“You shit,” hissed Samuel Carver.
“Yes,” said Jack Grantham. “Thought that would do the trick.”
52
E
ver since he’d started putting himself back together, Carver had been wondering what he really felt about Alix. As his recovery progressed he began to piece together images of the few short days and nights they had spent together. A woman brushed past him in a store in Beisfjord, and as he caught a waft of her perfume in the air he knew at once, without thinking, that Alix had worn the same scent, and suddenly it was as if she were lying next to him again. And of course, he and Thor Larsson had talked about her, Larsson telling stories of the months in Geneva before her disappearance, or joking about his own first sight of Alix, dressed in La Perla lingerie and a brunette wig. She’d been getting ready to seduce a Swiss bank official who was their only link to the hidden men who had bought Carver’s deadly services, betrayed him, and then tried to have him killed.
“Man, she looked good,” Larsson had said wistfully. “I was seriously jealous of you. I mean, I could tell what you’d been doing!”
Larsson had laughed out loud and Carver had laughed along with him. But though he could recall a vague image of Alix in that hotel room, and though he knew, as a historical fact, that they had made love that afternoon, the memories were fleeting and insubstantial, unreal ghosts of a time that had vanished beyond recovery.
And then he saw the picture of Alix on the yacht, being grabbed by another man’s hands, and all the emotions that had been hidden out of his reach burst through, and the pain he felt was like a branding iron on his heart.
“Sit down,” said Grantham. “I’ll get you a drink. You look like you could use it.”
He flicked a finger at one of his men, as if summoning a waiter. “Whiskey, chop-chop.”
Carver looked at Grantham’s smug features.
“You don’t give a toss, do you?”
Grantham let the anger wash over him.
“On the contrary—I certainly give a toss about the job I do, and the country I do it for. That’s why I’m here. Someone assigned Alexandra Petrova to do a honeytrap on Kurt Vermulen. And I’m sure you’ve worked out, same as I have, that she’s gone back to her roots, working for the Russians. I don’t know why. Maybe she got bored sitting around, waiting for you to wake up—”
“She was paying my bills,” said Carver.
“How admirable. Sacrificing her somewhat tarnished virtue for the man she loves.”
Carver looked at Grantham, glanced across at his men, then leaned forward.
“It’s a funny thing, the way my memory comes back. You talking like that reminds me of the last time we met. You made another one of your smart-arsed remarks, and I pointed out that I could kill you with your own pen. Do you remember that?”
“Point taken,” said Grantham. “It was a cheap shot. So let’s get down to business. Do you know how they got to Petrova, put her up to this escapade?”
“It was Yuri Zhukovski’s widow. She went to the place where Alix was working. Alix tried to escape. Obviously, she didn’t make it.”
“Ah, yes,” murmured Grantham appreciatively. “We thought this had the touch of Deputy Director Zhukovskaya—a very powerful, impressive lady, that one. Call me a cynic, but it strikes me Miss Petrova may well have been working for her all along.”
“I doubt it. Alix was screwing her husband.”
“Exactly. Zhukovskaya was controlling her husband’s mistress. That’s the kind of woman she is. Brilliant. . . .”
For a moment Grantham seemed lost in admiration. Then he recovered himself.
“Anyway, let me tell you what Petrova has been doing since you last saw her. We think she got her hooks into Vermulen in Washington—that’s his normal base—but they’ve been in Europe the past few weeks, charging about like demented honeymooners. I can see why the Russians are curious, because Vermulen is certainly on some kind of a mission. He had a meeting in Amsterdam, though we don’t yet know who with. Next he went to Vienna to see a chap called Novak, who makes a murky living trading arms and information. His Venice contact was a former U.S. Army colleague, name of Reddin. As you can see from the picture, Mrs. Reddin came along, too, so it’s conceivable that was just a social encounter, though I doubt it. After that was Rome. We tracked him to another meet there, but the pictures were hopeless and we couldn’t identify the other party. Now they’re on a yacht that Vermulen has rented, ostensibly for a Mediterranean holiday.
“Those last shots I showed you were taken a couple of days ago, off the Corsican coast. My interpretation is that they’re having some kind of an argument. Or maybe she’s getting cozy, calming him down. Look, she’s operating alone, without backup. She has to do whatever it takes to keep him sweet. But the closer she gets, the more pissed off he’ll be if he ever discovers she’s been deceiving him. She can’t try to run for it, because then he’ll know for sure. She’s in the shit, Carver. And it’s all because of you.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
Grantham opened up a new file on his laptop. This time the photographs showed a U.K. passport photo of a man in his mid-thirties, with sandy hair and a defiant, uncompromising expression.
“That,” said Grantham, “is Kenny Wynter. And two days from now, he’s due to meet Kurt Vermulen for lunch at the Hotel du Cap, on the coast between Nice and Cannes, down in the South of France.”
“Sounds very civilized.”
“I doubt it. Vermulen has a job for Wynter. We intercepted a call. It’s a blind date. The men have never met before, but evidently Wynter has been recommended.”
“What’s the job?”
“Vermulen wouldn’t tell him. Said he’d give him the details in person. But there’s only one reason you call Kenny Wynter, and that’s to steal something. The man’s spent the past fifteen years doing jobs to order: confidential documents, industrial plans and prototypes, financial papers, the occasional safe-deposit box. And he’s not fussy about his clients. He’s stolen military secrets for the Russians, the Chinese, the Iraqis, and the IRA, and we’ve lost good men and women because of it. The man is an unscrupulous shit, with blood on his hands. But he’s never once been caught. Arrested, of course, countless times, but there’s never been enough evidence to convict. Kenny Wynter has bought himself a flashy house up in Totteridge and a box at the Arsenal. He drives fast cars, screws gorgeous women—”
“Now him I could kill,” said Carver, sarcastically.
“Good,” said Grantham, dead serious. “Because you’re going to.”
53
“H
ave we heard from Petrova yet?” asked Olga Zhukovskaya.
The FSB colonel standing before her shook his head.
“Not since that meeting in Rome, Madam Deputy Director. I have ensured that the standard notice is placed in the classified advertisement section of the
International Herald Tribune,
but she has not responded.”
“Do we even know where she is?”
Another shake of the head, almost sorrowful this time.
“No. We have reason to believe that Vermulen might have chartered a yacht, but we have been unable to confirm that, and we would not be able to track it, even if we had. As you know, ma’am, our resources are not what they used to be. We have not launched a single reconnaissance satellite since September 1995. We have been completely blind since it ceased to function a year later.”
He sighed, somewhat theatrically.
“We used to impose our will across the globe; now the best we can hope for is to steal pictures off Western commercial satellites. . . .”
Zhukovskaya was not in a mood for self-pity. It was not an emotion for which she’d ever seen any need.
“That may be. The fact remains: We need to find them. Vermulen is planning something. I can feel it.”
The colonel stayed silent, letting his boss think in peace. It did not take long for her to come to a decision. Olga Zhukovskaya was a woman who knew what she wanted. It was one of the qualities that made her such an effective leader.
“Whatever Vermulen is doing, it involves Pavel Novak. He will know what is happening. And very soon we will know, too.”
54
K
enny Wynter worked hard at being respectable. He belonged to his local Conservative Association, donated money to the church restoration fund, and had memberships at the golf and tennis clubs. A lot of women were seen coming and going from his house, which irritated his female neighbors, but also increased their interest in him. Their real annoyance, however, was reserved for their husbands’ obvious admiration and envy of Wynter’s harem, and the eagerness with which they attended his swimming-pool parties every summer, eyes on stalks at all the young things in their bikinis twittering around their host.
So it was that Kenny Wynter both obeyed the social rules and gave everyone plenty to gossip about. In this leafy north London suburb of detached houses, large gardens, and expensively filled garages, he was the perfect citizen.
Thursday evenings, Wynter headed for the tennis club. He was part of a regular men’s foursome. They’d play the best of three sets, work up a gentle sweat, then grab a drink and a bite to eat at the Orange Tree pub in Totteridge Village. By eight o’clock, his brand-new Porsche 911 Carrera S was sitting in the parking lot behind the pub. It was slate gray, with a black leather interior. Wynter was already in the pub, getting in the first round of beers.
A car pulled up next to the Porsche. It was a ten-year-old Honda Accord with faded blue paintwork. Just about any passerby with a minimal knowledge of cars would be able to identify the 911. But to any but the most dedicated Honda-lover, the old Accord was just another drab, anonymous, totally unmemorable sedan. That was why Carver had bought it for £450, cash, from a small ad in
Auto Trader,
just that afternoon.
He got out of the car. He was wearing a gray polyester suit and a white polyester shirt. His blue tie, with paler blue and white stripes, was made of rayon. His shoes were shiny pale-gray slip-ons, decorated with snaffles across the instep, whose gold coloring had flaked away in places to reveal the bare metal underneath. The briefcase beside him was old and scuffed. His tinted, wire-framed glasses were a drone’s pathetic attempt at individuality and cool.
Carver was unshaven. A mousy wig straggled over his ears and hung down the back of his neck. It added to the general impression of a white-collar nonentity, and it concealed his actual hair, which had been cut and dyed to match Wynter’s. In the morning, he would put in contact lenses the color of Wynter’s eyes. By the time he stepped onto the plane to France, he would be Kenny Wynter.
Now he got out of the Honda. The driver’s door was next to the passenger side of Wynter’s Porsche. Carver stepped onto the pavement, then turned back to grab his briefcase from the seat. As he pulled it out, the clasp gave way, the case fell open, and its contents—a half-eaten sandwich in a cardboard and cellophane box, a cheap pocket calculator, a heavily chewed Biro pen, and a copy of the
Daily Express
—fell to the ground between the two cars.
Cursing to himself, Carver got down on his haunches and started gathering up his belongings. He looked up for a second and scanned the parking lot. He was the only person in it. He ducked back down and removed a small, clear, Ziploc bag from his inside jacket pocket. From it he took a small tool, just a few inches long. At one end, a flat black plastic disc enabled the tool to be placed upright on the ground. From the disc protruded a cylindrical shaft, like that of a miniature screwdriver. The far end, however, was not flattened into a blade. Instead, a notch was cut across its circumference.
Carver unscrewed the cap of the Porsche’s front near-side tire valve and placed it on the pavement. Then he inserted the tool into the top of the valve, which nestled in the notch, and turned it counter-clockwise. The valve unscrewed from its rubber housing and slipped out, still attached to the tool. Air began to hiss out of the open tube. Carver stuck his left thumb across the tube to prevent any more escaping. The last thing he wanted was any noticeable loss of tire pressure. With his right hand, he put the tool down on the ground, the tire valve pointing upward. He removed the valve from the tool and slipped it into his trouser pocket.
Next he slipped his fingers back into the Ziploc bag and extracted what appeared to be an identical valve. He stuck it on the end of the tool, then removed his thumb and screwed the new valve back into the tire, replacing the screw-on cap when he had finished. The entire operation had taken no more than thirty seconds.
A car pulled into the lot and parked about twenty yards away. A man and a woman got out. Carver started picking up the junk that had fallen from his case. He needn’t have bothered. The couple were far too interested in each other to notice his presence. They wandered arm in arm into the pub.
Carver gave them a few seconds’ start while he put all his crap away in the briefcase. Then he went for a pint of his own.
No one paid the slightest attention to Carver as he sat nursing his lager and reading his paper. Wynter and his tennis-playing pals were sitting at the next table. Carver watched out of the corner of his eye and listened. Wynter, as always, looked the part: faded jeans, a dark-blue V-necked cashmere pullover worn over a plain white T-shirt, a top-of-the-line TAG Heuer watch. He didn’t attempt to impose himself on the conversation, but when he spoke he exuded a sense of relaxed good humor. His voice was neutral, with just a trace of his working-class London roots. Every so often he went a bit more Cockney, just for comic effect. But if he mocked something one of the other men had said, there was always a friendly smile, just to let them know that he was bantering, not seeking to cause offense. None was ever taken. It was a masterful performance.
Carver had spent the past few days studying every aspect of Kenny Wynter’s life. Grantham had given him the basic biography while they were still in Norway.