
Tyzack pressed a speed-dial number on his phone. ‘He’s on the move,’ he said. ‘Track him. Let me know where he’s going. Don’t let him out of your sight.’
Next he punched in 22-66-90-50, the number of the Oslo Police District. When his call was answered he said, ‘I have important information about the bombing at the King Haakon Hotel. Please alert the detective in charge of the case that the identity of the bomber is now in your possession. A picture of him standing by the telephone used to detonate the bomb was posted to your standard email contact address, along with details of the perpetrator’s known associates. You will not hear from me again.’
He hung up without bothering to ask whether the call-centre operative to whom he had spoken had understood what he was saying. He simply assumed that she spoke English. Everyone in Norway spoke English.
When he had finished, he took the SIM and memory cards out of his phone, wiped the handset, made sure that no one was watching him and skidded it along the ground, into a pile of rubble from the explosion.
As he left the scene of the crime, Tyzack had already pulled another phone from his jacket and was talking into it: ‘Right, where is he? What’s he doing? Come on, I haven’t got all night…’
He was walking up a side street called Akersgata. A black Mercedes E-Class saloon was parked there, a driver sitting patiently behind the wheel. Tyzack got in. As he sat down, his phone rang. He listened for a few seconds, grunted an acknowledgement of what had been said, then turned to the driver and said, ‘Right, let’s get going. This should be amusing.’
37
Carver’s shirt was sticking to his skin, glued by the blood that seeped from the incision in his back. A wound in the back was the mark of a coward and a quitter, he thought bitterly, and he could hardly argue with that description. He was running away. He was running from the King Haakon Hotel and the savagery that had been unleashed there. He was fleeing from Tyzack’s vengeance; from Thor Larsson, who was still trying to chase him down the street; and from Maddy Cross, somewhere behind him in the chaos. He was getting away from his attacker and putting as much distance as he could between himself and the ones he loved. He hoped they would understand that he was doing it for them, saving them from being infected by his guilt.
He needed to go faster.
Beyond the hotel Karl Johans Gate rose uphill and became a pedestrian zone. There were no cars or motorbikes anywhere. But Oslo is a city of bicycles and many of the people who’d been drawn to the explosion by ghoulish curiosity or a more noble desire to help had simply flung their bikes to the ground when they got close. Carver grabbed one of them and started pedalling.
Carver stood up in the saddle and pumped his legs to get him over the top of the hill. Above him a sign flashed the word ‘Freia’ in swirling script, while a multi-coloured fan of neon lights provided a constantly changing backdrop of red, blue and white that echoed the flashing lights of the police cars, ambulances and fire engines now pulling up outside the hotel.
The people that Carver slalomed around as he rode against the human tide had been hoping for a fun night out. Now they seemed listless, numbed by what had happened and uncertain how they should react. Some were still moving towards the hotel. Others just stood in the street, bereft of the power of decision. Yet others had shrugged their shoulders, accepted that there was nothing they could do and were heading back to their drinks.
He was over the crown of the hill now, and the land fell away in front of him, the broad promenade lined on either side by bars, souvenir shops and clothing stores selling T-shirts and cut-price denims. Carver was pretty sure that the main station was somewhere at the bottom of the slope. He was hoping he could get a night train out of the country, across the Swedish border. Carver was a big fan of the European railway system. The tickets could be bought in cash. There were no customs or passport controls across a vast swathe of the continent, from the northernmost tip of Norway to the furthest-flung Greek island. Trains were a fugitive’s best friend.
In the street outside the King Haakon, Thor Larsson put a comforting arm around Maddy’s shoulder. ‘I’m sure Sam’s fine,’ he said. ‘He’ll be back, don’t you worry.’
‘But he left, and then that happened…’ She stared up at the ruined hotel, round which police were rapidly creating a formal crime zone while firemen and paramedics ventured into the rubble in search of victims and survivors. Maddy had been calling out to any of their number who came near her, begging for information about Carver, but never getting a reply.
She looked at Larsson, her eyes no longer cool and knowing but wide with uncertainty and apprehension. ‘I don’t understand. He hasn’t come back. I think he’s in there somewhere. We’ve got to find him.’
Larsson strengthened his grip as she tried to run towards the wreckage. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, doing his best to sound calm, repressing any hint of the anger seething inside him. He wasn’t going to tell Maddy that he had seen Carver and that he’d been dashing away from the hotel, leaving them both to their own devices. He wasn’t going to call his friend a coward. Not after all that they’d been through. Not to his girlfriend. Not yet.
‘Really,’ he went on, ‘Sam’s been in far worse situations than this. He always pulls through.’
‘Then why isn’t he here?’ she asked, with simple but undeniable logic. ’Why hasn’t he come back for me?’
It wouldn’t be long now, Larsson realized, before her confusion and fear gave way to resentment. For now, she was concerned about Carver. Soon, she would start wondering whether he had deserted her when she needed him most.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing we can do here. We need to be somewhere that Sam will know to look for us. We’ll go back to the hotel. That’s the best place now.’
In the front passenger seat of his car, Damon Tyzack burst out
laughing as he was given the latest report on his mobile phone. ‘He’s on a bicycle? Are you sure? Oh, that’s priceless. Who does he think he is, ET? Well, just make sure he doesn’t fly away, then.’
Tyzack snapped the phone shut and looked out of the window, shaking his head. ‘The great Samuel Carver reduced to riding a pushbike,’ he said, talking to himself as much as his driver. ‘My, my… aren’t we coming down in the world?’
38
There was no one following him down the pedestrian precinct of Karl Johans Gate itself, Carver was sure of it. But his route was crossed at intervals by roads that were open to traffic. Up ahead of him, he saw two black Mercedes saloons drive slowly across the next junction and then stop, pulling up by the side of the road nearest to him, directly blocking his path. The cars’ doors opened and half a dozen men got out. They lined up in front of the cars, each a couple of paces apart, forming a picket line across Karl Johans Gate, waiting for him to reach them. And all of them were armed.
The slope had flattened out briefly, but then plunged down again, much steeper than before. Carver was picking up speed, rocketing downhill. He’d be on them in seconds. He looked back over his shoulder. A third Merc had stopped by the junction he had just crossed, preventing him from retreating back the way he had come. On either side of him, the shops and bars lined the street in an unbroken wall of neon and glass. He was as trapped as a rat in a blocked drainpipe.
The distance between him and the waiting men had halved. They stood there, waiting for him, a line of broad shoulders, thick necks and impassive, patient faces. He had two or three seconds at most before he’d be on them. And then, like a crafty, resourceful rat, Carver spotted his way out.