Assassin

by Tom Cain

  ‘Morten,’ snapped the anti-terrorist officer, shooting out a hand towards Ravnsborg, who shook it and introduced himself.

  ‘Inspector Petersen,’ said the policeman, presenting a sweaty paw. He spoke a couple of further sentences in Norwegian. Grantham did not understand a word, but he didn’t have to. A nervous, eager-to-please subordinate sounded the same in any language.

  ‘This is Mr Grantham… from London,’ Ravnsborg said, in English, with a wave of his hand. ‘He may be able to help us with the man in the barn.’ He gave one of his weary smiles. ‘If he is who we think he is… If he is there at all.’

  Morten gave a grunt that seemed to convey disapproval of Ravnsborg’s apparently vague manner, and scepticism of Grantham’s value to proceedings, all without a word being spoken.

  ‘Hope I can be of assistance,’ said Grantham, offering his own hand and noting Morten’s reluctance to take it.

  ‘Now that you are here, we can proceed,’ Morten said, also switching to English. ‘We have reconnoitred the main building thoroughly. No heat-signatures of any occupants have been detected, nor any sounds. With your permission, we will secure this building, then move on to the barn.’

  Ravnsborg shrugged. ‘That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Mr Grantham?’

  ‘Fine by me,’ said Grantham with a smile whose graciousness was calculated to irritate Morten still further.

  He told himself he really shouldn’t be winding the poor bastard up like this. They all had serious work to do. But it was fun. And Grantham was a great believer in trying to enjoy his work.

  Morten turned on his heel and walked back down towards his men, shouting orders. He was efficient enough, Grantham had to grant him that. There were already men posted on all sides of the farmhouse, covering every possible exit. Now the personnel behind the cars were transformed in seconds from bored layabouts to fast-moving fighting men. Three of them scurried across the open ground towards the front door while the rest stood behind the cars, guns pointed towards the house, ready to fire at the slightest sign of trouble.

  The first blast, however, came from a shotgun blasting the lock on the door. It was followed by the crash of a hand-held battering ram.

  ‘Close your eyes and cover your ears,’ Ravnsborg said to Grantham just seconds before the deafening blast of a flashbang erupted from within the front hall of the farmhouse.

  The three men by the door were already moving into the house before the last echoes had stopped ringing round the surrounding hills. Three more men raced across from the cars, following them into the building. Barely a minute later, Morten was taking a message on his headset.

  Ravnsborg was standing next to him.

  ‘The building’s clear,’ Morten reported. ‘No occupants.’

  ‘Good,’ said Ravnsborg. ‘Now for the barn. And fast. Someone may still be alive in there. There’s no time to waste.’

  69

  The road from Bjørkelangen to the lake at Tvillingtjenn described two sides of a crudely drawn right-angled triangle. The third side was formed by rough, heavily wooded country. That was the way that Maddy and Larsson took, hoping to make up time by cutting the corner. Their route was comprised, at best, of rutted, potholed dirt tracks. When they ran out Maddy had to drive between the trees, jinking between the biggest trunks and simply smashing the big Volvo through the lighter undergrowth.

  If her technique on tarmac had been as impressive as it was terrifying, her off-road skill was something else again. Maddy drove at motorway speeds down tracks barely wider than the car, using the rally-driver’s knack of drifting round corners in a controlled sideways skid, oblivious to the frantic scrabbling of the tyres as they swung out over precipitous hillside drops. She took hairpin bends using handbrake turns, locking the rear wheels and letting them swing round to push the car through an angle far tighter than its steering lock would allow.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not really Scandinavian?’ Larsson shouted over the roar of the engine and the constant clattering of stones, solid rock and knotted tree-roots against the underside of the car. ‘I thought we were the only people who were crazy enough to drive like this.’

  Maddy didn’t say anything. She was racing through the woods, heading directly towards the trunk of a massive old tree. Larsson suddenly realized that he had never been so frightened in all his life. He was certain that he was about to die. There could be no doubt of it. She was taking her revenge for his betrayal of Carver by killing them both.

  The tree got closer and closer until it seemed to fill the entire windscreen. In the last fraction of a second before impact, Maddy flicked the steering wheel sharply to the left and then equally fast to the right. The sudden shifts in direction were enough to destabilize even the Volvo’s four-wheel drive. For an instant, all traction lost, the Volvo turned broadside on to the tree. Maddy seemed to be hurling herself sideways into its trunk. Then she slammed her foot down on the accelerator, the wheels spun frantically, grabbed a fraction of purchase against the forest floor and the car slid past the tree, still moving sideways till she turned hard left again and swung the nose of the car round and they could carry on again, careering through the trees until they hit another track.

  ‘OK, almost there,’ said Larsson, his voice shaking. He looked across at Maddy and saw the whites of her knuckles against the steering wheel. Her face was more taut and mask-like than ever. She was only just keeping her emotions in check. It occurred to Larsson that the nerve-shredding tension of driving so fast in such difficult conditions was, for her, a distraction from the far greater fear of what might have happened to Carver.

  How had it come to this? Larsson thought about the steady escalation of threats and demands to which he had been subjected. At first it was just a matter of getting Carver to arrive in Oslo on a particular day. Then came the order for the bombs and their triggers: not just the hotel device but other ones, too, incendiaries. There had never been any explicit connection between the various commissions. Larsson had feared, of course, that Carver might be the target for the bomb, but not knowing it for sure had enabled him to pretend that it might not be so.

  Finally he had been taken up to the barn and had been forced to install the booby-trap system the man demanded. Larsson had seen that the barn was intended as a torture chamber, but there was still no certainty that it would be Carver hanging from that cord and sitting on that simple wooden chair. The only certainty was that Karin and their unborn child would be made to suffer if he, Larsson, did not do as he was told. That had overridden everything else. But then there was the other thing, the design job he’d been given just recently. That didn’t fit with any of the others. It was intended for something else, he was sure: something just as bad as the atrocity at the King Haakon Hotel. If only he knew what, that might give him a chance to atone for what he had done.

  Then the track came out of the trees and joined another path that was running through an open field with a helicopter parked at its centre. He knew where he was now, recognized the house that stood beyond the line of parked police cars.

  ‘Down there!’ he shouted, pointing ahead and to the right. ‘He’s in the barn!’

  Maddy gave a fractional nod of the head and flung the car down past the house, oblivious to the unarmed police officers, shouting and waving at them, and the black uniformed figures lifting their automatic weapons to their shoulders.

  When one of them fired a pair of three-round warning bursts that just missed the car, Maddy finally hit the brakes.

  Larsson hardly noticed the men or their weapons. He was too busy grabbing the alligator loppers, kicking the door open and running towards the barn. He was watching the black-clad figures crouching by the double doors at the front of the building. His eyes were wide in horror at what he was seeing. His mouth was forming the word ‘No’ and he was screaming it.

  But the sound of Larsson’s voice was drowned by the blast of the shotgun and then, as the door was rammed open, the sound of an explosion and a
sudden whoosh and a crackle of timber as the whole barn was engulfed in a blazing yellow and orange sheet of flame.

  70

  Samuel Carver did not believe in regret, any more than he believed in guilt. There was no point in feeling sorry about something that could not be changed, and even less in mourning an action that could still be put right. Stop whining and do something about it: that would be his reaction. And if you’ve got regrets, but too few to mention, then just stop singing and shut the fuck up.

  Like guilt, regret was also a self-excusing emotion. People felt better about themselves for being sorry about bad things they’d done, their character failings, their wealth, or their full bellies when others were starving. They were often so proud of themselves for displaying all this guilt that it seemed to be enough in itself: they saw no need to actually change anything.

  Yet as he confronted his death and tried to make peace with himself amidst the pain, the thirst and the noise that assailed him, there were three things Carver wished he’d done before it was too late. Getting the warning through about Tyzack’s hit on Lincoln Roberts was one of them and in the greater scheme of things perhaps that was the most important. But to Carver, the people he loved mattered more.

  He wished he’d been able to sit down with Thor Larsson, pour him a beer and ask him a simple question: why? There had to be a good reason Larsson had shafted him. He wouldn’t have done it for money, surely. Unless he’d suddenly developed a cocaine habit or a dangerous taste for casinos, Larsson wasn’t short of cash and anyway he stood to earn more from Carver alive than dead.

  Maybe it was something personal. He and Larsson had had the odd fight in their time, but nothing that had left any lasting resentment, not that Carver was aware of anyway. And though Larsson was slow to anger, when there was something eating at him, he wasn’t shy about letting Carver know, even if it meant grabbing him by the throat and shaking some sense into him. Carver smiled to himself as he thought about a night in Geneva when Larsson had done just that. Carver had barely been out of the clinic an hour and he hadn’t been thinking straight, to put it mildly. That was when you knew you had a true friend: when he had the balls and the honesty to let you know you were making a total tit of yourself.

  It must have been a threat, then. He’d been frightened into the betrayal. And since he knew that Larsson was no coward, Carver knew it had to be something to do with someone he loved, and that meant Karin. Christ, why hadn’t he just got in touch? Together they could have dealt with anyone. Except they couldn’t have, could they? Larsson had told Carver about his upcoming wedding just a few days before Carver had started work on that Lusterleaf job. He’d been totally wrapped up in that. When his best friend had needed him, he hadn’t been there.

  Same with Maddy. If he’d been any kind of normal man, he’d have moved heaven and earth to get back to her after the bomb went off. Instead he’d found every way he could to rationalize running away, and every single one of those reasons had been nothing but crap. The truth was, he just couldn’t deal with the possibility that a woman might actually love him.

  But all he wanted now was to put his arms round Maddy one last time. He wanted to feel her, smell her, hear her whispering something filthy in his ear, both of them laughing as they rolled into one another’s arms. He wanted to say sorry for being such a dick and putting her through so much when all she’d wanted was to be together and have a good time. He closed his eyes and concentrated on recalling her with all his senses, hoping that would help him forget the pain, the exhaustion and the fear that racked his mind and body, and buy him a few moments of peace.

  That was why it took him a few seconds to register the sound of the helicopter coming into land, loud enough to be heard over the TVs, and a while after that to conclude that it was a different, bigger aircraft than the one that had taken off just after Tyzack had left him. And if it wasn’t him on that chopper… A surge of hope flooded through Carver. Someone was coming for him!

  He shouted out, ‘Help! Over here! I’m here!’ but it was only when he’d shouted the same few words over and over again that he realized no one could possibly have heard him. His voice had been reduced to a husky, almost silent croak. Someone standing where Tyzack had been, just a few feet away, would have had a hard time making him out. There was no chance at all of his cries carrying to anyone outside.

  Still, it wouldn’t be long till they found him, surely…

  … would it?

  Time went by, the seconds stretching out like faces in a hall of mirrors, and nothing happened. Carver thought he heard cars arriving. After that… nothing.

  He strained to pick up scraps of information from the brief moments of silence between words and music on the BBC news report. Several minutes later two more cars arrived. The next thing Carver heard was the familiar sequence of a forced entry. OK, he thought, so there was another building nearby. That made sense. If this was a barn, there had to be a farmhouse to go with it. They were clearing the buildings one by one. Whoever was out there, they’d get to him soon enough. It was just a matter of keeping cool until they arrived.

  It struck him that he would probably be arrested. They were looking for a bomber, not the half-strangled, beaten victim of a psychopath’s obsession. He didn’t mind. If he could just write to Maddy, call her, maybe have one prison visit, that would give him the chance to explain.

  The sound of running boots on the path outside and orders being barked told him it would not be long now. Then he heard another engine, the sound of a car being driven right on the limit and he knew – absolutely knew with the certainty that comes from a lover’s deepest instinct – that Maddy was in that car. His heart soared… and then crashed back down again as he heard two short bursts of gunfire. The engine died away.

  ‘Oh God, please, oh no-o-o-o…’ Carver pleaded. He thought for a second he could hear a voice outside, one he recognized, echoing his own. But then there were more footsteps, the blast of a shotgun against a lock.

  And the next thing Carver knew, he had swapped Damon Tyzack’s personal vision of hell for the fires of an all-too-real inferno.

  71

  Thor Larsson did not stop running. While the men in their black uniforms fled from the blazing barn, he kept moving straight towards it. When he got to the doors, he kicked out at them, sending his foot through the flames that were racing up the green-painted wood and forcing them open so that he could charge right through and into the building itself.

  Larsson looked like a man who was already halfway to damnation. His face bore a look of such manic intensity that his old self was all but unrecognizable. Fire was licking at his trouser legs and he held some kind of weapon in his hands. Carver flinched like a whipped dog confronted by a man’s passing boot, but then he saw that the weapon was not intended for him as Larsson reached over him, gripped the bungee cord in the alligator’s teeth and turned on the chainsaw. He was shouting something, the same words again and again, but the rasping buzz of the saw biting at the toughened rubber was so loud in Carver’s ear that he could not make out what it was. It was only by lip-reading that he worked out Larsson was repeating, ‘I’m sorry,’ in an anguished mantra of apology.

  The air was rippling with the scorching heat that had turned the barn into a cross between a sauna and a pizza oven, and smoke was curling up walls that had been transformed into satin curtains of gold and scarlet by the roiling flames and snaking over the inside of the roof. Carver’s eyes were watering and he was choking as his battered lungs tried to extract oxygen from the scorching, toxic atmosphere. The flesh on his back, exposed by Tyzack’s cane, felt as though it was cooking, basting in the sweat that poured from the pores of his remaining skin, the burns adding a whole new layer of pain to his torment.

  At the end of the barn, by the doors through which Larsson had entered, a roof-beam gave way, eaten through by fire, and crashed to the ground, bringing a sheet of corrugated iron roofing down with it. Carver glanced up and saw that the beam fr
om which he was hanging had caught fire. It would give way soon, and he would be directly underneath it.

  ‘Hurry up!’ he croaked.

  Larsson grimaced. There were burning embers floating down on his head but he ignored them as the loppers tore all too slowly through a cord designed to resist the massive stress imposed by a human body falling hundreds of feet through the air.

  The flames were creeping across the floor towards them, forming a predatory circle around the two men. The roaring fire and crashing timbers were now as loud as the chainsaw, but Carver just made out the words, ‘Almost there!’

  Larsson’s demonic transformation was complete. He had become a creature of flame, all but consumed by the inferno his own incendiaries had created. The last strands of the cord gave way. Larsson threw the loppers away and shouted, ‘Go! Go!’

  Carver looked around, searching for a way out, but there was none. The flames were everywhere. Their only hope was to race towards the doors and pray that they could get through to the outside world before the fire consumed them. Carver took a first tentative step towards the blaze, girding himself for the final effort.

  And it was then that one end of the beam gave way. It swung downwards, as if on a hinge, hitting Larsson with a sickening impact, caving in the left side of his skull and dropping him to the ground before it crashed to a halt. Larsson lay motionless on the floor. The beam was angled over him, one end on the floor, the other jammed against the far wall. Calling up the last reserves of strength that adrenalin always provides, the berserker energy that is any fighting man’s last resort, Carver dragged Larsson’s long, spindly body out from beneath the beam. He got down on one knee and hauled Larsson over his shoulder, then forced his legs to straighten, pushing him upright.