Revenger (34 page)

‘Frank Preston, CNN . . . I’m finding it hard to believe that a man can kill forty people and then just go out to dinner. Was your guest some kind of psychopath, do you think? Or are we talking about a case of mistaken identity?’

‘I’m not a psychiatrist, Mr Preston, so I can’t give you a diagnosis. But I have been to war as a soldier. So let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that this really was the Second Man. Within the previous hour or so, he had been involved in an extremely stressful combat situation. A close friend had been killed, and he had used extreme methods to save his own life and those of the other people with him. Well, I’m sure you’ve all seen old war films about pilots coming back to base after a mission. They’ve seen their mates getting shot down, but they don’t sit around moping. That’s not what fighting men do. They go to the pub, have a drink, dance with a pretty girl, sing rowdy songs. They live, Mr Preston. They try to be as alive as possible because they have been surrounded by death . . . John.’

John Murphy, an ITN reporter, asked, ‘The Prime Minister’s office today issued a statement saying that there was no place for vigilante behaviour in British society. They have described the bombing of the Lion Market as, quote, “a cowardly act that is no better than terrorism”. How do you respond to that?’

‘I say that if there was an act of terrorism, it was carried out by the rioters. They were the ones who planned to take people’s lives, wreck their businesses and disrupt an entire community. From everything that I have heard, what happened in the Lion Market was a spontaneous, unplanned reaction to the threat the people there were facing—’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Adams,’ Murphy interrupted, ‘but how could anyone make a “spontaneous” or “unplanned” bomb?’

‘Well, I could have done it,’ said Adams, provoking an audible gasp from the audience. ‘Any soldier who has served in the special
forces
or another elite unit could do it, though I’m not going into details in public.

‘As for the Prime Minister, he has a nerve accusing men who’ve fought for this country of cowardice. He may go off to country estates with all his posh pals and blast away at defenceless pheasants. But he’s never had to stand up to anyone who’s shot back. He’s a spoiled, pampered toff, and he’s using these accusations in a blatant attempt to cover up the truth, which is that a terrible event like this would never have happened if the government had given the police the means to crack down hard on the very first riots. But they didn’t. Just like they didn’t deal with the underlying causes of these riots: the broken communities, the racial tension, the deadly effects of alien cultures being introduced into this county . . . all the things that ordinary people can see all around them every day. And the result is more than fifty people dead in a street in South London.’

Adams had managed to turn the press conference into a miniature version of his rally, getting across the arguments that the riot had silenced last night. Now he just had to drop a final quotable bombshell and go. He gave one of his slow, meaningful scans of the audience and said, ‘I have a message for the Prime Minister, and it is this: the blood of those dead people is not on the hands of the so-called Second Man. It is on your hands. And I will hold you to account.’

Then he leaned a little closer to the microphone, said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and strode briskly from the stage.

81

CARVER WAS STANDING
in front of a display of nail guns. He’d concluded that the best use of the cash he’d drawn out earlier that morning was a Paslode IM90i Framing Gas Nailer. It was capable of firing thirty-seven 90mm nails deep into the timber frame, joists, roofing and floorboards of a house at the rate of three a second. It wouldn’t have any problem blasting into human flesh and bone.

The phone rang: Kevin Cripps.

‘Victoria’s a bloody bastard for parking,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I went on one of them websites where you can park at someone’s gaff, and got a garage in this mews by the Vauxhall Bridge Road. I’ll send you the address by text, yeah?’

‘Is the garage locked?’

‘Nah, just pull up the door.’

‘So where are you now?’

‘Just past Haywards Heath on the train to Shoreham-by-Sea.’

‘Then give me your bank details as well as that address, and I’ll stick the ten grand in your account.’

‘Quality!’

‘When you get there, make sure the bloody thing works. Get him to show you, all right? If he needs encouraging, call me and I’ll put a ten per cent deposit down, so he knows the money’s real.’

‘What do I say if he asks why I want it?’

‘You say that your client is a very wealthy man with a very spoiled son. Roll your eyes. You’re just a normal bloke working for a rich prat. He’ll understand.’

‘So you’re a rich prat, yeah?’

‘No . . . but my life would be a lot easier if I was. Call me when you’ve got everything.’

There was a brief pause on the other end of the line and then Cripps asked, ‘You all right, boss?’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Carver. ‘I’ll manage.’

82

TRENT PECK THE
Third hurried around his penthouse apartment, clearing the empty packets of last night’s Chinese takeaway from the table in front of the leather sofa where he’d been sprawled eating dim sum and watching a box-set of the first season of
Prison Break
(ten years old but still a classic) on his 55-inch Loewe TV. He checked that his built-in espresso maker was stocked with beans and water, then cast an eye around the open-plan living area that stretched right across the front of the apartment. Once he’d thrown the surface trash in the bin, the rest of the place wasn’t too bad.

All the while he was giving Alix the kind of detailed examination that hadn’t been possible while he’d been driving through London like a lunatic, trying to shake off that damn VW. She had to be forty, at least, he figured, but she’d taken a lot of effort to keep her looks, succeeded and knew it. Peck admired women like that. They were grown-ups. They knew their value in the marketplace, and they weren’t coy about what they wanted in the sack, but they’d also been around long enough to be realistic in their expectations.

Trent gave her the benefit of his most charming smile. ‘Can I
get
you a cup of coffee? Reckon I make the best in London.’

‘Sure, that would be great. This is just so, so sweet of you, taking me in like this. Your place is amazing, by the way.’

He fixed a cappuccino with low-fat milk, no sugar, for Alix, and a double espresso for himself. Then he led them across to the big leather sofa, offered Alix one end, took the other, waited till they’d both had time for a sip or two of coffee and then said, ‘So, what on earth are we going to do now? Seriously, we need to figure out your next move. Mine, too, come to that. I can’t just keep you here, you know. I need to talk this through with someone.’

Her eyes widened in alarm. ‘No you can’t! No one must know I’m here – absolutely no one!’

‘Trust me, the guy I’m thinking of is totally reliable. He’s not going to tell anyone anything. But I really value his advice.’

‘So who is he?’

‘Someone at the embassy . . . a mentor, I guess you could call him.’

‘Promise me you’re not going to hand me over to the police.’

‘I promise . . . on one condition: everything you’ve told me has to be true. If I find out you’ve been bullshitting, or there are things you’ve not been telling me – like illegal activity on your part, or involvement in any of Carver’s alleged illegal actions – well, then all bets are off. Is that fair?’

She nodded.

‘Great,’ Peck said. ‘Then we’ve got a deal. Now, I’ve gotta get to work, and I’d better not take my automobile. Don’t want to be followed again.’

Trent Peck stood on the pavement outside his building for half a minute till a cab came by. He hailed it and told the cabbie, ‘US Embassy, fast as you can.’

Two men in a parked C-Class Mercedes saloon watched the taxi disappear down the road. They’d arrived less than a quarter of an hour earlier, having taken over from the men in the VW Passat who’d first picked up Petrova’s trail when she’d left the hotel.
They had pictures of her arriving at the apartment building with a male, whose car had diplomatic plates. They had pictures of him leaving. Now the driver of the Mercedes called Oleg Kutchinski, who was sitting in an office in the white stucco mansion on Kensington Palace Gardens that houses the Russian Embassy.

‘Petrova is now alone in the apartment,’ said the driver.

‘Good. Stay where you are. Maintain observation of the apartment. Wait there until you receive further orders.’

‘What if she leaves the apartment?’

‘Then inform me and follow her. Wherever that woman goes, I want to know about it.’

83

CARVER WENT TO
a diving store, where he bought a lightweight triathlon wetsuit, a wetsuit balaclava to cover his head, a pair of short ‘zip-fins’ designed for building up fitness over long swims, a face mask and a snorkel.

He removed the nail gun and its accessories from the box, disposed of all the packaging, loaded the gun and placed it inside the Tesco bag. The axe, firework, rope, scissors, matches and water went into the rucksack, along with the wetsuit balaclava, the fins, the mask and the snorkel.

Having given the matter considerable thought, he concluded that he had no option but to wear the wetsuit under his clothing. Even though he had specifically chosen the lightest, most flexible possible suit, it would still get as hot and sweaty as hell over the next few hours, but he couldn’t see a practical alternative.

‘It’s a personal thing,’ he said to the male shop assistant who’d taken his order.

‘What a perv,’ the man had muttered, under his breath, but loud enough that Carver could hear.

It was just as well that the assistant hadn’t known what his customer actually had in mind for the rest of the day. The harmless predilections of a rubber fetishist would seem charmingly innocent in comparison.

At Kennington police station, the resident computer wizard had been set to work to compile two new photofit images of the Second Man: one with a floppy bush-hat over his face, the other with much shorter, lighter hair. Neither looked exactly like the newly disguised Sam Carver. They did not, for example, show him wearing glasses. But they were closer to the present truth than the original portrait had been. And once Inspector Keane had passed them on to the press office for immediate distribution, it was only a matter of time before somebody out there made the connection.

She knew it would not happen at once; that would be too much to ask for. But if Sam, or whoever the Second Man really was, did something either bold or public enough to attract anyone’s attention, then spottings of him would soon be reported to the police. Keane was absolutely confident of that.

84

LONDON HAD BEEN
a crucial base for American intelligence for more than seventy years. In 1942, the newly created Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, set up an office of its Secret Intelligence Branch, or SI, in London, from which more than a hundred agents were sent into Nazi-occupied Europe. For decades afterwards, the extraordinarily close, if sometimes fractious, relationship between British and US intelligence led to almost constant communication between the two nations’ agencies.

Many CIA personnel, based among the diplomats at the US Embassy in London, were entirely open – within the profession at least – about their jobs. They were well-known to their British counterparts – or ‘cousins’ as the two nations’ spies referred to one another, with heavy, knowing irony. Others, however, were undercover, for one of the dirty little truths about espionage is that one spies on one’s allies quite as much as one’s enemies.

One of these undercover CIA agents was Trent Peck the Third.

When he got to the US Embassy he slipped into the office of the
CIA
Head of Station, John D. Giammetti, for a quiet conversation. As he recounted the story of Alexandra Vermulen’s call to him, her plea for help and her arrival in his apartment, Giammetti was searching through the files on his desktop computer.

‘Well, I gotta say, Trent, you can pick’em,’ he said, when Peck had come to the end of his story.

‘Yeah, she’s pretty hot,’ Peck said, assuming Giammetti was referring to a photograph of Vermulen.

‘I wasn’t talking about her looks. You know she’s Russian, right, by birth? Ex- KGB, in fact.’

‘Jesus! That explains how she got out of that hotel without being caught by Scotland Yard’s finest. But how did she ever get citizenship?’

‘Marrying a retired US Army general, I guess. Don’t worry, she’s been checked out. Far as anyone can see, she had a brief career as a young woman, doing all the things that hot young women in the KGB used to do, you get my drift. Looks like she quit the trade once the Soviet era ended.’

‘Ha!’ Peck exclaimed. ‘There’s no such thing as ex-KGB.’

‘That’s not what the file says,’ Giammetti insisted. ‘She’s been clean for a long, long time. The Bureau kept a watch on that lobbying business she runs for a while, but they couldn’t find too much to worry about.’

‘Well, that may change. She’s dating some Limey called Samuel Carver. And get this: he’s the Second Man.’

‘What? From the Lion Market Massacre?’ said Giammetti, incredulously.

‘One and the same. He’s got every cop in London after him. And from the way the Prime Minister’s been talking, they’re treating him like the second coming of Osama bin Laden.’

‘Yeah, well, that tells you what’s wrong with this friggin’ country. Guy risks his life to save two helpless women and some Asian shopkeepers, blows a bunch of douchebag rioters to pieces, and they think he’s a criminal. Back home he’d already have his first movie deal and an invitation to lunch from the mayor.’

‘She said this guy is some kind of personal buddy of the President’s, though. Is that for real?’

‘Let me have a look,’ said Giammetti, consulting his screen. He gave a low whistle. ‘OK . . . So, this Carver dude is ex-British special forces. Did some work for the Secret Service a few years back. They hired him to test the security precautions at Roberts’s private compound down in Carolina. Carver staged some kind of phoney attack.’