Revenger (35 page)

‘Why did they get a Brit to do it? Why not use the SEALs or Delta Force?’

‘Dunno, it just says he was hired on account of his “specialist professional expertise”.’

‘Does that mean he’s some kind of hitman? Makes sense of the way he behaved last night.’

Giammetti scratched the back of his head. ‘You know what? I think you did a smart thing coming to talk to me. And I’m going to do another smart thing and cover all our asses. Time to talk to our cousins.’

Giammetti pressed a speed-dial number on his desk phone. ‘Hi, honey,’ he said when the call was answered. ‘Your boss available? Oh, OK . . . well, when he gets out of the meeting tell him John Giammetti needs to talk to him. And yeah, I would say it is kinda urgent.’

‘So who did you call?’ Peck asked.

‘Grantham,’ Giammetti said. ‘You wanna get something done, it’s best to go straight to the top. Now, do me a favour: head back to your apartment and make sure your house guest is being a good little girl.’

Alix’s presence in Trent Peck’s apartment was also attracting considerable interest in Moscow. The FSB were, of course, well aware of Peck’s status as an undercover CIA operative. The fact that he was now sheltering the former agent Petrova provided even greater potential for causing massive embarrassment to both the British and American governments than anyone had anticipated. Novak
had
been parked in an FSB property in North Kensington and told to wait for her next orders. It was not yet time for her to proceed against both Petrova and Peck. But that time was not far away.

‘Tell her to make her way to Peck’s property,’ said Gusev. ‘She should coordinate with our people on the ground there, but she must not do anything beyond that. There are still further characters to arrive on the scene. But there is no need to be impatient. It will not be too long before they make their entrance.’

It took almost an hour for Grantham to reply to Giammetti’s call. His morning schedule had been blown to pieces by the need to cope with the fallout from the police’s arrival at the flat where Carver had spent the early hours of the morning. He’d expected them to put two and two together, of course, but not quite this quickly. Not before Carver could be safely got out of the way.

Faced with the combined forces of Scotland Yard and the Home Office, not to mention MI5, hanging around the affair like hyenas waiting for some nice, dead prey to feast on, Grantham had been hard-pressed to keep them all at bay. He’d been forced to resort to a blank, outright denial of any Secret Intelligence Service involvement, pleading total ignorance of how the suspect had managed to find his way into the safe house. But that line wasn’t going to hold for long.

Then he called Giammetti and an already lousy day took another turn for the worse.

‘Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,’ Grantham replied after the CIA man had said his piece. ‘The woman Vermulen – she’s run for shelter to one of your guys. Now, she’s a US citizen, and Adams has already vouched for her presence at the O2 and subsequently at dinner with him for the entire evening. So unless Adams was behind the whole riot, which I dare say is possible, and she was involved in that in some way, I don’t see that she has anything to worry about. It’s not an offence to be a murderer’s girlfriend. And it’s equally acceptable for a citizen of a foreign country to seek help from one of their own nation’s diplomats.’

‘Well, I’m glad you see it that way.’

‘On the other hand, your president may soon be exposed as being best buddies with a man who killed forty civilians in a London supermarket. If you ask me, John, that’s where your problem lies.’

Grantham put the phone down, feeling certain that he’d taken care of Giammetti. He’d be fully occupied getting on to his bosses at Langley and warning them of the massive embarrassment that could be coming the President’s way. But that still left Grantham with a world of troubles of his own to solve.

He did not regret his decision to have Carver killed. The logic of the situation demanded it. Either he would be caught by the police, in which case there was always a chance that embarrassing, not to say career-ending, information might emerge. Or, far more likely, Carver would escape capture and dedicate himself to uncovering, tracking down and killing whoever was responsible for the riot. Since Grantham did not want to die at Carver’s hands, he had to get to him first. And in a situation of such extreme urgency, he’d been left with little option but to reach for an operative he knew would be keen to take the job. He’d acted in haste, and had been repenting it ever since.

There were worrying signs that Novak had gone rogue, or – even worse – was playing a double game, working for someone else too. He’d tipped the police off to Carver’s whereabouts and given Novak an ideal killing zone in which to take him out. He was virtually certain that she had gone as planned to the abandoned building site. According to the Met’s latest information, three vagrants had been found dead in a basement there, and one of the unfinished houses was peppered with .22 rounds. But there was no indication that anyone had been hit. Carver’s body certainly wasn’t there. Nor was Novak’s, come to that. It was barely believable, but somehow two of the planet’s most dangerous inhabitants had fought one another without either suffering any damage. And that made Grantham suspect that there had been a third party in the mix somewhere.

He’d been a bloody idiot to call Zhukovskaya. They’d worked together in the past, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t sell him out in a heartbeat. And he knew exactly who she’d call. The Russians were getting in on the act somehow, and anything Giammetti knew, they’d know too. Alix might as well have sent out change-of-address cards. If Novak was getting help to track her down, she’d go straight to Peck’s place, and suddenly there’d be US diplomats with CIA connections and women who were personal friends of the President getting blown away on Grantham’s patch. Not good.

He tried to get to Novak and tell her to forget Alix and concentrate on Carver, but she’d gone off-grid. Probably just as well. He had to assume that any calls to her, Peck or Alix were being monitored. If he got back to Giammetti, he’d only be giving the whole game away. He’d have to sort this out the old-fashioned way: go there in person and get Peck and Alix out of the flat while he still had the chance.

Grantham buzzed his secretary. ‘Something’s come up. I’ve got to leave the office. So cancel the rest of my appointments for the day. I could be gone some time.’

85

CARVER COULDN’T HELP
wanting to be near Alix. Part of it was a natural feeling of protectiveness. And then there was the nagging fear that no matter how hard she tried to hide herself away, Novak would somehow manage to find her. If or when that happened, he had to be able to do something about it.

He’d tried to call Alix, but her phone was unavailable. All he knew was that she was at Trent Peck’s flat, somewhere in St John’s Wood, so he headed to Regent’s Park, which was pretty much next door. It was also a large, open area with very few CCTV cameras and plenty of space for a man to get lost in. Carver navigated a path through the wilderness of unmown grass, stinging nettles, broken bottles and used condoms and found himself a relatively intact park bench. Then he started thinking.

Peck was a US diplomat, so his phone and address wouldn’t be listed. But he was also a rich bachelor at a loose end in the big city, and it struck Carver that he might just be daft or egotistical enough to stick himself all over a social network or two. In point of fact, it had nothing to do with ego. Peck was in the business of creating an
image
for himself, a smokescreen behind which he could hide his true purpose, and the self-indulgent playboy has been a pose for spies as long as secrets have been hidden and uncovered.

Either way, it took a minute or two on Carver’s smartphone to uncover Peck’s Facebook account. Though his Wall was restricted to Friends, most of his photos were not. So Carver sifted through countless shots of TP3 living large at poolsides, parties and polo tournaments. And then he hit pay dirt: an album modestly titled, ‘John, Paul, George, Ringo . . . and Trent’.

There was Peck, posing with his kids as they strode across the zebra crossing in Beatle-esque poses with the caption, ‘Can’t believe I live about fifty yards from here!’

In the next shot, there he was again, standing on a roof terrace, pointing back down at the road, with the famous white stripes just visible in the background and another caption. ‘Told ya so!’

So he lived on Abbey Road. Carver logged on to Google Earth, opened up the Streetview shots of the area and soon found Peck’s flat. The jammy little sod had a fifth-floor penthouse on top of a modern, glass-fronted building just down the road from the legendary Abbey Road Studios. It was actually more like eighty yards from the crossing, but that was just being picky. More importantly from Carver’s point of view, the satellite photo showed that Peck’s building, which was named The Glasshouse, butted right up against the block next door. Both buildings were of very similar heights and had flat roofs. This neighbouring block was right beside Peck’s penthouse, which occupied half the top floor. It had two large glass lanterns in its roof, bringing natural daylight into the rooms below.

Carver kept Googling, and found countless property ads for apartments in The Glasshouse, including an old one for Peck’s apartment which not only gave him pictures of the open-plan living area, the kitchen and one of the bedrooms, but also provided a plan, which he promptly downloaded to his phone. The images of the interior layout were tiny, but he could make out the key features nonetheless.

He knew exactly where Alix was now. He could picture the rooms where she was sitting. Was she making polite conversation with Peck? Was she having to give him more to ensure his co-operation? Carver knew she loved him, but he also knew she had been trained to use her body to bend a man to her will.

It took every ounce of self-control to stop himself going there now, standing guard outside the door, or simply charging in and beating the crap out of Trent Peck the bloody Third. But he knew the reality of the situation. He could not compromise Alix’s security by leading anyone else to her. He was a mile and a half from her now, and that was as close as it was going to get.

Still, now that he’d found one of the women in his life, what about the other? Ginger’s number was still in his address book. He sent her a message: ‘Ginger, darling, enjoyed our chat this a.m. v much. Care for a walk in the park? Sam Cx’

It was the first feeler sent out from one opponent to another. Carver was certain it wouldn’t be long now before contact was made. He could sense it in his bones.

Novak got the message. She would have grinned with delight if she’d been capable of such a thing. Instead, she called Kutchinski: ‘Carver’s made contact. He wants to meet. Do I have clearance to act on his invitation?’

‘No,’ she was told. ‘We have other plans.’

‘What if this is my only opportunity? He could be captured by the police. He could leave the country. Anything could happen.’

‘Be patient. Just bide your time and you will have him. You will have it all.’

86

GRANTHAM HAD A
personal driver, but this wasn’t a journey he wanted recorded on any official log. Instead he walked to Vauxhall underground station and took the Victoria Line to Green Park and then the Jubilee to St John’s Wood. As he scurried down Grove End Road, past the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth en route to Abbey Road, Grantham prayed he wasn’t too late. He might have affected a blasé attitude to Giammetti, but he knew how much danger Alix and Peck were really in. If harm should befall them in a flat owned by an American diplomat, well, it would just be one more rusty nail in the coffin of the not-so-special relationship. And if Giammetti should then choose to reveal the contents of their conversation, then life could get very nasty for J. Grantham too.

Now he’d reached the corner of Abbey Road. He wanted to get to the other side of the road, and there was a zebra crossing right in front of him, but a group of people were standing on it in stupid poses taking pictures of one another, so it was much more difficult to get across it than it should have been. Grantham had never taken
the
slightest interest in music. He neither knew nor cared what the appeal of this particular crossing might be. He looked at the numbers on the buildings beside him. Not far to go now.

Celina Novak had been given the go signal. She was standing in the shadow of a tree that stood in the forecourt of a Baptist church, just across the road from the glass-fronted building, wondering what the best way was to get access to Trent Peck’s apartment, when she saw the nondescript figure in the dark-blue overcoat walking up Abbey Road. It took her a second to realize that this was Jack Grantham, and she guessed at once that he was coming to warn Petrova of the threat that she was facing. Well, the two of them would soon discover just how great that threat was. As Grantham turned left off the pavement and walked between two rows of ornamental trees towards the front door, Novak slipped out from under the tree and started walking towards that same door.

Grantham pressed the buzzer of the apartment building. It was answered by a man. The sound was muffled and crackly but when the voice said, ‘Hello?’ Grantham thought he detected an American accent.

‘Is that Peck?’ Grantham said.

‘This is he,’ the voice replied, with the grammatical formality that was now far more commonly found among well-educated Americans than the English of any class. ‘To whom am I speaking?’

‘Hello, my name’s Grantham. Your boss just called me.’

‘Jack Grantham?’ Peck said, incredulously.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re kidding me, right?’

‘Trust me, I’m not. I’m here because of Mrs Vermulen. She’s in very serious danger.’

For a few moments there was nothing but interference coming through the speaker. Then Grantham heard the American again: ‘I guess you’d better come up.’