The Accident Man:A Novel

27

Freshly showered, Alix came into the kitchen, where Carver was fixing them both some food. She had one towel wrapped around her body, another around her hair.
“Do you have an old shirt or something I can wear?” she said, with a self-conscious smile. “None of my . . .”
“Shhh.” Carver held up a hand.
Alix was about to argue. Then she saw that there was a small television on a bracket on the kitchen wall. Carver was watching a satellite news program.
“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “There are thousands of people outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. There are more of them laying wreaths outside Kensington Palace, where she lived. There’s a book of condolence and people are queuing for, I don’t know, hundreds of yards to sign it. The prime minister’s calling her the People’s Princess. They’ve had politicians giving messages from all over the world. There are experts talking about everything from whether paparazzi photographers should be allowed to chase people on powerful motorcycles, to how the royal princes are going to cope with bereavement. . . . The actual time of death was four a.m., by the way. Like that makes any difference.”
“We didn’t know what we were doing.”
“Like that really makes any difference either. Look, do you want some cheese omelette? It’s pretty good. This is the place for Swiss cheese, after all. It’s just that I’ve rather lost my appetite.”
“Sure, thanks,” Alix said. “But I think I should be wearing some clothes when I eat.”
“Of course. Stay right there.”
He was back a few seconds later, holding a gray T-shirt. It said “Sandhurst Special Forces Challenge 1987” across the front. “Is that okay? Afraid I’ve not done much laundry lately, I’ve been away. It’s crazy. . . . I was in New Zealand when they contacted me. On my bloody holiday.”
She touched his arm gently, sensing the barely suppressed tension in his voice. “It’s okay. This shirt will do fine.”
“Good. On second thought, maybe I will have some of that omelette after all.”
They sat eating and watching the TV for a while. There were cameras at RAF Northolt air base, west of London. The princess’s body was expected at any moment. Finally, Carver got up from the table and switched the TV off.
“You know what? I think I’ve seen enough of that. They’re not going to tell me anything I don’t already know. And there’s not been anything about our part in it all. Nothing about explosions or gunfights in Paris. Either they don’t know, or someone is going to great lengths to cover it all up.”
He walked through to the living room. “I thought you were going to tell me your life story.” He threw himself down on the sofa and waved at the two armchairs. “Grab a seat. I’m all ears.”
Alix walked into the room. She settled into one of the chairs, pulled her knees up to her chin, then wrapped her arms around her shins in a self-protective embrace. Carver watched her, taking in every detail. He looked at the way the sunlight caught the soft down on her long brown thighs. He looked at the way she ran her hands through her short, damp hair. He was wondering if she would betray him. He thought it might be worth it, just for the chance to have this girl in his apartment, even for a single day. As long as she was there, he could forget about death. Then Alix began to talk.
“Imagine a world without color. The sky is gray. The buildings are gray, and the people too. The grass is gray. In winter even the snow is dirty gray. No one has any money, and capitalism is the enemy, so there is nothing in the shops, no displays in the shop windows. There are no advertisements in the streets, no bright lights. You queue for bread with your mother and wonder how drunk your father is going to be later, and which of you he is going to hit, if the vodka does not make him unconscious first. That is how I grew up.
“We lived in a city called Perm, maybe twelve hundred kilometers from Moscow. I was a good student. I had lots of time for studying because no boys were interested in me.”
“Oh, come on,” Carver interrupted. “I don’t believe that.”
“No, really. I was not a pretty girl, and my eyes they . . . how do you say it when eyes point in the wrong direction?”
“Cross-eyed?”
“Yes, I was cross-eyed.”
“Oh, that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“Your eyes. There’s something just a tiny bit uneven about them.”
Alix started as if someone had slapped her. Carver cursed himself.
“I’m sorry, that was incredibly stupid of me. What I meant was, I think you have amazing eyes. They’re beautiful. And they’re kind of hypnotic. I can’t stop looking at them and, er, now I know why.”
Carver waited to see whether he would be forgiven.
“You were saying . . .”
“I was saying that my squint was not so—what did you say?—hypnotic when I was a lonely little girl. I had to wear spectacles with really ugly, thick frames. So the other children made fun of me, the boys, and the girls also. Later, I grew up. My body was good, I knew that, but my face, forget it.”
“So how did the ugly duckling turn into a beautiful swan?”
She gave a quick nod of the head that simultaneously acknowledged and dismissed his compliment.
“I belonged to Komsomol, the Young Communists League. I did not love the Party. I did not care about politics. But you had to join, and there were benefits: summer camps, places at better colleges. You know. So, anyway, they had a literary competition. Even under the Communists it was important to be kulturny. . . .”
“Cultured?”
“Yes, like playing a musical instrument really well, or dancing ballet or, for me, being able to write a long essay on Chekhov. I said he exposed the decadence and emptiness of the bourgeoisie in Imperialist Russia, proving the need for the revolution. Total bullshit! But it won a trip for me to a big Komsomol convention in Moscow. There were young athletes, scientists, artists, and academics. We did not know it, but the state used these conventions to select the best young people to be trained for all the different agencies.”
“Aha!” Carver raised a finger in the air, like some corny old TV detective solving a mystery. “So this was where they selected you to be a dangerous Soviet spy!” His voice turned more serious: “What were you, an analyst? Or did you do fieldwork?”
“You could call it that. A woman came up to me at the convention. She said, ‘Do you mind?’ She took off my glasses and looked at me, saying nothing, like someone at a museum who is looking at a painting, trying to decide if she likes it. I did not know what to do. My face went red.
“We went to a small side room. There were two men sitting behind a desk. I had just been reading my essay to the judges of the literary competition. These men looked exactly the same, like they were going to judge me. The woman said, ‘Take off your clothes, my dear.’ I was very shy. I had never shown my body to any man. But I also knew I had to obey orders.
“The woman told me not to worry, this was no different than seeing a doctor. I stripped to my underwear and then the three of them started talking about me. It was terrible, so humiliating, like I was a farm animal at market. They were talking about my legs, my breasts, my ass, my mouth, my hair, everything. Then one of the men said, ‘We will have to do something about the eyes, of course.’ And the other said, ‘That is no problem, a simple procedure.’
“I could not believe it. All my life, the doctors in Perm had said they could do nothing for me. They said my problem was not serious enough to justify the cost of an operation. Anyway, the woman told me to get dressed again. The men talked quietly for a moment. Then one of them told me I had been selected for a great honor. That September, I would return to Moscow to receive special training at an elite academy. I would learn to undertake duties that would be of great service to the motherland. If I completed the training satisfactorily, I would be given the finest clothes and my own Moscow apartment. My parents too would be granted improved accommodation.
“It was incredible, like a fairy tale, like becoming a movie star. When I told my mother, she burst into tears. She was so proud. Even my father cried for joy. That summer, I had my operation at last, carried out by the same doctor who had told me it would be impossible. I threw away my glasses. When I got on the train for Moscow, I was sad to be leaving home. But I was so excited also. I could not believe that fate had chosen me for such great fortune.”
Carver shifted position on the sofa, cleared his throat. “What happened when you got to Moscow?”
“My academy was the Feliks Dzerzhinsky University. It was run by the KGB. I was assigned to the second chief directorate, which monitored foreigners within the Soviet Union. I was taught English. I was educated in art, western culture, film, even politics, so that I could hold a conversation with the most sophisticated visitors to our country. And then I discovered what I was really being trained to do. Have you heard of the term honey trap?
“Sure.” Carver nodded. “A guy meets a pretty girl in a bar. They go back to his place. They have sex. The next day someone shows him the pictures. Either he tells them what they want to know, or wifey sees the snaps. Your lot went for honey traps in a big way. So, you were one of those girls, huh? The ones us Westerners were always warned about.”
“I was the honey in the trap, yes. You want to know the truth? I was a prostitute for the State. When I went to Moscow, I was a virgin. I had not even kissed a boy. By the time I graduated, there was nothing I did not know about attracting a man and giving him pleasure. Every trick, every perversion . . . and you know, we were always told to be as dirty as possible because a man will talk much more if he is filmed on his knees being whipped or taking a dildo up the ass than if he is simply putting his dick in the mouth of some cheap whore.
“And I was good, you know. When Alexandra Petrova was sent on assignment, all the boys at headquarters would gather around to see the photographs and the videos. And naturally, the senior officers liked to ensure that my work was of the highest quality. So they invited me out to their dachas for the weekend and I . . . I . . . Well, you can imagine what happened.”
She blinked three or four times and looked away.
Carver sat up and held out a handkerchief. “Hey, come on. Stop beating yourself up. You were a kid. You lived in a dictatorship. You didn’t have any choice. I mean, what would have happened if you’d said, ‘No, I refuse to do this’?”
“If I was lucky I would have been transferred to some small, cold town in Siberia. If not . . . What happens to whores who anger their pimps? They get raped, beaten, killed . . .”
“It’s not your fault, then.”
She gave him a tired smile. “You mean, I’m a whore the same way you’re a killer?”
“That’s one way of looking at it. I suppose there could be others.” Carver didn’t know what else to say. He could feel his defenses falling apart with every word she said, every time he looked at her face.
Alix loosened her arms and stretched her legs. She smoothed the T-shirt down over her thighs. Then she leaned forward and stared Carver straight in the eye, as if issuing a challenge.
“Perhaps. But I will not know that until I have heard your story too.”
“Well, I need a drink before I start spilling my guts.” Carver got up and started walking toward his kitchen. “How about a glass of wine? Let’s pretend we’re normal, have a nice, cold bottle of Pinot Grigio on a summer afternoon.”
She thought for a second. “Pinot Grigio, an Italian wine. Also known in America as Pinot Gris. Not a classic wine but, as you say, very refreshing.” A smug smile. “See? I was trained well.”
Carver paused in the doorway. He looked at the beautiful woman in the ratty old T-shirt. “Yeah,” he said. “I can believe that.” Then he went to get the wine.



28

Pierre Papin brewed a large pot of very strong coffee, found a fresh pack of cigarettes, and got to work. The Englishman he knew as Charlie had returned to England, still dressed for the weekend in his corduroy pants and knitted sweater. He’d told Papin that he needed to talk to his boss and decide what they should do. Doubtless they would use their own means to track down their missing operatives. Papin was determined to beat them to it. And then he would take advantage of whatever he discovered.
It amused him to think that no one else in Paris shared his interest in the couple’s fate. The TV stations had stopped showing the composite photos by early afternoon. The death of the princess had become a global tidal wave, swamping all other news in a mass of grief, speculation, and sheer curiosity. The police had been happy to let the other events of the night be swept under the bureaucratic carpet.
So much the better for Papin. He had no competition. Yet he knew Charlie worked for men who would very much like to find Carver, the girl, and that precious computer. And all Papin’s instincts told him these men would not be alone. Others would also be searching. After all, if his bet was right and Petrova was Carver’s new partner, she must have a boss in Russia. He’d be wondering where she’d got to and what she was doing. If Papin could get information that both sides wanted, he could drive the price sky high. So he commandeered all the tapes from the Gare de Lyon and took them back to his unmarked, unnumbered office.
His first task was to identify Petrova. The hair color Carver had bought must have been intended for her, because he had not used it himself—that much was clear from the CCTV images of him they’d already identified. So Papin’s composite photo of Petrova was already out of date. He decided to start again from scratch.
Papin looked at every person seen walking toward the platform for the Milan train between six forty-five and its departure at seven fifteen. Thankfully, at that hour on a Sunday morning, the station was relatively quiet. He ignored all single males, families with children, anyone who was obviously under eighteen or over forty. All he wanted was young female adults traveling alone.
Twenty-two fit the bill, so Papin printed up stills of all of them. Then he started the process of elimination again.
Papin approached the problem logically. Petrova had persuaded a trained assassin to forget all his basic field craft. He should have killed her. Even if he had spent the night with her, he should have killed her afterward. He could not afford to let a potential witness live. Yet he had. Clearly this was an exceptional woman.
It took a matter of seconds to flick through the pile of stills and get rid of all the obviously dumpy, plain ones; the backpackers with bulging thighs; the short-sighted, buck-toothed, flat-chested wallflowers; the anonymous young women whose destiny was to always remain invisible to men. That left seven. Beauty, thought Papin, was indeed a rare commodity.
Not that all seven of them were beautiful. But one had to be careful. This woman had been through a tough night. She would be tired, not looking her best. And a closed-circuit camera was not the most flattering lens. Papin looked again, more closely. Four more pictures hit the trash can.
Now there were three finalists in Pierre Papin’s contest. The first was a pretty little blond in tight jeans and a lacy white peasant top. Papin smiled to himself. This one would certainly tempt any man. But her golden hair fell to her shoulders. And why had Carver bought hair color and scissors if not to get rid of such distinctive locks?
That left two. One was a redhead. Despite the hour and the day, she was smartly dressed, an ambitious young executive, heedless of weekends and holidays. Papin examined her sharp features and the tight, dark slash of her lipsticked mouth. He could imagine what she would be like in bed: fiery, controlling, neurotic. This one would be easy to anger and difficult to control. A man would have to play Petruchio to her shrew. She hardly looked like the seductive model Charlie had described.
The third woman wore a short, pale blue dress. Papin paused to imagine the way it would look as she walked, stretched across her ass, flicking around her slender thighs. He paused to let himself enjoy that thought. It was just business, he told himself. He had to put himself in Carver’s shoes.
Charlie had said Petrova looked like a model. Well, this girl had the body for it and the fine, haughty features. Even in the blurred, grainy video still that much was obvious. Papin looked at her raven black hair. It was roughly cut, like an urchin’s. A coiffure like that could cost a fortune in a smart Parisian salon, or you could get the same effect for free. With a pair of cheap scissors and a bottle of dye from a pharmacy shelf.
Yes, thought Papin, this was the one. It was a gamble to eliminate all the other possibilities, but he was prepared to go all-in. He believed he had found Mademoiselle Petrova.



29

They were both on the sofa now, sitting at either end, with the empty bottle of wine in an ice bucket on the floor below them. Carver had showered too. Now he was wearing a loose-fitting white T-shirt and a pair of faded blue linen pants. He looked good. Alix had seen the way he’d been looking at her from the moment they’d first met. She wondered when he’d make his move.
“Your turn,” she said.
“Must I?”
“Yes! I did. And anyway, I want to know how you became who . . . what you are. I have met lots of people who kill. But I never met one before who made me omelettes, or listened to anything I had to say. I guess I never met a killer with manners.”
“You don’t want to be taken in by manners. Having manners doesn’t necessarily mean you care about other people. Sometimes it just hides the fact that you couldn’t give a damn.”
She looked at him. “Can you give a damn?”
“About what?”
She said nothing.
“Yes, I give a damn.”
All he had to do was lean toward her, break the invisible wall between them. Her pulse rate started to rise. Her breathing deepened. Her back arched fractionally. Her lips relaxed, ready to receive his.
But Carver didn’t move.
Alix felt like an idiot. Then her temper flashed. How dare he play games with her? How dare he look at her with those cool, assessing eyes?
“You didn’t finish your story,” he said.
Alix didn’t reply.
“Tell me about Kursk. What was the offer he made you? The one you could not refuse.”
“I told you, I have said enough. Now you tell me something.”
“What?”
“I don’t care. Anything. Just so long as it is true.”
Carver looked away. He put a hand up to his face. He leaned back and gazed at the ceiling.
“Fair enough. I’ll tell you why I didn’t kiss you just now.”
Alix was silent, but her eyes narrowed as she looked at him.
“I was scared. I was afraid that if I opened myself up, even that much, I would not stop until I had given myself away, every bit of me. Is that true enough for you?”
“Yes,” Alix whispered.
She had been watching Carver’s eyes as he spoke. Something in them had changed, as though a curtain had been drawn aside to reveal a distant view of the man he really was. But now she could see him closing up again. When he spoke again, that other man had vanished.
“So . . . Kursk?”
She wanted to scream at him: Forget Kursk! She longed to get the hidden Samuel Carver back. But she had to find the patience to wait, to let him emerge of his own accord. So she gathered her thoughts and said, “It was very simple. He blackmailed me.”
“What do you mean?”
She sighed. “May I smoke?”
She could see him hesitate for an instant. There was a fastidious, disciplined side to Carver. It probably came from his years in the military. All the videos on his shelves were in alphabetical order, all the cooking implements in his kitchen were immaculately arranged. He would not like anyone smoking in his apartment.
As if he knew what Alix was thinking, Carver laughed. “Sure. Go ahead. Then talk.”
Alix inhaled deep into her lungs, then let out a long, slow stream of smoke that curled and eddied in the shafts of afternoon light that shone through the apartment’s deep-set windows.
“I had been in the KGB for less than two years when the wall came down. Suddenly, all our old allies were rebelling against us, kicking our soldiers out of their countries. It was humiliating. Everything any of us had known was falling apart.
“For a while, we carried on in Moscow as if nothing had happened. In some ways it was easier. More Westerners were coming to the city. They thought that the cold war was over and they had won, so they did not care what girls they screwed, or what they said to us. But then Gorbachev was deposed, Yeltsin took over, and suddenly there was no money to pay anyone. The whole country was run by gangsters. However bad it had been before, now it was one hundred times worse. We had nothing. We had to live somehow.”
“You sound like you’re expecting me to judge you. I’m in no position to do that.”
“Maybe. Anyway, I was lucky. Because I can speak English I got a job at a hotel, the Marriott, working at the reception desk. I found a good man, a doctor. He was not rich or handsome, but he treated me with respect.
“For a long time, I thought I was okay. Then Kursk started coming to the hotel. He had worked with the girls as a ‘bodyguard.’ That was what they called it. The real reason was to make sure we did not do any business for ourselves, or try to run away with a rich foreign client. Kursk liked to remind me that he knew who I was and what I had done. He could expose me at any time. Everything I had worked for would be ruined. I offered him money to go away, but he turned me down. He was happier teasing me, just keeping me like a fish on the end of a line. I knew that sooner or later he would pull on the hook.
“That’s what happened. Kursk came to the hotel on Friday morning. He said he needed a partner on a job. He wanted a woman. People would be distracted by her and pay less attention to him. He told me to leave work, tell my supervisor I was feeling sick. If I came with him, he would pay me ten thousand dollars, U.S. And if I did not . . .”
“Let me guess. He still had some of your old photographs. You would be caught by your own honey trap.”
Alix nodded.
“So what happened to the doctor?”
“He is still there. He wants to marry me.”
“What do you want?”
“He will give me a home, maybe a family. I will be a respectable woman.”
“But?”
“But I do not love him. I would just be selling myself again.”
“Come here,” said Carver.
He opened his arms, and Alix nestled against his shoulder. He put his arms around her. She could feel him pressing his nose against her hair, breathing in its scent. Then he leaned back against the arm of the sofa and she went with him, relaxing into his lean, muscular embrace.
It took a couple of minutes for Alix to realize that Carver was asleep. She smiled ruefully. She must be losing her touch if men could take her in their arms without being driven mad with lust. But perhaps it was a greater compliment that a man like Carver would let himself sleep. That was the ultimate vulnerability. She could do anything to him now.
Alix slipped out of Carver’s arms and got to her feet. She stroked a lock of hair away from his forehead, then gently kissed his brow, like a mother would a child. She picked up the wine bottle, the ice bucket, and the glasses and carried them to the kitchen.
She walked along the hallway to Carver’s bedroom, smiling as she saw the TV on a stand at the end of the bed, exactly as she’d predicted. There was a bedside table with a photograph in a silver frame, showing Carver at the helm of a yacht with a woman hugging him from behind. They were both laughing.
Alix felt a quick, sharp stab of jealousy. Who was this woman making Carver so happy? There was no trace of any feminine presence in the apartment. She wasn’t part of his life now. Even so, Alix resented her closeness to Carver and the unforced joy in their laughter.
She told herself she was just being professionally thorough as she looked through Carver’s wardrobe, fingering the fabric of his classic English and Italian suits, smiling at his well-worn jeans and baggy sweaters. She thought of his tracksuit. Why was it that the older clothes got, the more men seemed to like them?
On the top shelf of the wardrobe, above the hanging suits and shirts, there were a couple of folded blankets and a rolled-up duvet. Alix had to stretch to reach the duvet. She pulled it down, then carried it through to the living room and draped it over Carver’s unconscious body.
But where was she going to sleep? This was a bachelor apartment. There was only one bed. Alexandra Petrova went to sleep in it.



30

Alone in his office on Sunday night, Pierre Papin pursued the question of Carver, the girl, and the train they had taken out of Paris. A check on the ticket machines at the Gare de Lyon had come up with more than a dozen purchases made during the missing minutes when Carver could have used them. Four of these were for one ticket only. Papin was tempted to dismiss these, but he had to consider the possibility that the Englishman had dropped the girl and continued to a separate destination on his own.
Several of the ticket buyers had used credit cards, none in Carver’s name. But that was to be expected. If he had used a card, the name would certainly be that of an alias. So Papin was left with the task of checking twelve separate journeys, involving more than twenty individuals, hoping to track down his two suspects by a process of elimination.
It was a massive task and would require a great deal of cooperation. Ideally, Papin should ask for help from other departments, but he had no intention of doing that unless it was absolutely unavoidable. It was a matter of selfpreservation.
It is said in politics that your opponents are in the other parties, but your enemies are in your own. Papin operated on the same principle. He had a visceral distrust of his colleagues in the various branches of the French security system. He knew they’d happily stab him in the back if it gave their department a moment’s advantage. That was the way the game worked in every intelligence community. It wasn’t the terrorists, the spies, and the other assorted dangers to national security you had to worry about. It was the bastard in the next office.
There had to be another way of tracking his prey. Papin put himself in Carver’s position: Okay, he arrives at the station with the girl. They split up in case anyone is looking for a couple. He tells her to go to the Milan train, makes a public show of buying tickets to Milan, and lets himself be seen on camera walking toward the appropriate platform. But unless he is engaged in a massive double bluff, he does not get on that train. He gets on another train, using tickets he has bought from a machine. Yet Carver and the girl do not return to the concourse. . . .
Papin had been through the footage. Even if they had hidden their faces from the camera, he would have recognized them by their clothes or the way they walked.
So what does Carver do?
Papin got up from his seat and walked over to the small table where his cafetière was standing, poured out the last dregs into his dirty cup, and grimaced at the feel of the cold, gritty liquid on his tongue. He was about to spit it out into his wastebasket when the solution suddenly struck him. Of course! Papin’s face broke into a triumphant grin. Unless he had led his girl on a mad dash across the railway tracks, Carver must have got on whatever train was waiting on the platform opposite the one to Milan. Papin reached for a timetable and there it was, departing at thirteen minutes past seven, the express service to Lausanne, Switzerland. Carver and the girl had been on that train, he was absolutely certain of it.
As reluctant as he was to ask for help from any of his rivals in Paris, Papin had no hesitation in making a late-night call to Horst Zietler, of the Swiss Strategischer Nachrichtendienst, or Strategic Intelligence Service. Zietler had nothing to gain by screwing him. Papin got straight to the point.
“Horst, I need your help. I’m trying to find two people—a man and a woman. I think they arrived in Lausanne by train from Paris earlier today.”
“Anyone I need to be concerned about?”
“No, they’re no danger whatsoever to Switzerland. But . . .”
“They’re an embarrassment to France?”
Papin chuckled wearily. “Something like that. Let’s just say I’d like to know where they went once they arrived in your country.”
“So, what do you need?”
“Cooperation in Lausanne, interviews with any station staff who were on duty yesterday, maybe a look at security footage from, say, ten a.m. to noon. But, you understand, this is unofficial, off-the-record.”
“I’ll have a quiet word with the station manager in the morning. I’ll tell him you’re from the federal interior ministry, following up on a possible visa irregularity—purely routine, nothing to worry about. Your name will be Picard, Michel Picard. You’ll need an ID. I’ll e-mail a template: Work from that.”
“Thanks, I owe you.”
“Certainly, but I’m sure you can find a way of paying me back. . . .”
Papin laughed again, this time with genuine amusement. “Well, now that you mention it, there’s a house we’ve been watching by the Parc Monceau, filled with remarkably beautiful girls. It’s attracted some very interesting clients with impressively exotic, imaginative sexual tastes. Perhaps I should send you some of the video footage to see if any Swiss citizens are involved. Purely as a matter of international cooperation, you understand.”
“Of course,” agreed Zietler. “What other reason could there be? As always, it’s a pleasure doing business with you, Pierre. The documentation you need is on its way.”
Papin was on the early-morning flight out of Charles de Gaulle to Geneva. He planned to be in Lausanne by the time the station manager arrived for work.



31

Carver woke just after three in the morning. It took him a second to work out where he was. He was lying on the sofa, still dressed, but someone had draped a duvet over him. He pondered the significance of the gesture. It certainly seemed like a good sign. Faced with a choice between killing him as he slept or making him comfortable and tucking him in, Alix had reached for the duvet.
So where was she? There was no one in the kitchen, nor in Carver’s office. The bathroom was empty, though a pair of women’s underpants was drying on the towel rack. That left only one possibility. Carver opened his bedroom door as quietly as possible and padded across the room.
She was in his bed. He could see the outline of her body under the sheet, the shock of her pitch-black hair against the white pillow. One arm was flung out in front of her, half- covering her face. As she breathed she let out an occasional soft, barely audible snuffle.
Carver smiled then shook his head as he recognized a long-forgotten emotion: affection.
Fancying a woman was one thing. But when you heard her snore and thought she was cute, well, then you knew it was serious.
It took an effort of will to turn around and leave the room. As he walked back down the hallway, Carver thought about everything Alix had said earlier. He believed the stuff about her joining the KGB. But the very fact that she had been trained to deceive men made him doubt the rest of her story.
She’s working behind the desk at a fancy hotel when some thug comes along and says, “Do a highly dangerous, top-secret mission with me in Paris, or I will tell the world you were a hooker?” No, that just didn’t sound credible. On the other hand, it didn’t automatically make her his enemy. There were all sorts of reasons why she might want to lie about her real identity and purpose. God knows he did it enough.
He checked his phones and office computer to see if she’d tried to talk to anyone or send any messages while he was asleep. His phones were routed through a sequence of relays that made it impossible for anyone to track where he was. The system also tracked any activity. There had been none at all. He logged on to his ISP mail server—nothing there either.
That left the stolen laptop. It was conceivable that Alix had used it. The bag was still on the kitchen chair where Carver had left it when they arrived at the flat. It looked untouched. But that meant nothing. She would have been smart enough to leave everything exactly as she’d found it.
Carver opened the padded black nylon case and pulled out the laptop. It was a Hitachi, another gray plastic box just like a million others. Carver opened it, pressed the power button, and waited while the operating system booted up. A box immediately appeared, demanding a password. Carver didn’t have a clue what Max had chosen as his personal open sesame, and he’d bet his bottom dollar Alix didn’t either. So no one had sent anything from this computer since the last time Max had used it. Carver closed the Hitachi again. He certainly wasn’t any kind of techno-wizard. But the next person who opened up this laptop would be.
He was sure now that Alix had not been able to communicate with anyone since he left her mobile on the Milan train. For now, at least, their presence in Geneva was still secret.
Carver suddenly realized he was starving. He went to a cupboard and pulled out a box of cornflakes. They were at least three weeks old, but that was too bad. At least the milk was fresh and cold.
He ate the cereal sitting at the kitchen island. After a couple of spoonfuls, he reached for the TV remote control and turned on the set. They were still talking about the princess, showing the same crash-site footage, the same holiday memories. There was a picture of her in a swimsuit that made her look unusually thick around the middle. Some guy on CNN was speculating that she might have been pregnant. Other reporters were commenting on the absence of CCTV footage. Twelve cameras covered the roads between the Ritz Hotel and the Alma Tunnel, but not one of them had produced a single image of the Mercedes at any stage of its journey. He sighed. Whoever had set this up had powerful friends. But he had a few friends too.
Carver washed his bowl and put it on the draining board. He wiped the milk and cereal splatters off the counter, using these simple domestic chores as a means of clearing his mind. He stood by the phone for a second, his hand hovering over the handset. Finally he picked it up and dialed a number. It rang several times, then there was a grunt of irritation at the other end of the line.
He grinned. “Wakey-wakey. It’s Carver.”
“Uhhh . . . what time is it?”
“Half past three. Yeah, I know, I’m sorry. But this is urgent. We need to meet. Can you be at Jean-Jacques in twenty minutes?”
There was another grunt, of assent this time. Carver grabbed the computer, pulled a leather jacket from a peg in the hall and headed out the door. He walked downhill towards the lake, through the commercial district by the shoreline and onto the Pont des Bergues, a V-shaped bridge whose two arms met by a small island jutting out toward the lake. A walkway linked the bridge and the island, which was planted with trees and illuminated by spotlights. At the far end there was a statue of a man in Roman robes seated on a chair, looking out across the lake with a frowning, thoughtful expression. This was Geneva’s most famous son, the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
As Carver reached the statue, he heard a voice from the shadows. “‘Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.’ Well, Monsieur Rousseau, you got that right.”
Carver laughed. “Now, now, Thor, stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
An extraordinary figure walked into the light. He was well over six feet tall, rake-thin, pale-skinned, blue-eyed, and topped with an explosion of blond dreadlocks. He rubbed his face with his hand to emphasize his exhaustion. “Aww, come on, man,” he said, in a singsong Scandinavian accent. “You wake me up in the middle of the night and make me come running like a poodle. How do you expect me to feel?”
“Come and rest your weary bones on this park bench,” said Carver. “See if I can make it worth your while getting out of bed.”
He’d met Thor Larsson four years back, at a bar where they’d both gone to hear a visiting American blues guitarist. They’d got to talking over a couple of beers. By the fifth or sixth round, Carver had discovered that this golden-haired Rasta was both a professional software engineer and a former lieutenant in the Norwegian army’s intelligence corps. “National service,” he’d said, apologetically. “I didn’t have any choice.”
“That’s nothing,” Carver had replied. “I did a dozen years in Her Majesty’s royal marines. And I bloody volunteered.”
They’d listened to the blues, talked, drank many more beers. Larsson became his tech-man. He never asked precisely why Carver needed untraceable e-mail and telephone accounts, computers that were at least eighteen months ahead of anything available on the open market, and guaranteed penetration of any network, anywhere. He just did the work and accepted the extravagant amounts of cash Carver paid him for his skill and his discretion.
“What’s the big deal, then?” the Norwegian asked.
“This,” said Carver, holding up the computer case. “There’s a laptop in here that I need to get into, past all the encryption and password protection. But here’s the problem: There are people who want this computer and the information on it. And they want it badly. If they ever discover you’ve got it, or even that you had it and you know what was on it, they won’t piss around. They’ll come after you.”
“So what’s the good news?”
“I’m going after them, which is why I’d really like to know of any names and addresses listed on this thing.”
“You mean, there are people out there, trying to kill you, and you don’t even know who they are?”
“I’m working on it.”
“No, apparently I’m working on it. So, this laptop, is it gonna be a challenge?”
“Oh yeah. One thing I do know about these guys, they’re very well-connected. They’ll be using military, maybe even NSA-level encryption. Don’t ask me about the details, but it’s bound to be real high-end stuff.”
Larsson gave a rueful smile. “Don’t say that, man. You know it only tempts me.”
Carver grinned back. “Well, if you don’t think you’re up to it, I understand. . . .”
The Norwegian shook his great shaggy head. “This is going to cost you, big-time.”
“Doesn’t it always?”
Carver handed over the case. Larsson turned to leave, but Carver stopped him. “Seriously, Thor, this could get tricky. Keep your eyes open. If you even suspect that someone’s after you, grab the computer and get out. Don’t hang around, you understand?”
“Yeah.”
“And if you get anything out of that address book, contact right away. It could save both our asses.”
Larsson gave a nod of acknowledgment. They walked together, not speaking, back up the path to the bridge. When they got there, Larsson turned right, toward the more modern side of the city. Carver made his way back to the Old Town, following the familiar winding streets up the hill until he arrived at his building.
Alix was still asleep. It was half past four. Carver got undressed and lay back down on the sofa, obeying one golden rule of military life: Never miss a chance to eat, sleep, or shit. The next thing he knew, the apartment was filled with light, a hand was gently shaking his shoulder, and a soft, slightly breathy woman’s voice was saying, “I forgot. Do you take milk and sugar in your coffee, or not?”