Assassin

by Tom Cain

  ‘I shouldn’t have told your men that. I should have waited and just gone to get it myself.’

  ‘But then you would have been committing a crime, so it is as well that you did not. As it is, you have been a great help to me, Mr Olsen. Thank you. And I will have one of my men drive you home, so you won’t even miss your moped.’

  When Olsen had been led away, Ravnsborg sat for a while in silence, letting the many apparently contradictory elements of the evening’s events sort themselves out in his mind. Olsen’s survival was just one of these. If Carver were really a heartless killer, why had he not killed the young man when stealing his ridiculous little moped? It would have removed a witness. Ravnsborg wished there were some way of seeing precisely what had happened around the hotel and up on the roof of the opera house. Oslo was not littered with CCTV cameras every few metres: the Norwegian government, unlike so many of its counterparts, still trusted its people to go about their business unobserved.

  Ravnsborg was musing on this fact when a thought suddenly struck him. The government might take that view, but the people, particularly the young, were just like their counterparts everywhere else. They photographed or videoed every single moment of their lives. And then they put it online.

  The massive policeman lumbered off to the incident room. He looked around, mentally sorting through his officers until he found two detectives who looked particularly juvenile and, to his eyes, badly dressed. He thought they would understand the task best.

  ‘You, you… come here!’ he snapped. ‘Go on the internet – Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, all those places. Find everything you can relating to the bomb at the Haakon, and the shoot-out at the Operaen. Oh, and anything that anyone took between those two points. In fact, find every damn frame of material taken in Oslo tonight. Stick it all together. Then come and get me.’

  It was amazing, Ravnsborg mused, this total change in the way the world perceived itself, and it had happened almost overnight. There had been no massive advertising campaigns, no government policies: just a spontaneous global decision to make everyone visible everywhere, all the time.

  Already there were six different YouTube entries that showed the actual moment of the explosion, and more than twice as many dealing with the aftermath. The first group all began with something extraneous in the foreground: a girl posing awkwardly for her boyfriend, trying not to look embarrassed; two teenage lads pulling silly faces at the rich folk gathered inside the hotel café; an elderly couple arm in arm, smiling at the grandchild recording them on his phone. But the next scene was always the same: a blast of light and flame; a tremor as the force hit the person holding the camera or phone; the boom of the blast, followed by screams and shouts of alarm. The YouTube films all kept rolling. In the post 9/11 world, everyone understood the value of live disaster footage. But there was another film, retrieved by detectives at the site itself. Immediately after the blast, this one switched to a single, unchanging shot: the night sky seen through the blood-smeared filter of the glass that had killed the young woman behind the lens.

  It was now possible for Ravnsborg to assemble a sort of montage that showed the run-up to the explosion, the blast itself and the aftermath from a series of different angles. He knew now that Madeleine Cross had not been lying when she described the events at her café table. He could see her behind the face-pulling boys. Larsson, too, was there. And, yes, there was a third figure, just rising from the table as the film began. That must be Carver.

  It was only when he had spent more than two hours watching the same few minutes of footage again and again that Ravnsborg spotted a fourth individual, a red-haired man, standing outside the café, tapping out a message on a phone. That same figure was on another film, walking into the hotel, barely a second before the blast. He could be seen emerging fifteen seconds later. So, too, was a man who appeared to be wearing a T-shirt similar to the one worn by the man in the café that Ravnsborg had identified as Carver. He stood for a moment outside the hotel, a single point of stillness among the confusion all around him. Then the red-haired man came up behind him.

  That took him by surprise, thought Ravnsborg, zooming in as close as he could on Carver’s face.

  The other man was very close to him, whispering in his ear. Were these instructions, perhaps? Or was he making threats? For Carver’s face twice winced as though he had been hurt. Ravnsborg wished he had a shot that could give him a view from beside or behind the redhead, just so he could see what he was sticking in Carver’s back. The obvious assumption was a knife, for Carver then jerked forward, arching his back and pulling his hands round to protect his kidneys.

  Ravnsborg could then see what Carver had not, the red-haired man sidling back into the crowd and disappearing down the street. Carver, meanwhile, looked around. He saw someone – Ravnsborg knew from his witness statement that this must have been Larsson – then ran.

  But why? Was this the natural reaction of a fugitive, fleeing the scene of a crime? Or was Carver fleeing something else?

  The answers to his question, Ravnsborg felt sure, lay up on the roof of the opera house. He went and poured himself yet another black coffee, then settled down again. He was using a workstation equipped with a widescreen the size of a large domestic TV. It enabled him to get several different shots in front of him at the same time.

  His young officers had collected all the material they had found into folders covering specific times, places and incidents. Sipping on his coffee as he worked, he clicked on the one marked ‘Operaen’. There were nine different video files, and 114 photos.

  Ravnsborg rubbed his aching eyes. He slapped his hand against his cheek to sting himself back awake. And then he got down to work.

  53

  Karin Madsen lay in bed at three in the morning watching the man she was about to marry emerge from the bathroom and walk towards her. There was barely any light in the room, but even so she could tell just by the set of Thor Larsson’s shoulders and the heavy, sighing sound of his breathing that something was wrong: something above and beyond the obvious stress of the past six hours.

  She propped herself up on one elbow and asked, ‘What is it?’

  ‘What’s what?’ he mumbled, almost as if he were making a point of sounding exhausted.

  ‘Do you think I won’t notice something’s wrong? Come on, Thor.’

  ‘I’m just wrecked, OK? It’s been a long day, and a night from hell.’

  ‘I know, darling, it must have been terrible. I understand. But that’s not what I mean. I know you too well, Thor Larsson. I’ve changed your bedpan and wiped your backside. You can’t fool me. Something’s wrong.’

  He sat down on the bed. ‘Yes, Kari, something is wrong,’ he said irritably, stating the blindingly obvious. ‘My oldest friend has disappeared. The police say he is responsible for a terrorist attack. His girlfriend doesn’t know if he is alive or dead, innocent or guilty. I have been interviewed by the police, and they told me they may speak to me again. And I’m probably going to have a whole bunch of cops as uninvited guests at my wedding. So yes, something’s wrong.’

  Well, it was a reasonable explanation, but it wasn’t the whole story, Kari was sure of it. Something else was eating at Thor. But whatever it was, he wasn’t going to tell her now. If she pressed him any harder it would only lead to an argument and she didn’t want that, not two nights before her wedding.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, reaching out to rub his back. ‘Come to bed now. I’ll hold you till you fall asleep.’

  But it was Karin who slept first, and Thor Larsson who lay in the darkness, guts churning, eyes staring blankly up at the ceiling for hours until exhaustion finally claimed him.

  54

  Arjan Visar had received the technical specifications for the weapon that would be used to kill Lincoln Roberts within seventy-two hours of Tyzack’s departure from his villa. He was impressed. Tyzack might be an animal, but it had taken cunning and imagination for him to devise his means of attack,
and initiative to commission the design he had in mind.

  The finished device, however, depended on an existing piece of technology that could not be purchased without attracting undue attention. So it was that a modest commercial premises tucked away in a mostly residential area of detached family homes in the English Midlands was burned to the ground as a result of an electrical fault. Amidst the damage caused by the blaze itself and the efforts of fire crews to put it out before it could spread to nearby houses, no one noticed the absence of two small units from the company’s inventory. Within a couple of hours of the theft, they had been taken to a small engineering company, whose workshop was located under a railway arch in Manchester, and work had already begun on their conversion from the peaceful uses for which they were designed to the deadly intent conceived by Damon Tyzack.

  As the engineers were getting down to work on their conversion job, Jack Grantham was at Heathrow trying to find a seat on an early-morning flight to Oslo. It wasn’t easy. The news that the Norwegian police were looking for an English male – they hadn’t specified that he was a suspect, but that was the only inference that could be drawn – had suddenly given what would otherwise be a shocking but relatively minor tragedy a much more powerful domestic angle. When, in the early hours, Oslo University Hospital announced that two of the seriously wounded victims of the King Haakon Hotel bombing had both passed away, and that they were a British pensioner couple, that just added to the feeding frenzy. It had taken a discreet conversation with a senior British Airways executive to squeeze Grantham on to the 7.20 plane, leaving a big-name newspaper columnist fuming as he was bumped on to a lunchtime departure.

  On the plane, Grantham returned to the subject that had been nagging at him for hours. He’d spent the previous evening at the movies: even intelligence officers, after all, have wives and social lives that need to be attended to occasionally. When he left the cinema he forgot to switch his phone back on. It wasn’t till he was home that he remembered and picked up the text Carver had sent him, which consisted of three short messages topped by two questions and a statement: ‘Was this you? If not, who? Framed.’

  The answer to the first question was easy: no, it damn well hadn’t been him that sent the messages to Carver. So who was it? Well, ‘Mrs Z’ herself, Olga Zhukovskaya, was still a Deputy Director of the FSB, and strong, reliable rumours suggested she would soon be its Director. Yet there seemed no reason that Grantham could think of why she would want to stage a bombing in the middle of Oslo (and he had spent half the night going through the bombing’s casualty list trying to find one), still less plant it on Carver. He had got her out of a very nasty hole in the Waylon McCabe affair. She had no reason to feel anything but gratitude towards him. That wouldn’t stop her screwing him if she could gain sufficient advantage from it, of course. But try as he might, Grantham could not think what that advantage might be.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, there were senior officers at the CIA who knew about Carver’s role in disposing of McCabe. They might well have uncovered Zhukovskaya’s involvement by now – Grantham had hardly publicized it at the time – but again, he could not see how the Cousins stood to benefit by what had happened in Oslo. After all, one of the victims – the presumed target, according to some reports – had been a prominent anti-slavery campaigner, and President Roberts was about to go balls-out against slavery.

  Grantham was a professional conspiracy theorist. Experience had told him there was no explanation so bizarre that it could not, in fact, be true. So he was willing to consider the possibility, however grotesque, that some headcase at Langley had decided that the death of a photogenic campaigner against human trafficking would give the President’s crusade some handy advance publicity. It was not inconceivable, either, that this was a cover-up of some kind. One of the grubbiest aspects of this sordid trade had long been the involvement of senior UN officials, military personnel and corporate leaders in facilitating the passage of trafficked women through territories like Montenegro, Kosovo and Bosnia. Plenty of respectable men, with no desire to be embarrassed, had procured women for themselves. It was not inconceivable that their allies in the CIA might wish to snuff out any embarrassment. But using a man with known links to SIS, the Agency’s closest ally, well, that was just bad manners.

  And then there was a third possibility. One man knew every detail of Carver’s activities, because he knew virtually every detail of Grantham’s own working life: Bill Selsey. Grantham hoped, very much, that this had nothing to do with Selsey. They may have had their differences of late, and his deputy’s sudden interest in playing office politics had come as an unpleasant surprise, but there was a big difference between professional rivalry and active involvement in cold-blooded murder. Surely Selsey would never have crossed that line?

  Still, someone had crossed the line, and Grantham wanted to know who it was. He was flying to Oslo in the guise of a Foreign Office official, concerned about the involvement of Her Majesty’s subjects in this unpleasant event. At the airport, a first secretary from the British embassy, who just happened to be the Secret Service’s representative there, led him to a waiting Jaguar.

  ‘Are we all set up?’ Grantham asked as the car purred away from the terminal.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said his officer, who was showing a distracting amount of bare thigh beneath the hem of her skirt. ‘Everything’s arranged. The detective in charge is called Ravnsborg. He’s quite an interesting man, actually, quite subtle – you know, for a policeman. Anyway, he seems very happy to help. In fact, I get the impression he’s really keen to meet you.’

  ‘Oh great,’ said Grantham, ‘an enthusiastic copper. Can’t wait.’

  55

  Carver came to with his brain as numb as a novocained tooth, his mouth as dry and malodorous as a chicken-house floor and his bladder as uncomfortably swollen as a porn star’s boob-job. He’d been seated on a plain wooden kitchen chair. There were no restraints on his hands or feet. Tyzack was standing no more than ten feet away, bending over a small metal-framed table, arranging something on it. Carver couldn’t believe his luck. He leaped from the chair, took two quick strides towards Tyzack…

  … and was jerked back by a sudden, choking tug at his throat so violent that at first he lost his footing and thrashed around like a condemned man on the end of a noose before he could get to his feet and retreat, coughing and gagging, back to the chair.

  Tyzack was convulsed with laughter as he turned to face Carver. ‘I’m sorry, but that was priceless!’ he gasped, trying to catch his breath. ‘Excellent kit! It’s bungee-jumping cord, in case you were wondering, and much too strong for you to have any hope of breaking it. The item round your neck is what’s known among the sado-masochist fraternity as a slave collar. They tell me it’s very comfy, nicely padded. I dare say that’s why you didn’t notice it straight away. It’s padlocked at the back, incidentally, and I filled the lock with superglue, so you won’t be picking it. Oh, and the shackle at the end of the cord, where it joins the collar, has been welded shut, so that won’t come undone either.’

  Carver looked around. He was sitting in the middle of a small wooden barn, maybe twenty feet by forty, illuminated by sunlight streaming through an open window high up on one wall.

  The table at which Tyzack had been standing was directly opposite Carver. It was flanked by two large plasma-screen TV sets, angled towards him. More sets were arranged in a circle, surrounding him.

  On the table stood a fifteen-litre bottle of mineral water, the kind that sits upturned in an office water-cooler. Next to it Tyzack had placed a single plastic cup and beside that a small cardboard box on which the word ‘Japp’ was printed in red and gold script. The final item, to the right of the table, was made of white plastic and stood about a foot tall.

  ‘It’s your bog,’ Tyzack said, spotting where Carver’s eyes were directed. ‘Do you fancy a slash? I bet you do. You were out the best part of twelve hours. Must be bursting. Go ahead, don’t mind me.’<
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  Carver remained exactly where he was. Tyzack wasn’t the only man with an agenda in the room. Carver was determined to get him to name Lincoln Roberts as his target. That meant messing with Tyzack’s head, keeping him talking, getting under his skin, no matter what it cost him, or what pain he had to endure. Carver was used to pain. It didn’t hurt half as much as the knowledge that he’d screwed up.

  Tyzack shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Only here’s the thing. You’re going to be here quite a while, and very soon you’ll be totally alone. I won’t even be in this boring little country and there are no other houses for miles around. When I leave here I will activate a booby-trap system. A friend of yours installed it, top-quality work. Once I flick the switch, anyone who tries to get in or out is going to meet a very sticky end. So if you want to live, you’ve got to be able to get to that water and pray that I decide to come back.’

  Tyzack gestured towards the cardboard box. ‘I’m a generous man, so I’ve also left you some nice choccy bars, just in case you get peckish. They’re called Japp, but they’re really just Mars bars for Norwegians and I never met a soldier who didn’t like a nice Mars. Helps him work, rest and play. But now I come to look at it, I have a feeling I made a mistake. I put this table too far away from you. Well, I must have done, otherwise you’d have got to me by now. Now, I’m prepared to move it all a bit closer, so you can eat and drink. But how much closer, that’s the question. One has to be precise about these things and I’m going to need your help. What you’re going to do is get up and see how far you can go before you get pulled back by the bungee cord, or strangled by the collar. Come on, up you get!’

  Carver stayed exactly where he was. Tyzack glared at him. Then he walked round behind Carver, took three quick steps towards him and kicked the wooden chair out from under him. Carver fell to the floor, felt the cord yanking at his neck and was forced to scramble to his feet. There wasn’t enough slack to let him sit on the ground, still less lie down.