Revenger

by Cain, Tom

  ‘Is the garage locked?’

  ‘Nah, just pull up the door.’

  ‘So where are you now?’

  ‘Just past Haywards Heath on the train to Shoreham-by-Sea.’

  ‘Then give me your bank details as well as that address, and I’ll stick the ten grand in your account.’

  ‘Quality!’

  ‘When you get there, make sure the bloody thing works. Get him to show you, all right? If he needs encouraging, call me and I’ll put a ten per cent deposit down, so he knows the money’s real.’

  ‘What do I say if he asks why I want it?’

  ‘You say that your client is a very wealthy man with a very spoiled son. Roll your eyes. You’re just a normal bloke working for a rich prat. He’ll understand.’

  ‘So you’re a rich prat, yeah?’

  ‘No . . . but my life would be a lot easier if I was. Call me when you’ve got everything.’

  There was a brief pause on the other end of the line and then Cripps asked, ‘You all right, boss?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Carver. ‘I’ll manage.’

  82

  TRENT PECK THE Third hurried around his penthouse apartment, clearing the empty packets of last night’s Chinese takeaway from the table in front of the leather sofa where he’d been sprawled eating dim sum and watching a box-set of the first season of Prison Break (ten years old but still a classic) on his 55-inch Loewe TV. He checked that his built-in espresso maker was stocked with beans and water, then cast an eye around the open-plan living area that stretched right across the front of the apartment. Once he’d thrown the surface trash in the bin, the rest of the place wasn’t too bad.

  All the while he was giving Alix the kind of detailed examination that hadn’t been possible while he’d been driving through London like a lunatic, trying to shake off that damn VW. She had to be forty, at least, he figured, but she’d taken a lot of effort to keep her looks, succeeded and knew it. Peck admired women like that. They were grown-ups. They knew their value in the marketplace, and they weren’t coy about what they wanted in the sack, but they’d also been around long enough to be realistic in their expectations.

  Trent gave her the benefit of his most charming smile. ‘Can I get you a cup of coffee? Reckon I make the best in London.’

  ‘Sure, that would be great. This is just so, so sweet of you, taking me in like this. Your place is amazing, by the way.’

  He fixed a cappuccino with low-fat milk, no sugar, for Alix, and a double espresso for himself. Then he led them across to the big leather sofa, offered Alix one end, took the other, waited till they’d both had time for a sip or two of coffee and then said, ‘So, what on earth are we going to do now? Seriously, we need to figure out your next move. Mine, too, come to that. I can’t just keep you here, you know. I need to talk this through with someone.’

  Her eyes widened in alarm. ‘No you can’t! No one must know I’m here – absolutely no one!’

  ‘Trust me, the guy I’m thinking of is totally reliable. He’s not going to tell anyone anything. But I really value his advice.’

  ‘So who is he?’

  ‘Someone at the embassy . . . a mentor, I guess you could call him.’

  ‘Promise me you’re not going to hand me over to the police.’

  ‘I promise . . . on one condition: everything you’ve told me has to be true. If I find out you’ve been bullshitting, or there are things you’ve not been telling me – like illegal activity on your part, or involvement in any of Carver’s alleged illegal actions – well, then all bets are off. Is that fair?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Great,’ Peck said. ‘Then we’ve got a deal. Now, I’ve gotta get to work, and I’d better not take my automobile. Don’t want to be followed again.’

  Trent Peck stood on the pavement outside his building for half a minute till a cab came by. He hailed it and told the cabbie, ‘US Embassy, fast as you can.’

  Two men in a parked C-Class Mercedes saloon watched the taxi disappear down the road. They’d arrived less than a quarter of an hour earlier, having taken over from the men in the VW Passat who’d first picked up Petrova’s trail when she’d left the hotel. They had pictures of her arriving at the apartment building with a male, whose car had diplomatic plates. They had pictures of him leaving. Now the driver of the Mercedes called Oleg Kutchinski, who was sitting in an office in the white stucco mansion on Kensington Palace Gardens that houses the Russian Embassy.

  ‘Petrova is now alone in the apartment,’ said the driver.

  ‘Good. Stay where you are. Maintain observation of the apartment. Wait there until you receive further orders.’

  ‘What if she leaves the apartment?’

  ‘Then inform me and follow her. Wherever that woman goes, I want to know about it.’

  83

  CARVER WENT TO a diving store, where he bought a lightweight triathlon wetsuit, a wetsuit balaclava to cover his head, a pair of short ‘zip-fins’ designed for building up fitness over long swims, a face mask and a snorkel.

  He removed the nail gun and its accessories from the box, disposed of all the packaging, loaded the gun and placed it inside the Tesco bag. The axe, firework, rope, scissors, matches and water went into the rucksack, along with the wetsuit balaclava, the fins, the mask and the snorkel.

  Having given the matter considerable thought, he concluded that he had no option but to wear the wetsuit under his clothing. Even though he had specifically chosen the lightest, most flexible possible suit, it would still get as hot and sweaty as hell over the next few hours, but he couldn’t see a practical alternative.

  ‘It’s a personal thing,’ he said to the male shop assistant who’d taken his order.

  ‘What a perv,’ the man had muttered, under his breath, but loud enough that Carver could hear.

  It was just as well that the assistant hadn’t known what his customer actually had in mind for the rest of the day. The harmless predilections of a rubber fetishist would seem charmingly innocent in comparison.

  At Kennington police station, the resident computer wizard had been set to work to compile two new photofit images of the Second Man: one with a floppy bush-hat over his face, the other with much shorter, lighter hair. Neither looked exactly like the newly disguised Sam Carver. They did not, for example, show him wearing glasses. But they were closer to the present truth than the original portrait had been. And once Inspector Keane had passed them on to the press office for immediate distribution, it was only a matter of time before somebody out there made the connection.

  She knew it would not happen at once; that would be too much to ask for. But if Sam, or whoever the Second Man really was, did something either bold or public enough to attract anyone’s attention, then spottings of him would soon be reported to the police. Keane was absolutely confident of that.

  84

  LONDON HAD BEEN a crucial base for American intelligence for more than seventy years. In 1942, the newly created Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, set up an office of its Secret Intelligence Branch, or SI, in London, from which more than a hundred agents were sent into Nazi-occupied Europe. For decades afterwards, the extraordinarily close, if sometimes fractious, relationship between British and US intelligence led to almost constant communication between the two nations’ agencies.

  Many CIA personnel, based among the diplomats at the US Embassy in London, were entirely open – within the profession at least – about their jobs. They were well-known to their British counterparts – or ‘cousins’ as the two nations’ spies referred to one another, with heavy, knowing irony. Others, however, were undercover, for one of the dirty little truths about espionage is that one spies on one’s allies quite as much as one’s enemies.

  One of these undercover CIA agents was Trent Peck the Third.

  When he got to the US Embassy he slipped into the office of the CIA Head of Station, John D. Giammetti, for a quiet conversation. As he recounted
the story of Alexandra Vermulen’s call to him, her plea for help and her arrival in his apartment, Giammetti was searching through the files on his desktop computer.

  ‘Well, I gotta say, Trent, you can pick’em,’ he said, when Peck had come to the end of his story.

  ‘Yeah, she’s pretty hot,’ Peck said, assuming Giammetti was referring to a photograph of Vermulen.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about her looks. You know she’s Russian, right, by birth? Ex- KGB, in fact.’

  ‘Jesus! That explains how she got out of that hotel without being caught by Scotland Yard’s finest. But how did she ever get citizenship?’

  ‘Marrying a retired US Army general, I guess. Don’t worry, she’s been checked out. Far as anyone can see, she had a brief career as a young woman, doing all the things that hot young women in the KGB used to do, you get my drift. Looks like she quit the trade once the Soviet era ended.’

  ‘Ha!’ Peck exclaimed. ‘There’s no such thing as ex-KGB.’

  ‘That’s not what the file says,’ Giammetti insisted. ‘She’s been clean for a long, long time. The Bureau kept a watch on that lobbying business she runs for a while, but they couldn’t find too much to worry about.’

  ‘Well, that may change. She’s dating some Limey called Samuel Carver. And get this: he’s the Second Man.’

  ‘What? From the Lion Market Massacre?’ said Giammetti, incredulously.

  ‘One and the same. He’s got every cop in London after him. And from the way the Prime Minister’s been talking, they’re treating him like the second coming of Osama bin Laden.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that tells you what’s wrong with this friggin’ country. Guy risks his life to save two helpless women and some Asian shopkeepers, blows a bunch of douchebag rioters to pieces, and they think he’s a criminal. Back home he’d already have his first movie deal and an invitation to lunch from the mayor.’

  ‘She said this guy is some kind of personal buddy of the President’s, though. Is that for real?’

  ‘Let me have a look,’ said Giammetti, consulting his screen. He gave a low whistle. ‘OK . . . So, this Carver dude is ex-British special forces. Did some work for the Secret Service a few years back. They hired him to test the security precautions at Roberts’s private compound down in Carolina. Carver staged some kind of phoney attack.’

  ‘Why did they get a Brit to do it? Why not use the SEALs or Delta Force?’

  ‘Dunno, it just says he was hired on account of his “specialist professional expertise”.’

  ‘Does that mean he’s some kind of hitman? Makes sense of the way he behaved last night.’

  Giammetti scratched the back of his head. ‘You know what? I think you did a smart thing coming to talk to me. And I’m going to do another smart thing and cover all our asses. Time to talk to our cousins.’

  Giammetti pressed a speed-dial number on his desk phone. ‘Hi, honey,’ he said when the call was answered. ‘Your boss available? Oh, OK . . . well, when he gets out of the meeting tell him John Giammetti needs to talk to him. And yeah, I would say it is kinda urgent.’

  ‘So who did you call?’ Peck asked.

  ‘Grantham,’ Giammetti said. ‘You wanna get something done, it’s best to go straight to the top. Now, do me a favour: head back to your apartment and make sure your house guest is being a good little girl.’

  Alix’s presence in Trent Peck’s apartment was also attracting considerable interest in Moscow. The FSB were, of course, well aware of Peck’s status as an undercover CIA operative. The fact that he was now sheltering the former agent Petrova provided even greater potential for causing massive embarrassment to both the British and American governments than anyone had anticipated. Novak had been parked in an FSB property in North Kensington and told to wait for her next orders. It was not yet time for her to proceed against both Petrova and Peck. But that time was not far away.

  ‘Tell her to make her way to Peck’s property,’ said Gusev. ‘She should coordinate with our people on the ground there, but she must not do anything beyond that. There are still further characters to arrive on the scene. But there is no need to be impatient. It will not be too long before they make their entrance.’

  It took almost an hour for Grantham to reply to Giammetti’s call. His morning schedule had been blown to pieces by the need to cope with the fallout from the police’s arrival at the flat where Carver had spent the early hours of the morning. He’d expected them to put two and two together, of course, but not quite this quickly. Not before Carver could be safely got out of the way.

  Faced with the combined forces of Scotland Yard and the Home Office, not to mention MI5, hanging around the affair like hyenas waiting for some nice, dead prey to feast on, Grantham had been hard-pressed to keep them all at bay. He’d been forced to resort to a blank, outright denial of any Secret Intelligence Service involvement, pleading total ignorance of how the suspect had managed to find his way into the safe house. But that line wasn’t going to hold for long.

  Then he called Giammetti and an already lousy day took another turn for the worse.

  ‘Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,’ Grantham replied after the CIA man had said his piece. ‘The woman Vermulen – she’s run for shelter to one of your guys. Now, she’s a US citizen, and Adams has already vouched for her presence at the O2 and subsequently at dinner with him for the entire evening. So unless Adams was behind the whole riot, which I dare say is possible, and she was involved in that in some way, I don’t see that she has anything to worry about. It’s not an offence to be a murderer’s girlfriend. And it’s equally acceptable for a citizen of a foreign country to seek help from one of their own nation’s diplomats.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you see it that way.’

  ‘On the other hand, your president may soon be exposed as being best buddies with a man who killed forty civilians in a London supermarket. If you ask me, John, that’s where your problem lies.’

  Grantham put the phone down, feeling certain that he’d taken care of Giammetti. He’d be fully occupied getting on to his bosses at Langley and warning them of the massive embarrassment that could be coming the President’s way. But that still left Grantham with a world of troubles of his own to solve.

  He did not regret his decision to have Carver killed. The logic of the situation demanded it. Either he would be caught by the police, in which case there was always a chance that embarrassing, not to say career-ending, information might emerge. Or, far more likely, Carver would escape capture and dedicate himself to uncovering, tracking down and killing whoever was responsible for the riot. Since Grantham did not want to die at Carver’s hands, he had to get to him first. And in a situation of such extreme urgency, he’d been left with little option but to reach for an operative he knew would be keen to take the job. He’d acted in haste, and had been repenting it ever since.

  There were worrying signs that Novak had gone rogue, or – even worse – was playing a double game, working for someone else too. He’d tipped the police off to Carver’s whereabouts and given Novak an ideal killing zone in which to take him out. He was virtually certain that she had gone as planned to the abandoned building site. According to the Met’s latest information, three vagrants had been found dead in a basement there, and one of the unfinished houses was peppered with .22 rounds. But there was no indication that anyone had been hit. Carver’s body certainly wasn’t there. Nor was Novak’s, come to that. It was barely believable, but somehow two of the planet’s most dangerous inhabitants had fought one another without either suffering any damage. And that made Grantham suspect that there had been a third party in the mix somewhere.

  He’d been a bloody idiot to call Zhukovskaya. They’d worked together in the past, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t sell him out in a heartbeat. And he knew exactly who she’d call. The Russians were getting in on the act somehow, and anything Giammetti knew, they’d know too. Alix might as well have sent out change-of-address cards. If Novak was getting help to trac
k her down, she’d go straight to Peck’s place, and suddenly there’d be US diplomats with CIA connections and women who were personal friends of the President getting blown away on Grantham’s patch. Not good.

  He tried to get to Novak and tell her to forget Alix and concentrate on Carver, but she’d gone off-grid. Probably just as well. He had to assume that any calls to her, Peck or Alix were being monitored. If he got back to Giammetti, he’d only be giving the whole game away. He’d have to sort this out the old-fashioned way: go there in person and get Peck and Alix out of the flat while he still had the chance.

  Grantham buzzed his secretary. ‘Something’s come up. I’ve got to leave the office. So cancel the rest of my appointments for the day. I could be gone some time.’

  85

  CARVER COULDN’T HELP wanting to be near Alix. Part of it was a natural feeling of protectiveness. And then there was the nagging fear that no matter how hard she tried to hide herself away, Novak would somehow manage to find her. If or when that happened, he had to be able to do something about it.

  He’d tried to call Alix, but her phone was unavailable. All he knew was that she was at Trent Peck’s flat, somewhere in St John’s Wood, so he headed to Regent’s Park, which was pretty much next door. It was also a large, open area with very few CCTV cameras and plenty of space for a man to get lost in. Carver navigated a path through the wilderness of unmown grass, stinging nettles, broken bottles and used condoms and found himself a relatively intact park bench. Then he started thinking.

  Peck was a US diplomat, so his phone and address wouldn’t be listed. But he was also a rich bachelor at a loose end in the big city, and it struck Carver that he might just be daft or egotistical enough to stick himself all over a social network or two. In point of fact, it had nothing to do with ego. Peck was in the business of creating an image for himself, a smokescreen behind which he could hide his true purpose, and the self-indulgent playboy has been a pose for spies as long as secrets have been hidden and uncovered.