The Accident Man:A Novel

32

Carver opened one eye and held up a hand to shut out the morning sun streaming in through the open window. “Uh, hi,” he mumbled. “Um, I’ll have it strong, just a drop of milk, two sugars, thanks.” A thought struck him out of nowhere and he pulled his hand down to cover his mouth. “Christ, I haven’t brushed my teeth. Hope I’m not too toxic.”
Alix laughed. “I think I’ll survive.”
She stood there, outlined by a glowing halo of light. She was still wearing his old T-shirt, just that and a pair of underwear, her hair still tousled from bed, not a scrap of makeup on her face. Carver had never seen anything so beautiful.
“Bloody hell, you’re gorgeous,” he said. He sounded surprised, as if he couldn’t quite believe she was there.
“Silly man,” she said, and ruffled his hair. The touch of her fingers on Carver’s scalp sent thrilling shock waves through his entire body. “Go and brush your teeth. I’ll bring you your coffee.”
Carver didn’t know how he was going to get off the couch without revealing just how pleased he was to see her. He grabbed the blanket to cover himself and scuttled from the room, both of them laughing, sharing the knowledge of what was happening.
He dived under the shower, quickly washed with the water as hot as he could take it, then swung the thermostat back the other way and stood for twenty seconds under a blast of water as pure and cold as a waterfall. Now he was properly awake.
He’d brushed his teeth and was dragging a razor over his chin when she walked in, holding a cup of coffee. He caught her eye in the mirror and smiled, just for the pleasure of seeing her there. She walked up to him from behind, handing him the coffee with one hand and running a finger down his spine with the other. He took the cup, placed it on the basin, then turned around and leaned toward her, but she lifted the finger up to his lips, holding him back with the barest touch of her skin against his.
“No,” she murmured, her voice much throatier now. He could see her nipples outlined against the T-shirt’s flimsy, faded cotton. His skin felt electric, craving the touch of her body, but she gently turned him back to the mirror. “Finish shaving. Drink some coffee. We have time.”
She stood behind him, leaning up against the wall and watching him with forensic attention as he finished shaving, rinsed his face, and dried with a hand towel that was hanging next to the sink.
He chucked the towel onto the floor beside him, then he turned around. Carver stood stock-still, unsmiling, just looking at the girl. Her eyes narrowed, meeting his gaze and matching it, neither one of them backing down.
He crossed the room in two strides and lifted her bodily off the floor, pressing her up against the wall as he kissed her with a passion that had been caged inside him for too long. She answered his intensity with her own, pushing her mouth against his, wrapping her arms around his neck, and gripping his waist with her thighs.
Carver brought his arms around under her and held her up to him, never breaking away from their kiss as he carried her through the door into the bedroom. He put her down on the floor beside the bed, breaking away for just long enough to slide the T-shirt over her head as she stood with her arms up, arching her back and bringing her breasts up toward him. Then he was running his tongue around a nipple and she was ripping the towel from his waist and they were rolling onto the bed and at last their hunger could be satisfied.
The second time around, the frenzy was replaced by tenderness, the urgency by a lazy, indulgent, mutual exploration; getting to know the taste, the smell, the feel of each other; each beginning to learn what the other needed most.
Later, as they were lying together, her head nestled against his shoulder, he felt her body turning. She looked up at him, her chin resting on his chest.
“I had forgotten it could be like that,” she whispered.
He stroked her hair, gently circling a thumb around her temple. “It’s been a long time for me too.”
“Who is she? The girl in the picture.”
“Her name was Kate. We were supposed to get married.”
“Did she leave?”
“She died,” he said softly
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No, it’s time I talked about her. I’ve spent the past five years trying not to. That hasn’t got me very far.”
She nodded. “Fine, then tell me about Kate. In fact, tell me everything. You promised yesterday, remember?”
“I was hoping you’d forgotten.”
“I am a woman. I never forget.”
Carver laughed. “This KGB training you did, was interrogation part of the curriculum?”
“No, it comes naturally.”
He grinned. “You’re great, you know? Just great.” He ran a hand along her body, relishing every contour. “And I’m not just saying that because you’ve got a perfect ass.”
She slapped his hand away in mock annoyance. “Kate!” she said.
“Okay, Kate . . . well, I’d been a marine for, I dunno, ten years or so. Typical soldier boy—you know, love ‘em and leave ‘em, nothing serious. But with Kate, I don’t know why, it was much more serious, right from the get-go. I met her at a party. We started talking and we didn’t stop till it was morning. We just cuddled up in this big old armchair and told each other pretty much everything about ourselves. By the end of the night, I knew she was the woman I was going to marry.”
He looked up at Alix. The light had gone from her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said so much.”
“No, I asked.”
“I’ll stop.”
“No, don’t. Tell me everything.”
“There isn’t that much more,” he said, as she laid her head on his chest again and he stared up at the ceiling. “I mean, there is, obviously, but what it all boils down to is that we got engaged. I left the service, planning to start a new life. Her dad ran a charter yacht business and I was going to work with him for a few years before taking it over when he retired. Then . . . then . . . well, then we went out to lunch, and I stayed behind for a minute, just a minute, and she walked across the street alone, and some bastard in a stolen car ran a red light . . . and I wasn’t there. . . .” He screwed up his eyes for a moment, trying to hold the feelings back.
He could see the room where they’d had that last meal: him, Kate, and Bobby Faulkner, his closest friend since the day they’d both turned up as marine officer candidates on the same admiralty selection board test. He could hear Bobby telling insulting stories about his past misdeeds, hiding his affection under a smokescreen of mockery.
Then Carver saw the jerks by the bar as they were all walking out, felt the jolt against his shoulder as one of them deliberately bumped into him and accused him of spilling his pint, looking to pick a fight. He watched Kate walking out the door as he said, “Get the car, this won’t take long.”
Then he opened his eyes and said, “She never stood a chance. Killed instantly. That was a blessing, at least. She never suffered, never even knew what hit her.”
Alix brushed a lock of hair off his forehead. “But you suffered.”
“No, I got drunk. I cultivated my rage. Then I made everyone else suffer instead. That’s how I got into this business.”
He told her how much his old commanding officer, Quentin Trench, had meant to him, how he’d pulled him out of that police cell and given him the telephone number that had changed his life.
She balled her fist and tapped his shoulder. “So now you are here and now I am with you. Enough talking. What are we going to do?”
Carver propped himself up on an elbow. “Follow the money,” he said.




33

Sir Perceval Wake pressed the button on the antiquated intercom that linked his study with his secretary’s desk outside. “Send him in.”
The apartment in Eaton Square where he lived and worked occupied two floors of a tall, white house. It stood in a terrace of identical buildings lining a broad boulevard running from the aristocratic playground of Sloane Square to the walls of Buckingham Palace. The government departments of Whitehall were just a five-minute cab ride away. This was one of the world’s most expensive neighborhoods. Wake’s hunger for money and influence had always been as great as his thirst for knowledge.
For decades, Her Majesty’s government had come to Sir Perceval Wake for advice and paid handsomely for the privilege, as had the chief executives of city institutions and multinational corporations. He’d begun his career as a political history lecturer at Oxford University, but he did not linger long among the city’s brilliant but impoverished academics. In 1954 he published a book based on his postgraduate thesis. It was provocatively entitled, Useful Idiots: The Role of Western Intellectuals in the Spread of Communist Dictatorship. At a time when most supposedly progressive, liberal thinkers still believed that the Soviet Union was a force for good in the world, Wake’s ideas exploded like a hand grenade in a barrel of fish. He became a hate figure on the left and an icon on the right.
Within weeks of publication, he was invited to attend a private conference of politicians, financiers, and thinkers from Europe and the United States that met at the Hotel Bilderberg in Arnhem, Holland. The organizers aimed to protect Western democracy and free markets against the Communist tide. That original meeting evolved into an annual event, an institution in its own right. For over forty years, Wake had been an active member of the Bilderberg Group, whose secret meetings, attended by some of the richest and most powerful men on earth, had become the focus of countless conspiracy theories. He regularly attended the World Economic Forum in Davos. He traveled to the 2,700-acre estate of Bohemian Grove in Sonoma County, California, to join the cast of rich, powerful, male Americans parading in torchlight before a giant, fake stone owl and—the conspiracy theorists insisted—hatching plots for global domination.
To Wake, the accumulation of power and influence was a matter of duty as well as a personal pleasure. He believed that people like him, the ones who truly understood the world, were obliged to save its people from the consequences of their own stupidity. Left to their own devices, the masses made distressingly poor decisions. They elected genocidal maniacs like Hitler. They swore allegiance to tyrannical despots like Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. It was really best for everyone if running the planet was left to the experts.
He rose from his desk to greet his visitor. Wake had taken great care to cultivate his appearance, from the artfully unkempt mane of silver hair that he swept back over his ears to the custom-made tweed jackets, soft cotton shirts, and corduroy trousers that signified both his affluence and his status as a free thinker. By contrast, Jack Grantham’s drab suit demonstrated that even as a senior officer of MI6 he was, in the end, just another civil servant. Still, it would be unwise to underestimate him. Grantham did not possess the usual flabby pallor of a desk-bound bureaucrat, and there was a look of measured, skeptical assessment in his gray eyes.
He had the air, Wake decided, of a man who had come a long way, but still had farther to go. His energies had not yet been depleted by the unrelenting grind of the Whitehall machine, and there was a toughness about him that was as much mental as physical. He would not be fobbed off by easy options or the countless excuses that officialdom found for inaction. Wake had been keeping an eye on Grantham’s career for some time. He was curious to see whether his abilities matched his growing reputation.
They exchanged a cordial handshake.
“Jack, my boy, how very good to see you.”
Grantham responded with a single sharp nod of acknowledgment.
“So, how are things down at Vauxhall Cross?” Wake asked, settling back down behind his desk and waving in the direction of a chair to let his guest know that he could sit too.
“Things could be better,” Grantham replied. “That crash in Paris has stirred things up.”
“I daresay it has. No doubt there will be claims that it could have been prevented, but I can’t see that you have any need to be concerned. After all, it was simply an accident. A ghastly, tragic accident, of course, but nothing to worry the secret intelligence service.”
“That depends. We think this might have been a hit. So we’re wondering who might have wanted to kill the princess, or her companion, and why?”
“What does that have to do with me?” Wake leaned forward a fraction. His interest had been piqued.
“Well, you’ve studied every threat to our national security for the past forty years. You’ve known our leaders and half our enemies’ leaders too. You’ve been in the room when people have discussed and even planned operations off the books. So you tell me. Why would anyone want to kill the Princess of Wales?”
“Well, now, that’s an intriguing question,” said Wake, relaxing back into his chair. “I imagine you’re not the only one asking it. Has the media raised the prospect of foul play?”
The MI6 man shook his head. “Not yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Some of the wilder conspiracy-theory Web sites are claiming the princess was pregnant. The boyfriend’s father swears that the Duke of Edinburgh has been plotting against him. And the princess herself apparently believed the Prince of Wales would have her killed in a car crash. We think she put it all down on tape. God help us if that ever sees the light of day.”
Wake sighed. “The poor girl, she always had such a desperate need for love, such a strong sense of persecution. Not surprising, I suppose. The parents’ divorce was particularly messy. So, was she pregnant?”
“We don’t know. We don’t think so.”
“Never mind. It’s not important. The princess was no longer a member of the royal family, so even if she had given birth, her future children would have had no constitutional significance. Nor do I believe for one second that any member of the royal family would have anything whatever to do with an assassination, under any circumstances. The very idea is absurd.”
Grantham paused for a second before he spoke again. When he did, his words were impeccably polite, his voice was quiet, yet with a steely tone. “I’m not suggesting that the palace had any direct involvement, but there may have been others who believed they were acting in the monarchy’s or the country’s best interests. Let’s just suppose—hypothetically—that such people existed. What would be their motive for committing such a crime?”
Wake picked up a pen from the desk in front of him and tapped it a couple of times on the walnut surface, gathering his thoughts. Then he began to speak.
“I went for a walk yesterday evening, up to the palace. It was quite extraordinary. Huge crowds were gathered in front of the gates, and there was an anger about them, a feverish intensity quite unlike anything I have ever known in this country. They were hurt, bereft, and they wanted someone to blame. It would only have taken one man on a soapbox to whip them into a frenzy, and I swear they would have stormed the gates.”
Grantham seemed about to interrupt, but Wake held up a hand. “Let me continue. I walked down Constitution Hill, through Hyde Park, and into Kensington Gardens. On the grass in front of Kensington Palace, below the princess’s apartment, there is a mass, a veritable sea of flowers. Some are magnificent bouquets, some just pathetic little bunches of wilting blooms, but all of them are laid there in tribute. And every minute that passes, more people are bringing more flowers, more messages, more candles. They are talking to one another, weeping, complete strangers collapsing into one another’s arms.
“This is something entirely new. All the reserve that has long characterized our nation, all that stiff upper lip and muddling through, has been replaced by an almost wanton hysteria. And yet at the same time it’s actually quite primitive, a return to the cult of the goddess, the mother. Clearly the princess symbolized something extraordinarily powerful. So I can’t help but ask myself: If this is the influence she could exert after death, what might have happened had she lived?
“Yesterday the prime minister called her the People’s Princess. It was a trite little phrase, but telling all the same. She did indeed have a remarkable hold over the people, and every interview she gave, every picture for which she posed merely underlined how much more affection and sympathy she commanded than her former husband.
“Of course, that’s natural. People will always sympathize with a wronged wife, particularly if she is beautiful and vulnerable. In normal circumstances, that really doesn’t matter. But these are far from normal circumstances. The former husband is also the future king of England, and it would be impossible for him to rule effectively, perhaps even to ascend the throne at all, if there was another, competing court surrounding his former wife. Everything he did would be judged by the degree to which she was seen to approve or disapprove. It would be intolerable.
“Monarchies are by nature monopolistic. They cannot allow competition. So I can, in theory, see why a group or an individual concerned with the preservation of the monarchy might deem it necessary to remove such a threat to the Crown.”
Grantham shrugged. “But you just said yourself, the death of the princess has plunged the monarchy into crisis. If she really has been killed by some kind of fanatical royalist, then they’ve got the wrong result.”
“Not necessarily. Only one full day has passed since the crash, so it’s far too early to tell how its aftereffects will play out. A while from now, things might look very different.
“As matters stand, the Prince of Wales cannot possibly marry Mrs. Parker Bowles, still less make her his queen. The monarchy is at such a low ebb, one can barely imagine it surviving to Her Majesty’s Golden Jubilee in five years’ time, still less celebrating such an event. But however hysterical they may be now, people will forget the princess eventually. If she fades from their hearts, if the prince is forgiven, if the family survives, well, a dispassionate observer might say that the killing—if such it was—had served its purpose.”
“You sound as though you approve.”
“Not at all. You asked for an objective assessment, and I gave it.”
Grantham nodded. “Agreed. But that leaves us with another hypothetical. If the crash was not an accident, who was responsible?”
Wake smiled and shook his head. “Ah, well, there you have me. I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest idea. You’ll just have to round up the usual suspects, eh?”
“Indeed we will, which is one of the reasons I’m here.”
Wake gave an amused, patronizing chuckle. “Really? Surely I am not on your list? Has my stock fallen that low?”
Grantham ignored the attempt at humor. “Let’s not waste each other’s time. We both know your record. My predecessors weren’t exactly scrupulous in their methods. If they wanted a job done off the books, they came to you. No one knew exactly how you made things happen, or who your contacts were. They didn’t want to know. It gave them deniability if anyone started asking inconvenient questions. But you knew.”
The old man bristled. “That was all a long time ago, before the wall came down. We were at war with an enemy that would stop at nothing. All anyone wants to talk about these days is the Nazis. Well, they were a danger to this country for six years. Soviet communism was a threat for almost half a century, and I fought that threat. I did my duty. I have no reason to apologize, still less to feel ashamed.”
“I didn’t say you did. But if anyone’s out there taking people out on the basis of what’s supposedly best for this country, or its monarchy, or Christ knows what else, you may just know who they are. So I’m asking you a favor: If you do happen to bump into any of your old associates, pass on a message from me. We want this mess cleaned up. No fuss. No scandal. No one running to the papers saying, ‘I did it.’ Tell them to sort it out or we’ll stop turning blind eyes and sort them out ourselves. Do I make myself clear?”
“To them, perhaps,” said Wake. “But you’re wasting your time if you think I can help. Still, it’s been very interesting to meet you. Perhaps we’ll see each other again under less trying circumstances. And now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to attend to. Good day to you, Mr. Grantham. My secretary will show you out.”
Wake let the other man leave the room before he rose from his desk and walked to one of the tall windows that looked down on Eaton Square. He watched a black cab cruise down the road. He followed a mother chasing her child on the sidewalk, heard their innocent laughter ringing like bells through the summer air. Then he turned back to the desk, let out a single heavy sigh, and started to press the numbers on his telephone keypad.




34

Pierre Papin’s taxi pulled up outside the honey-colored stone facade of Lausanne’s main railway station a little after nine o’clock. The manager and his staff were properly Swiss, which is to say as efficient as Germans, as welcoming as Italians, and as knowing as Frenchmen.
Within an hour he’d found out everything he needed to know. He followed Carver’s trail, taking the train to Geneva, where he walked out of the station into the Place Cornavin, the bustling square whose taxi stands and bus stops were the heart of the city’s transportation system. Once he was there it was just a matter of basic old-fashioned police work, canvassing the drivers to find anyone who’d been around late morning the previous day and showing them the CCTV pictures of Carver and Petrova.
Fifteen minutes in, he struck lucky. One of the taxi drivers, a Turk, remembered the girl. “How could I forget that one?” he said with a knowing wink, from one red- blooded man to another. “I watched her all the way from the station, thinking this was my lucky day. I was next in line. The man with her looked like he could afford a taxi, and if I had a woman like that I wouldn’t want to share her with the trash who take the bus. But no, he walked right past me, the son of a whore, and stood in line like a peasant.”
“Did you see which bus they took?”
“Yeah, the Number Five. It goes over the Pont de l’Ile, past the Old Town to the hospital and back. So, what have they done, these two, huh?”
Papin smiled. “They’re killers. Count yourself lucky they didn’t get in your cab.”
He left the cabbie muttering thanks to Allah and then, still posing as Michel Picard from the federal interior ministry, called the control room at Transports Publics Genevois, the organization that ran the city’s bus system. Naturally, they were only too happy to supply the names and contact numbers of those drivers who’d worked the Number 5 route leaving the station around eleven o’clock the previous day. There were three of them, and once his memory had been jogged by Papin’s photos, one recalled the couple who’d got on at the station. He also remembered looking in his mirror as the girl got off at a stop on Rue de la Croix-Rouge, crossed the road behind the bus, and started walking up the hill toward the Old Town.
“Some guys have all the luck, right?” he said with a rueful chuckle.
“Don’t worry,” Papin assured him. “That one’s luck is about to change.”
Twenty minutes later, he was walking the streets of the Old Town. It seemed an unlikely place for an assassin to hide out. In Papin’s experience, most killers were little more than crude gangsters, spending their money on tasteless vulgarity and excess. But the beauty of the Old Town was restrained, even austere. The tall buildings seemed to look down like disapproving elders on the people walking the streets. There were few hotels in the area, and it took little time to establish that neither Carver nor Petrova had checked in anywhere within the past twenty-four hours, under those names or any other aliases.
Petrova came from Moscow, so this must be where Carver lived. And that meant there would be people in the neighborhood who knew him and his exact address. Papin got out his photographs and started canvassing again.



35

“Well now, there’s a surprise.” Carver leaned back, tilting his office chair and putting his hands behind his head. Then he looked back at the computer screen, which showed the recent transfers in and out of his Banque Wertmuller-Maier account, and sighed. “Of course those buggers weren’t going to pay. They assumed I’d be dead.” Even so, he had received faxed notification of a $1.5 million deposit from his account manager. He had a loose end. If he could find a way to give it a good pull, the whole conspiracy might just unravel.
He thought for a moment, then got up and wandered into the kitchen, where Alix was making herself a late breakfast. The TV was on, still showing news about the crash. He wondered whether anyone in the world was watching anything else.
“Any developments we need to know about?” he asked.
Alix pressed the remote control, lowering the volume, then turned to look at him. “People are blaming the paparazzi for chasing the car. There are rumors it was going at almost two hundred kilometers an hour when it crashed.”
“Well, that’s bullshit, for a start. It was one twenty, max.”
“Also, they say that blood tests prove the driver was drunk, more than three times over the limit. And there’s a survivor, the princess’s bodyguard.”
Carver frowned. “The guy didn’t drive like a drunk. And there’s a bodyguard? Well, no way would any self-respecting bodyguard let a driver get in a car if he was three times over. The guy would have been completely legless, reeling all over the place, stinking of booze. Christ, you wouldn’t let anyone get behind the wheel if he was that far gone.” He slammed his hand against the kitchen counter. “This is bloody amateur hour. They did a rush job and they’ve bungled the cover- up. Now every investigative journalist in the world is going to be crawling all over the place, trying to prove it was murder.”
“Well, it was murder.” Alix’s voice was quiet, but it cut straight through Carver’s bluster. “We did it. Every time I hear about photographers hounding her to her death, all I can think is, no, that was me. I was flashing the camera, forcing them to go faster.”
“Maybe, but if you hadn’t been, someone else would. The real photographers weren’t far behind you. And as soon as they got to the crash, did they try to help? No, they started taking photographs.”
A coldness had descended on Carver, the passion of his lovemaking replaced by impersonal calculation. Alix’s voice rose in intensity as she tried to break through his armor.
“How can you just stand there and talk about this as if we weren’t involved? Don’t you think at all about what you’ve done?”
“Not if I can help it, no.”
For a moment they fell silent; the only noises in the room were the bubbling of the coffeemaker and the muted jabber of an ad from the TV set. Then Carver’s body relaxed slightly. He held out a hand and laid it on Alix’s shoulder.
“Look, I know how callous, how cynical that sounds. I’m not a total bastard. But one thing I’ve learned over the years is not to waste time over people who are already dead. It’s the only way to stop yourself from going crazy. Am I sorry she died? Of course I am. Do I feel bad that it was me at the end of that tunnel? Just a bit. But where does feeling guilty about that get me, or anyone else? Screw feeling guilty. We were tricked into doing something terrible, and I aim to find the people who did that.”
Carver told Alix what he had in mind. It meant her going undercover, playing a role.
“You’ve got a lot of experience using fake identities, right? You can fool a man into thinking you’re someone you’re not?”
“Isn’t that what you’ve been worrying about, that I’m deceiving you?”
“It has crossed my mind, yeah. But forget that for now. I’ve got another part that might interest you.”
He dialed a local number. When he spoke it was with the guttural bark of an Afrikaner accent. “Could I speak to Mr. Leclerc, please? Thank you. . . . Howzit, Mr. Leclerc? The name’s Dirk Vandervart. I’m what you might call a private security consultant, and you’ve been recommended to me by contacts at the very highest levels. I have a little over two hundred million U.S. dollars, looking for a home. I’m hoping you can help me find one. . . . Excellent. Well now, I’ll be in meetings with clients all day. Why don’t we meet at my hotel, the Beau-Rivage, at six this evening, ja? We will have a drink and discuss my banking requirements. I will give you all the references you need at that time. In the meantime, my personal holding company is called Topograficas, SA, registered in Panama. You’re welcome to look it up, though I must say you won’t find a great deal if you do. . . . Ja, absolutely, that is indeed the blessing of Panama! So, are we set, then? Six o’clock, the Beau-Rivage, ask for Vandervart. Thank you. And good day to you too.”
Carver put the phone down with a flourish.
“You sound as though you have done some acting too,” said Alix.
“More than I’d like,” he agreed. “This business is basically one long game of charades.”
“And that company with the crazy name. Does it really exist?”
“Mind your own business,” said Carver. He was smiling as he said it, but internally he was making a note to himself. Close down that shelter as soon as this is all over. And hide all the money behind another Panamanian front.



36

In the end, it was just a matter of blind luck. Papin was walking down Grand Rue, the street of art galleries and antique shops at the center of the Old Town, when he saw a flash of pale blue out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head in an automatic reflex and there they were, Carver and Petrova, strolling along the street hand in hand like any other couple, he in jeans and a stone-colored cotton jacket, she still wearing the same dress in which she’d left Paris the previous day. Papin pumped a fist in triumph. His gamble had paid off!
His first instinct was to duck into a doorway for cover. Then he reminded himself that they had no idea of his identity. He looked into a gallery window, closely examining some Goya prints, while his targets walked by on the far side of the street. He let them get fifty meters down the road, then casually ambled after them.
Papin had to smile. The woman wanted to go shopping—mais naturellement. She’d arrived from Paris without any luggage, she didn’t have a thing to wear, what else could she do? Still, he had to admire her style. She ignored three-quarters of all the shops she passed. Then something caught her eye and she went in, found what she wanted, bought it—courtesy of Carver’s credit cards, Papin noticed—and moved on. She was doing a thorough job too, starting with lingerie and working outward from there. Papin raised an appreciative eyebrow as he watched her pick out a selection of little lacy numbers. Even from across the street and through a shop window, he could tell that Carver was in for an entertaining evening.
In the meantime, the Englishman’s lust appeared to have addled his brain. To be walking around the streets in broad daylight with a fellow suspect was madness. Either Carver was playing a game so subtle that Papin could not fathom it, or he had concluded that he had no hope of survival and might as well enjoy what little time was left to him.
And then, without warning, Papin lost them. They ducked into a crowded department store down by the river with exits onto four different streets. Papin cursed under his breath. Perhaps Carver was not quite as careless as he had assumed.
He tried to follow them through the busy store, then abandoned that attempt and settled for a patrol on foot around the block, hoping to catch them leaving the building or walking down one of the adjacent streets. He knew this was futile. One man had almost no chance of maintaining surveillance under those circumstances.
No matter. He might have lost them for now, but he knew where Carver lived to within a matter of three or four blocks. All he had to do was return to the Old Town and start showing his trusty ID card to all the local barkeepers, café owners, and apartment-house concierges. Some would refuse to cooperate with anyone in authority as a matter of principle. Others, though, would be equally keen to display their credentials as loyal, law-abiding citizens, eager to do their part in maintaining law and order. As any secret policeman knew, it was never hard to find people willing to inform on their neighbors. Papin was sure he would locate Carver’s apartment soon enough. But first it was time to open negotiations.
There was a bar across the road that had a Swisscom public telephone on the wall. “Merde!” It only took phone cards, not cash. The barman saw his frustration and gestured across the road at a newspaper kiosk. Papin muttered a curse, then wasted a couple of minutes walking over to the kiosk, paying for a fifty-franc card, and returning to the bar. By the time he was standing in front of the phone again his previous good humor had been replaced by gut-tightening tension. He made a conscious effort to summon up an air of confidence, then called the man he knew as Charlie.
“Good news, mon ami. I have found your lost property.”
“Really?” replied the operations director. “That’s great news. Where?”
Papin chuckled. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to tell you that right now. But such information is valuable and I have had to work very hard, at great personal expense, to obtain it. I will require compensation.”
“How much?”
“Five hundred thousand, U.S., payable in bearer bonds, endorsed to me, and given to me in person. I will take you to the property. And just you, Charlie. Don’t try any ambush.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, old chap.”
“So, do we have a deal?”
“I don’t know. Half a mill sounds like a lot of money.”
“In your situation? I don’t think so, Charlie. You have two hours. I will call you again at one thirty p.m. Central European Time. If I don’t get your guarantee of payment then, I’m going elsewhere. Good-bye.”
Papin ended the call, then thought for a moment. He needed some insurance, but why wait for another two hours? He dialed a London number. He could think of more than one organization that would be happy to have his information.



37

The man in the white coat took off his glasses and rubbed a hand across his bearded face. He looked at Carver through squinted eyes, trying to focus.
“Okay, so we need to induce a sense of relaxation and empathy, yes?”
“Correct.”
“Then we want sexual arousal.”
“That’s right.”
“And finally, we must lower mental defenses, maybe create a sense of disorientation?”
“Exactly, Dieter. That’s the plan.”
Carver and Alix had concluded the first part of their shopping expedition. She had bought the clothes she needed, and a selection of wigs. He had spent ten minutes getting the Swiss version of a number-two cut at a backstreet barbershop, which left his scalp bristling with the military buzz cut a man like Dirk Vandervart might favor. Then he bought a designer suit whose shiny silken fabric went perfectly with an oversize gold watch to create the defiantly tasteless look of a man with a lot of dirty money to wash. The purchases had been packed in a couple of Gucci overnight bags. Where Carver planned to go, they would need expensive luggage.
Together, he and Alix had taken their costumes to an attic studio above a chocolate shop. It had taken a lot of persuasion and even more money to get the studio’s obsessively painstaking Swiss proprietor to compromise his perfectionism and fix them two South African passports on a rush job. They’d changed into their new clothes, posed for photographs, packed their original garments, and Carver had placed two phone calls: one to the reservations department of one of Geneva’s finest hotels, the other to Thor Larsson. Now he had one last errand to run, but he needed professional advice, and Dr. Dieter Schiller was the man to provide it.
“One important detail: The whole thing has got to be soluble. It’s going into a drink.”
Schiller smiled as he put the spectacles back on. “You know, Pablo, this is going to be some party. Can I come?”
“Sorry, Dieter, this is strictly professional. And there’s one other specification. The dose has got to be packaged so that my associate . . .”
“Miss . . . ?” Schiller raised his eyebrows, waiting for a name.
“Miss None-of-Your-Damn-Business,” Carver replied. “It’s better for everyone that way. My associate needs to be able to deliver the dose easily, without being spotted. Okay?”
Schiller shrugged, apparently unbothered by the lack of formal introductions. He was used to the concept of anonymity. In fact, he assumed that none of his clients ever supplied their true names. “That’s no problem. A simple capsule will be sufficient. But what to put in it? To start with, for relaxation, I would suggest methylenedioxymethamphetamine—MDMA for short.”
“Ecstasy,” said Alix.
“Ah yes, the drug of choice for modern pleasure seekers. Makes you feel good, relaxed, full of love for the people around you. Of course, it may also make you psychotic in the long term, but that’s not our problem right now. Immediate side effects can include feeling hot, sweaty, even a little sick. But we can take the edge off that.”
Schiller was sitting at a desk, like any other practitioner taking a consultation. His office was a back room in a private house. There was no brass plaque on the door, though his remarkable, if unorthodox approach to pharmacology attracted large numbers of wealthy clients who felt the need for personal prescriptions that would never be written by more conventional doctors. Behind him stood a series of wooden cabinets and, above them, shelves of glass bottles, plastic containers, and small white cardboard boxes.
He swiveled in his chair, reached for one of the plastic pill jars, and brought it back to the table. “Soluble in water too, so that’s no problem. Sadly, though, I can’t say the same for Viagra, which many of my older clients like to combine with Ecstasy when entertaining their young ladies. We shall have to be more adventurous with this element of the formula. I would suggest bromocriptine.”
Another pill bottle appeared on the desk. “Unlike Viagra, it acts on the brain, rather than the penis, boosting dopamine—which is a neurotransmitter, you understand—and effectively promoting sexual desire. Strangely, this effect wears off after thirty or forty doses. But again, that is not our problem. Now, this substance is not soluble in water, but it is soluble in alcohol, so please bear that in mind. And the same applies to this. . . .”
He turned to the shelves one last time, reached inside a white box, and pulled out a rectangular piece of aluminum foil with eight clear blisters, each containing a small, diamond-shaped pill.
“Flunitrazepam,” Schiller continued. “Better known as Rohypnol, or ‘roofies.’ As you may know, this sedative, which is a first-rate treatment for anxiety or sleeplessness, has acquired an unsavory reputation as a so-called date rape drug. It diminishes inhibition and stress while promoting a sense of euphoria. It can also affect short-term memory. We must be careful not to give too high a dose or it will simply knock the patient out. But combined with the other two chemicals it should supply, I would say, a very interesting experience. Now tell me a little about the person who will consume this cocktail.”
“I’ve only met him once, and that was four years ago,” Carver replied. “But he must be in his midforties, I’d say, medium height, quite stocky. Unless he’s gone on a diet, he’ll weigh the best part of two hundred pounds, ninety-odd kilos.”
Schiller reached across his desk and grabbed a pestle and mortar set. “A standard dose of each drug will be fine.” He popped three pills into the stone bowl and started grinding them down with the wood-handled pestle. “Just like an old-fashioned apothecary, huh?” he said, looking up at his clients. Then he opened one of the small brass-handled drawers in the chests behind him and rummaged around until he found a small, clear plastic capsule. He squeezed it between his thumb and forefinger, splitting it in two. Very carefully, he poured the powdered pills from the mortar through a plastic funnel into one half of the capsule before pressing the other half back onto it.
“There,” said Schiller, handing Carver the completed capsule. “That will be fifteen hundred Swiss francs.”
“That’s a lot for one dose, Dieter.”
Schiller smiled. “It isn’t the dose you’re paying for.”
Outside on the street, Alix asked, “Now what?”
“Now we go and pick up those passports. Then we check into our hotel.”