The accident man sc-1

by Tom Cain

  "So… Kursk?"

  She wanted to scream at him: Forget Kursk! She longed to get the hidden Samuel Carver back. But she had to find the patience to wait, to let him emerge of his own accord. So she gathered her thoughts and said, "It was very simple. He blackmailed me."

  "What do you mean?"

  She sighed. "May I smoke?"

  She could see him hesitate for an instant. There was a fastidious, disciplined side to Carver. It probably came from his years in the military. All the videos on his shelves were in alphabetical order, all the cooking implements in his kitchen were immaculately arranged. He would not like anyone smoking in his apartment.

  As if he knew what Alix was thinking, Carver laughed. "Sure. Go ahead. Then talk."

  Alix inhaled deep into her lungs, then let out a long, slow stream of smoke that curled and eddied in the shafts of afternoon light that shone through the apartment's deep-set windows.

  "I had been in the KGB for less than two years when the wall came down. Suddenly, all our old allies were rebelling against us, kicking our soldiers out of their countries. It was humiliating. Everything any of us had known was falling apart.

  "For a while, we carried on in Moscow as if nothing had happened. In some ways it was easier. More Westerners were coming to the city. They thought that the cold war was over and they had won, so they did not care what girls they screwed, or what they said to us. But then Gorbachev was deposed, Yeltsin took over, and suddenly there was no money to pay anyone. The whole country was run by gangsters. However bad it had been before, now it was one hundred times worse. We had nothing. We had to live somehow."

  "You sound like you're expecting me to judge you. I'm in no position to do that."

  "Maybe. Anyway, I was lucky. Because I can speak English I got a job at a hotel, the Marriott, working at the reception desk. I found a good man, a doctor. He was not rich or handsome, but he treated me with respect.

  "For a long time, I thought I was okay. Then Kursk started coming to the hotel. He had worked with the girls as a 'bodyguard.' That was what they called it. The real reason was to make sure we did not do any business for ourselves, or try to run away with a rich foreign client. Kursk liked to remind me that he knew who I was and what I had done. He could expose me at any time. Everything I had worked for would be ruined. I offered him money to go away, but he turned me down. He was happier teasing me, just keeping me like a fish on the end of a line. I knew that sooner or later he would pull on the hook.

  "That's what happened. Kursk came to the hotel on Friday morning. He said he needed a partner on a job. He wanted a woman. People would be distracted by her and pay less attention to him. He told me to leave work, tell my supervisor I was feeling sick. If I came with him, he would pay me ten thousand dollars, U.S. And if I did not…"

  "Let me guess. He still had some of your old photographs. You would be caught by your own honey trap."

  Alix nodded.

  "So what happened to the doctor?"

  "He is still there. He wants to marry me."

  "What do you want?"

  "He will give me a home, maybe a family. I will be a respectable woman."

  "But?"

  "But I do not love him. I would just be selling myself again."

  "Come here," said Carver.

  He opened his arms, and Alix nestled against his shoulder. He put his arms around her. She could feel him pressing his nose against her hair, breathing in its scent. Then he leaned back against the arm of the sofa and she went with him, relaxing into his lean, muscular embrace.

  It took a couple of minutes for Alix to realize that Carver was asleep. She smiled ruefully. She must be losing her touch if men could take her in their arms without being driven mad with lust. But perhaps it was a greater compliment that a man like Carver would let himself sleep. That was the ultimate vulnerability. She could do anything to him now.

  Alix slipped out of Carver's arms and got to her feet. She stroked a lock of hair away from his forehead, then gently kissed his brow, like a mother would a child. She picked up the wine bottle, the ice bucket, and the glasses and carried them to the kitchen.

  She walked along the hallway to Carver's bedroom, smiling as she saw the TV on a stand at the end of the bed, exactly as she'd predicted. There was a bedside table with a photograph in a silver frame, showing Carver at the helm of a yacht with a woman hugging him from behind. They were both laughing.

  Alix felt a quick, sharp stab of jealousy. Who was this woman making Carver so happy? There was no trace of any feminine presence in the apartment. She wasn't part of his life now. Even so, Alix resented her closeness to Carver and the unforced joy in their laughter.

  She told herself she was just being professionally thorough as she looked through Carver's wardrobe, fingering the fabric of his classic English and Italian suits, smiling at his well-worn jeans and baggy sweaters. She thought of his tracksuit. Why was it that the older clothes got, the more men seemed to like them?

  On the top shelf of the wardrobe, above the hanging suits and shirts, there were a couple of folded blankets and a rolled-up duvet. Alix had to stretch to reach the duvet. She pulled it down, then carried it through to the living room and draped it over Carver's unconscious body.

  But where was she going to sleep? This was a bachelor apartment. There was only one bed. Alexandra Petrova went to sleep in it.

  30

  Alone in his office on Sunday night, Pierre Papin pursued the question of Carver, the girl, and the train they had taken out of Paris. A check on the ticket machines at the Gare de Lyon had come up with more than a dozen purchases made during the missing minutes when Carver could have used them. Four of these were for one ticket only. Papin was tempted to dismiss these, but he had to consider the possibility that the Englishman had dropped the girl and continued to a separate destination on his own.

  Several of the ticket buyers had used credit cards, none in Carver's name. But that was to be expected. If he had used a card, the name would certainly be that of an alias. So Papin was left with the task of checking twelve separate journeys, involving more than twenty individuals, hoping to track down his two suspects by a process of elimination.

  It was a massive task and would require a great deal of cooperation. Ideally, Papin should ask for help from other departments, but he had no intention of doing that unless it was absolutely unavoidable. It was a matter of selfpreservation.

  It is said in politics that your opponents are in the other parties, but your enemies are in your own. Papin operated on the same principle. He had a visceral distrust of his colleagues in the various branches of the French security system. He knew they'd happily stab him in the back if it gave their department a moment's advantage. That was the way the game worked in every intelligence community. It wasn't the terrorists, the spies, and the other assorted dangers to national security you had to worry about. It was the bastard in the next office.

  There had to be another way of tracking his prey. Papin put himself in Carver's position: Okay, he arrives at the station with the girl. They split up in case anyone is looking for a couple. He tells her to go to the Milan train, makes a public show of buying tickets to Milan, and lets himself be seen on camera walking toward the appropriate platform. But unless he is engaged in a massive double bluff, he does not get on that train. He gets on another train, using tickets he has bought from a machine. Yet Carver and the girl do not return to the concourse…

  Papin had been through the footage. Even if they had hidden their faces from the camera, he would have recognized them by their clothes or the way they walked.

  So what does Carver do?

  Papin got up from his seat and walked over to the small table where his cafetiere was standing, poured out the last dregs into his dirty cup, and grimaced at the feel of the cold, gritty liquid on his tongue. He was about to spit it out into his wastebasket when the solution suddenly struck him. Of course! Papin's face broke into a triumphant grin. Unless he had led his girl on
a mad dash across the railway tracks, Carver must have got on whatever train was waiting on the platform opposite the one to Milan. Papin reached for a timetable and there it was, departing at thirteen minutes past seven, the express service to Lausanne, Switzerland. Carver and the girl had been on that train, he was absolutely certain of it.

  As reluctant as he was to ask for help from any of his rivals in Paris, Papin had no hesitation in making a late-night call to Horst Zietler, of the Swiss Strategischer Nachrichtendienst, or Strategic Intelligence Service. Zietler had nothing to gain by screwing him. Papin got straight to the point.

  "Horst, I need your help. I'm trying to find two people-a man and a woman. I think they arrived in Lausanne by train from Paris earlier today."

  "Anyone I need to be concerned about?"

  "No, they're no danger whatsoever to Switzerland. But…"

  "They're an embarrassment to France?"

  Papin chuckled wearily. "Something like that. Let's just say I'd like to know where they went once they arrived in your country."

  "So, what do you need?"

  "Cooperation in Lausanne, interviews with any station staff who were on duty yesterday, maybe a look at security footage from, say, ten a.m. to noon. But, you understand, this is unofficial, off-the-record."

  "I'll have a quiet word with the station manager in the morning. I'll tell him you're from the federal interior ministry, following up on a possible visa irregularity-purely routine, nothing to worry about. Your name will be Picard, Michel Picard. You'll need an ID. I'll e-mail a template: Work from that."

  "Thanks, I owe you."

  "Certainly, but I'm sure you can find a way of paying me back…" Papin laughed again, this time with genuine amusement. "Well, now that you mention it, there's a house we've been watching by the Parc Monceau, filled with remarkably beautiful girls. It's attracted some very interesting clients with impressively exotic, imaginative sexual tastes. Perhaps I should send you some of the video footage to see if any Swiss citizens are involved. Purely as a matter of international cooperation, you understand."

  "Of course," agreed Zietler. "What other reason could there be? As always, it's a pleasure doing business with you, Pierre. The documentation you need is on its way."

  Papin was on the early-morning flight out of Charles de Gaulle to Geneva. He planned to be in Lausanne by the time the station manager arrived for work.

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1

  31

  Carver woke just after three in the morning. It took him a second to work out where he was. He was lying on the sofa, still dressed, but someone had draped a duvet over him. He pondered the significance of the gesture. It certainly seemed like a good sign. Faced with a choice between killing him as he slept or making him comfortable and tucking him in, Alix had reached for the duvet.

  So where was she? There was no one in the kitchen, nor in Carver's office. The bathroom was empty, though a pair of women's underpants was drying on the towel rack. That left only one possibility. Carver opened his bedroom door as quietly as possible and padded across the room.

  She was in his bed. He could see the outline of her body under the sheet, the shock of her pitch-black hair against the white pillow. One arm was flung out in front of her, half- covering her face. As she breathed she let out an occasional soft, barely audible snuffle.

  Carver smiled then shook his head as he recognized a long-forgotten emotion: affection.

  Fancying a woman was one thing. But when you heard her snore and thought she was cute, well, then you knew it was serious.

  It took an effort of will to turn around and leave the room. As he walked back down the hallway, Carver thought about everything Alix had said earlier. He believed the stuff about her joining the KGB. But the very fact that she had been trained to deceive men made him doubt the rest of her story.

  She's working behind the desk at a fancy hotel when some thug comes along and says, "Do a highly dangerous, top-secret mission with me in Paris, or I will tell the world you were a hooker?" No, that just didn't sound credible. On the other hand, it didn't automatically make her his enemy. There were all sorts of reasons why she might want to lie about her real identity and purpose. God knows he did it enough.

  He checked his phones and office computer to see if she'd tried to talk to anyone or send any messages while he was asleep. His phones were routed through a sequence of relays that made it impossible for anyone to track where he was. The system also tracked any activity. There had been none at all. He logged on to his ISP mail server-nothing there either.

  That left the stolen laptop. It was conceivable that Alix had used it. The bag was still on the kitchen chair where Carver had left it when they arrived at the flat. It looked untouched. But that meant nothing. She would have been smart enough to leave everything exactly as she'd found it.

  Carver opened the padded black nylon case and pulled out the laptop. It was a Hitachi, another gray plastic box just like a million others. Carver opened it, pressed the power button, and waited while the operating system booted up. A box immediately appeared, demanding a password. Carver didn't have a clue what Max had chosen as his personal open sesame, and he'd bet his bottom dollar Alix didn't either. So no one had sent anything from this computer since the last time Max had used it. Carver closed the Hitachi again. He certainly wasn't any kind of techno-wizard. But the next person who opened up this laptop would be.

  He was sure now that Alix had not been able to communicate with anyone since he left her mobile on the Milan train. For now, at least, their presence in Geneva was still secret.

  Carver suddenly realized he was starving. He went to a cupboard and pulled out a box of cornflakes. They were at least three weeks old, but that was too bad. At least the milk was fresh and cold.

  He ate the cereal sitting at the kitchen island. After a couple of spoonfuls, he reached for the TV remote control and turned on the set. They were still talking about the princess, showing the same crash-site footage, the same holiday memories. There was a picture of her in a swimsuit that made her look unusually thick around the middle. Some guy on CNN was speculating that she might have been pregnant. Other reporters were commenting on the absence of CCTV footage. Twelve cameras covered the roads between the Ritz Hotel and the Alma Tunnel, but not one of them had produced a single image of the Mercedes at any stage of its journey. He sighed. Whoever had set this up had powerful friends. But he had a few friends too.

  Carver washed his bowl and put it on the draining board. He wiped the milk and cereal splatters off the counter, using these simple domestic chores as a means of clearing his mind. He stood by the phone for a second, his hand hovering over the handset. Finally he picked it up and dialed a number. It rang several times, then there was a grunt of irritation at the other end of the line.

  He grinned. "Wakey-wakey. It's Carver."

  "Uhhh… what time is it?"

  "Half past three. Yeah, I know, I'm sorry. But this is urgent. We need to meet. Can you be at Jean-Jacques in twenty minutes?"

  There was another grunt, of assent this time. Carver grabbed the computer, pulled a leather jacket from a peg in the hall and headed out the door. He walked downhill towards the lake, through the commercial district by the shoreline and onto the Pont des Bergues, a V-shaped bridge whose two arms met by a small island jutting out toward the lake. A walkway linked the bridge and the island, which was planted with trees and illuminated by spotlights. At the far end there was a statue of a man in Roman robes seated on a chair, looking out across the lake with a frowning, thoughtful expression. This was Geneva's most famous son, the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  As Carver reached the statue, he heard a voice from the shadows. "'Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.' Well, Monsieur Rousseau, you got that right."

  Carver laughed. "Now, now, Thor, stop feeling sorry for yourself."

  An extraordinary figure walked into the light. He was well over six feet tall, rake-thin, pale-skinned, b
lue-eyed, and topped with an explosion of blond dreadlocks. He rubbed his face with his hand to emphasize his exhaustion. "Aww, come on, man," he said, in a singsong Scandinavian accent. "You wake me up in the middle of the night and make me come running like a poodle. How do you expect me to feel?"

  "Come and rest your weary bones on this park bench," said Carver. "See if I can make it worth your while getting out of bed."

  He'd met Thor Larsson four years back, at a bar where they'd both gone to hear a visiting American blues guitarist. They'd got to talking over a couple of beers. By the fifth or sixth round, Carver had discovered that this golden-haired Rasta was both a professional software engineer and a former lieutenant in the Norwegian army's intelligence corps. "National service," he'd said, apologetically. "I didn't have any choice."

  "That's nothing," Carver had replied. "I did a dozen years in Her Majesty's royal marines. And I bloody volunteered."

  They'd listened to the blues, talked, drank many more beers. Larsson became his tech-man. He never asked precisely why Carver needed untraceable e-mail and telephone accounts, computers that were at least eighteen months ahead of anything available on the open market, and guaranteed penetration of any network, anywhere. He just did the work and accepted the extravagant amounts of cash Carver paid him for his skill and his discretion.

  "What's the big deal, then?" the Norwegian asked.

  "This," said Carver, holding up the computer case. "There's a laptop in here that I need to get into, past all the encryption and password protection. But here's the problem: There are people who want this computer and the information on it. And they want it badly. If they ever discover you've got it, or even that you had it and you know what was on it, they won't piss around. They'll come after you."