Carver

by Tom Cain

  ‘Mr Zorn, I presume,’ said Grantham.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What’s the story with him, then?’

  Nainby-Martin took over: ‘Could you pause the video a moment, please, Elaine?’ As the image froze, he glanced down at a file in front of him. ‘Malachi Vernon Zorn. Born in Westchester, New York, in 1970. His father was a banker, his mother a full-time housewife. Malachi was the only child. Educated privately at Phillips Exeter Academy, then went up to Harvard to study mathematics, for which he had a phenomenal aptitude. As a boy he was also an accomplished horseman, played a lot of tennis and was a competent yachtsman. So far, so conventionally privileged. But then came an unexpected twist. Both his parents died: mother first, then the heartbroken father.

  ‘Zorn was in his final year at Harvard, but walked out without graduating. He proceeded to hit the New York party circuit, apparently set on throwing away every penny of his inheritance as fast as possible. Aside from occasional mentions in the gossip columns, no more was heard of him until 1995, when he set up a small company called Zorn Financials. It was a one-man band. Just Zorn, alone in an office, surrounded by screens, essentially placing bets on a variety of financial markets.’

  ‘Any market in particular?’ Grantham asked. ‘I thought most of these people were highly specialized: particular commodities, currencies and so forth.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Nainby-Martin agreed. ‘And what’s more, they tend to use other people’s money. Young Zorn, however, took positions without any apparent regard for the type of market, or its location, or the nature of the play. And he did it by risking every penny he had, all the time.’

  ‘Sounds like a typical death wish to me,’ said Grantham. ‘His parents had left him alone, nothing to live for. He was just tempting fate to get him, too.’

  ‘That’s certainly a theory,’ said Nainby-Martin. ‘And the rest of his behaviour seems to give it a certain credence. Once Zorn started making big money, he spent it seeking thrills: seriously fast cars, speedboats, skydiving, mountaineering expeditions to the Himalayas, all that sort of thing. An adrenalin junkie, you might say.’

  ‘So how did Nicholas Orwell enter the picture?’

  ‘Ah well, a year ago, Zorn let it be known that he was thinking of going into business in a more conventional way, setting up a hedge fund called Zorn Global that would accept investments from exceptionally high-net-worth individuals. He was contemplating a minimum stake of one billion dollars. And the man he had in mind to act as his personal ambassador to the world’s super-rich was Nicholas Orwell.’

  Grantham laughed to himself. ‘Orwell must have loved that idea.’

  ‘He’s not shown any sign of objecting,’ Nainby-Martin replied drily. ‘Our information is that Zorn offered him a fee of five million dollars, plus the same again for his charitable foundation.’

  ‘So he’s doing this for charity? How very noble.’

  There were stifled sniggers round the table at Grantham’s acid sarcasm.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Nainby-Martin, maintaining an impressively straight face. ‘But in any case, rumours of Zorn’s new fund went round the smart set in an instant. In no time people were practically begging to be allowed to give him their cash.’

  ‘In this financial climate? Aren’t they all hanging on to their money for dear life?’

  ‘Apparently not. The problem for the rich appears to be that there’s nowhere to put their money. Stocks and commodities are all over the place, property values are going nowhere and interest rates on savings have been rock-bottom for years. They’re looking for a magician who can buck the markets.’

  ‘And Zorn is happy to oblige.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘So this event in Italy – I assume it was aimed at possible investors? Orwell does the schmoozing, Zorn takes all the money?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Grantham nodded thoughtfully. ‘I see. Let’s carry on with the show.’

  Zorn and his guests started moving down the stairs again. The men of the party were dressed in more formal variations on Zorn’s dinner suit. The women, by contrast, wore dazzling couture gowns in silk and lace, decorated with jewels worthy of a pirate’s treasure trove; a description that in some cases was disturbingly close to the truth, given the dubious means by which their men had come by their fortunes. Through this select little group flitted a man known the whole world over for the bright, shiny charm of his smile and the deceptive plausibility of his words. He strode jauntily to the front as they all descended the steps and exchanged a few words with Malachi Zorn.

  ‘Aha!’ said Grantham. ‘Nicholas Orwell himself, the very man I was …’

  Grantham fell silent as he peered, frowning more closely at the video. He waved at McAndrew. ‘Pause it!’ Then he got up and walked towards the screen, stopping just a few feet away. He stared intently for a few more seconds, and then tapped his forefinger against the screen, directly over the motionless image of a blonde, whose slender elegance stood out from the other women there, despite all the time and money they had put into perfecting their appearance.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ murmured Grantham to himself.

  Behind him there was another shuffling of papers and a voice said, ‘If you give me a second, sir, I think I should be able to identify her.’

  ‘No need,’ said Grantham. ‘Her name’s Alexandra Vermulen. Born Alexandra Petrova. She’s Russian, age around forty. Also known as Alix. Fascinating woman.’

  ‘You sound as though you know her well,’ Nainby-Martin remarked.

  Grantham said nothing. He was thinking back to the only time he had ever met her: at a funeral in Norway, saying farewell to a good man who had made one bad mistake. And then he thought of a time before that, and the events that had linked him to Alix through the man who had loved her, Samuel Carver.

  ‘No,’ Grantham finally replied. ‘I can’t say we’re particularly close.’ For a moment he sounded uncharacteristically wistful. But then, to his staff’s relief, he snapped back to his usual, acerbic style: ‘But one thing I do know, from my experience, is that whenever that woman enters the picture, trouble’s never far behind.’

  4

  * * *

  Mykonos

  OVER THE YEARS, Carver had made a lot more enemies than friends. That was the nature of his business. When you spent your adult life getting rid of criminals, terrorists and malevolent psychopaths of every description, you were bound to provoke a grudge or two.

  Carver wasn’t his real name. When his mother had abandoned him as a baby he’d been adopted by a couple who called him Paul and gave him their own surname, Jackson. He began his career as a second lieutenant in the Royal Marines before being selected for the Marines’ own elite-within-an-elite, the Special Boat Service. He quit after a dozen years in uniform, and dreamed of a peaceful, normal life on Civvy Street, until a hit-and-run driver killed the woman he planned to marry. Carver had gone off the rails and been sleeping off a drunken brawl in a police cell when his former commanding officer, Quentin Trench, offered him a job perfectly suited to his particular talents and training.

  He became a freelance assassin, his major client a group that called itself the Consortium. It consisted of men whose wealth and influence enabled them to commission work that could not be attributed to any elected government, removing individuals whose guilt had long since been proven beyond any doubt, without recourse to judges or juries. Carver provided them with deniability: calculated hits that either appeared to be random accidents, or could be attributed to another, false perpetrator.

  He was very good at his job and paid accordingly, but as long as he possessed a shred of humanity he could not help but be affected by the taking of another man’s life, however evil that life might be. He tried to justify his work mathematically: every guilty life he took saved many more innocent ones, but that rationalization could not stop the steady erosion of his soul, or ease his emotional isolation.

  And then, on
e August night in Paris, in an underpass beside the Seine, Carver committed an act for which there was no justification. He had been set up, and he took fearsome revenge on the men who had deceived and betrayed him. Still, the stain on his conscience had never quite washed away, and his need for atonement had never been satisfied.

  This was not, however, a subject on which Carver liked to dwell. He saw no point in trying to repair an unchangeable past or speculate about an unknowable future. He dealt in the here and now, and saved his mental energy for problems he could solve, like the two now confronting him. First he had to deal with the three remaining gunmen pursuing him through the streets of Mykonos. And then he had to get the hell away from the island.

  He had not had anything to do with Ginger’s murder, and a decent lawyer might be able to argue successfully that the dead man in the alley had been killed in self-defence. But there was no telling what pressure would be put on the local police and prosecuting magistrate to come up with a guilty man whose arrest and conviction would put tourist minds at ease. Carver had no intention of being that man.

  He stepped out of the alley, back on to another crowded shopping street, indistinguishable from the last. The crowds looked no different. The only thing missing was the presence of any threat. Carver scanned his surroundings, searching for any trace of his pursuers, but could see none. He walked out into the middle of the street, clearly visible to anyone who was watching. Nothing happened.

  He frowned, made more uneasy by the absence of danger – the dogs that did not bark – than he had been when running for his life, pursued by men with guns. Where had they gone? And why, come to think of it, had they not killed him when they had the chance? These were men who had gunned down a completely innocent victim without a second thought. Yet when he had been running through to the restaurant kitchen they had somehow managed to miss his exposed, defenceless back at virtually point-blank range. And now they were nowhere to be seen.

  Carver’s phone rang.

  He took it from his pocket, wondering whether to answer.

  He looked at the number that had appeared on the screen, recognizing it at once.

  Carver pressed the green button, put the phone to his ear, and heard a voice that had recently become very familiar.

  ‘Hi, baby,’ it said. ‘This is Ginger. If you want to get off the island in one piece, do exactly what I say …’

  5

  * * *

  MI6 headquarters

  JACK GRANTHAM GAVE a sigh that seemed to hint at disappointment. ‘Hmm … I don’t suppose there’s too much to worry about. Nicholas Orwell appears to be making a few more bob by helping this Malachi Zorn – and sundry other equally plutocratic types – to become even wealthier than they already are. They’re all consenting adults. If anything goes wrong they have no one to blame but themselves. Who are we to object?’

  Piers Nainby-Martin cleared his throat. ‘Well, there’s just one more thing.’

  ‘Really?’ Grantham became instantly alert, like a hound that has just caught the scent of a distant fox. ‘What would that be?’

  ‘There’s a freelance reporter in New York called Camilla DaCosta, who helps us out from time to time. I asked her to look into Zorn, tell people she was writing a newspaper profile of him. Well, she managed to get quite a bit of material, including an interview with an old girlfriend of his …’ Nainby-Martin glanced down at his notes. ‘Name of Domenica Cruz, an ex-stripper.’

  ‘You mean he’s kinky? If he’s vulnerable to blackmail, that could be a problem.’

  ‘No, that’s not it. The woman was only working at a club to pay her way through college. She sells insurance now …’

  ‘A rather less honourable profession than stripping.’

  ‘Quite possibly. Anyway, her views on Zorn’s personal demons caught my attention. And there’s something at the end that might interest you, too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just a remark she makes. It’s nothing concrete, but it’s been niggling at me. See what you think. I must apologize, by the way, if Miss DaCosta’s interrogation technique is a little, ah, fluffy for your taste.’

  There was a suppressed chuckle around the table. Grantham was one of nature’s bad cops, known for the speed and toughness with which he liked to extract information. He took a deep breath, as if preparing himself for the worst, and then said, ‘Let’s see it, then.’

  Once again a grainy video image appeared on screen, this time shot at a sidewalk café on a busy Manhattan street, two cups of coffee on the table. An attractive brunette in a formal business suit was looking into the lens with a worried look on her face.

  ‘You promise me that you’re not going to write nasty things about Mal? I mean, I don’t want to end up in some supermarket tabloid,’ she said.

  The voice that answered her was that of a young, upper-middleclass Englishwoman. ‘Oh no, I quite understand. That would be terrible. But don’t worry. You’re quite safe with The Times. We were founded more than two hundred years ago and we’re terribly respectable. The paper of record, and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ Grantham groaned.

  ‘She knows what she’s doing,’ Nainby-Martin assured him.

  On screen, Domenica Cruz relaxed a little, though there was still a trace of hesitancy as she said, ‘Well, in that case, I guess it’s OK if I help you.’

  ‘So tell me about Mr Zorn. You met at the Penthouse Club, isn’t that right?’

  A fresh look of alarm crossed Cruz’s face, and she held a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh my God! I was just trying to pay my way through college and …’

  ‘I think pole-dancing’s terribly sexy,’ said Camilla DaCosta, encouragingly. ‘I went to classes for a while. My boyfriend absolutely loved it!’

  ‘Huh! I hope he was nicer than some of the assholes I had to dance for!’

  ‘Was Mr Zorn an asshole?’

  ‘God no, Mal was great!’ Cruz said, smiling for the first time. ‘Really smart, you know. He just, I don’t know … got it. And people, too. It was like he knew what they were gonna do or say next. Got a little spooky actually, sometimes.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Cruz frowned, trying to find the right words. ‘I guess he could just take in an incredible amount of information, analyse everything, and then figure out what to do faster than anyone I ever met. And, believe me, he had a LOT of information. He has people all over the world working for him.’

  ‘Like spies?’

  ‘Kinda, I guess. He’s always one step ahead, that’s for sure.’

  A little laugh from DaCosta, then: ‘I’m not sure I’d like a man who knew what I was going to do next!’

  Cruz laughed, too. ‘Totally!’

  ‘It sounds like you had a real connection. I mean, I can see why any man would be drooling over you. You’re so gorgeous!’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, someone get me a sick-bag!’ Grantham interjected.

  ‘Wait!’ Nainby-Martin implored his boss. ‘She’s getting good material here.’

  On the screen, Cruz was making the obligatory self-deprecating woman-to-woman remarks about how much she hated her own body – her upper arms and ankles seemed to give particular grounds for concern. ‘But, yeah, I know, most guys don’t seem to care. They just want to bang a dancer.’

  ‘Zorn doesn’t sound like that kind of man, though.’

  ‘No, that was what I liked about him. He saw beyond that. He was interested in me, you know, as a real person. I think we kind of bonded over our parents, too, you know?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I was raised by my grandmomma, ’cause both my parents died in an auto smash.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry …’

  ‘Thanks, but it’s OK. I mean, it was a long time ago.’

  ‘Didn’t Mr Zorn’s parents die, too, when he was a boy?’

  ‘Exactly. We really connected over that. And for Mal, losing his people was just a huge,
huge issue.’

  ‘You mean he hadn’t got over it?’

  Cruz sighed: ‘You have no idea … What happened was, Mal’s mom got sick in the head. She was stuck at home all day. Her husband was away in the city working totally crazy hours, and she just got lonely and bored and miserable. You know what it’s like for a guy who works for one of those big banks. They own him. If it’s a choice between doing something for the bank or doing something for his family, the bank wins. And the little woman back at home still has to be the pretty, smiley wifey. It’s like Mad Men or something. If Mal’s mom started drinking or popping pills, God, who can blame her?’

  ‘Is that what happened?’ Camilla DaCosta’s hand could be seen coming into shot and lifting a coffee cup.

  ‘Uh-huh, pretty much. And Mal’s dad tried to help. I think he really loved her. But he couldn’t ever take the time to really be there for her, because Lehman’s always came first, and it really tore him apart. From what I heard—’

  The cup was almost slammed back on to the table. ‘Sorry, did you say Mal’s father worked at Lehman Brothers?’

  ‘Oh yes, didn’t you know? Mal hated Lehman’s … The way he saw it, the bank had killed his parents. What happened was, his dad had to put his mom in rehab because he couldn’t look after her at home. She’d been there a coupla months or something when they let her come home for a weekend. But while she was in the house, Mal’s dad was called back to the city for a meeting, and had to leave her. You know, just for an afternoon, or whatever. Anyway, when he came back, she was dead. Took an overdose. Mal found the body.’

  ‘God, how terrible.’