Assassin

by Tom Cain

  The aide turned to leave. She had almost reached the door when James, as an afterthought, casually asked, ‘They got any idea who did it yet?’

  ‘No name,’ she said. ‘But the police released a photograph of a guy they said was wanted for questioning. They said he was armed and dangerous. Seems he killed some other folks, too, making his getaway.’

  ‘Hope they catch him then,’ said James.

  A few minutes later, sighing with irritation, he told himself he’d better look at the damn briefing package before he took it into the President. The statement was fine, though he knew Roberts would add a flourish or two of his own. The information was pretty straightforward. James raised an eyebrow when he read the account of the gunfight on the opera house roof and the apparent disappearance of the hotel bomber. Then he turned a page and saw the shot the police had released. The copy in front of him had been taken from an internet download. The quality was poor. But Harrison James did not need high resolution to recognize that face.

  Now the bombing had his attention.

  He called Tord Bahr, from one private mobile phone to another, keeping the conversation off the White House and Secret Service logs.

  ‘We have a situation,’ he said. ‘And I want you to make it go away.’

  Plenty of men Harrison James had worked for swore by the principle of deniability. The less their subordinates told them, the safer they felt. Lincoln Roberts took a very different view. The first time they’d discussed working together, he’d told James, ‘I don’t see any excuse for ignorance. When there’s something I need to know, tell me. And if I don’t need to know it, well, tell me anyway.’

  So James told his boss about the picture of Samuel Carver holding the phone from which he’d triggered the Oslo bombing. Roberts didn’t rant and rage. He didn’t demand immediate action. He didn’t blame anyone for risking his life with a mass-murderer. He sat at his desk, steepled his fingers and took a moment to reflect, like a university professor considering a philosophical proposition. The first word he said was: ‘Interesting…’ He thought some more and added, ‘I guess there are two possibilities here. Either my ability to judge another man has totally broken down, or they got the wrong guy.’

  ‘I’d say your judgement is pretty good.’ The President smiled. ‘Yeah, that’s what I’d say, too. But I could be wrong. And if anyone finds Carver, I’d sure feel better if it was us.’

  Tord Bahr spent the night getting nowhere. Carver had disappeared. No one knew where he was. There were no satellite images, no communications intercepts, no leaks or leads from anyone, anywhere. He finally crashed out at three in the morning. At five he was woken by a call from his office and told that the Norwegians had just announced that the suspect in the Oslo bombing had died when cornered by police. Bahr sank back on to his pillow with his face wreathed in something perilously close to an actual smile. He wasn’t bothered that the man’s name had been given as Paul Jackson. A guy like Carver would have multiple aliases. All that mattered was that the face of the man the Norwegians were talking about was unmistakably his. If Carver was dead, he couldn’t possibly cause any trouble to anyone. The big brown clouds that had threatened an almighty shitstorm had passed and the sun was shining on Tord Bahr’s little world.

  Bahr thought about trying to grab a couple of hours’ more sleep, but it wasn’t in his nature to take it easy. Instead he got up and went for a three-mile run. He showered, dressed and ate his customary bowl of granola and fruit. He got to work shortly before seven and spent an hour working on the final details of the President’s trip, talking to his people in London and Bristol, and to the Brits with whom they were working, most of whom struck Bahr as pompous, arrogant, lazy and incompetent. Plus, the way they spoke, every last one of them sounded gay.

  He had just put the phone down on some asshole police commander when he got a call on his cellphone.

  ‘Tord Bahr?’ said a British voice, one that sounded oddly familiar.

  ‘This is he.’

  ‘Hi, this is Samuel Carver.’

  75

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ said Bahr. He sounded disappointed.

  ‘That’s the theory,’ Carver replied. ‘But here I am.’

  ‘Pity, for a moment there my life just got a whole lot simpler. So, you want to tell me what the hell is going on?’

  ‘Certainly. I’m trying to work out whether there’s a highly trained psychopath trying to kill your boss. Wondered if you could help me with that.’

  Bahr had a short fuse at the best of times. These were not the best of times. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’ he snapped. ‘Your famous British sense of humour?

  Listen, I got a lot of work to do. I don’t have time for this shit.’

  Carver took a deep breath and fought the urge to get angry right back at him. With studied calm he said, ‘It’s not shit. It’s a legitimate threat, a man called Damon Tyzack. He served with me, briefly, in the SBS. He got sacked and blamed it on me. It was him who set up the Oslo bombing, tried to frame me for it. So yesterday me and Tyzack had a little chat, and shortly before he said goodbye he told me he had a job to do. I believe that job is the assassination of Lincoln Roberts.’

  ‘Whoa! Hold up there. You say you had this guy and you let him leave? Are you frickin’ nuts?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t have much choice in the matter. I was his captive, not the other way round.’

  Tord Bahr yawned. With his free hand he tried to rub the sleep from his eyes.

  ‘Wait a second,’ he said. ‘Run this by me from the top. This Tyzack is some kind of professional killer?’

  ‘Correct,’ said Carver.

  ‘He had the same training as you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you served together in the military?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But he captured you, which tells me that he’s better than you…’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what it tells him, too,’ said Carver. ‘Personally, I doubt it.’

  ‘Kind of similar, aren’t you? Like brothers or something.’

  ‘I sincerely hope not. Listen, Bahr, Tyzack is a man you should take very seriously. Technically, he’s very accomplished. Morally, he’s sociopathic. That’s a dangerous combination.’

  ‘And you think that’s unusual?’ asked Bahr. ‘My whole life is dealing with people like that.’

  ‘So Tyzack’s not unique. But you’re about to go with the President to a conference on people-trafficking, and trafficking is what Damon Tyzack likes to do when he isn’t killing people. So the question is: will the President do anything, or say anything in Bristol that would make him the next target?’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know,’ said Bahr. ‘I’m not in the loop on the President’s speaking plans. He’s restricting the contents of his speech to an absolute need-to-know basis. And I don’t need to know what he’s going to say. I just need to keep him alive while he’s saying it. So, tell me, what actual, concrete evidence do you have that Tyzack is planning a hit? And, if so, what is the target, date and location of the attack?’

  ‘Concrete evidence? None,’ said Carver. ‘He just told me that he was about to do a job and implied it was a big one.’

  ‘And from that you figure it’s Lincoln Roberts?’ Carver knew how feeble his warning sounded. He tried to make it anyway: ‘Look, I know it sounds crazy, but-’

  ‘But nothing,’ Bahr interrupted. ‘You know how many threats we are currently investigating against the President? I mean real, confirmed threats, with credible evidence of hostile intent? More than six hundred a month, that’s how many. We’ve got everyone from the Aryan Nation to al-Qaeda under observation. Lincoln Roberts is like a magnet for nut-jobs and we follow them all up, every last one. Maybe your guy is dangerous. But I don’t know, because you have nothing to tell me beyond, “He said he was going to do something big.” What am I supposed to do with that? You give me some real facts, I’ll take a look at them. But this kind of bullshit, forget it.
No use to me. So, Carver, enjoy your life. This conversation is over.’

  ‘Charming, isn’t he?’ said Jack Grantham, who’d been listening to the conversation on the speakerphone.

  Carver was still lying on his front on the examination table, though the doctor had finished his handicraft.

  He reached out and handed Grantham back his phone. ‘Oh yeah, Bahr’s a fun guy all right,’ he said.

  ‘How did you get to be such great chums?’

  ‘I helped him out with some security work. It didn’t end well for him. I was hoping he’d got over it. Apparently he hasn’t. So now what?’

  ‘What’s next,’ said Grantham, ‘is we go back to London and I spend some time playing bureaucratic games in Whitehall, trying to persuade people that even if the Yanks won’t take the threat of Damon Tyzack seriously, we should. I’ll see if I can get this in front of the Joint Intelligence Committee, point out it wouldn’t do much good to trans-Atlantic relations to have the US President killed on British soil by a British assassin. There’s an outside chance that might scare the powers-that-be into action. Trouble is, unless I have something better to give them, they’re liable to react the same way Bahr did. I mean, he wasn’t exactly tactful, but one could see his point.’

  ‘Well, there is one other possibility,’ Carver said. ‘If Tyzack persuaded Thor to work for him against me, maybe he involved him in the job he’s about to do. I mean, that’s what Thor does…’ His voice trailed away.

  ‘Did,’ said Grantham, not unkindly.

  Carver pulled himself together. ‘Has anyone checked his laptop? He had everything on that. If he was working on something, that’s where it’ll be.’

  ‘Ravnsborg already thought of that. He’s brighter than he looks, that man. Anyway, his people went to Larsson’s apartment. They found his computer, but it was protected by iris-recognition.’

  Carver had a hard time getting the next question out. ‘Couldn’t they…’ He sighed; tried again. ‘Couldn’t they remove his eyeballs and use them?’

  Grantham shook his head. ‘Apparently not. The system only works with living tissue. Besides which, Larsson’s eyes were pretty badly damaged. Might not have worked anyway. They’ve got their boffins trying to hack into the computer. They’re working on the phones, too.’

  ‘Forget it,’ Carver said. ‘Whoever they’ve got, I guarantee they won’t be as good as Thor. The guy was a bloody genius – a big, geeky, hippy…’

  Grantham nervously placed a hand on an undamaged area of Carver’s left shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know he was your friend.’

  ‘It’s just… we never had the chance to talk, to put it right. He died thinking I hated him…’

  Carver’s voice drifted away. Grantham reached out his arm again, but Carver brushed it away impatiently.

  ‘I’m not looking for sympathy,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to think. Larsson did say something, just before they put me under… something about the sky… That’s it, got it: “Look to the sky.”’

  ‘Is that all?’ asked Grantham. ‘“Look to the sky”? You’re sure there was nothing else?’

  ‘No, that was it.’

  ‘But that could mean anything. He could have meant something spiritual or religious. You know, look to the sky, to heaven, God, angels, all that kind of thing.’

  ‘Thor Larsson didn’t believe in God and angels.’

  ‘It’s amazing how dying can suddenly make someone start believing.’

  ‘No,’ said Carver, ‘that wasn’t the point of what Thor was saying. He was giving me a warning. He knew that something was going to happen. It’s got to be Tyzack. Whatever it is he’s doing, it’s coming from the sky.’

  76

  Lara Dashian was living under siege. It had begun slowly in the first hours after Jake Tolland’s piece appeared in the London Times. Local TV stations had asked for interviews with her and been turned down by Sadira Khan. So had the Dubai stringers for the major news agencies and international press. But then Jake Tolland arrived and said that he had been offered one hundred thousand English pounds to write a book about her story. He said he would share it fifty-fifty with her. Lara was not really interested in a book. She did not understand why anyone in England would want to know about her. But she had trusted Jake, and when he came to her offering to share his money that trust deepened. Her experience of men was that they wanted to abuse and exploit her. The notion that a man might treat her as an equal was far more exciting than any book.

  Tolland promised he would keep the book project quiet. But someone took a photograph of Lara saying goodbye to him at the gate of the House of Freedom. When that hit the internet, along with a report of an upcoming book – now said to be worth half a million pounds – the reporters all came back. Once the first murmurings of Hollywood interest in her story began to surface, reporters started flying into Dubai from Britain, Europe and the States. Several prominent young actresses were said to be vying to play her. They knew that the part of a raped and abused prostitute rescued from hell and triumphing over her suffering had Best Actress Oscar written all over it. By the time that Jake Tolland’s agent was unwise enough to get drunk at a launch party and boast that he was about to do a series of deals that would make both his client and Lara multi-millionaires, the House of Freedom had effectively become a prison, its inhabitants entirely blockaded on all sides by hordes of media, police and onlookers.

  And then the delegation from the US embassy arrived.

  The two women in their knee-length skirt suits were hustled into the refuge compound by a team of large men with black suits and buzz-cut heads. They kept their heads down and faces obscured. When they got into the courtyard they had to keep running, just to get out of range of the photographers up trees, on ladders or shooting from the roofs of nearby buildings. And then they had to get past Sadira Khan.

  She stood opposite her two compatriots, hands on hips, watching them disdainfully as they brushed themselves down, straightened their clothes and checked their hair. ‘You wanna say why you’re here?’ she asked.

  One of the women came forward and held out a hand. ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘My name’s Renee Sorenson. I’m with the embassy in Abu Dhabi. This is Chantelle Clemens. She works with Harrison James. He’s the White House Chief of Staff.’

  ‘It’s OK, hon, I know who he is. I’m still a registered voter. So let me guess, this is to do with Lara, right? Or did you come all this way to congratulate me on my selfless work for abused women?’

  ‘Er, no, ma’am,’ said Chantelle Clemens as she shook hands. ‘We’re here at the President’s particular request. We’d like to speak to Miss Dashian.’

  ‘The President, you say?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘He gonna rescue us all from this madhouse?’

  Clemens smiled. ‘Anything’s possible. But first, please, we really do have to talk to Miss Dashian.’

  ‘You know I’ve turned down every single request since that story came out?’

  ‘We heard, yes.’

  ‘I’m trying to protect the kid, you understand? She’s been through hell. She’s still very fragile.’

  ‘I understand, and so does the President,’ said Clemens. ‘You can rest assured that we are very aware of the suffering she has been through, and we respect that totally.’

  While the women had been talking, the House of Freedom’s inhabitants had been gathering in the background, whispering to one another, fascinated by these new arrivals in their home.

  Sadira Khan turned and looked at the girls, who retreated a few paces. Some slipped back through doors into other rooms.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, and the girls came a little bit closer again.

  ‘Lara,’ she went on. ‘Come here, sweetheart.’

  Two of the girls stood to one side to let Lara through. She stood still for a moment, sticking by her friends, examining the American women through her big, brown, bush-baby eyes. Then she looked at Sadira Khan seeki
ng reassurance, found it and stepped forward.

  Chantelle Clemens watched the slight, nervous figure step across the hall towards them. Was this really the sex-slave who’d been bought, sold and raped, the way the story claimed? In her cheap T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms she looked about fourteen.

  The woman from the White House smiled as she said, ‘Hi, Lara, my name’s Chantelle.’ She almost had to bite her lip to stop herself adding, ‘So you’re what all this fuss is about?’

  77

  Greta Lyngstad placed a large bowl of spaghetti covered in tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese in front of Carver and said, ‘Eat. You need it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Carver and piled in. Greta wasn’t the best cook in the world, but he didn’t care. Almost eighteen hours had passed since he’d been rudely interrupted, halfway through his dinner, and not a morsel of food had crossed his lips since. He was famished.

  They’d moved from the doctor’s study into his dining-room. Carver was bandaged like an Egyptian mummy from his shoulders to his waist. There were padded dressings on his buttocks – Greta had tactfully left a soft cushion on the dining-chair just to make him more comfortable – and more bandages round his thighs. Grantham and Lyngstad were standing at the far end of the room, by a window that looked out over a small, well-tended garden.

  ‘So, is he fit to go?’ asked Grantham, nodding in Carver’s direction. He did not seem bothered by the fact that Carver was sitting at the other end of the tables well able to hear every word that was said.

  ‘I am afraid that I can only discuss my patient’s condition with him,’ Lyngstad replied. He had clearly not forgotten Grantham’s description of his stitching and was not going to forgive him any time soon.

  Grantham sighed irritably. ‘Oh, for God’s sake. You ask him, Carver.’

  ‘Ask who what?’ said Carver innocently.