Revenger (38 page)

So he reached into his bag, pulled out the nail gun and started firing. He put a dozen nails into her throat and head in under four seconds, keeping firing even as she fell to the ground. He had the gun set to maximum power, so many of the nails went straight through, punching their way like bullets out of the back of her neck and skull before embedding themselves in the walls and floor.

Now Celina Novak was categorically dead.

In the flat below, an Italian woman called Maria Donatelli was racked by indecision. Signor Peck was normally a very good, quiet neighbour. He liked to have a lot of lady friends over, but he was a man, so what else was one to expect? But this afternoon there had been strange sounds: scurrying feet, thuds on the floor and then a blast, like a bomb, so powerful it had made her whole apartment shake. Then more thumping on the floor that sounded almost like people fighting.

She felt she should call the police, but she did not want to get Signor Peck into any kind of trouble. On the other hand, what if his apartment had been raided by burglars, or worse, terrorists? He was an American. He could easily be a target. But then, if she called, she might put herself in danger, too.

What should she do?

Maria Donatelli wavered this way and that. But in the end, she decided to behave like a good citizen and she dialled 999.

Carver laid the nail gun on the floor, picked up Novak’s Ruger and made his way through the flat, looking for Alix in the spare bedroom and its bathroom, even though he was certain she would not be there. He desperately wanted to discover her, and yet at the
same
time he dreaded what he would find so much that he was almost trying to delay the moment as long as he could.

Carver was in the hall now, right by the two bodies. The dead one had to be the owner, Peck. Grantham was lying next to him. He had been right by the firework when it went off and was looking around him with the wide, sightless eyes of the blind, trying to call out through the gag around his mouth.

From the moment he had seen Novak in that construction site, Carver had known that Grantham had been behind the riot. Who else could have tipped the police off to his presence in the MI6 flat? Who else knew enough about Celina Novak to choose her for the job of tidying up the loose ends?

He would deal with Grantham in due course, but now he kept going to the door of the master bedroom, the same door Novak had come through less than a minute before. He took a deep breath. He turned the handle. He walked in.

And he stepped into a charnel house.

91

ALIX WAS LYING
splayed, naked and ruined in the midst of a crimson eruption of blood. The sheets around her were sodden with it. Blood was dripping from the brass bed frame, sprayed and smeared across the wall behind the bed, pooled on the floor beside it.

She had been abused.

She had been tortured.

She had been eviscerated.

An incision had been made from her pubis up across her stomach almost to her ribs. Novak must have reached inside and pulled out Alix’s entrails, stringing them across the skin on either side of the cut.

It struck Carver that she might have been hunting for the baby, seeking out their embryonic child. It was somewhere in that glistening tangle of pink and crimson entrails, lying dead in its mother’s violated womb. He thought of the text, ‘Bye-bye baby’, and he had to lift a hand to his mouth to stop himself from vomiting.

It had been barely fifteen hours since he had walked into the
ruins
of the Lion Market and seen the dead and dying lying there so thickly that there was barely room to step between them across the floor. He’d thought that he had never seen anything as bad as that before, and never would again. He’d been wrong.

As he stepped closer, Carver saw how specifically Novak had taken her revenge. She had told him how Alix had surprised her with a kick to the knee. In return, Novak had kneecapped Alix: putting a bullet through the soft tissue just above each knee. Then, repaying the hands that had done her such harm, Novak had cut off every one of Alix’s fingers, one by one, leaving nothing more than two blood-drenched paws.

Finally he forced himself to look at the face of the woman he loved, the face that had always been able to make his heart sing. She had a smile that could light up the darkest corners of his soul. She had lips he could not go near without wanting, no, needing, to step close enough to kiss them. The vivacity in her eyes had given him life and hope at times when it had seemed both would be lost.

And now that was all gone.

Her mouth had been closed with a strip of silver duct tape. There were two blistering, disfiguring welts running in parallel down Alix’s cheeks, and a third, horizontal one across her forehead, branding her for ever.

Her hair had all been hacked off, almost down to the scalp, and it lay in a golden fan on the mattress around her head.

And she had no nose.

Novak had hacked it off – a repayment, with interest, for her own shattered nose – leaving a gaping black hole in the middle of Alix’s face.

The mutilation was terrible, and Carver tried to comprehend how much Alix must have suffered in the last minutes of her life. He had known real agony himself; far more than anyone should ever have to endure. But nothing that he had been through had remotely compared to this.

Just to see her there, spreadeagled, was more than he could bear. He was consumed with guilt at the thought that this was all his
fault
. If he had just had the guts to kill Novak when he’d had the chance, Alix would still be alive. Let her at least be given some comfort and dignity in death.

He was at the head of the bed now, and he took out the hunting knife and cut the ties that held her arms to the bed frame, gently taking her hands in his and laying them straight by her sides. He peeled the tape from her lovely mouth. He tried very hard not to look at the tools of Novak’s butchery arrayed on the bedside table: the carving knife, the sharpening steel and the secateurs, all steadily glueing to the table-top as the blood that had dripped from them congealed and coagulated into a sticky, solid mass.

Carver turned his eyes back to Alix and as he looked down at her, his vision blurred and it was only then that he realized he was crying. He wiped his eyes and his nose like a little kid, sweeping his sleeve across his face. And that was when he noticed . . .

She was alive.

Her eyes were flickering. She was looking at him, tilting her head up just the smallest little bit, and her mouth was moving soundlessly.

‘I’m here, my darling, my love,’ he said and bent his head so that she could try to whisper into his ear.

‘Please . . .’ she said. ‘Please . . . it hurts so much.’

‘Oh darling, it’s all right . . .’ He was scrabbling for his phone. ‘I’ll call an ambulance. It’s all going to be all right.’

She moved her head, a tiny, fractional shake. ‘No . . .’ she gasped. ‘No ambulance . . . Please, Sam . . . please . . .’

And then he realized what she was asking him, and he said, ‘No, baby, no . . . you’ll get better . . . you’ll see . . .’

‘Begging you,’ she said. ‘I love you . . . Please . . .’

Then her eyes closed again, her head fell back and her chest rose and fell as she gasped for breath.

He thought to himself: They could put her back together. It’s battlefield medicine. They could do incredible things these days. People could survive for years, decades in fact.

But how could he refuse her? She did not want to be that person,
the
disfigured recipient of other people’s pity. She wanted to be put out of her misery, future as well as present. And if he loved her, his final gift to her had to be a quick, merciful release from her pain.

He got down on one knee on the floor beside her. As he stroked her head with his left hand he looked into her eyes and said, ‘I love you so much . . .’

His right hand reached for the gun.

‘I love you,’ he repeated softly, and thought he saw the faintest flicker of a smile in her eyes.

He kept stroking her head as he raised the gun.

‘I love you . . . I love you . . . I love you . . .’

He took his left hand away from her head and put the gun to her temple.

‘I love you . . . I love you . . .’ he murmured.

Then Carver pulled the trigger and killed the woman he loved.

92

AT KENNINGTON POLICE
station DI Keane’s office door burst open and a young detective constable ran in.

‘Ma’am, ma’am, they’ve found him!’ he exclaimed.

‘The Second Man?’

‘What’s happening?’ called Commander Stamford down the line.

Keane switched to speakerphone just as the DC went on, ‘There were a couple of reports of a man answering his description running hell for leather through Regent’s Park. Then more of him on Wellington Road, and by the studio at Abbey Road.’

‘So where is he now?’

‘Well, that’s the thing,’ said the DC. ‘He was spotted going into a building on Abbey Road, and then about a minute later someone called up saying a bomb had gone off.’

‘Get over there at once, Inspector,’ Stamford said. ‘Take whoever you’ve got. I’ll call SCO19 and get them on the move. This time we’re damn well going to get him.’

The Metropolitan Police weren’t the only ones on the move. When
someone
gets on the phone and reports a bomb going off, key-word programs at GCHQ in Cheltenham and the National Security Administration at Ford Meade, Maryland immediately signal an alert. When the address given by the caller is the same as that of a US diplomat, it becomes a red alert. Within less than a minute of the 999 call concluding a message was on its way to John D. Giammetti at the CIA in London. And within a further sixty seconds a team of armed field agents had already been scrambled and were running for the black, bullet- and bomb-proof Chevrolet Suburban people-carrier that would take them straight to Abbey Road.

93

CARVER TOOK ONE
last look at Alix, then left the bedroom and closed the door.

A clearly defined sequence of events was forming in his mind, and it began with locating the duct tape that Novak had used on Alix. It was sitting on the kitchen island with a pair of scissors neatly placed across the top. Carver grabbed them both and retrieved the nail gun that was lying not far away. He went back to the hall and crouched down beside Grantham, just as Novak had done a few minutes earlier. He placed the tape and scissors on the floor. He took the head cam out of his jacket pocket, switched it on and held it in his left hand, pointing it at Grantham. With his right hand he placed the head of the nail gun against Grantham’s crotch.

Grantham’s eyes widened. Clearly his sight was returning. What about his hearing? Speaking very clearly, with his mouth not far from Grantham’s ear, Carver said, ‘Can you hear me?’

Grantham nodded.

‘Good. Now here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to remove your gag. If you try to call for help, I will fire the nail gun. I’m then
going
to ask you some questions. As you see, your answers will be on camera. I already know what happened, so don’t try to lie to me, or pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, or my trigger finger will start itching. I’ve already tried this gun out on Novak, and it works pretty well. So unless you fancy life as a eunuch, I’d advise you to do precisely what I say. Nod if you understand.’

Grantham nodded.

Carver put the camera down for long enough to pull the gag from Grantham’s face and the sock from his mouth.

‘Right,’ he said, picking up the camera again, ‘let’s get started.’

As Carver began his interview the CIA’s black Suburban was rounding Marble Arch and taking the direct route to the flat, straight up Abbey Road. The driver was paying no attention whatever to speed limits, red lights or road safety. He tilted his head back and shouted out loud enough for all the men in the back to hear: ‘Estimated time of arrival: four minutes!’

Metropolitan Police vehicles were also converging on the scene from several different directions. They were a little way behind, but they had the advantage of lights and sirens. Keane had the longest distance to travel. She radioed the officers in the leading car. ‘How long till you get there?’

‘Five minutes at the outside, ma’am.’

‘That won’t do,’ she insisted. ‘I need you there faster than that.’

‘We’re going to keep it very simple,’ Carver said. ‘Just answer yes or no. So, are you Jack Grantham, the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you order a man called Danny Cropper to organize a series of riots, including the one in Netherton Street last night?’

Grantham paused for a second. Carver pressed the nail gun into his balls. Grantham said, ‘Yes, but—’

The nail gun fired. Carver had pulled his hand back a few inches. The nail blasted into the floor between Grantham’s legs.
The blood drained from Grantham’s face and Carver said, ‘Just stick to yes or no . . . You were going to say that it wasn’t supposed to be violent, weren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you know what field ops are like: anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Next question: were you planning to frame Mark Adams?’

‘Yes.’

‘You wanted everyone to think that he had set up the riots?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then his whole campaign would be totally discredited and he would face criminal charges?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you working under orders?’

‘Not exactly . . .’

‘Tut-tut . . . that’s not quite a yes or a no, is it? All right, then . . . your specific actions were deniable . . .’

‘Yes.’

‘But someone wanted you to go after Adams, even if they didn’t want to know how you were doing it.’

‘Yes.’

‘Someone close to the Prime Minister?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let me guess: Cameron Young?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you. That’s all I need.’

Carver turned the camera off and put it back in his jacket. Then he took the nail gun away from Grantham’s crotch. Grantham’s shoulders slumped as the tension left his body, but a second later his eyes were widening in protest again as Carver shoved the sock back in his mouth and replaced the gag. Carver said, ‘I really don’t want to have to look at you any more,’ and wound the duct tape round and round Grantham’s head until everything was covered and sealed tight except a small breathing-hole beneath his nose.