by Tom Cain
Max was not impressed. "Think of yourself as a dead man," he said, walking around to the table and pulling wires from the back of the computer. "Do me a favor, Carver, make it easy. Answer my questions. What happened to Kursk?"
"Who the hell is Kursk?"
"The Russian."
"He's dead."
"And his partner, the woman?"
"What do you reckon? I'm here. She isn't. Dead."
"How?"
"I flushed them down the sewers. Like shit. I think you know that."
Max said nothing for a moment as he slipped the computer into its case, then asked, "Colclough saw two people return to the apartment. Who were they?"
"I've no idea. I don't know anyone called Colclough. And I'm not going to answer any more of your questions until you answer mine. Why do you want me dead?"
Max sighed as he zipped up the case. "Please, don't treat me like an idiot. You went back to the apartment. But why? You had no reason to do that. Not unless you wanted me to think that the woman was dead. And the only reason to go to such trouble would be if-"
"I was alive?"
Alix was standing in another doorway at the far side of the room, holding her Uzi, moving it from side to side, trying to cover Max and McCall at the same time. She was carrying the gun properly, high on the shoulder, sighting along the barrel. The gun trembled slightly in her grip, betraying her tension. She looked like a little girl playing with her big brother's toys.
For half a second they all just stood there. Any longer and it would have been too late. If McCall had done nothing, forced Alix to take the initiative, dared her to shoot in cold blood, she might have lost her nerve. But he got cocky, staking his life on her inability to turn the threat of her gun into action. He grabbed Carver with his left hand and threw him to one side, clearing the space to bring up his own weapon. But Alix fired first.
She did it properly, just like a training exercise. She didn't spray bullets all over the place. She fired a three-shot burst into McCall. There was nothing girlish about her now, just a fierce, almost manic concentration in her eyes as she turned toward Max, who was desperately backing against the wall. Another burst hit his chest, shoulder, and neck-the hits rising as the force of the shots lifted the barrel in Alix's hand. He spun around, blood from a ripped artery spraying in a scarlet arc across the wall. Then he fell to the floor, dead.
Carver got to his feet, wincing, and made his way across the room. The air reeked of cordite and blood. Alix was standing stock still, her eyes wide open. Then suddenly she turned away from Carver, bent over, and started shaking. She was dry retching, streaming tears and snot. Carver stood next to her, rested a hand on her shoulder, and offered her a handkerchief.
"First time?"
Alix nodded.
"You did well," Carver said. "You saved my life. Thank you."
He was seized by a deep, familiar emotion, the comradeship that exists between those who have experienced combat together and survived. Carver had experienced feelings like this in the Falklands, Iraq, and the bandit country of South Armagh. He'd known what it was to have that bond between fighting men. But a blond Russian woman in a short silk dress, well, that might take a bit of getting used to.
Gradually, her body stilled, her breathing steadied. Alix stood up, wiping her face. She looked at the two bodies for a second or two. Then she looked at Carver as if seeing her reflection in his eyes. "Oh my God," she said. "I must look terrible."
Carver gave a clipped, dry laugh. "Not half as bad as they do. Listen, you'll be fine. But we've got to get out of here. Wipe your prints off the gun. Stick it in Max's hands-the guy with the gray hair. Make it look like they shot each other."
It would take at least a day for the police forensic lab to work out that all the bullets had come from the same gun. By then, he planned to be long gone.
He turned his attention to the computer in its case on the table. Somewhere inside it was everything he needed to know about the people who'd hired him and everything anyone else would need to know about him. For both reasons, it was coming with him.
So was Max's gray jacket. Carver needed to get out of the clothes he'd been wearing all night, to do something to change his appearance. He looked at the dead men on the floor. Even their trousers were spattered with blood.
Then he struck lucky. Beside the table there was a soft brown leather overnight bag. Max must have had it beside him, ready to leave. Inside there was a fresh white shirt, still in its laundry wrapper. He put it on, then slipped the jacket over the top.
Carver picked up the back nylon computer case. "Time to go," he said. But as he walked from the room, he was thinking: If Alix Petrova had never fired a gun in anger before, what the hell had she been doing on this mission?
13
The Pitie-Salpetriere medical complex in southeast Paris dates back to 1656 and the time of the Sun King, Louis XIV. Over the past century it has been modernized and massively increased in size until it is almost a city of its own, devoted to the sick and those who care for them. But tonight its emergency department had turned into a cross between a war zone and a diplomatic cocktail party.
The French minister of the interior was there, along with the prefect of police and the British ambassador. It was past two a.m. when the guest of honor arrived. She was fashionably late, as befitted the world's most famous woman. But she came in an ambulance, rather than the usual limousine.
The operations director was waiting at the hospital. He found himself getting angry with the delay. It was irrational: The more inefficient the Paris ambulance services were, the better it was for him. He wanted the woman dead, after all. More than anything, however, he wanted it all to be over. He turned to the tanned, compact, leather-jacketed man next to him. "Jesus Christ, Pierre, what took so long?"
Pierre Papin worked in French intelligence. He didn't have a job title. Officially, he didn't have a job. This gave him a certain freedom. Sometimes, for example, he worked on projects even his bosses-the ones he did not officially have-knew nothing about.
"Relax, mon ami," Papin said, pulling a packet of Gitanes from the pocket of his linen jacket. He wore a pristine white T-shirt and a pair of snug-fitting black jeans. He looked like he'd just come from a night out in Saint-Tropez. "We don't like to rush things in France. You Anglo-Saxons throw trauma victims into ambulances, drive at a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, and then wonder why your patients are dead on arrival. We prefer to stabilize them at the scene, then take them tres doucement-gently, no?-to the hospital."
"Well, I hope you explain that to the media. Believe me, they'll sniff a conspiracy in the delay."
The Frenchman smiled. "Perhaps that is because there truly is a conspiracy, huh?"
"Not over the bloody ambulance there isn't."
The operations director's mood was not improved by the trouble he was having getting through to Max. They had not spoken for about an hour, not since Max had called to report that the Russians had been eliminated, exactly according to plan.
It wasn't unknown for Max to disappear off the radar from time to time. His obsessive concern for security, secrecy, and personal survival saw to that. But it was unlike him to go missing before the operation was complete.
The operations director pressed his speed dial again. Again he got no answer. He turned back to Papin.
"What's the latest news from the doctors?"
The Frenchman took a long drag on his cigarette. "The left ventricle vein was ripped from the heart. The poor woman has been pumping blood into her chest." Papin looked at the operations director. "This was not a clean operation. The princess will not survive. But a bullet would have been more merciful."
"Yes, well, that option wasn't available, was it? What are you doing about the autopsy?"
"The pathologist is waiting outside the room, along with all the other vultures."
"And the formaldehyde?"
"It will be pumped into the body, immediately after the postmortem. B
ut why is this so important to you?"
"It will create a false positive on any subsequent pregnancy test."
"So the world will think she was pregnant?"
"So the world will never know for sure."
Papin frowned. "Tell me, then, why did she have to die?"
The operations director smiled but did not answer the question. "Excuse me one moment."
He turned away from Papin and dialed again. Still no answer from Max. What the bloody hell was going on?
14
There was no way out of Paris at that hour of the morning. Trains weren't running. Carver wasn't going anywhere near an airport. You couldn't hire a car. He could easily steal one, but he never liked to commit minor offenses when he was working. They got Al Capone for failing to pay his taxes. They weren't going to bust him for a stolen car.
So they were stuck. They couldn't risk checking into a hotel, even under assumed names. They needed somewhere to go for a few hours, a place that would stay open till dawn, where they could be anonymous. He didn't think that would be too hard to find, not on a Saturday night.
They walked down the main stairs-Carver, carrying the laptop, stopped to pick up his SIG-Sauer-then out the back of the house, through formal gardens to a small door set into the back wall, where Alix had left her bag. Then they headed down to the Rue de Rivoli. Carver threw his old T-shirt and jacket in a trash can on the way. His actions were methodical and unhurried. Nothing about his manner betrayed the intensity of what he had been through that night. Then, without warning, he came to a sudden stop.
He was standing in front of a shuttered electronics store. Half a dozen televisions in the front window were tuned to the same channel. A news reporter was standing in the middle of a road silently speaking into the camera. He was standing in front of a police line, surrounded by a crowd of other journalists, photographers, and TV cameras. The reporter stepped slightly to one side so that his cameraman could shoot past him.
"Hang on a second," said Carver, putting out a hand to hold Alix back.
Six images of the Alma Tunnel filled the shop window. The camera zoomed into the tunnel, where an ambulance was parked by the crumpled wreck of a black Mercedes.
Alix stood next to Carver, watching the same images with a look of incomprehension that gave way to shock as their meaning struck her. "Dear God. Is that the car? The one we…"
"Yeah. That's what I did to it after you and Kursk whipped it in my direction. But what the hell's that doing there?"
"What do you mean?"
"The ambulance. I can't believe anyone got out alive. But if they did, surely they'd be in the hospital by now. I mean, the crash was"-he looked at his watch-"an hour ago. What are they hanging around there for?"
"An hour?" she murmured, half to herself. "Is that all?"
The pictures had changed. They'd cut back to the studio. A news anchor was sitting behind her desk, a picture of the Princess of Wales inset into the screen. She said a few words, then the picture cut to footage of the princess lounging on a massive yacht, surrounded by smaller boats packed with people trying to get her picture. Carver shook his head. He had nothing against the princess. She'd visited his unit once and charmed every man on the base. When he'd served under an oath of loyalty to the Crown, he'd taken that oath seriously. He'd never had any interest whatever in gossip columns or celebrity gossip.
"Come on, this isn't going to tell us anything we need to know," he said, moving on down the road.
He walked to the edge of the pavement and watched the late-night traffic cruising down the Rue de Rivoli.
"We need a cab," he said.
The impish, cheeky grin that broke across her face brought an unexpected light to her eyes. "Leave that to me," she said.
15
Jack Grantham sipped bad coffee from a plastic cup and wondered just how much worse his weekend could possibly get. Still in his thirties, he was one of the highest flyers at the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6 as it was known to the world outside. But stardom had its drawbacks. He'd been dragged into Whitehall for a crisis meeting at one in the morning, which was bad enough. But there was more, much more. The crisis involved a terrible accident, a beautiful princess, and the entire world's media. And then, of course, there were his fellow civil servants.
Looking around the table, Grantham could see some typically unctuous undersecretary from the foreign office oozing oily Old Etonian smugness, and next to him the flinty, tight-mouthed, sharp-eyed presence of Dame Agatha Bewley from MI5. So now the infighting would begin. Each department would do its best to avoid the shit storm that would burst upon them just as soon as the great British public discovered what had happened to their beloved Queen of Hearts, while ensuring they dumped as much crap as possible on everyone else. Well, that would be fun. And just to make life really enjoyable, Ronald bloody Trodd had decided to stick his oar in.
Grantham had more faith in hard facts than in Freudian psychology. But he couldn't help thinking of Ron Trodd as the foul-mouthed, unrestrained id that lurked beneath the prime minister's bright and shiny ego. He was the ultimate henchman, always ready to do anything, no matter how distasteful, so that his master could keep his lily-white hands clean.
The foreign office man spoke first. "Well, as you know, our ambassador is already at the hospital. The French are terribly embarrassed, as you can imagine. Not the sort of thing one likes having in one's backyard, as it were. Naturally, we've made it clear we don't hold them responsible. Meanwhile, we're making preparations to get His Royal Highness out to Paris as soon as possible. He's at Balmoral. I gather the young princes have already been informed that their mother has been in an accident."
"Thank you, Sir Claude," said Trodd, with a contempt that made the knighthood sound more like an insult than an honor. "Jack, what has SIS got?"
"Total chaos," said Grantham, trying to work out how much to reveal, and when. "Someone's turning Paris into a war zone. There've been reports of muffled explosions coming from somewhere underground, just across the Seine from the scene of the crash. An apartment got blown to smithereens, south of the river. The police are telling the locals it was a gas leak, but a car was seen driving away at high speed. Fifteen minutes later, the same car exploded in the courtyard of a mansion in the Marais district. A team of armed police got inside the house a few minutes ago. They found bodies everywhere. And several of them seem to be British."
"Bugger!" Trodd slammed the tabletop in fury. "Tell me this isn't a bunch of your lads on some kind of private mission. Have you been pissing about, off the books?"
"No, we have not. We had people in Paris, of course, but it was purely a matter of surveillance. None of them were involved in any dirty work. I can assure you of that."
"Of course, it's possible that we're acquainted with whoever did do it." Agatha Bewley's voice was as dry as her appearance.
Trodd frowned in her direction. "What do you mean by that?"
"Well, we all use outside assistance from time to time. People who do odd jobs. These people may have attacked the princess on their own account. They might have been hired to do it by some other client. The boyfriend might have been the main target. His father had plenty of enemies. Then again, it may indeed just be a terrible accident."
"Surely that's what one is assuming," said Sir Claude. "Is anyone really suggesting that this was some kind of assassination attempt?"
"We don't know, do we?" said Trodd. "For public consumption, this was an accident. That's the story, and I bloody well hope it happens to be true, because if it isn't, the fallout will screw us all. But if some bastard has taken out the mother of the future king of England, I don't want to wake up one morning and read all about it in the Sun. I want to be the first to know."
"And the prime minister?" asked Sir Claude.
"Let me worry about that. For now, I want the Foreign Office to stick to the party line: terrible accident, condolences all round. Stay cozy with the Frogs."
The diplom
at winced. "Of course, of course… but we really must wait until the foreign secretary decides how to proceed."
"The foreign secretary will proceed exactly as I bloody well tell him. Now, where was I? Yeah, Jack, I want SIS to find out what really happened in Paris. And Agatha, I want a list of anyone in this country who might have had a motive for taking out the world's most popular woman and who they'd have used to do it. And by the way…" Trodd leaned forward and looked around the table. "If you find the bastards who did this, deal with them. Permanently. And keep Number Ten well out of it."
Trodd got up without another word and stalked out of the room. Sir Claude followed close behind.
Grantham tried to busy himself, putting his notepad and ballpoint pen away in his briefcase, but he could feel Agatha Bewley's falcon gaze burning into him.
"You have an idea who's behind this, don't you?"
"Come on, Agatha, you know it's not that simple. There are crews all over Europe, half of them right here in London, who could have carried out the operation. And, as you suggested, plenty of people could have commissioned them."
She held his gaze for a moment, then spoke in a lower, almost confiding tone. "I think you have people in mind, and I don't like the feeling that I'm being kept out of the loop. I'm sorry, Jack, but I'm not prepared to stay silent for very long. The reputation of my department is at stake."
"This is no time for us to be fighting among ourselves," said Grantham, trying to mollify her. "Besides, if I did, hypothetically, have an idea of who it might be, I don't have anything that even approaches evidence, let alone proof."