by Tom Cain
The two men were standing side by side now, looking out at the vivid green lawn, across which the shadow cast by an ancient cedar of Lebanon was spreading.
‘What, you think I don’t have the stones for this?’ Zorn asked, with a genuine note of surprise in his voice.
‘It is not easy to have that many deaths on one’s conscience,’ Razzaq answered.
A lazy smile spread across Malachi Zorn’s face. ‘What makes you think I have a conscience?’ he said.
26
Carver looked at the phone in his hand, wondering what he was going to say. It had been a couple of years since he’d last spoken to Alix, just a handful of words snatched at the funeral of a mutual friend. There hadn’t been a chance for a proper conversation: he’d been there with another woman.
He wasn’t even sure if the number he had for her would still work. He dialled it. Well, at least there was a ringtone. But no one was answering. He heard the phone ring three, four, five times, and was just formulating a voicemail message in his mind when she took the call, sounding brisk and a little hurried: ‘Hello, Alexandra Vermulen.’
The sound of her voice still thrilled him. They’d been apart for more than a decade, yet even now there was no other woman in the world that could get to him the way she did. But there was a stab of jealousy in him, too, that she should be using another man’s name as her own. That was another thing Carver had never quite got used to. ‘It’s me,’ he said.
There was no need for any further identification. He knew that his voice would be as instantly recognizable to Alix as hers was to him. Now he waited to hear her reaction. There was a hesitancy, almost a brittleness, as she said, ‘Hello…’
‘Look, I’m sorry to call you out of the blue. But you might be able to help me…’
Did he imagine it, or was there a sigh before she asked, ‘Is this a business call?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I suppose it was too much to hope that you might just want to speak to me.’
Carver rolled his eyes to the ceiling and took a deep breath. Bad start. Try again.
‘Come on, Alix, you know it’s not like that.’
‘So what is it like?’
Silence fell on the line, neither knowing what to say next, but not ready yet to hang up. It was Carver’s move. He made it.
‘Can we start again, here? I would really like to see you. Full stop. Also, you might be able to help me with something important. Is there any chance we could meet up this evening? It doesn’t have to be for very long if you’re busy. Maybe we could have a quick drink?’
There was another pause. Carver could sense the debate in Alix’s mind as she weighed up the pros and cons of taking this further. Finally she said, ‘OK, Sam, we can meet. There’s a party at the Muscovy Gallery in Cork Street this evening. They’re opening an exhibition of Soviet propaganda posters. I’ll get your name put on the guest list. Be there in an hour.’
‘Thanks, I appreciate it.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you should.’
27
Kensington Park Gardens
Alix had taken the call in her bedroom, where she’d been getting dressed. She’d decided hours before what to wear to the opening: a white silk blouse and slimline midnight-blue cigarette pants with strappy high-heeled sandals. The look was simple, elegant, respectably attractive. She had put the clothes on, chosen a necklace and some bangles, and satisfied herself that the whole outfit worked. Now she looked at herself in the mirror once more, almost in disbelief that Carver had called and that somehow she had agreed to see him again. Why had she done that? Why couldn’t she just let go of the past and say no?
If she’d not had that argument with Azarov they’d have gone to the party together, and she would have had the perfect reason to turn Carver down. As it was, her so-called lover was still sulking in the Ritz, doubtless surrounded by hungry young women who’d be only too willing to take his mind off his troubles at home. So was that all she was doing now: getting her own back?
She found herself wanting to change her clothes completely. Alix told herself that she would not be dressing for Carver. She was not trying, still less hoping, to seduce him. She wanted it to be perfectly clear that she was a successful, independent woman who could do — in fact had done — very well without him. But she also wanted to look marvellous.
She went through several options before settling on a simple tobacco-coloured silk dress. The apparent modesty of its length was offset by a perfect cut that subtly showed off every inch of her body, caressing the curves of her breasts and hips. She tied the halter neck that held the dress in place, and let the loose ends of the bow fall, brushing against her naked back.
Now she examined herself in the mirror. Objectively, she knew she was in amazing shape: her scales and her dress size did not lie. But that did not make her any less critical of the flaws she could see in every part of her body. As she straightened her back to pull in her already flat stomach she wondered what Carver would see when he looked at her. Would she still be, to him, the beautiful young woman he’d once loved, or would the evidence of all those passing years, so obvious to her own eyes, destroy any illusions he might still have?
She imagined Carver standing next to her. Even in her heels she would still be an inch or two shorter than him. She lifted her chin as if looking up at him and was relieved to see how her jawline was tightened. For a second she stared herself in the eye, and as she did a memory came to her of her first day in Carver’s apartment. It had been a refuge for them, a haven after a night of violence and danger. He had looked at her with a frown of concentration on his face and said, ‘Your eyes. There’s something just a tiny bit uneven about them.’ The words had stung her like a whip. In an instant she had become that ugly duckling again, the butt of so many cruel taunts about her crazy cross-eyes. Even now she could feel the shock of having her deepest, most private insecurity so forensically stripped bare.
Carver had seen her pain at once, sensed her vulnerability, and apologized profusely. ‘You have amazing eyes. They’re beautiful, kind of hypnotic. I can’t stop looking at them, and now I know why.’ She had forgiven him. After all, his mistake had been the result of looking past the glossy surface of her and seeing the real woman within — and how often had she wished men would do that?
She’d been wearing Carver’s old grey T-shirt, sitting curled up like a cat in one of his huge armchairs, its leather scuffed and softened by age, basking in the warmth of the sun that streamed through the window. She had felt so comfortable there; so right, and yet so surprised that she had somehow allowed herself to lower all her professional defences.
And then she recalled the feel of him as they had made love, and the memory was so intense that she cursed herself for letting it into her mind. As she picked up her handbag and made her way towards the front door she told herself once again that she was not doing any of this for Samuel Carver. She was doing it for herself. Yes, that was it.
28
Whitehall
The Prime Ministerwanted a spectacular, and once the word got out to the highest reaches of the civil service that there was going to be an event that would provide massive publicity and a jolly day out, the biggest problem for the hard-pressed administrative officials at the Cabinet Office became the need to limit numbers. By early evening a plan was coming together. Support staff, press officers and media would be packed on to coaches at six in the morning, ready to set off on a magical mystery tour to a destination that, for security reasons, none of them would be given in advance. They would be followed by a flotilla of TV outside broadcast vans and trucks. But by far the fastest, most reliable way of getting VIPs from London to the chosen location would be by helicopter. That meant using 32 (Royal) Squadron, based at RAF Northolt in West London, which had two of its three Augusta Westland AW109E Power Elite choppers available, each of which could seat six passengers. There were, therefore, twelve VIP seats available… and at least ten times that number of pe
ople who were absolutely convinced they deserved them.
29
Cork Street, Mayfair, London W1
Alix looked around the gallery at the socialites and art-lovers crammed together to celebrate the art of a totalitarian system that would have shot them all in the blink of an eye. It was, she thought, becoming harder with every year to tell the Russians apart from the rest, as wealth and consumption became entitlements to be taken for granted, rather than novelties to be wallowed in as greedily and flagrantly as possible. She wondered how many of them, like her, were former members of the KGB. Plenty, in all probability: the Committee for State Security’s grip on the upper reaches of the new capitalist Russia was almost as tight as it had been in the old Soviet system. She made her way into the crush of bodies, through an invisible cloud of competing scents and aftershaves, searching for Samuel Carver.
And then she saw him, standing no more than ten metres away. He was looking at an image of a young woman in a red-spotted blouse standing in front of a silhouetted factory, brandishing a gun in her raised right fist. The slogan on the poster, in bold Cyrillic script, read, ‘Women workers, take up your rifles!’ Carver was regarding it with a wry smile on his face: she had a feeling he wouldn’t feel too threatened by anything that girl was likely to do. Alix ran her eyes down her former lover’s body, appraising him. He was still as lean and taut as ever, but the lines on his face were a little deeper, and there was the hint of grey at his temples. These signs of age merely served to make him look more attractive, and she cursed the unfairness of the differing ways time affected men and women. She took a couple of steps towards him, and he must have sensed her approach because he turned and greeted her with a broad, boyish smile that made her heart leap. Damn him!
‘Would you like me to translate?’ she asked, sounding cooler than she felt.
‘Sure, go ahead,’ he said, his eyes fixed on hers.
She pretended to look at the image with exaggerated concentration, using the time to pull herself together before she answered, ‘So… what it says is: what am I doing here?’
‘Appreciating your country’s great history…’
‘It’s not so great.’ Alix ran her eyes around the other posters on the walls, with their repetitive images of Lenin — one arm always extended towards his people: soldiers, workers and noble, sturdy communist women. ‘Everything in this room is a lie.’
Carver’s expression lost its amusement. ‘Everything?’
Alix shrugged. ‘I don’t know, you tell me. What am I doing here?’
‘Like I said, business…’
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes,’ Carver said, adding to the number of lies. ‘I need to know about a woman who currently goes by the name of Magda Sternberg. We think she used to have another identity.’
‘Who’s “we”?’
‘Me, Grantham… MI6.’
‘Ha! You’re working for Grantham now?’
‘Let’s just say we’re helping each other out.’
Alix felt calmer now. Maybe this really would just be business. Maybe that would be better. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘OK, this Magda Sternberg… the name means nothing to me. Why should I know her?’
‘Because it’s possible that you trained together. We think she used to be called Celina Novak.’
That name! It took all her years of experience to conceal the shock of it. Alix felt herself taken back to a time when she was still a gauche, provincial teenager, her eyes only recently cured of their squint, her teeth still in the braces that would create her perfect smile. She thought of Celina Novak, the spoilt, vicious daughter of senior officials in Poland’s ruling United Workers’ Party, sent to Russia to be trained by the KGB. She remembered the absolute contempt and disdain with which Celina had regarded her, and felt a sudden rush of the humiliation that used to be her overpowering emotion. It took an effort to control her voice as she said, ‘Do you have a picture?’
Carver held up his phone. On its screen was an old black and white identity photo of a uniformed cadet, her beautiful face set hard as flint.
Alix nodded.
‘Have you met her?’ she asked.
Carver turned his head away from her and cast his eyes towards the poster again. ‘Professionally,’ he said, still not looking at Alix.
‘Then you’ll know she likes to destroy the lives of everyone she meets.’ She wondered what Carver was trying to hide.
Now he turned back to her. ‘But not yours…’
‘I had powerful protectors. I was luckier than I knew.’
Carver frowned. ‘What happened to the ones who weren’t lucky?’
‘There was a girl called Dasha Markova. She hanged herself…’
Alix could not bear to tell the whole story of how Markova had committed suicide after months of psychological torture inflicted by a gang of classmates recruited and led by Celina Novak. She, Alix, had been part of that gang. She’d felt thrilled that Celina had finally allowed her into the inner circle after all the months in which she had herself been excluded and tormented. And, yes, she’d been relieved that someone else had now been the target. The shame of it had only grown over time.
‘Celina can make you do anything,’ Alix said, her voice barely more than a whisper, so that Carver had to strain to hear her over the noise of the gallery crowd.
Her words seemed to affect him, though, because he grimaced.
‘So what happened to her? Did she get kicked out?’ he asked.
Alix gave a bitter smile. ‘No, she graduated with honours.’
Carver mimed the opening of an envelope: ‘And this year’s winner of the Stalin Prize for psychopathic cruelty is…’
Despite herself, Alix could not help but laugh.
Carver said nothing, just looked at her.
Nervous about what he was seeing, she asked, ‘What is it?’
‘Your smile.’
Just the way he said it told her that his feelings had not changed. But maybe she was fooling herself. She realized her pulse was racing. Her mouth was dry.
‘I need a drink,’ she said.
‘Sure.’
A waiter was passing by, his tray laden with glasses of champagne. Carver stepped over to him, took two and offered one to Alix.
She reached for it. Her fingers brushed his, and it was as if an electric circuit had been completed as the energy surged between them. It was all she could do not to drop the glass.
They looked one another in the eye and felt the connection again.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Carver said.
‘I haven’t had my champagne,’ Alix replied.
‘Don’t bother. It’s not the real stuff.’
‘Well, I always want the best stuff there is. Don’t you?’
‘You know I do,’ he said.
Less than a minute later they were hailing a cab.
30
Carn Drum Farm
The weapon had specifically been designed to be as simple as possible. ‘The fewer parts there are, the less there is to go wrong,’ Smethurst had said. ‘People always try to get fancy, you know? Doesn’t matter if they’re the Paddies or the Pentagon, they can’t resist fucking it up with unnecessary complications.’
He’d made sure there would be none of that.
A metal plate had been welded to the base of each of the larger cylinders, with a small hole in the bottom for an electric wire. The wire was passed through the hole into the cylinder, and one of the igniters was attached.
Twelve of these cylinders were placed inside the metal framework, which had already been welded to the floor of the camper van. They were each arranged at fractionally different angles, according to instructions given by Dave Smethurst, who supervised the entire process and checked the results with extreme care. He had spent two hours test-firing shells from that remote cwm, far from prying eyes, then processed the results and determined an individual trajectory for each of his projectiles.
Only when the cylinde
rs were positioned exactly as he wanted them were they filled about one-third deep with the fuel mix of icing sugar and fertilizer, just as an old-fashioned muzzle-loading cannon would have been filled with its load of gunpowder.
The result was a multi-barrel launcher, filled with propellant. All that was missing was something to propel.
That wouldn’t be long in arriving.
Under Smethurst’s direction, two of Gryffud’s men had removed the valves from a dozen of the smaller cylinders. The explosive mix was poured in through the hole where the valve had been, then the fuse and detonator assembly was inserted and the hole resealed.
The small cylinders were placed in the big ones, like one Russian doll inside another, so that the fuse wire from the bottom of the shells nestled in the fuel mix.
The wires from the bottom of each of the launch cylinders were connected to a junction box, along with a thirteenth wire which led to a large plastic jerrycan filled with petrol. The junction box was in turn connected to a timer located by the passenger seat.
The rear door of the van opened vertically. When the multiple launcher was complete and loaded, the door was lowered and welded shut. Then the open top of the camper van was covered with a large sheet of paper, lacquered to improve its strength and water-resistance, and sprayed white to match the van. It was sealed to the roof with clear vinyl tape. Only the closest inspection would reveal that anything had been done to the roof. Only a torrential downpour would break through the lacquered, painted paper. This, too, was another old IRA ploy.
The weapons had been made and loaded. The mission was ready to go.
31
London
Grantham called while Carver and Alix were in the cab. ‘So, did you speak to your old girlfriend?’ he asked.