by Tom Cain
Once the van had been immobilized, he walked around the vehicle and opened the rear doors. With an air of infinite suspicion, he examined the rows of baguettes, round loaves, cakes, tarts, and croissants arranged in the back of the van, seemingly immune to the temptation posed by their crisp brown crusts, succulent fillings, and mouthwatering aromas. So far as he was concerned, every pain au chocolat was a potential booby trap, every quiche a hidden hand grenade. He looked inside the plastic bags filled with meat, vegetables, and booze. Finally, he satisfied himself that the contents of the van posed no danger to anything other than the arteries and brain cells of the people who consumed them.
The bull-necked gangster closed the doors, then resumed his circuit of the van. He came to a halt by the passenger door. He signaled for the window to be wound down. When it had been, he pointed the gun through the opening, bent his head, looked along the barrel, and stared Carver full in the face.
Ringo’s single eyebrow knitted even more tightly as he considered the threat posed by this unfamiliar individual wearing white housepainter’s overalls. He took a step back, positioning himself just to the rear of the door, making sure his field of fire was unimpeded, then motioned with the gun barrel, telling Carver to get out of the van.
Carver stepped out into the warm, scented sunshine, putting his hands up as he did so, the natural reaction of an innocent, inexperienced civilian confronted by a man with a gun. The Georgian pointed his gun at the worn, khaki canvas shoulder bag on the floor of the passenger compartment. He wanted Carver to retrieve it. Once again, Carver did as he was told. He carried out the apparently simple task in slow, distinct stages, making it clear at every point that he was doing nothing untoward.
Once he was standing upright again, with the bag in his hand, he opened it up for inspection. There were two cans of paint inside: one white gloss, brand-new and unopened, the other empty and stuffed with old rags. Alongside the cans lay three brushes of varying widths, a large can of paint thinner, a packet of potato chips, a glass one-liter bottle filled with orange juice, and a small, greaseproof-paper package.
“Sandwiches, for my lunch,” said Carver in French, holding it up. He strongly doubted that the guard spoke the language, but he kept going anyway.
“I just came to do some painting. My patron said the woodwork in the kitchen and lounge needs touching up. Told me he’d spoken to the man that’s renting the place… comprenez?”
Ringo glowered some more before he got out a phone and, still keeping one hand on his gun, hit the speed dial. He had a brief conversation in a language Carver had never heard before, but assumed must be Georgian. Then he signaled to Carver to get back in the van, and jerked his head in the direction of the house.
The baker started up the rackety engine once again and they headed up the hill, around the building to the parking area at the rear. There, the baker got out and walked toward the kitchen door, carrying a couple of shopping bags filled with provisions. He glanced nervously at the two dogs, standing by the wire cage, growling and barking at his approach as he knocked on the door. It opened and the brunette woman, Yoko, stuck her head out. She shouted at the dogs, who lowered their barking to a mean, resentful grumbling and backed away a few paces from the wire. Then she let the baker into the building.
Carver hung back, as if waiting his turn to say his piece. He was standing about fifteen feet away from the kitchen door, by the pile of firewood, under its wooden shelter. He looked around. There was no one watching him. He crouched down at the back of the log pile by the wall of the house and opened up his bag.
Over the next few seconds, he carried out a series of quick, precise actions. First, he took out the small packet of sandwiches and placed them in his pocket. Then he gently slid out a small log at the back of the pile, as if he were removing a brick from a Jenga tower, and shoved the bag of chips and the bottle of orange juice into the gap where the log had been. The canvas bag was tucked out of sight on the ground, in the shade of the shelter, right by the wall of the house. Carver left the bag open, with the can of paint placed across the top of the used paint can stuffed with rags.
Then he walked past the kitchen door. Inside, the baker was holding out a tray of pastries for Yoko to inspect. Again making sure that no one could see him, Carver opened his packet and lobbed the two sandwiches into the dogs’ cage, where they were instantly devoured. He turned back again and hovered outside the kitchen door while the woman made her selection and the baker noted it down on a pad before picking up his tray again and going back to his van.
When it was his turn to speak, Carver stepped into the doorway and launched into the same garbled explanation of his presence that he had given the guard at the gate. Yoko looked puzzled at first, then anxious. She looked behind her, into the house, clearly trying to decide whether it was worth waking her boss. To Carver’s relief, she concluded that it was not and started shooing him away, gabbling indignantly as she did so.
He took the hint and walked back to the van, where the baker was waiting with a grin plastered all over his face-the delighted smile of a man who has just seen another male getting it in the neck from an angry woman. As he got into the passenger seat, Carver shook his head ruefully and blew out his cheeks.
“Les femmes, hein? ” he sighed.
The baker laughed, then started up the van, and they rattled away down the hill.
66
Ivan Sergeyevich Platonov, commonly known as Platon, was the man entrusted with expanding the Podolskaya crime clan’s activities in Western Europe. He had been in bed in his Paris apartment with one of the women whose bodies provided so much of his gang’s revenues when Olga Zhukovskaya called.
“How are you, Ivan Sergeyevich?” asked Olga Zhukovskaya.
“Very well, thank you, and you?”
“Also well. You know, my husband always spoke very warmly of you…”
“He was a great man. My condolences. You received my wreath, I hope.”
“Yes, thank you, very impressive. I’m not disturbing you?”
The girl had woken up, yawned, and then dutifully started running her fingers down Platon’s stomach. He shooed her away.
“Of course not. What can I do for you?”
“I need something collected, or perhaps retrieved would be a better word…”
While Platon listened, occasionally breaking in with specific, practical questions, the deputy director explained about a missing document, the property of the Russian people, that was currently sitting in a safe in a house in the South of France, about 550 miles from where he now lay. It was currently guarded by four Georgians, led by a low-rank gang leader named Bagrat Baladze. Within the next twenty-four hours, it would be either sold to a filthy Arab terrorist or stolen by the agents of an even more despicable American, unless Platon and his men could get to it first.
“You have fought for the Motherland in the past,” said Zhukovskaya. “Now she calls you for one more mission.”
There was something almost seductive in her voice; it was less the command of a senior officer than the request of a vulnerable woman made to a mighty warrior.
Platon wasn’t falling for it.
“Naturally, I am a patriot,” he said. “Even now, when I live as a peaceful businessman, I am willing to do my duty. But there will be costs. Men may die. Their families must be considered.”
He had never paid a single ruble to a widow or orphan in his life, a fact of which Zhukovskaya was fully aware.
“Of course, you must be compensated,” she agreed. “I was thinking, you may be aware that my late husband was involved in the production and sale of certain munitions, on behalf of the state.”
Platon knew that, all right. Zhukovski had made a fortune flogging land mines until that English princess had stuck her interfering nose in his business. That had been the death of her… and of him, too. Since then, as political pressure against them grew, the mines had been rotting in warehouses all over Russia. But the illicit demand for t
hem was unabated. Mines sold by the tens of thousands, and each one was worth three hundred U.S. dollars in pure profit. If he could secure the concession, there was a massive fortune to be made.
“I would be proud to assist my country, but it will not be easy,” he said. “I must take my best men away from their current assignments. They will need equipment. And of course we must all get to the property as fast as possible. A helicopter will be the fastest method. The French make one called a Dauphin. It will easily seat six men and take us all the way there, right to the front door, with just one refueling stop. If I can charter one this morning, I can be at this place by early afternoon.”
As it turned out, Platon’s takeoff was delayed. The chopper he hired had technical problems. It was not until lunchtime that the Eurocopter Dauphin left the Paris heliport and began the three-hour flight south.
67
There had been a number of problems confronting Carver as he tried to work out how to get the document Vermulen wanted from the house where Bagrat Baladze was keeping it. For a start, he was not a professional thief, unlike Kenny Wynter, the man he was impersonating. He did not know where in the building the document was hidden, and the only method he knew of opening a safe was blowing it up: not such a smart idea if you wanted to preserve a flimsy cardboard folder filled with bits of paper. And, of course, there were six potential opponents-because he couldn’t assume that the women would be useless in combat-and only one of him.
Of these considerations, the last was the least significant. Given the element of surprise and a properly planned assault, he could soon even the odds. He’d done it often enough before. But he wasn’t there to kill people. He was there to steal. So he worked through the problem logically, considering all the possible permutations, until he came to a solution that made sense. Which was why he needed his shopping list. That, and a working knowledge of basic chemistry as it applied to the art of sabotage.
The logic was simple. The simplest way of getting the document out of the house was to make Bagrat Baladze do the work for him. Pondering that led Craver inexorably to the chemical properties of the substances on his list.
Linseed oil, for example, is prone to spontaneous combustion, as painters and decorators-not to mention their clients-sometimes learn, at their own cost. When the oil is exposed to air, it oxidizes and releases heat. The greater the exposure, the greater the heat generated. If the linseed is spread thinly across a relatively large area of cotton rag, that maximizes exposure, and so the heat rises. Over a period of approximately six hours, the rags can reach a temperature of more than 430 degrees Centigrade, some 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which is enough to produce a flame.
But there’s a catch. If there’s too little ventilation, the oxidation process is greatly reduced. If there’s too much, the flow of air around the rags simply disperses any heat it creates. It’s just like blowing on a fire. Stifle it and it dies. Blow too hard and you blow it right out. You’ve got to get the balance just right.
The ideal between too much and too little air is to place linseed-soaked rags in an open container. An empty paint can is perfect.
Aquarium pellets have equally potent chemical properties. Their job is to freshen up water by producing oxygen, and their active ingredient is potassium chlorate, an extremely efficient oxidizing agent. Just as with linseed oil, this oxidization produces energy in the form of heat. If the release of energy is sufficiently powerful, it creates an explosion. Potassium chlorate is a very effective oxidizer, which explains why it is also an active ingredient in many homemade explosives, whether formulated by fireworks hobbyists or homicidal terrorists. Carver had ground down the tablets using a pestle and mortar and then mixed the resulting powder with sugar, which would burn to produce a bigger, brighter bang.
He had poured the mix into the bottom of an opened, emptied bag of potato chips, replaced the chips, and glued the bag back together. Then he prepared the bottle of “orange juice,” which actually consisted of acetone-bought from the same hardware store where he’d found the rest of the painter’s supplies-orange food dye, and, once again, sugar. Acetone is an extremely highly flammable liquid whose vapors can explode on exposure to a spark. Among sugar’s properties is that it caramelizes under heat, becoming extremely sticky. So the addition of sugar to this sort of bottle bomb, or Molotov cocktail, causes the flame to adhere to its target, much like napalm.
Carver didn’t have to add anything to the paint thinner or the oil paint. They would be fine just as they were.
His painter’s bag and its contents were, essentially, a self-detonating incendiary bomb. Once they were in place, Carver had ridden back to the village in the baker’s van, checked out of his hotel, and driven back up the mountain, this time by the scenic route. He made a second trek across the mountainside to his observation post, now carrying the equipment that Vermulen’s people had delivered to the poste restante, as per instructions. After that, he’d just waited.
By midday, the air temperature had risen into the high seventies. The women sunned themselves with the gratitude of northern Europeans released at the end of a cold, dark winter. The men went shirtless, revealing torsos covered in the tattoos that are an essential mark of status in Russian gangland culture. The dogs lazed in their cage, their laid-back demeanor caused less by the hot sun on their fur than the large quantities of Valium-fifty milligrams crushed and mixed with the pâté in each of their sandwiches-coursing through their bloodstreams.
The humans lunched late, at around two in the afternoon. They drank heavily with their meal. By half past three, George had taken over sentry duty by the gate. Bagrat and Linda had gone back indoors for sex and a snooze. Everyone else was flopped semicomatose by the pool. That was when Carver saw the first wisps of smoke coming from his canvas bag.
He texted Vermulen’s number: “Delivery 19:00 in bar as planned.” Carver spelled the words in full. He regarded text-speak as infantile twaddle and presumed a retired general would feel the same way. Thinking about it, he doubted whether Vermulen had ever before in his life been obliged to use text at all.
By the time he’d finished, a flame was clearly visible. He’d painted the inside of his bag with linseed, too, just to add to the effect. Once the spark caught, it would quickly spread.
There was a sudden, sharp crack, a shattering of glass, and a whoosh of flame as the bottle of cleanser cracked open and its contents ignited. From there it was a chain reaction. The flame from the cleanser lit the bag of chips, which then went off with an explosive fizz, like a Roman candle. That shattered the drink bottle, releasing a fireball of acetone and sugar, which in turn set the bone-dry logs aflame.
Carver was already wearing his bulletproof vest, with his pistol holstered below it. The loaded grenade launcher was slung around his back. The baton was in his hip pocket. The wax plugs had been stuffed deep into his ears. His hands, encased in tight leather gloves, were holding his gas mask. It would be the last thing to go on.
By now the woodshed was completely ablaze, the flames dancing up the side of the house. A first-floor window was open, and the fire caught on the wooden shutters and window frames and the nylon net curtains rippling in the hot currents of air generated by the fire. The flames slipped into the room beyond as stealthily as a cat burglar. Above them, the massive oak beams under the eaves of the tile roof began to smolder. It would not be long before they, too, added to the conflagration.
68
It was the sentry, down by the gate, who realized what was happening first. Carver watched George’s reaction as he saw the smoke rising over the top of the house and dashed back up the hill, shouting at the top of his voice. By the pool, Paul slowly raised himself to one elbow to see what had caused the commotion, took a few seconds to process what he was seeing, then sprang to his feet and screamed at Ringo to wake up. Yoko started shrieking. The three men raced around the side of the house. They disappeared from Carver’s view for a few seconds, then reappeared on the ground behind the house,
where they stood, pointing at the fire, backing away from the flames and shouting at one another.
A window was flung open above the kitchen and Bagrat stuck out his head. Carver could see the look of horror on his face as he saw the blaze and then watched the expression turn to panic as the Georgian looked down at the propane-gas cylinders beneath him. If they exploded, they could take half the building with him. He screamed a series of orders at the three men, threw a set of keys out of the house onto the ground in front of the men, then ducked back inside.
Carver’s entire plan hinged on what Bagrat did next, but he didn’t have time to wait and see what would happen. He had to get moving and hope that his enemy’s logic was the same as his own.
Down below, the men had split into two groups. George and Ringo were frantically trying to disconnect the propane cylinders and drag them away from the fire. This wasn’t good. Carver wanted the men well out of the way. He’d assumed they’d make a dash for the front of the house, away from the threat of the fire. Paul had picked up the keys from the dirt and was moving toward the Shogun. Carver had planned to hit the Georgians when they gathered together in a group in front of the burning house. As any normal people would do.
Time for an instant rethink.
He pulled on his gas mask and scrambled down the hillside, charging through the undergrowth as fast as he could, heedless of the noise he was making. He knew the men’s attention would be fully focused on the fire.
He was making for a point on the boundary wall halfway between the gas tanks and the carport, almost exactly opposite the fire. The wall was about seven feet tall. It felt just like being back on the marines’ assault course as Carver leapt up, grabbed the top of the wall, scrambled for purchase with his feet, then propelled himself, rolling over the top and down the other side.
The moment his feet touched the ground, he reached for the grenade launcher and fired twice: the first round toward the car, the second at the canisters. Two plumes of white gas belched from the grenades, trapping the three men in thick clouds that burned their eyes and rasped their throats. The Georgians staggered, dizzy, disoriented, and retching, as Carver came at them out of the smoke, swinging his steel riot baton at their defenseless skulls and necks with ruthless brutality.