Revenger (32 page)

At least there were some advantages to the whole feeble-female routine: it gave men a warm glow of strength and protectiveness.

‘Hey, Alix, it’s OK,’ Peck was saying. ‘I’m sure I can help, but first things first: where are you?’

‘Hyde Park,’ she said, with a sniff. ‘At the Knightsbridge end of the Serpentine.’

‘Great. That’s not too far from me. Listen, I have an apartment in St John’s Wood. That’s no distance. So what I want you to do is walk down towards Hyde Park Corner. You’ll come out by the Queen Mother’s Gates . . .’

‘Yes, I know where you mean.’

‘OK, so you know where the Hilton and the Metropolitan hotels are? There’s kind of a drop-off area, like a turning circle, right off of Park Lane. I’ll meet you there in fifteen minutes. I drive a black Range Rover.’

‘I’m on my way,’ Alix said.

‘Outstanding,’ Peck replied. ‘See you in fifteen.’

75

‘GET UP!’ CARVER
commanded Novak.

‘Or what?’ Novak replied, propping herself up on her elbows and looking directly up at him.

‘Or I’ll . . .’ The words died in Carver’s mouth as he saw her face full-on for the first time. His first reaction was shock, followed by something close to pity – and a personal sense of his own loss as he thought of the times he’d looked down on her during those few days and nights they’d spent together. She’d been lovely then. Her face had glowed with life, personality and humour. It was all put on, of course: everything she did was calculated, every single smile or laugh an act of manipulation. Yet even so she’d been captivating. He thought of the way the freckles had dusted her cheeks, the softness of her lips and the barely perceptible little groove at the very tip of her nose. And now all that had vanished.

It wasn’t so much that her face was now grotesque that made it so disturbing, for her features were where they should be and in the correct proportions. It was that all the life and movement had somehow been drained from her expression. She looked blank,
immobile
, waxen; like her own death mask. It struck him that this chilly, soulless facsimile of a beautiful woman was actually a much truer reflection of the inner Celina Novak than the deceitful animation of her old face had been.

‘Go ahead, stare,’ she said. ‘But just answer me this. Did your little bitch-whore Petrova ever tell you what she did to make me this way?’

‘What do you mean? How could she possibly—’

‘By smashing my nose against the edge of a counter top. By putting a flame to my face and burning off half my skin.’

‘You’re lying!’

‘You should be proud of her,’ Novak said, ignoring him. Her expression had not changed at all while they’d been talking. She could open and close her eyes but she could not frown. She could open her mouth to talk, but she could not smile. ‘It was the night Zorn died . . . She took me by surprise. She kicked me in the knee and had me down before I even knew what was happening. And she did it all for you. She thought you were in danger. She thought I could help her save you.’

‘I wasn’t even there,’ Carver said, as though that would somehow disprove what Novak was saying.

‘Well, isn’t that ironic? All of this for nothing . . . You know, I spent months wrapped in bandages. I had so many operations, so many nerves cut that if my skin is touched I cannot feel it. If I try to smile, it is so twisted, so ugly that I told my surgeon: “Fill me with Botox, that way I can’t even try.”

‘Now I only have one expression, but like they say about a stopped clock, it has to be right at least a couple of times a day . . . Oh, come on, Carver, wasn’t that funny? Give me a smile. No one’s put Botox in you.’

Carver couldn’t say anything. He was filled with a sense of the world unravelling. First the massacre in the supermarket; now this zombified ghost of a real woman rising up out of the past; and all around the evidence of an entire society falling apart. For the first time in his life, he was in a combat situation and he couldn’t
make
the next move. Not when the next move meant shooting her in cold blood.

Novak knew it. Her expression was as blank as a showroom dummy, but she could still put a sneer in her voice: ‘At least I still have some fight left in me. You’ve not got the balls for this any more. It’s obvious. If you let me live, I’ll kill you, and the Petrova bitch too. You have to kill me now. But you can’t . . . can you?’

Carver said nothing. He couldn’t let her walk away. But it was as though Novak had somehow hypnotized him. She was actually getting to her feet, and he was just letting her do it. He forced himself to drive all the memories of last night from his mind. He couldn’t afford to be handicapped by them now. He had to be as callous as the enemy in front of him. He had to . . . for Alix’s sake.

Now he had a justification. If he didn’t kill Novak, she would surely take advantage of her reprieve and she would do it at Alix’s expense. His eyes narrowed with a newfound resolution. His finger tightened on the trigger.

And then he felt the cold kiss of metal on the back of his neck and a man’s voice with a slight Russian accent said, ‘Drop the gun . . . And take the other one out of your pants. Hold it in your fingertips . . . Now drop that, too.’

Carver saw the Glock join the Ruger on the ground in front of him and then his head exploded in pain as the gun-barrel that had been pressed against his skin was lashed across his skull, just behind his right ear.

He fell to his knees, and stayed kneeling for a second or two as he fought to shake off the pain, the tight, sick feeling in his throat and the white noise filling his brain. Then his body slumped forward, face down on the cold, hard, wet ground.

Carver was only unconscious for a minute or two, but when he awoke Novak was gone. He was alone. He was unarmed. And he’d just been betrayed by the one man on earth he’d been stupid enough to trust.

76

MARA KEANE WAS
in the hotel suite, consoling an extremely frustrated group of SCO19 personnel, and organizing the collection and forensic analysis of the belongings left in the room by its two former occupants, when a man in a hotel staff uniform appeared in the doorway and called out, ‘Excuse me!’ And then again, when no one paid any attention to him, ‘Excuse me, please!’

‘Yes?’ said Keane.

‘There’s a noise coming from room 827, down the corridor. It sounds as though there’s someone in there, and I think they might be trapped.’

Four of the SCO19 men were dispatched to investigate. They returned a couple of minutes later with a terrified, tearful half-naked chambermaid, wrapped in a blanket. Between her sobs she managed to tell Keane what had happened to her.

‘I thought you said Mrs Vermulen didn’t pose any threat,’ said the SCO19 commander when the chambermaid had finished.

‘Evidently I was misinformed,’ Keane replied.

Just then her phone rang. It was Commander Stamford. ‘I need
you
back at Kennington,’ she said. ‘Go through all the evidence we’ve collected in the past few hours and tell me what we’ve got. There’s a situation developing and we need to sort it out.’

Walcott was on the ragged edge of exhaustion. He’d accompanied the team who’d been dispatched to the flat where the Second Man had been. They’d arrived a fraction too late. It had been a matter of seconds, but the suspect had got out and vanished into the maze of side streets that surrounded the flat. If they’d had dogs there might have been a chance of tracking him, but half the police dog units had been disbanded as a cost-saving measure, and the remaining handlers were on strike, protesting against new regulations that required them to buy their animals’ food. He had officers out patrolling the area, but the chances of spotting, let alone apprehending, the suspect were minimal. Still there had been some news, which he was passing on to Keane.

‘He didn’t have time to cover his tracks before he got out,’ Walcott told her. ‘We found an empty packet of hair dye and there were dark hairs in the plughole of the bathroom basin. So we need to update the photofit to make the hair shorter and more blond. Also he left a black quilted waistcoat behind, so either he’s very cold now, without that and his coat, or he’s found something else to wear. And one other thing . . . I got one of the lads at the station to run a Land Registry check to find out who owned this place. And it belongs to the Foreign Office.’

‘Is it the kind of place where they’d put up visiting dignitaries?’

Walcott laughed. ‘Not unless they wanted a diplomatic incident. This place is a dump. No, it’s where you put someone you want to hide away.’

‘So it’s a safe house?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘And if it’s owned by the Foreign Office, then it belongs to MI6.’

‘So why are they keeping this guy safe?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Keane. ‘And I’m not sure I really want to know, either.’

Carver was making his way through the streets of Lambeth on foot, trying to work out why he was still alive and what the Russians were doing sticking their noses into all this. At least some of his questions had been answered, though. He knew now exactly who had ordered the riot and why, and he was determined to find a way to prove it in the hours before he could put his escape-plan into effect. During that time he had to keep himself and Alix alive and deal with Novak. Things were going to get messy, and he needed the weapons to cope with any situation. His gun might have been taken from him, but that wasn’t the end of the world. Just as Carver could make bombs out of pizza flour, so he could create his own personal arsenal just by going to the nearest shops. And he had Novak to thank for one thing, at least. She’d shown him very clearly that the traumatic events in the Lion Market had taught him the wrong lesson. There was nothing to be gained by refusing to take life when that was the only sensible option. The next time he got her in his sights, he wouldn’t be afraid to fire.

‘Why didn’t you let me kill him?’ Novak fumed. ‘He was helpless. He should be dead by now.’

‘Our orders were only to observe and if necessary protect you,’ replied FSB Major Oleg Kutchinski, who was sitting next to her in the car driving them back across the Thames and into Central London. ‘I am in constant contact with Director Gusev himself. He specifically instructed me to extract you from the construction site, but not to assist you to kill Carver. In the first place, that would place us much too close to the killing. And in the second, Director Gusev judged that it was not the correct time for Carver to die. It is his view that events can be managed so as to do far greater harm to the British government. Rest assured, you will be allowed to carry out your mission. And we will be of great use to you. But for now, you will obey Director Gusev’s commands.’

‘Why? He is not my director. I do not belong to the FSB any more.’

‘Oh come now, Novak, you know that is not true. You may say that you have left the FSB. But you, like all of us, belong to it for life.’

77

ALIX SENT CARVER
a text as she walked across the park: ‘Plan Z (no other option): “3rd-rate” wanker from DC. St J’s Wood. Ax’. There wasn’t anything very cryptic about that location, but it would have to do. There were a lot of flats in St John’s Wood. It would be impossible for anyone to find her unless they knew which particular wanker she was referring to. And speak of the devil . . . less than a minute after Alix got to the rendezvous point, the black Range Rover swung off Park Lane. She recognized Peck looking impossibly preppy and all-American behind the wheel. He pulled in by the side of the road and she ran across to the car. A door swung open as she approached.

‘Get in,’ Peck said. There was no trace at all of his playboy persona in the brusque, impersonal way he greeted her. This was a very different, much more businesslike Trent Peck. He gave Alix a moment to put on her seatbelt. He checked the road was clear, pulled away, eased into the rush-hour traffic, then swung round in a U-turn at the bottom of Park Lane and headed up the other lane, going north. Peck suddenly floored the accelerator as a gap opened
up
in the traffic ahead of him and raced ahead, moving from lane to lane as he dodged in and out of the traffic. There was a flash of light behind them from the speed camera opposite the Grosvenor House Hotel.

‘Don’t worry,’ Peck said. ‘They can’t get me . . . Diplomatic plates.’

The car slowed as the traffic thickened again and Peck looked across at Alix. ‘Suppose you tell me what the hell this is all about. And do me a favour. Make it real.’

Alix sighed. ‘There’s someone in my life – someone I care about very much – and he’s in trouble. I need to get out of the way . . . for his sake.’

‘You mean the guy I met that time in DC . . . what was he called? Sam Carver, wasn’t it?’

She nodded.

‘So what kind of trouble is he in? Has he done anything criminal? This is serious, Alix. I’m a US Foreign Service officer. I can’t afford to get mixed up in any kind of illegal activity.’

‘Well, the police are after him . . . but I don’t know that what he did was really illegal. And I’m certain it wasn’t wrong.’

‘Why don’t you just tell me the facts?’

‘I can’t . . . I just . . . I can’t . . .’

‘Well, maybe then you could tell me why we’re being followed.’

‘What do you mean?’ Alix said.

‘Grey VW Passat saloon. It’s about three cars back of us right now. But when I hit the gas it stuck with me all the way.’

‘I have no idea. I really don’t. It can’t be the police. I’m sure they didn’t see me leave the hotel.’

Peck looked at her in a way that suggested he’d explore the implications of what she’d just said in more detail later. For now he just asked, ‘Do you have a phone?’

‘Of course . . .’

‘Could you give it to me, please?’

‘Why?’

‘Just give it to me. Give it to me or I stop the car and kick you out right here.’

She looked at him for a moment and saw that he meant it.

Peck took the phone. Up ahead the traffic was moving again. Peck darted forward and manoeuvred the two-and-a-half-ton car as nimbly as a hot hatchback until he was positioned directly in front of a double-decker bus. Then he opened his window and dropped the phone out on to the road, where it was crushed beneath the bus’s wheels.