by Cain, Tom
‘We have no reason to believe that Mrs Vermulen is armed or likely to pose any threat,’ she said. ‘So we need to show restraint. She’s a US citizen with influential contacts in Washington – that’s why Adams wanted to hire her. We don’t want a diplomatic incident on our hands.’
‘I still have to go in hard,’ the officer said. ‘If there’s any chance at all that chummy’s there, I can’t afford not to.’
‘Fine . . . but I don’t want that woman to get so much as a torn fingernail if he isn’t.’
The officer didn’t reply. He was too busy ordering his men out of their vehicles.
‘We’ve got the green light. Go, go, go!’
71
CARVER WAS STILL asleep when a police driver in a hurry, blocked by drivers who refused to clear a path for him, turned on the siren he had hitherto kept silent. It was only a short blast – five seconds, maybe: ten at most – and the driver killed it the moment that the first fractional gap appeared in the traffic in front of him, but it was all the alarm clock Carver needed. As he woke he was already processing the subconscious awareness that the noise had been getting closer. Seconds later he learned something else: the reason that the driver had turned on his siren was that he’d been left behind by his mates.
The MI6 flat was located on the top floor – the third – of a low-rise, redbrick development, a mix of flats and small terraced houses arranged in a rectangle around a central courtyard. The only way in by car was through an arched entrance. The bedroom was directly above the arch.
Carver heard the sound of an engine passing beneath him through the arch and stopping in the courtyard. Blue lights flashing thirty-five feet below danced across the bedroom ceiling. He could hear men piling out on to the tarmac, the sound of pounding on the outside door and a voice shouting, ‘Police! Open up!’ Lights were being turned on in windows all around the courtyard.
Downstairs the police crashed an Enforcer battering ram, otherwise known as a ‘big key’ into the outside door. When they smashed through that, they would have six short flights of stairs and the door to the apartment itself to deal with.
Now they were on the stairs.
Carver didn’t rush. He picked up his gun, walked out of the bedroom, turned right and went into the open-plan kitchen and living area where he’d been working earlier. There were windows either side of the room, facing towards the courtyard on one side and the slip road down to the entrance on the other. The courtyard was filled with police vehicles. Carver opened the window on the slip-road side and looked out. God bless the Plod, they’d not left anyone to keep watch from the road. He looked up: no helicopter. Not yet.
There was a crash from the door to the apartment. It had a steel frame and Banham locks top and bottom as well as the regular Yale. It wasn’t going to be broken down without a fight. Whatever the flat lacked in aesthetic appeal it gained in security. It was a safe house, after all.
Which begged the question . . . No, no time to think about that now. Concentrate on the job in hand.
Carver opened the window and climbed out on to the window ledge. A steady drizzle was falling, leaving a slick of water on the glossy white-painted ledge. There were two steel handholds, one above the other, hammered into the brickwork immediately above the window frame. Carver grabbed the cold, wet metal with one hand and used the other to close the window behind him. He pulled himself up: one handhold, then the other. He grabbed hold of the gutter above his head and it twisted a little in his hand, sending a splash of cold rainwater on to his head and down the back of his neck. Carver swung his legs up, scrambled for purchase on the gutter and pulled himself up on to the roof.
Perching low on the slate tiles Carver watched more police vehicles racing down the road towards the apartment block. In a few seconds they would be close enough to see him, even if the first arrivals had not. He made his way across the roof in a crouching, simian lope, turned the corner on to one of the short sides of the rectangle and stopped by the junction between the guttering and a downpipe. Another quick look around. The street below him was empty. Anyone living in the apartment block would have rushed to their windows on the other side of the building, overlooking the courtyard.
The far side of the street, directly opposite him, was dark and lifeless: a new development of luxury townhouses, abandoned half-built when the builders had gone bankrupt. There wasn’t much of a demand for luxury these days. Survival was the best anyone could hope for.
Carver climbed down the drainpipe and crossed the road. The development where he’d been staying had its own basement garage. The only cars left out on the streets were rusting, burned-out wrecks, little different to the ones in Netherton Street, relics of an earlier, long-forgotten civil disturbance.
A chain-link fence surrounded the abandoned construction site, but great holes had been punched in it. Several of the poles had been knocked down. Carver walked unimpeded into the site and then picked up speed, wanting to clear the area as soon as possible. He jogged between the hollow shells of the unfinished buildings, sticking to the shadows, staying alert to any signs of pursuit. The rain eased up a little, the clouds began to part. As he ran, Carver kept turning his head to look behind him, making sure that there was no one on his trail.
The site was littered with unused concrete building blocks. Carver wasn’t watching where he was going. He tripped on one of the blocks, catching his shin painfully on the edge. He uttered a sharp, quickly stifled gasp of pain, lost his balance for a second, half-fell on to the stony ground, stuck a hand out to support himself, and for a second found himself perched like a sprinter rising from the starting blocks. His head was up, his eyes looking down the path ahead of him, and at that moment a shaft of sunlight shone through a keyhole of clear sky and glinted off something bright and metallic up ahead.
Carver did not need to be told what that was. Even before the first shot had been fired he was flinging himself to his right, splashing in a puddle as he landed, and rolling towards the gaping empty doorway to one of the unfinished buildings while the gun made the characteristic hammer-tapping-on-metal sound of a suppressed .22 pistol, and bullets ricocheted around him. Somehow he survived unscathed for long enough to reach the shelter of the bare brick walls. He crouched beside a hole where a window should have been and looked out across the site. At first he could see nothing, but then a sudden movement caught the corner of his eye and he turned quickly enough to see the slender black flicker of a female silhouette darting between two buildings, topped by a streaming red mane of red hair.
Novak!
He’d had no idea she was still alive. Alix had told him about her fight with Novak at the Goldsmiths’ Hall, the night that Malachi Zorn had died, but he’d simply assumed that Novak had ended up as one of the unidentifiable bodies lying pulverized in the rubble. More fool him.
Carver scampered to the back of the building, looking for a way out. He was spoiled for choice: there were spaces for French windows and a back door. He got to the doorway, pressed his back against the brick beside it, moved his head fractionally into the opening to give himself a view of the surrounding area and then jerked it back again as the whipcrack of a passing bullet skimmed past his newly shaved scalp.
He couldn’t fire back. His Glock had no suppressor and the sound of it would bring the police racing over from Grantham’s flat with far more firepower than he could muster. He couldn’t get out of the building. Now what? Looking around he saw a rectangular hole in the ceiling, a little closer to the front door: the opening for an unbuilt staircase. If he could get some height he would at least be able to look down on the site and have a better chance of tracking Novak’s movements.
Carver sprinted across the bare concrete floor, jumped with his hands above his head and grabbed a bare joist intended to support the unlaid first floor.
For a moment he was suspended, full length, with his back to the kitchen door and French windows. If Novak came through them now, he’d be a sitting duck.
72
ALIX HAD GONE over to the window to check what was happening outside. She saw the flashing blue light behind the radiator grille of an unmarked police car screaming down Sloane Street, coming straight towards the hotel. She looked from the car to the front of the building and saw a faceless black figure slip like a wraith beneath the portico over the front entrance.
They were here already.
Alix didn’t panic. She slung her bag over her shoulder, left the room and hurried down the corridor. As she passed the bank of lifts she saw that one of them was on the way up. It was passing the third floor: five more to go. There would be police officers on it and more coming up the stairs. But there was an external fire escape, too: the old-fashioned metal kind running up the side of the building. The way out to it was at the far end of the corridor, a good thirty metres away. She broke into a sprint.
There was a chambermaid’s trolley up ahead, parked by the right-hand wall of the corridor, just beyond an open bedroom door. Alix heard a familiar sound, an echo of her childhood. It was a hotel maid, about her height, humming the old Russian folk song ‘Semyonovna’ as she walked out of the door in her hotel uniform, with a small cotton headscarf tied over her hair. The maid was lost in the cheerful tune as she approached the trolley and turned her back to put something in the trash bag at the rear of it.
Forget the fire escape. Alix had a better way out of here.
She did not break stride. She picked up her bag in both arms, holding it in front of her as she lowered her shoulder and barged into the maid, catching her completely by surprise and sending her sprawling back through the door into the room. Then she grabbed the handle at the back of the trolley and pulled it with her as she followed the maid, who was now sitting on her backside in the middle of the bedroom floor, winded and gasping for breath as she tried to get back to her feet. Alix shut the door.
Across the room, by the window looking out on to Knightsbridge, a room-service trolley had been set up for a guest’s breakfast. Someone had ordered steak and eggs and a steak-knife, crusted in dried yolk, was lying on a dirty plate. Alix walked towards the trolley. The maid was in her way, now upright, but hunched over, desperately trying to gather enough breath to scream for help. Alix slapped her hard on the side of the face as she went by, stunning her. She grabbed the knife, came back to the maid and grabbed her from behind, putting one hand over her mouth, pulling her head back to expose her throat to the touch of the sharp serrated blade.
Outside in the corridor came the sound of heavy, running footsteps and a man’s voice, several rooms away, shouting, ‘Open up! Police!’
The girl was crying. She was badly hurt and extremely frightened. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty, if that, and she had a soft, placid passivity to her. The capacity to fight back against a sudden physical assault just wasn’t in her nature. It shamed Alix to bully her like this, but she had no other choice.
‘Listen to me very carefully,’ she said, in Russian, as the policeman shouted again. ‘If you do exactly what I say, you will come to no harm. If you do not, then the edge of this knife is the last thing you will ever feel. Nod if you understand.’
The girl gave a series of frantic little nods that made her whole upper body quiver.
‘Good,’ said Alix. ‘I need your uniform. Take it off. Now. Your shoes, too.’
She let go of the maid who did as she was told, stripping down to her underwear and tights.
There were three loud hammering noises from down the corridor as the police battered at the door to Alix and Carver’s suite, followed by the crash as it finally gave way.
‘And your scarf, please,’ Alix told her.
The maid pulled it from her head and handed it over. ‘That was a Christmas present . . . from my mother,’ she said, looking utterly miserable.
Alix took off her earrings. She could hardly pretend to be a chambermaid with diamond studs in her ears.
‘These are a present from me,’ she said. The girl’s eyes widened in amazement at this unexpected bounty, and she hurried to obey as Alix said, ‘Get in the wardrobe. Keep quiet. And stay there.’
Alix heard more shouts – the sound of angry, frustrated, disappointed men – as she shoved one of the two heavy, silk-upholstered armchairs in the room up tight against the wardrobe door. It had taken all her strength to shift it. She didn’t see the maid being able to open the doors too quickly.
She put on the uniform, which was a little large for her, and the shoes, which were at least a size too small; close enough. She put her own clothes, shoes and bag in the trash bag at the back of the trolley. She checked herself in the mirror, saw that her make-up was much too good for her newly reduced status, and spent twenty seconds in the bathroom splashing soapy water on her face, rinsing it off and towelling herself down.
When she got back to the room she saw that the maid was pushing hard against the wardrobe doors and had even managed to open them a fraction.
Alix put all her weight against the chair and slammed the door shut again.
‘Don’t move,’ she snarled. ‘Or I’ll use the knife . . . and I’ll take back the earrings.’
The latter threat was the one that did the trick. Alix heard a thud as the maid sat down on the floor of the wardrobe.
‘Sensible girl,’ she said. Then she took the trolley and pushed it out of the room and into the corridor, going back the way she’d originally come, towards the service elevator, whistling ‘Semyonovna’ as she went.
A police officer wearing black battle-dress and a bullet-proof vest and clutching a sub-machine gun emerged from her suite. ‘Stop!’ he commanded her. ‘Have you seen anyone come out of this room?’ he asked.
Alix screwed up her face in incomprehension. ‘Don’t understand,’ she said. ‘English not good.’
The policeman rolled his eyes and muttered, ‘Fucking immigrants,’ under his breath. Then he repeated, with exaggerated slowness and clarity, ‘Have you seen a man . . . or a woman . . . coming from this room?’
Alix thought hard and then said, ‘No. Have not seen nothing.’
The policeman stood there, glowering at her.
‘Must go now . . . for work,’ she said.
‘Piss off then,’ he snarled at her, and disappeared back into the suite.
73
CELINA NOVAK WAS furious with herself. She’d had the chance to kill Carver without the slightest risk to herself. She’d known it had to be him from the moment she’d seen him step through the gap in the chain-link fence. Who else could it possibly be? The police had arrived, exactly as she’d been told they would, and then Carver had taken the obvious escape route. She’d recognized his walk, too.
Like all former Eastern Bloc intelligence personnel, Novak had been taught the three-point identification method, developed by the East German Stasi. Using academics from a range of fields, from anthropologists to zoologists, they’d identified hundreds of markers that define an individual: the shape of their eyes, their stride-patterns, their posture and so on. Agents were trained to take three of these markers, apply them to someone they were trailing and then consider those three markers – and nothing else – when they were looking for that individual. A person could change their clothes, their haircut, add a false beard or wear spectacles, but as long as one or more of those markers remained consistent, they could never escape observation.
Novak had observed Carver at the closest possible range when they had been together, back in Greece. She had automatically filed away the markers she would use to identify him. The shabby, balding, mousey-haired man hurrying towards her across the building site had still retained the essential characteristics of Samuel Carver. And yet she had somehow been unsure. She had hesitated; only for a second, but that had been long enough.
Now she would have to hunt him through this godforsaken warren, which reeked of failure and broken dreams almost as much as it did of the methylated spirits and rancid urine of the drunken tramps who’d spent the nigh
t there and were now lying dead in the bare basement beneath an unfinished townhouse. She hadn’t wanted any witnesses, even ones with addled brains.
Novak put a fresh magazine into her long-barrelled Ruger MK II pistol, and walked towards the house where she’d last seen Carver, the gun held in front of her in both hands as she peered into the relative darkness of the interior. She was only about ten feet from the entrance, walking at a slow, steady pace, alert to any movement. And then she heard the sound of footsteps above and ahead of her and looked up to see Carver leaping from a gap in the ragged brickwork of the house’s unfinished upper storey and flying through the air towards her.
She raised her gun to shoot him. But at the very moment she fired Carver crashed into her, flinging her backwards and sending the shot harmlessly wide. She hit the ground back first and was winded as Carver gripped her right wrist and slammed her hand against the rough, concrete-studded surface, forcing her to let go of the Ruger. She was still gasping for breath as he rolled off her and scampered after the gun.
Carver grabbed it, got to his feet and spun round to face her. Now she was lying on the ground and Carver was standing over her, the gun-barrel aimed right between her eyes.
‘Morning, Ginger,’ he said.
74
ALIX REACHED THE hotel basement and entered the warren of kitchen, laundry, housekeeping, security and management facilities that acted as the frantically paddling legs that kept the graceful five-star swan up above moving forwards. She played dumb. She was the new girl at work, not sure of her way around, needing directions back to the staff changing rooms. She got back into her regular clothes, but kept the scarf on and put on dark glasses the moment she got outdoors, going through the service entrance and across the road into Hyde Park as quickly as she could, away from prying eyes and security cameras.