30
There was a time when Severn Road might easily have been a desirable neighbourhood in the stockbroker belt of Surrey. The substantial houses, set amid croquet lawns, tennis courts and shrubberies, had all been built in the 1930s. They had steeply gabled roofs, half-timbered mock Tudor facades and verandas on which privileged ladies, burdened neither by jobs nor household chores, could comfortably take their tea. The men who owned them had all been educated at the same small group of private boarding schools and shared identical, unquestioned assumptions about their innate superiority, the lesser status of anyone unfortunate enough to be black, brown, yellow or French, and the utter deviousness of Jews.
Yet Severn Road lay not in southern England but southern Africa, in what had once been a suburb of Fort Shrewsbury, capital of British Mashonaland. Its houses were built for the families of the colonial administrators, army officers and businessmen who ran this particular outpost of Empire, as well as the native servants who tended to their needs. For half a century, nothing changed. Then a civil war was fought and lost and British Mashonaland became the independent state of Malemba. Fort Shrewsbury changed its name to Sindele and the white inhabitants of Severn Road made way for a new governing class of African bureaucrats, lawyers and entrepreneurs. By and large, they kept on the servants who had once waited upon their country’s white masters. They even retained some of the old furniture, left behind as the whites fled for the old country. The new bosses were, in some respects, just the same as the old ones.
So another twenty years went by, and Severn Road remained as exclusive and comfortable as it had always been. Then Henderson Gushungo made his fateful decision to cleanse his nation of the white farmers and entrepreneurs he hated with such a burning passion. The economy promptly collapsed, the notionally democratic government became a tyrannical dictatorship, and Severn Road was changed beyond all recognition. The houses were stripped of their contents as the people who lived in them sold everything they could, simply to make a few instantly worthless Malemban dollars. Then they were subdivided as rooms were rented out. Families half-a-dozen strong were crammed into bedrooms intended for a single pampered child; grand living rooms became makeshift dormitories; floorboards were lifted for firewood; crude sheets of plastic were nailed over holes in roofs whose tiles had not so long before been kept in immaculate repair.
Mary Utseya and her baby son Peter had been sharing part of the old dining room at No. 15 Severn Road with three other women and their children for the past four months, ever since Mary’s husband Henry, a soldier in the Malemban army, was killed in action in the Congo. She had been forced to leave the married quarters where she and Henry lived. With the government in no shape to pay her a widow’s pension, Mary had no way of renting a place of her own and had counted herself fortunate that a friend had offered her a few square feet on the dining-room floor.
Within a week or two of Mary’s arrival at Severn Road there had been a presidential election. Loudspeaker vans filled with armed men had driven down the street warning the inhabitants of the terrible consequences of voting for the treacherous Popular Freedom Movement and its lying, unprincipled leader Patrick Tshonga (who was, they added, a notorious homosexual and soon to die from AIDS). Mary was not registered to vote at the nearby polling station and had no means of getting back to her old neighbourhood, so she did not vote. Had she done so, however, she would certainly have sided with the rest of Severn Road’s people, who overwhelmingly ignored the threats of Gushungo’s thugs and voted for Tshonga. They knew that they were wasting their time, since Gushungo would never accept the result. But they voted anyway.
Now, on a Friday night in May, with the ground still damp from an afternoon downpour, they were going to pay for their impudence.
The operation was carried out with a brutal ruthlessness honed by constant repetition: many, many people had already suffered the fate that awaited the people of Severn Road. The two ends of the road were blocked. Patrols were posted in neighbouring streets to catch anyone who tried to escape over back walls and garden fences. Then the military trucks arrived, one for every house. The trucks were organized in groups of four, three soldiers to a truck, each group under the command of a sergeant.
They did not bother to knock. Front doors were kicked or if necessary blown open. Warning shots were fired into the ceiling to cower the inhabitants, the muzzle flashes blazing in the gloomy interiors, where the only light came from the occasional gas or meths-fuelled lantern. Soldiers went in shouting at the tops of their voices and swinging their gun-butts with indiscriminate abandon. If they were lucky, the people crammed into the houses had time to grab a few belongings and even some food or water before they were herded at bayonet point on to the trucks, but many clambered into the bare open-topped cargo bays with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.
Mary Utseya was relatively fortunate. She managed to sling a canvas bag across her shoulder and stuff it with a bottle of milk, a couple of biscuits and a clean nappy-cloth for baby Peter. All she kept for herself was a small framed picture of her dead husband Henry. It had been taken on his last leave home before he died. He was dressed in his army uniform, smiling proudly at the camera as he showed off the corporal’s stripes he had just been awarded.
It was only when one of the soldiers grabbed her upper arm and shoved her up on to the truck that Mary noticed that his uniform carried exactly the same regimental insignia as Henry’s. These men were his old comrades, his brothers in arms.
‘Did you know Henry Utseya?’ she babbled, hoping she might somehow get better treatment if the soldier knew her man had belonged to his unit. ‘Please! He was in your regiment. He was killed in—’
Mary was silenced by a slap to the side of her head. The blow sent her spinning across the floor of the cargo bay. She dropped Peter, who started crying, bawling with the banshee volume that even the tiniest baby can generate. Her face still stinging, her mind dazed and her vision blurred by the soldier’s slap, she scrabbled half-blindly around the truck, desperately trying to get to her baby before the soldier silenced him for good. She bumped into an old man, who lashed out at her with his boot. A woman started screaming. More people kept being shoved over the tailboard into the cargo bay, terrifying Mary, who felt sure her child would be trampled.
At last her outstretched hands felt Peter’s cotton blanket, tightly curled hair and soft, warm skin, and she clutched him desperately to her breast. Then the truck’s ignition key was turned, its engine coughed into life, and they rumbled off into the night.
A black Rolls-Royce Phantom was parked by the turning into Severn Road. It had been stretched to more than twenty-two feet in length and fitted with armour plating by Mutec, a specialist carriagemaker in Oberstenfeld, Germany. From behind tinted, bulletproof windows, its passengers watched as the trucks went by.
‘Let that be a lesson to them,’ said Faith Gushungo. ‘Have you allocated the properties yet?’
She was sitting in one of four passenger seats, arranged in two facing pairs behind the divider that separated them from the driver, guaranteeing total privacy.
Moses Mabeki gave a jerky twitch of his brutally distorted head. ‘Of course,’ he said, the last word dissolving into a drooling slur.
‘And the new owners are aware that the trucks will come for them, too, if they ever question their loyalty to our cause?’
Mabeki’s laugh was a hacking cough. ‘Oh yes, they know, and they believe it, don’t worry about that.’
‘And the diamonds: you have a buyer lined up?’
‘Yes. They’re offering ten million. I will make them pay twelve.’
‘Twelve million dollars,’ purred Faith Gushungo with something close to ecstasy. ‘All for us.’
‘It will almost double our holdings,’ said Mabeki.
‘You’re sure Henderson doesn’t know that we control the accounts?’
‘He does not know that we control the country. Why would he know about the accounts?’
Faith laughed. She reached out to stroke Mabeki’s face, feeling the hard, shiny knots of scar-tissue under her fingertips. His terrible ugliness appalled her. The drops of spittle that fell from his lips on to the palm of her hand disgusted her. Yet they thrilled her, too, and she felt herself melting with desire for him.
‘You are my beast,’ she whispered.
She ran her hands over the whipcord muscles beneath his suit and lowered her head over his body. Moses Mabeki’s face had lost all its beauty and his shoulder was a twisted wreck. But he was still a man, for all that.
31
The dinner was as magnificent as Klerk had promised. The truffle soufflés were almost as light as the air around them. The main course was a leg of tender pink roast spring lamb, served with fondant potatoes and a fricassee of baby vegetables picked barely an hour earlier. For dessert they ate fresh strawberries and cream, dusted with ground black pepper to bring out the sweetness of the fruit. All the ingredients came from Campden Hall’s own home farm. Even the truffle had been found in one of the patches of woodland that dotted the estate. Only the wines had been imported, and for Carver, the journey from Geneva was entirely justified by the chance to sample the 1998 Cheval Blanc, a red wine from the Bordeaux commune of St Emilion, which accompanied the lamb. He wasn’t a man who sat around thinking of pretentious adjectives to describe what he was drinking. It was simpler just to say that the wine tasted even better than Zalika Stratten looked.
No one talked about Malemba, or Gushungo, let alone the reason why Carver was a guest at the meal. It was as if there were an unspoken agreement to keep the conversation light and trivial.
After the meal, the diners began to drift upstairs to bed. Carver’s room was on the same corridor as Zalika’s. They went up together.
‘Well, this is me,’ she said, stopping outside her door.
They stood opposite each other, so close that it would take only the slightest inclination of their heads to join in the kiss that would open the door and take them both inside. The tension between them mounted. Then Zalika leaned across and gave Carver an innocent peck on the cheek. He did not move as she turned the handle, half-opened her door and then paused at the entrance to her room. She looked him in the eyes. And then she was gone.
Before long, only Tshonga and Klerk were left downstairs. They discussed their impressions of the afternoon’s discussion over brandy and cigars. Then the Malemban called it a day, leaving only Klerk behind.
In the small hours of Saturday morning, when all but one of the inhabitants of Campden Hall were lost in sleep, a mobile phone was used to contact a number in Malemba.
‘Carver arrived here today,’ the caller said. ‘We offered him the Gushungo assignment. He hasn’t accepted yet.’
The voice on the other end of the line was hard to make out. The reply had to be forced through a lazy mouth filled with spittle and incapable of precise speech: ‘Did you make sure he was tempted as I suggested?’
‘Oh yes. He knows you are still alive. We told him this is his chance to finish the job he started ten years ago.’
‘Did he like that idea?’
‘Hard to say. He wouldn’t commit himself.’
Moses Mabeki gave a long, rattling sigh, like a hiss from an irritable venomous snake.
‘I want them all dead: Gushungo, his bitch wife and Carver. All of them.’
‘Relax. He’ll take the job. It’s just a matter of time.’
‘Good. Everything we planned depends on that.’
‘I’m well aware of that,’ said the caller.
Then the phone snapped shut, the call ended, and within three minutes every bed in Campden Hall was occupied once again.
32
Wendell Klerk didn’t like to be hurried on a Saturday morning and saw no need to hurry his guests. The staff were on hand from the crack of dawn to provide anything anyone might want, but the first set event of the day was a midday brunch.
‘So, Sam, are you ready to shoot some clay pigeons?’ Klerk said, emphasizing his words with jabs of a sausage-laden fork.
Zalika smiled at Carver. ‘My uncle is very proud of his shooting ground. He had to bulldoze half of Suffolk to make it.’
‘At least half!’ said Klerk. ‘Patrick, will you be joining us?’
Tshonga smiled and shook his head. ‘No, Wendell, I have never had any skill with a gun. While my brothers were fighting for freedom in the bush—’
‘Ja, fighting me!’ Klerk interrupted.
‘I was studying law. All these years later, I am still happy just to read while others play with guns.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Klerk. ‘Brianna is not a great fan of shooting either, are you?’
‘Well, it’s not as boring as golf,’ Brianna sighed.
Carver laughed. So the plaything had a sense of humour hidden away inside that doll-like figure. There was more to her than met the eye. She had that, at least, in common with Zalika.
‘Very good,’ said Klerk, sounding rather less amused. ‘So now we three who will be shooting must agree on the stakes. What do you say, Sam, how about the two losers each give the winner ten thousand US?’
‘If you like,’ said Carver, unenthusiastically.
‘Not enough for you? What if we make it fifty grand each?’
‘Honestly, Wendell, can’t you see Sam’s not interested in money?’ Zalika said.
‘He was the last time I paid him.’
‘Well of course, that was business,’ Zalika insisted. ‘But if we want to get him interested today, it has to be something more personal. Now, I seem to remember that yesterday he called me, and I quote, a “screwed-up schoolgirl who’s got bugger-all training, experience or competence for this kind of work”. Sorry, Sam, but that’s not the sort of thing a girl forgets in a hurry. So my wager is this. I bet you can’t beat little schoolgirl me in a straightforward head-to-head shooting match. And I’m not going to put any money on it because I know that if you, the great Samuel Carver, action hero extraordinaire, can’t shoot better than a helpless, weak and feeble female, you’ll lose something – well, a couple of things, actually – that say more about you than cash ever can.’
‘Ahahaha!’ Klerk burst out laughing. ‘You’re really putting your balls on the line here, my man! Don’t be fooled by this kid. She’s a Stratten. She was blasting away all over the family estates when she was still in nappies.’
‘You’re on,’ said Carver.
Zalika smiled. ‘Excellent.’
One by one the others drifted away until Carver and Zalika were alone in the room. She sat herself down next to him and pulled her chair right over to his. Then she leaned forward so close it seemed to Carver that her sea-blue eyes were not just looking at him but through him, and very softly said, ‘If you want to take me, you’ll have to beat me first. And believe me, Carver, I won’t make it easy.’
33
The open trucks came rumbling down the dirt track that snaked between the rolling hills of south-central Malemba, throwing up a choking cloud of parched red earth over the tightly packed huddles of fearful, half-starved men, women and children crammed into their cargo bays. A horn blared from the leading vehicle and a uniformed soldier with sergeant’s stripes on his arm and his eyes hidden behind fluorescent yellow-framed sunglasses got out of the driver’s cabin. He slammed the door behind him and lifted his AK-47 assault rifle one-handed into the air. He fired off a volley of shots then shouted, ‘Move! Move! Clear the way!’
Ahead of him the track was blocked by more people: a horde that stretched away to either side, covering the rolling ground as far as the eye could see. There were more than thirty thousand of them, covering a barren wasteland that had once been occupied by flourishing crops and cattle made sleek and contented by lush green grass. Camps like this had sprung up all over the country, filled by families ejected from rural villages, estates seized from their white owners and urban neighbourhoods, just like Severn Road, that had dared to vote against Henderson Gushungo. Officially, the forced eviction and transportation of hundreds of thousands of people was known as resettlement. In reality, it was more like a form of ethnic cleansing, except that Gushungo terrorized members of his own tribe as willingly as he did those from other social and ethnic groups. Once moved, the people were simply dumped, without food, water or shelter, and left to fend for themselves. That they were doing so on land that belonged to other Malembans did not concern Henderson Gushungo in any way at all.
A two-storey house, constructed of breezeblocks with a corrugated iron roof, stood like an island in this ocean of humanity, some fifty metres from where the trucks had stopped. All around it, wisps of smoke rose from smouldering cooking-fires and women sat before huts and tents cobbled together from whatever scraps of rag, wood and corrugated iron they or their men could find. Here and there small children with legs like fragile twigs and bellies as swollen as honeydew melons tried to play. But they had no energy to run or jump; no toys for imaginary tea-parties or battles; no light in their round, enquiring eyes.
There was a slow, tired, hungry ripple of movement in front of the line of trucks and a few metres of track were cleared. The trucks rumbled forward again until they were swallowed up in the ocean of humanity and had to stop once more, some thirty metres now from the house. The man with the gun, who had been walking beside the leading truck, kicking people out of his way, fired another burst into the sky, and again a path through the throng, shorter and narrower this time, briefly appeared. When even this progress had reached its limit, the man accepted the inevitable. He turned round to face the line of trucks and shouted, ‘Enough, we stop here! Get them out!’
A dozen or so more soldiers spilled from the trucks’ cabins. They went round to the backs of the cargo bays and opened them up, screaming ‘Get out!’ to the people inside, prodding them with the barrels of their AK-47s and lashing out with the butts at anyone who dared protest, or even ask where they were or what was going on.
Mary had learned her lesson the previous night. She said nothing. She just held Peter tight, hoping that he would keep quiet. It made no difference. One of the soldiers smashed her in the face with his gun, just for the hell of it. He laughed and pointed Mary out to his mates as she fell to the ground, one hand still clinging to her baby, the other clasped to her face, blood seeping out between the fingers.
‘Stop that!’
The shout came from the building. A boy in his late teens and a girl of about the same age – brother and sister by the look of them – were standing in the open front door. They seemed a little healthier and better-fed than the rest of the people around them and they carried themselves with the confidence of young people who have been raised in the belief that anything is possible and have yet to discover the limitations and dangers of that particular delusion.
It was the boy who had shouted. Now he was walking through the people towards the truck, moving with the purposeful stride of a warrior prince. He ignored the soldiers and went straight to Mary Utseya, crouching on his haunches beside her and wrapping a consoling arm round her shoulders.
The boy looked up at the soldier who had hit Mary. ‘Shame on you,’ he said with dismissive contempt. ‘A real man has no need to hit a defenceless woman.’
The soldier took a step forward and the boy sprang to his feet to meet him. They stood opposite each other, glaring, barely a pace apart.
‘This woman needs help, her child too,’ the boy said. He turned his head towards his sister and called out, ‘Farayi, come and give me a hand.’
The girl ran towards him, picking her way through the crowds with the sure-footed grace of a young gazelle. She took hold of Mary’s elbow, gently guiding her as the boy lifted her to her feet.
‘We’re taking her to the house,’ the boy said.
He turned to lead the two women in that direction. They’d only taken three shuffling steps towards their destination when the sergeant’s voice rang out again: ‘Where you going, boy? You stay right here.’
The boy hissed at his sister, ‘Keep going. Ignore him.’
She hesitated for a second. ‘Canaan, do what he says.’
The sergeant ignored them both. He had his own way of resolving tricky situations. He slammed a fresh magazine into his AK-47, took careful aim and fired a three-shot burst. Mary Utseya seemed to dance in the two kids’ arms, then her body slumped to the ground as the boy and girl jumped aside, away from any more shots.
Peter was left lying on the ground between them. He started to cry. The sergeant walked up to the small bundle wriggling on the bare red earth. He aimed his gun at it then lowered the barrel. No need to waste a bullet. He raised his right foot high in the air, bringing his knee up almost to his chest, then slammed it down, crushing the baby’s skull with one blow of his boot heel.
‘Now you got no reason to go to the house,’ the sergeant said, rubbing his boot in the dirt to scrape the fragments of skull and brain matter off its sole.
He pointed his index finger at four of his men. ‘You, you, you, you.’ He jerked a thumb at Canaan and Farayi. ‘Seize them. They are rebels. They are trying to sabotage our mission. They must come with us.’
‘No!’ The simple word was dragged out into a long, wailing cry of despair as a third person came out of the house, a middle-aged woman, her once-elegant features ravaged by exhaustion and stress. ‘You will not take my children!’ she shouted, hurrying towards the trucks.
‘Stay away!’ the sergeant shouted, but she kept going.
‘Do what he says!’ Canaan cried, struggling to free himself from the soldiers who had him in their grip.
His words were drowned by the chatter of the gun.
As Nyasha Iluko – wife of Justus Iluko, mother of Canaan and Farayi – lay on the ground, twitching in her final death-throes, the sergeant walked up to Canaan and jabbed him in the chest with the burning-hot barrel of his gun. ‘You see, young man? This is what happens when you meddle in another man’s business. These two women, this child, they all died because of you.’
34
Wendell Klerk’s gamekeeper Donald McGuinness was a wiry Scotsman who combined an impeccably polite manner with a sharp, sceptical look in his eye that suggested he was a very easy man to get along with, but a very hard one to impress.
‘If ye’ll just follow me, please,’ he said in a soft Highland burr, leading Carver, Klerk and Zalika down a set of stairs that led to a subterranean hallway off which there were two doors. One of them led to the wine-cellar of which Klerk was so proud. McGuinness ignored it. He went directly to the second door, to one side of which was a keypad. McGuinness punched in a number.
Klerk looked at Carver. ‘I think you’re going to like this,’ he said.
Carver heard the sound of a lock being released. The door swung open. It was solid steel and hefty enough to resist anything short of an artillery shell. McGuinness stood aside to let them through, and Carver followed Klerk and Zalika into a room about forty feet long and fifteen wide. Three of the walls were wood-panelled and decorated with photographs, prints and oil paintings that depicted shooting scenes, dogs and artful arrangements of dead game. The fourth was taken up with a gigantic cabinet. Its lower portion consisted of a series of twin-door wooden cupboards, rising some three feet from the floor. Above them, the rest of the cabinet was set back behind a narrow shelf, covered in green baize. This upper section rose to the ceiling and was fitted with toughened, shatterproof glass. Behind it, a long line of guns marched the full length of the room.
The majority of them were shotguns, presented in matched pairs. Beyond them came a much smaller selection of rifles for use in target-shooting or stalking deer. There must have been at least a hundred weapons, enough firepower to equip a company of soldiers, and their quality was as striking as the quantity.
Klerk was smiling more broadly than at any time in the entire weekend, clearly delighted by Carver’s evident appreciation of his collection. ‘Pretty impressive, hey?’ he said. ‘And look here …’ Klerk opened two of the low cupboard doors to reveal a metal cabinet that looked like a small safe. Above its door, a digital readout showed the figure 68.5. ‘That, my friend, is a climate-controlled ammunition store. The temperature is constant. The air is dessicated to prevent any moisture corrupting the cartridges and their contents. When you fire my ammunition, Sam, you get the best bang my bucks can buy!’
Carver got the feeling that this was not the first time Klerk had used the line, but he was impressed nonetheless.
‘So,’ Klerk continued, ‘let us choose our weapons. I’ll have my usual gun, please, Donald.’
McGuinness unlocked one of the panes of glass and slid it open. He took out a supremely beautiful double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun engraved with an image of a pair of pheasants taking to the air. Around the birds, the gun’s action was decorated with an intricate swirling pattern of stylized leaves and flowers. In the midst of them a scroll bore the words ‘J. Purdey & Sons’. The Mayfair-based gunsmiths, founded in 1814, were to shotguns what Rolls-Royce were to cars: the ultimate example of traditional British craftsmanship and luxury. Their products were priced accordingly: a gun like Klerk’s, Carver reckoned, must have cost seventy thousand pounds at the absolute minimum. It was as much a work of art as a firearm.
Klerk turned to Carver. ‘What will you have, Sam?’
‘I’ll wait my turn,’ he said. He looked at Zalika. ‘Ladies first.’
Carver was acting the gentleman, but his intention was far less chivalrous. He wanted to see what kind of weapon Zalika chose. It would be the first clue as to the kind of opponent she was likely to be.
If Zalika was aware of the game Carver was playing, she gave no sign of it. She strolled along the full length of the cabinet, looking at the guns as casually as a woman eyeing up fruit on a market stall. Carver expected her to stop by the lighter, small-bored ladies’ guns, whose barrels were typically twenty-eight inches long. She ignored them. Instead, she pointed at a twelve-bore Perazzi MX2000S with thirty-inch barrels. ‘That one, please, Donald,’ she said.
Carver wondered for a moment whether she was putting on an act. The Perazzi was a serious competition gun, used by Olympic-level shots. It was entirely bare of fancy decoration. This was a gun that had no need to look pretty. Its only purpose was to shoot straight. It was his kind of weapon.
With gun-barrels as with skis, beginners go short for easier control, while experts go long for greater performance. Zalika frowned at the gun McGuinness was holding out to her. ‘Pity it’s only got thirty-inch barrels,’ she said.
‘Not to worry, Miss,’ McGuinness replied, placing the gun carefully on the green baize shelf. ‘I should have some thirty-twos available as well. I’ll get them fitted right away.’
‘Thank you, Donald,’ said Zalika with a gracious smile. ‘Would you mind putting full and three-quarter chokes in them, please?’
‘Certainly, Miss.’
Carver’s face remained impassive, but his mind was racing. The choke was a fitting placed into the end of the gun-barrel that restricted the blast of pellets from the cartridge, compressing them into a much tighter spread. This gave the gun much more hitting power, particularly at a distance. But it also placed a huge premium on the shooter’s accuracy because there was far less margin for error than a wider spread of pellets allowed. Zalika Stratten was either a seriously good shot, Carver decided, or she was playing her own personal game of bluff, raising the stakes without the hand to back it up. One way or the other, she was certainly ready to compete with him before a single shot had been fired.
So far he’d thought of her challenge to him as little more than a game, just another flirtation on the way to an inevitable conclusion. But it struck him now that he really wanted to beat her very much indeed. It wasn’t just because she’d made that a condition of having her. It was the fact that she’d been playing him, one way or the other, ever since he’d stepped inside the house, and now he’d had enough. Carver was not a man who sought either conflict or competition. But if anyone insisted on taking him on, then they were going to pay for it. It was time he taught Miss Zalika Stratten a lesson she wouldn’t forget.
‘And you, sir?’ McGuinness said, interrupting Carver’s train of thought.
‘I’ll take a Perazzi too,’ Carver said.
‘Longer barrels?’ McGuinness asked.
‘Sure.’
‘How about choke?’
Zalika had gone to one extreme by being so specific, Carver decided to go to the other. ‘I’ll just take it as it comes, thanks,’ he said.
He was pleased to see Zalika’s brow crinkle into a frown. She would, he hoped, be wondering why he could afford to be casual about his gun. Was he really that good, that confident of victory?
‘Interesting choice you made,’ Carver said.
‘I’ve always liked the trigger-pull on the Perazzi,’ she said. ‘It’s got a nice, even weight. Very crisp, don’t you think?’
Klerk was watching the two of them with detached amusement. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘let’s get out of here. We’ve chosen our weapons. Time we went and used them.’