The Accident Man

by Tom Cain

  Once the bags of explosive putty had been stashed in Carver’s backpack, he got out the cleanser and poured it all over the basin, removing any traces of oil or C4. He set the taps on full blast to rinse it all away and threw the bottle in the trash. There was still a slight smell of oil and plastic in the air, so Carver sprayed air freshener around the tiny room, then junked that can too. A man was waiting outside as he left. Carver shrugged his shoulders apologetically, held his nose, and murmured, “Pardon.”

  He collected his pizza and ate half of it in the parking lot. The rest he threw away in a Dumpster. He kept the box, mounted the Honda, and headed south into Paris.

  The apartment was on the Ile Saint-Louis, one of the two islands in the middle of the river Seine that sit virtually at the dead center of the city. The street outside was filled with tourists enjoying the island’s relaxed village atmosphere and the warm, late-summer evening. They wandered along, taking their time, stopping to look in shop windows or check out the menus of the restaurants and cafés dotted along the sidewalks.

  Carver parked his bike and got off, still wearing his helmet, carrying the pizza box. Anyone who spared him a passing glance would just see a delivery man. Only a very sharp eye would spot that he was wearing a pair of latex gloves as he walked up to the front door of the eighteenth-century building where Ramzi Narwaz entertained his lovers. A few seconds’ work with a set of skeleton keys got him in.

  He looked around the ground-floor lobby, familiarizing himself with its layout, then walked down it to a back door that led into a bare courtyard with a row of trash bins down one wall. Directly opposite him an archway opened out onto the street at the back of the building. Relieved to see that there was more than one way out, Carver got rid of the pizza box and went back into the building.

  The apartment was on the top floor, up several flights of stairs. Once again the locks were no barrier. Carver stepped into a central hallway with a floor-to-ceiling window at its far end. It was almost dark outside, but the streetlights gave off enough illumination to enable Carver to see his way around.

  The moment the door was opened, the burglar alarm warning started beeping, set off by a standard magnetic door contact. Carver had thirty seconds before the alarm went off. A small control pad was fixed to the wall immediately to the left of the door, just as the plans he’d been sent had promised. The code too was exactly as Max had said. The beeping stopped.

  Ahead of him, leading off the hall, there was a short passage, lined with cupboards. The left-hand side was broken by a door, which opened onto a tiny kitchenette. Carver turned the other way and opened the cupboard on the right-hand side of the passage. There were a couple of winter coats hanging there. Behind them was the white metal box that contained the heart and brain of the apartment’s alarm system. He gave a satisfied nod, then closed the cupboard door.

  At the far end of the passage was a large, open-plan living room. The place was classier than Carver had been expecting, given the kind of man who owned it and what he used it for. There were no flashy glass-and-chrome tables, no mirrored ceilings or semipornographic nudes. Instead, the room had pale walls, with an antique wooden dining table at one end, decorated with a vase of fresh flowers. Beyond it, three large, creamy white sofas were arranged around a Persian rug. Other than that, the floors were bare wood, echoed in the massive, black wooden beams that supported the ceiling. A fireplace was set into the far wall, next to bookshelves that housed a mini hi-fi system, a couple of rows of books, and a small collection of crystal vases, small pots, and miniature sculptures. Two infrared motion detectors blinked at him from opposite corners of the room, there to catch intruders coming in through the windows.

  Carver put his pack down in the middle of the floor, extracted the torch, strapped it around his head so that both his hands were free, and took a long, detailed look at the hifi. Then he banged his hand against the wall behind it, checking to see that it was a solid, load-bearing structure, and nodded to himself, satisfied.

  He returned to the pack and removed the screwdriver, the wire cutters, and three small, oblong plastic cases, each roughly the size and depth of a paperback book, but very slightly curved along their longer sides.

  These were M18 Claymore antipersonnel mines, configured for remote detonation. Each consisted of a kilo slab of C4 explosive, around which were wrapped seven hundred tiny steel ballbearings, encased in a polystyrene and fiberglass outer shell.

  He lifted down the mini hi-fi, unscrewed the back of the speaker cabinets, opened them up, and cut away the speaker units themselves. Then he placed a Claymore inside each of the empty cabinets, closed them up again, and replaced them exactly as they had been, complete with leads from the amplifier. When they went off, the deadly pellets would be fired in an arc across the room and through the flimsy partition walls that separated it from the kitchenette and the hall. Anyone in their way would be shredded into bite-size chunks. Carver tucked his screwdriver and wire cutters away in his outside thigh pocket and took another look at the finished job.

  The switch was undetectable. If Narwaz turned on his hifi within a minute of walking into the apartment, he might be suspicious when no sound came from the speakers. But then, if Narwaz came back to the apartment that night, he’d just have survived an assassination attempt. He wouldn’t be in the mood for music.

  Carver was working without undue haste, settling into a steady rhythm that would get him out of the apartment as quickly as possible, without rushing into careless mistakes. He picked up the pack and walked from the room, down the passage, and across the hall to the bedroom. Again, the walls were pale, the floors wooden, the window and drapes full length. This time there was just one motion sensor. The bed was the one extravagance in the place, a magnificent piece of Victorian brass, its gleaming rails topped by extravagant swirls of twisted metal.

  He was about to move on when something caught his eye at the end of the bed. When he shone his torch on it he realized it was an overnight bag. The pattern on the fabric was Louis Vuitton. It was open and half-filled with women’s clothes. Nearby was a small, shiny Chanel carrier bag. A pair of white jeans had been thrown on the bedspread next to a short denim jacket. Two slip-on Keds sneakers, in matching white, were lying on the floor next to the bed. Carver walked around the bed and over to another door that led into the en suite bathroom. On the shelf above the basin there were a couple of bags, one filled with makeup, the other, bigger one stuffed with shampoo, body lotions, and other bath-time paraphernalia.

  The discovery jolted Carver out of his smooth, complacent routine. Max hadn’t told him that Narwaz had a girlfriend in town. She’d obviously arrived, changed, and then gone out again. If she was with Narwaz now, she was going to die with him tonight. Carver pulled out his phone and dialed a UK-based mobile line.

  “You didn’t tell me about the woman.”

  “Why would I? Makes no difference to the mission.”

  “It makes a difference to me. I came here to eliminate a serious terrorist. The girlfriend’s a civilian. You know I don’t hit civilians, Max.”

  Carver heard a laugh come down the line.

  “Course you do. You just don’t like to admit it. That Albanian—you think his helicopter flew itself? He had a pilot, Carver.”

  “The pilot knew what he was doing. He was getting paid.”

  “Oh what, and the bird isn’t? Look, it doesn’t matter if the target has a girlfriend, a driver, a bodyguard, or his entire family with him. I don’t care if he invites the Dagenham Diamonds drum majorettes around to his place for a party and we blow them all to smithereens. This mad bastard wants to start a holy war. There could be millions of lives at risk. So he has to go. The collateral damage is not our problem.”

  Carver said nothing. He’d spent his military service fighting blood-soaked dictators who lost wars but stayed in power. He’d gone after psychopathic terrorists who somehow morphed into peace-loving politicians, greeted with handshakes at Number 10, and smiles on th
e White House lawn. He and his men had seized countless old freighters and fishing boats filled with drugs or guns. But it never made a damn bit of difference. No one ever paid for what they’d done. No government ever stopped them from doing it in the first place.

  Now he was able to trade with the bad guys in their own currency. He believed he made the world a better, safer place. Sometimes people got caught in the crossfire. That was the price of doing business. He forced his doubts out of his conscious mind, locking them up in the same mental dungeon where so many of his scruples, fears, and emotions had been shut away.

  Max broke the silence. “You still with me there, mate? ‘Cause if you’re not up for this job, just tell me now. I can’t have anyone screwing this up.”

  “Tell you what, Max. Why don’t you come down here? Walk through the front door and wait sixty seconds. Find out if I’m up for it yourself.”

  “That’s more like it. For a moment there, I thought you might have lost it. You’re not losing it, are you, Carver? I’m starting to worry about you.”

  “Piss off, Max.”

  Carver’s tone was aggressively self-confident. Inside, though, he asked himself whether Max might be right. Was he losing it? In terms of straightforward competence, he was certain the answer was no. He kept himself in good shape; he didn’t throw away his money on drugs or divorces; he wasn’t one of those military relics who hung around the pubs of Hereford and Poole telling pathetically exaggerated war stories to other old soldiers as lost and purposeless as themselves. So no, he hadn’t lost his ability to do the job. But maybe he was losing the taste for it.

  He’d long ago concluded that his strength had nothing to do with muscles, guns, or explosives. It lay in his mind and his eyes, in the force of his will and the certainty of his purpose. Somewhere inside him, there was a well of barely acknowledged anger and loss that had always driven him on. But if that fuel ran dry, if that strength of will should ever be diminished, well, what then?

  This really might be his last contract, after all. So he’d better make it a good one. And come out of it alive.

  The third bomb went in the bedroom, taped to the wall at the head of the bed and covered up with pillows. The woman’s bag was right next to Carver as he worked. He caught a faint trace of her scent, rising from her clothes. He wondered whether she knew the truth about her lover. Did she follow the same cause? Or was she just a pretty girl about to die because she let a wealthy man seduce her?

  “For Chrissakes!” he muttered to himself. “Focus.” He still had another three devices to put in place—the freezer bags filled with explosive putty. He taped one inside the cistern of the toilet, then stuck a tiny radio detonator into it. A second bag and another detonator went inside one of the eye-level kitchen cupboards. The Claymores should penetrate the room, but he wasn’t going to count on it. Too many targets had survived assassination attempts because bombs turned out to be less deadly than their users had planned. You needed to kill them twice, just to make sure.

  A final bag and detonator were secured beneath a console table in the hall. Every room in the apartment had been turned into a killing field. Now he just had to make all his bombs go off.

  He returned to the pack and removed a small plastic box the size of a miniradio. Two wires protruded from the bottom of the box, and on the top were an extendable aerial, an on-off switch, and a tiny red power light. He went back to the coat closet, opened up the main alarm-system box, and wired his little box into the same terminals as the door sensor. Then he switched it on. The red light at the top of the box began to pulse. The unit was on standby.

  When the apartment’s alarm system was activated, the unit would be fully switched on. Any break in the alarm circuit, such as the opening of a door, would trigger a switch inside it, setting off a sixty-second timer. But unlike the alarm, it couldn’t be turned off. Tapping the code into the control panel made no difference. The timer just kept counting down the seconds till it reached zero and sent its deadly signal to the explosives hidden around the apartment.

  The trap was set. Carver removed the torch and put it back in the pack, along with the rest of his equipment. He retraced his steps around the apartment, making sure that everything was exactly as he had found it and nothing had been left behind, then moved back out the way he had come in, resetting the alarm as he went. The next time anyone came in through the front door, the whole place would blow.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Carver turned toward the back door and went out into the courtyard. He took off his pack and extracted everything he’d need for the rest of the operation, along with the black garbage bag. He opened it up and put the pack and its remaining contents inside, then walked down the street to an alley beside a local bistro, where he slung it into a huge metal bin, burying it beneath a layer of restaurant trash.

  As Carver made his way back to his bike, he called Max.

  “The apartment’s fixed. Where do you want me now?”

  He received his instructions, making sure that he was absolutely clear about every stage of the operation. For now, at any rate, those moments of weakness in the apartment had passed.

  4

  Less than a mile from the apartment Carver had booby trapped, two men with false names were going about their work in a building with bogus ownership papers. One of them was known to Carver as Max. His face had the deep-lined, half-starved look of a jockey or a Rolling Stone. His steely hair was cropped tight to his skull. He wore rimless glasses, a charcoal suit, a white linen shirt, and a pale mushroom-colored knitted tie.

  His stark modernity looked out of place in his immediate surroundings. He had just walked into the drawing room of an eighteenth-century townhouse, decorated with lavish extravagance—twelve-foot ceilings, a marble fireplace, antique furniture, and ancestral portraits with heavy gilt. Whoever had chosen the decorations had been trying to evoke the grandeur of a bygone age.

  Max looked around in distaste. The place looked like a bloody museum. He turned his attention to the middle-aged man in beige cords, green sweater, and pale blue button-down shirt standing by the unlit fire, holding a glass of whisky. The man was stocky, powerfully built, just starting to run to fat as time, gravity, and lack of exercise took their toll.

  “I got news from Carver, sir.”

  The other man’s job title was Operations Director. Some of his staff referred to him as “O.D.” When he wanted to give an impression of friendship, he told people to call him Charlie. But Max preferred “sir.” He never liked getting chummy with his bosses. They started taking liberties if you did. Keep it nice and formal, then everyone knew where they stood.

  “How’s he getting on?” asked the operations director.

  His voice sounded tired. He ran a hand through his hair and down the back of his neck. He’d had less than three hours’ sleep in the past forty-eight. They’d been working fast, under pressure, cutting too many corners. Max wondered whether the old man was up to it anymore.

  “Fine,” he said. “Just one thing, though. Looks like he’s had a sudden attack of conscience.”

  “Really? How so?”

  “He’s worried innocent people might get killed.”

  The operations director laughed, composing himself when he saw the disapproval on Max’s face. “Sorry,” he said. “Tension must be getting to me. But you see the irony, surely.”

  “Oh, yes, I see that.”

  “Right then, are the Russians in place?” He gave a sharp, frustrated sigh. “I don’t like using new people on a job like this. Still, the chairman assures me they’re top-notch. He must know what he’s talking about.”

  “They’re in position,” said Max. “And the observation teams are ready. Once there’s a sighting, we’ll be ready to move at once.”

  “Excellent,” said the operations director. “Let’s wait for the show to begin.”

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 31

  5

  The time was a quarter past midnight. Samuel Carver stood astride th
e Honda, waiting to go into action. He glanced down at the black metal tube clipped to the bike behind his right leg. It looked like a regular, long-barreled flashlight, the kind that police or security guards use. It was, in fact, a portable diode pump laser, otherwise known as a dazzler. Developed as a nonfatal weapon for U.S. police forces, but taken up with deadly enthusiasm by special forces around the world, it emitted a green light beam at a frequency of 532 nanometers. Its nickname, though, was misleading. When this light shone in somebody’s eyes, they weren’t just dazzled. They were incapacitated.

  A green laser beam left anyone who looked at it disoriented, confused, and temporarily immobile. The human brain couldn’t process the sheer amount of light data flooding through the optic nerves, so it acted like any other overloaded computer: It crashed.

  Night or day, rain or shine, a dazzler was an accident’s best friend.

  It would only be a matter of seconds now. Carver was positioned by the exit of an underpass that ran beneath an embankment on the northern side of the Seine. If he turned his head fractionally to the right, he could look across the river at the glittering spire of the Eiffel Tower darting up into the night sky. It was past midnight, but there were still a few pleasure boats out on the water. If Carver had been the slightest bit interested, he’d have seen the lovers standing arm in arm by the rails, looking out at the City of Light. But Carver had other things to think about. He was looking toward the far side of the underpass. All he cared about was the traffic.