by Tom Cain
They were swapping horror stories about trying to find a decent home in Switzerland on a measly MI6 allowance when Johnsen saw a man get out of the Swisscom van and head toward the café.
“Hang on a minute, we’ve got company,” he said, reaching for his camera and firing off a few frames.
“I know that man,” said Jennifer. “He was hanging around this afternoon, but he was driving a black BMW then. Oh, now this could be interesting. . . .”
They watched as he went into the café.
“The other two are still in there, right?” asked Johnsen. “So, do we follow him in, try to get a closer look?”
Jennifer shook her head. “That could be tricky. It’s tiny in there. If I go in, the guy who runs it is bound to recognize me. And if there’s any trouble, we’d have a hard time staying out of the way.”
“Yeah, but we’re supposed to find out what’s going on with these clowns. And whatever’s happening, it’s happening in there. Tell you what, I’ll take a little recce. Just stand at the door, cast an eye inside. Then I’ll come back here, tell you what they’re up to, and we’ll decide our next move. Okay?”
By the time Jennifer said “Okay” back to him, Johnsen had thrown his camera carelessly into the backseat and was out of the car, walking toward the café.
52
They walked into the narrow men’s room one at a time. The first man had spiked, dyed red hair, with a straggle of punk rats’ tails flopping on the collar of his black overcoat. He must have pushed the door open with his back because he was spinning around as he came in and there was a MAC-10 submachine gun in his hands, another being held by the man behind him. The guns were fitted with Sionics noise suppressors that would make them virtually silent and far more accurate than the regular short-barreled MAC. That was the first thing Carver noticed, right about the time he was reaching into his jacket for his SIG. By the time he had his pistol out in front of him, swinging from one man to the next, he’d noticed something else: They weren’t firing at him.
If this had been a hit, they’d have come in blasting and he’d have been blown to smithereens long before he’d had a chance to draw. But they were just standing there, looking professionally mean and surly, but also pissed off, like they’d really have enjoyed the opportunity to kill him but were being prevented from doing so. That made sense. Whoever had sent them needed Carver alive. As long as Alix and the computer were out there, it wasn’t enough just to take him out. They needed the full set.
So now Carver had another piece of information to factor into his calculations. He wasn’t going to die within the next few seconds. They might be pointing guns at him, but no one was going to start shooting just yet.
The bozos didn’t seem to speak English. They just stood there, glowering. The redhead kept blinking. He had a speed freak’s dilated pupils and gray white pallor, the flesh of his face burned away till his cheekbones, brow, and Adam’s apple stood out in unnatural relief. Carver could almost hear the humming of his overstimulated nerve endings and feel the effort it was taking him to maintain even the semblance of restraint or rationality.
Nothing happened for a few seconds, no one knowing what the next move should be. Carver had no intention of making any provocative movements, not when a cranked-up crazy with a gun was standing six feet away. Then the other gunman started to move along the gap between the urinals on one wall and the sinks on the other. He eased by Carver, staying just out of reach, and took up a position beyond him, making sure Carver couldn’t cover both men with just one gun.
The man pointed at Carver’s gun and flicked his finger as if to say, “Hand it over.”
Carver looked at him dumbly. The man had a fleshy face, as smooth and stolid as a potato, with small eyes and a bully’s full, sulky lips. He gestured again, this time more forcefully, with a greater degree of irritation. “Oh,” said Carver, all wide-eyed and innocent, “you want my gun? Well, here it is. . . .”
He threw the SIG-Sauer hard at the potato-man’s feet, sending it clattering onto the tiled floor and skittering into his ankles. The piggy eyes looked down for a fraction of a second and that was long enough for Carver to swivel on his left foot and send his right crashing into the man’s fleshy jaw. He staggered backward, absorbing the blow, and Carver moved with him, grabbing the man’s right arm and using it as a lever to swing him around, like a dancer twirling his partner, sending him careering across the floor toward his pal with the red hair.
As the two men collided, Carver grabbed the suppressor of the potato-man’s MAC and ripped it from his grasp. He pivoted to face the two men. The redhead hesitated for a split second, wondering whether to fire, and that pause was all Carver needed. He took a single step forward, holding the gun barrel like a baseball bat, and swung it hard, backhanded, slamming the handle into one round head before his left elbow jerked back the other way, into the speed freak’s face.
That movement set Carver up for another backhander with the gun. He put all his strength into the swing, connecting with a crack that shattered bone and sent a spume of snot and blood flying across the room before the man with the punky red hair collapsed unconscious to the floor right next to his pal.
Carver took a moment to collect his breath. He checked his reflection in the mirror, smoothed down his hair, and straightened his clothes. Then he picked his pistol up from the floor, tucked it away, and walked back out of the men’s room.
When he got back into the pub, Stu the bartender was waiting for him.
“You all right, mate? You looked like you were about to upchuck.”
Carver smiled ruefully and wiped his hand across his mouth. “Yeah, I’m fine. But you’d better tell the customers not to go in there for a while. There’s a bit of a mess on the floor.”
“Anything to do with those two blokes who went in there right after you?”
Carver shrugged. “Two guys? No, don’t think I saw them.”
The Australian grinned. “Jeez, mate, I’m glad you never picked a fight with me. Listen, the doc’s on his way and so are the cops. A couple of the regulars insisted on calling ‘em. Law-abiding bastards, these Swiss.”
“I’ll be off, then.”
“Yeah, that might be an idea. And you’d best drink your Guinness somewhere else for a while too.”
53
Petrova had spotted Kursk coming into the café and tried to rise from the table where she’d been hunched over a cup of coffee, feeling sorry for herself. He’d seen her like that plenty of times before, filled with self pity and bemoaning her situation, like every other ungrateful whore. Before she’d even got to her feet, he’d wrapped an arm around her throat and was holding her tight enough to choke her. She struck out with her arms and heels, but the blows just bounced off Kursk. He didn’t even notice them.
There were two men in the room, an old geezer slurping soup at another table and a balding, middle-aged man wearing a white apron behind the counter. Kursk pointed his gun at him, gesturing for him to come out from behind the bar. The man started moving, never taking his eyes off Kursk. When he reached the middle of the room, Kursk gestured again, pointing at the floor. The man got down on his knees, and Kursk stepped over, dragging Alix as easily as he would a child with a cuddly toy, and stamped on the man’s back, forcing him facedown on the ground.
The old geezer hadn’t moved. Kursk figured he must be senile. There was no point trying to communicate with him, so he just swung a foot at the chair, knocking it out from under the old boy and sending him crashing to the floor. Kursk kicked him in the head, just to reinforce the message, and fired a bullet into the floor between the two men. They lay there, the older one moaning incoherently as Kursk put his gun to Alix’s head and hissed in her ear.
“You’re coming with me, you treacherous bitch. Yuri wants you alive, but just try anything clever and I’ll put a bullet through your jaw and smash your pretty face to pieces. You’ll live, all right, but you’ll wish you hadn’t. Now, move!”
Th
ey started toward the exit, and that was when Tom Johnsen walked up to the doorway. He stopped there for a moment, trying to make sense of what he could see, the two men lying on the floor, a third man holding a woman he was threatening with a gun. A coward would have done the smart thing and got the hell out of there. But Johnsen was not a coward. He was a trained agent. He was also a brave man faced with a felon abducting a woman. So he reached for his weapon.
Kursk put two rounds into Johnsen’s upper body before he’d even got a hand on his gun, the impact sending him sprawling backward into the street. Then the Russian turned back to the men on the floor, men who had just become eye witnesses to a homicide, and shot them point-blank in the back of their skulls, the bullets ripping half their faces off as they exited into the floor.
Alix turned her head and spat in Kursk’s face. “You bastard,” she croaked, gasping for the air to force her words out. “You didn’t have to do that.”
He pounded the pistol into her head, leaving her dazed and barely conscious as he pulled her out of the café. He didn’t have to do that, either. But it felt good.
As she watched Tom Johnsen walk up to the café, Jennifer Stock had been thinking about the weird ways life threw men and women together. When she got up that morning, she’d had no more expectation of meeting someone new than she had of spending the day cooped up in cars doing surveillance. But that was how the day had gone and that was how she’d found this man.
She liked him, that much was certain. She liked the way he’d smiled when he first opened his car door and let her in. She liked the way the sun had caught the golden hairs on his strong, muscular forearms when he held the steering wheel, his sleeves rolled up as he drove. She liked the way he’d tried and failed not to stare at her breasts, and his guilty-schoolboy look when she’d caught him at it. “Sorry”, he’d said, shamefacedly. Then he’d perked up and added, “Still, you look so great it would be rude not to.” She’d tried to be cross, but she’d actually felt ridiculously pleased.
She sighed to herself, knowing where all this would lead and wondering whether the pleasures would be worth the inevitable complications that arose from a relationship with someone else in the Service. Then she told herself to stop acting like a silly schoolgirl and start paying attention to her job. And that was when she saw the look of surprise on Tom’s face and the two steps he took as he staggered backward, as if hit by some invisible blow to his body, collapsed, and just lay there motionless in the middle of the street.
What she’d just seen was so far removed from what she’d been thinking that it took Jennifer a couple of seconds to make sense of it all. Then, understanding and horror collided in her brain and she was throwing open the car door, pulling out her gun, and racing up the street, crying out the name of the lover she’d never have, concentrating so hard on his dead body that she did not at first register the presence of the other, far bigger man, nor the woman in his grasp.
Then they were standing opposite each other, Jennifer and the killer, and immediately she knew that even though they were both armed, it really made no difference. During her small-arms training, Jennifer had been told that during the Second World War, 85 percent of soldiers in battle never fired their weapons in anger, even when their own lives were threatened. Normal, nonpsychotic human beings are overwhelmingly inclined not to kill one another. So the most important psychological element in military training is to overcome that inclination and turn decent people into killers. But in the case of Jennifer Stock, that training hadn’t worked. She knew she had to shoot the man in front of her or she herself would be shot, but she just couldn’t do it.
He knew it too. She could see it in his eyes, in the tiny twitch of a smile at one corner of his mouth.
Their whole encounter could be counted in seconds on the fingers of one hand, yet it seemed to stretch for hours as the smile spread and his finger tightened on the trigger and the muzzle of his gun flashed and then Jennifer felt herself being picked up by a force stronger than gravity and thrown through the air just like Tom had been. And then she felt nothing at all.
Kursk paused for a moment to be sure that the woman was dead, then continued on his way. When he got to the van, he yanked the rear cargo doors open, picked up Alix, and threw her in, locking the doors behind her.
As he walked around to the driver’s door, a flash of movement caught Kursk’s eye. He looked across to the far side of the street, up at the end of the road, and saw a man leave the Irish pub. It was Carver.
Carver spotted Kursk at the same time, and started to run down the street toward him, keeping his head down, his body covered by the line of parked cars as Kursk fired in his direction.
Kursk hunkered down behind the van door for a second, waiting to see if any of his men would follow Carver out of the pub. But there was no sign of them. Carver must have taken them out. Now they were one-on-one again, just like they had been in those Parisian sewers. Kursk didn’t like those odds. But he could see another way of getting at the Englishman: the woman lying helpless in his cargo bay.
Kursk fired two more shots in Carver’s direction, just to keep his head down, then leaped into his cab and fired up the engine, flooring the accelerator as he engaged the transmission. He could see Carver ahead of him, running into the street and standing there in the firing position, legs apart, arms outstretched in front of him. But Kursk ignored the bullets as they shattered the windshield in front of him and ripped into the bodywork at his side. He aimed the van straight at Carver, forcing him to dive out of the way and sideswiping a row of parked cars. The van careered back across the road, but then Kursk regained control of the wheel, sat up in his seat, and drove off into the night.
Carver couldn’t catch him now. If he wanted the woman back, he was going to have to beg.
54
The moment he’d seen the tall, massively built figure standing by the Swisscom van, Carver had known it was Grigori Kursk and realized that he’d made a terrible mistake. He should never have left Alix. Her place of safety had turned out to be a trap.
Now he could do nothing to help her. He dared not fire on the van as it hurtled away. Any shot through the side paneling or rear door could easily hit Alix. He couldn’t even aim to blow out the tires. She was unprotected and unsecured. At the speed Kursk was now driving, her body would be battered like a pinball around the vehicle’s interior. Carver, of all people, did not need telling that sudden deceleration could be fatal to a passenger.
So what had happened at the café? Carver ran back down the sidewalk, forcing his way through the knots of people who were already emerging onto the street. Their faces were filled with an anxiety that was rapidly giving way to a greater curiosity, that insatiable desire of human survivors to cast eyes on those who have died. The respectable citizens that Carver shoved out of his path looked like spectators who’d turned up late for a public hanging and felt cheated to have missed out on the big moment.
A dozen or so rubberneckers stood in a circle around two bodies in the street, a man and a woman. Carver recognized them as the couple he’d seen in the blue Vectra. Christ, what had happened here?
Then he heard a single word cried out in a child’s high, keening voice: “Papa-a-a!” Carver forced his way into the café and saw Jean-Louis on his knees, his father’s blood splashed all over his Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas, shaking Freddy’s dead body and crying, “Wake up, Papa, wake up!”
Carver stepped over to the little boy and picked him up, hugging him to his chest. Suddenly it was all too much. He felt surrounded by death, overwhelmed by loss, and racked with guilt for the destruction that seemed to surround him like a virus, afflicting anyone he touched. He felt his chest heave, his breath catch, and then he was staggering to a wall, leaning his back against it and sliding to the floor, the boy still in his arms.
He did not know how long he stayed like that, but the next thing Carver knew, Jean-Louis was being pulled from his grasp. He felt a sharp pain in the side of his leg and dimly
realized someone was kicking him and a female voice was screaming, “Your fault! It’s all your fault! How dare you hold my son? His father is dead because of you!”
Carver opened his eyes and saw Freddy’s wife, now his widow, Marianne. He caught a glimpse of a face battered by loss, but eyes within it burning with rage. She bent down and slapped him hard across the face. “Get up! Get up, you pathetic, useless excuse for a man. My man is dead. Your woman has been taken. Why don’t you get up and do something?”
Carver looked up at Marianne, unable to find words to apologize for what he had caused. Then he got to his feet and looked down at the blood that covered Dirk Vandervart’s shiny suit and his flashy designer shirt. He walked across the room and picked up the bag he’d left there less than fifteen minutes earlier, when Freddy had had nothing to fear, when Jean-Louis still thought his daddy was immortal.
“Anywhere I can get changed? The cops’ll be here any moment.”
Marianne opened the door to the stairway, no trace of forgiveness in her face, her voice still harsh and unrelenting. “Up there,” she said. “Leave the dirty clothes. I’ll get rid of them.”
As Carver walked by her, she grabbed his arm. “You want me to think about forgiving you? Well, find the people who did this and kill them. Kill them all!”
By the time he’d washed the blood from his hands and face and got back into his regular clothes, the police had arrived downstairs and were questioning Marianne and Jean-Louis. Carver wanted to get out, but he needed a hat, something to cover his hair and shade his face. He ransacked Freddy and Marianne’s bedroom, searching through chests of drawers and closets until he found an old blue cap emblazoned with the dark red badge of Ser vette, Geneva’s football club, abandoned on a closet floor. He beat it against his thigh to knock out the dust, shoved it on his head, then climbed out of a bedroom window, down a drainpipe, and into the yard at the rear of the building. Now it was just a matter of acting nice and casual.