Revenger (31 page)

He couldn’t fire back. His Glock had no suppressor and the sound of it would bring the police racing over from Grantham’s flat with far more firepower than he could muster. He couldn’t get out of the building. Now what? Looking around he saw a rectangular hole in the ceiling, a little closer to the front door: the opening for
an
unbuilt staircase. If he could get some height he would at least be able to look down on the site and have a better chance of tracking Novak’s movements.

Carver sprinted across the bare concrete floor, jumped with his hands above his head and grabbed a bare joist intended to support the unlaid first floor.

For a moment he was suspended, full length, with his back to the kitchen door and French windows. If Novak came through them now, he’d be a sitting duck.

72

ALIX HAD GONE
over to the window to check what was happening outside. She saw the flashing blue light behind the radiator grille of an unmarked police car screaming down Sloane Street, coming straight towards the hotel. She looked from the car to the front of the building and saw a faceless black figure slip like a wraith beneath the portico over the front entrance.

They were here already.

Alix didn’t panic. She slung her bag over her shoulder, left the room and hurried down the corridor. As she passed the bank of lifts she saw that one of them was on the way up. It was passing the third floor: five more to go. There would be police officers on it and more coming up the stairs. But there was an external fire escape, too: the old-fashioned metal kind running up the side of the building. The way out to it was at the far end of the corridor, a good thirty metres away. She broke into a sprint.

There was a chambermaid’s trolley up ahead, parked by the right-hand wall of the corridor, just beyond an open bedroom door. Alix heard a familiar sound, an echo of her childhood. It was a hotel
maid
, about her height, humming the old Russian folk song ‘Semyonovna’ as she walked out of the door in her hotel uniform, with a small cotton headscarf tied over her hair. The maid was lost in the cheerful tune as she approached the trolley and turned her back to put something in the trash bag at the rear of it.

Forget the fire escape. Alix had a better way out of here.

She did not break stride. She picked up her bag in both arms, holding it in front of her as she lowered her shoulder and barged into the maid, catching her completely by surprise and sending her sprawling back through the door into the room. Then she grabbed the handle at the back of the trolley and pulled it with her as she followed the maid, who was now sitting on her backside in the middle of the bedroom floor, winded and gasping for breath as she tried to get back to her feet. Alix shut the door.

Across the room, by the window looking out on to Knightsbridge, a room-service trolley had been set up for a guest’s breakfast. Someone had ordered steak and eggs and a steak-knife, crusted in dried yolk, was lying on a dirty plate. Alix walked towards the trolley. The maid was in her way, now upright, but hunched over, desperately trying to gather enough breath to scream for help. Alix slapped her hard on the side of the face as she went by, stunning her. She grabbed the knife, came back to the maid and grabbed her from behind, putting one hand over her mouth, pulling her head back to expose her throat to the touch of the sharp serrated blade.

Outside in the corridor came the sound of heavy, running footsteps and a man’s voice, several rooms away, shouting, ‘Open up! Police!’

The girl was crying. She was badly hurt and extremely frightened. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty, if that, and she had a soft, placid passivity to her. The capacity to fight back against a sudden physical assault just wasn’t in her nature. It shamed Alix to bully her like this, but she had no other choice.

‘Listen to me very carefully,’ she said, in Russian, as the policeman shouted again. ‘If you do exactly what I say, you will come to
no
harm. If you do not, then the edge of this knife is the last thing you will ever feel. Nod if you understand.’

The girl gave a series of frantic little nods that made her whole upper body quiver.

‘Good,’ said Alix. ‘I need your uniform. Take it off. Now. Your shoes, too.’

She let go of the maid who did as she was told, stripping down to her underwear and tights.

There were three loud hammering noises from down the corridor as the police battered at the door to Alix and Carver’s suite, followed by the crash as it finally gave way.

‘And your scarf, please,’ Alix told her.

The maid pulled it from her head and handed it over. ‘That was a Christmas present . . . from my mother,’ she said, looking utterly miserable.

Alix took off her earrings. She could hardly pretend to be a chambermaid with diamond studs in her ears.

‘These are a present from me,’ she said. The girl’s eyes widened in amazement at this unexpected bounty, and she hurried to obey as Alix said, ‘Get in the wardrobe. Keep quiet. And stay there.’

Alix heard more shouts – the sound of angry, frustrated, disappointed men – as she shoved one of the two heavy, silk-upholstered armchairs in the room up tight against the wardrobe door. It had taken all her strength to shift it. She didn’t see the maid being able to open the doors too quickly.

She put on the uniform, which was a little large for her, and the shoes, which were at least a size too small; close enough. She put her own clothes, shoes and bag in the trash bag at the back of the trolley. She checked herself in the mirror, saw that her make-up was much too good for her newly reduced status, and spent twenty seconds in the bathroom splashing soapy water on her face, rinsing it off and towelling herself down.

When she got back to the room she saw that the maid was pushing hard against the wardrobe doors and had even managed to open them a fraction.

Alix put all her weight against the chair and slammed the door shut again.

‘Don’t move,’ she snarled. ‘Or I’ll use the knife . . . and I’ll take back the earrings.’

The latter threat was the one that did the trick. Alix heard a thud as the maid sat down on the floor of the wardrobe.

‘Sensible girl,’ she said. Then she took the trolley and pushed it out of the room and into the corridor, going back the way she’d originally come, towards the service elevator, whistling ‘Semyonovna’ as she went.

A police officer wearing black battle-dress and a bullet-proof vest and clutching a sub-machine gun emerged from her suite. ‘Stop!’ he commanded her. ‘Have you seen anyone come out of this room?’ he asked.

Alix screwed up her face in incomprehension. ‘Don’t understand,’ she said. ‘English not good.’

The policeman rolled his eyes and muttered, ‘Fucking immigrants,’ under his breath. Then he repeated, with exaggerated slowness and clarity, ‘Have you seen a man . . . or a woman . . . coming from this room?’

Alix thought hard and then said, ‘No. Have not seen nothing.’

The policeman stood there, glowering at her.

‘Must go now . . . for work,’ she said.

‘Piss off then,’ he snarled at her, and disappeared back into the suite.

73

CELINA NOVAK WAS
furious with herself. She’d had the chance to kill Carver without the slightest risk to herself. She’d known it had to be him from the moment she’d seen him step through the gap in the chain-link fence. Who else could it possibly be? The police had arrived, exactly as she’d been told they would, and then Carver had taken the obvious escape route. She’d recognized his walk, too.

Like all former Eastern Bloc intelligence personnel, Novak had been taught the three-point identification method, developed by the East German Stasi. Using academics from a range of fields, from anthropologists to zoologists, they’d identified hundreds of markers that define an individual: the shape of their eyes, their stride-patterns, their posture and so on. Agents were trained to take three of these markers, apply them to someone they were trailing and then consider those three markers – and nothing else – when they were looking for that individual. A person could change their clothes, their haircut, add a false beard or wear spectacles, but as long as one or more of those markers remained consistent, they could never escape observation.

Novak had observed Carver at the closest possible range when they had been together, back in Greece. She had automatically filed away the markers she would use to identify him. The shabby, balding, mousey-haired man hurrying towards her across the building site had still retained the essential characteristics of Samuel Carver. And yet she had somehow been unsure. She had hesitated; only for a second, but that had been long enough.

Now she would have to hunt him through this godforsaken warren, which reeked of failure and broken dreams almost as much as it did of the methylated spirits and rancid urine of the drunken tramps who’d spent the night there and were now lying dead in the bare basement beneath an unfinished townhouse. She hadn’t wanted any witnesses, even ones with addled brains.

Novak put a fresh magazine into her long-barrelled Ruger MK II pistol, and walked towards the house where she’d last seen Carver, the gun held in front of her in both hands as she peered into the relative darkness of the interior. She was only about ten feet from the entrance, walking at a slow, steady pace, alert to any movement. And then she heard the sound of footsteps above and ahead of her and looked up to see Carver leaping from a gap in the ragged brickwork of the house’s unfinished upper storey and flying through the air towards her.

She raised her gun to shoot him. But at the very moment she fired Carver crashed into her, flinging her backwards and sending the shot harmlessly wide. She hit the ground back first and was winded as Carver gripped her right wrist and slammed her hand against the rough, concrete-studded surface, forcing her to let go of the Ruger. She was still gasping for breath as he rolled off her and scampered after the gun.

Carver grabbed it, got to his feet and spun round to face her. Now she was lying on the ground and Carver was standing over her, the gun-barrel aimed right between her eyes.

‘Morning, Ginger,’ he said.

74

ALIX REACHED THE
hotel basement and entered the warren of kitchen, laundry, housekeeping, security and management facilities that acted as the frantically paddling legs that kept the graceful five-star swan up above moving forwards. She played dumb. She was the new girl at work, not sure of her way around, needing directions back to the staff changing rooms. She got back into her regular clothes, but kept the scarf on and put on dark glasses the moment she got outdoors, going through the service entrance and across the road into Hyde Park as quickly as she could, away from prying eyes and security cameras.

The park wasn’t quite the urban oasis it had once been. Clumps of litter blew like plastic tumbleweed across the unkempt grass, and when she got to the glass-fronted restaurant that looked out over the waters of the Serpentine, two of the great panes had been replaced by temporary boarding and there was graffiti all over the brickwork. But the place was open, and Alix was able to order a cup of coffee and a stale, flaccid croissant, although in truth she didn’t feel like consuming either of them. In the adrenalin rush of
escaping
from the hotel she had forgotten how lousy she felt, but now the fatigue and nausea seemed to have gripped her again.

She scrolled through her phone’s address book, trying to find someone in London she could call on for shelter. She needed them to be reliable, discreet, and not have a family: she didn’t want anyone’s kids getting caught up in this. The first man she tried was a banker. He lived in a high-security residential block on Canary Wharf that had round-the-clock armed guards. His office said he was away on a trip to Singapore. She tried a female friend – a high-level political PR – but the way she said, ‘I’d love to help, darling, but . . .’ told Alix all she needed to know. She hung up before the woman had got halfway through her phoney excuse.

Her third choice was a forty-eight-year-old diplomat called Trent Peck the Third, or TP3 to his friends. He was handsome, rich, educated at Harvard before taking his Masters as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and only recently emerged from a really savage divorce. Alix had lunched with him two or three times when he had been working at the State Department and she had been seeking favours for this or that foreign client. She and Carver had also met Peck and his ex-wife at social events in Washington. Peck was the kind of man who never let minor details such as the presence of spouses and partners prevent him trying his luck. Alix had spent more than one evening trying to fend him off, and Carver had noticed enough to put a cold, narrow-eyed look on his face that made Alix genuinely concerned about what he might do next.

In the end she’d managed to calm Carver down. ‘I know . . . you’re right,’ he’d said, admitting that a swift, brutal act of violence wasn’t the answer to this particular problem. ‘The man’s a wanker, though. You do know that, don’t you?’

Alix had agreed then, and she still felt the same way now. But she was a beggar who couldn’t afford to be choosy, so she made the call.

Answering his cell phone, Peck came on strong, right from the word go: ‘Alix! How great to hear from you!’ He exuded an automatic, artificial charm. ‘I can’t believe it! A call from the
most
beautiful woman in Washington DC! To what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘I need a place to stay,’ she replied.

‘Really? Don’t you have a reservation at a fancy hotel? I can’t believe they’re all booked up – not in this economy. But, hey, maybe it’s just me that you’re after . . .’

‘No, Trent, this is serious . . . I’m in trouble. I really need your help. I can explain everything. But please . . .’ Alix suddenly felt pathetically desperate and tearful – no stronger than that poor little hotel chambermaid. Her emotions were all over the place this morning, swung this way and that by her hormones. Life was so unfair sometimes. Why didn’t men have to put up with this?