Tom Cain - Carver

‘Congratulations,’ he murmured. ‘You survived.’

Wentworth

The British Prime Minister had wanted a television spectacular. To Malachi Zorn’s delight, what he got was a live horror show.

It had all been caught on camera: one helicopter exploding in mid-air; the other in its death-spiral to the ground; the flaming debris raining down upon spectators; the slaughter on the ground; the screams of reporters as they realized that they, too, were as vulnerable as anyone else; the roar of the flames, the volcanic thunder of the explosions, and then the darkness as one by one the TV crews were added to the casualties, their equipment was destroyed and their broadcasts died. For a minute there was nothing but blackness from Rosconway, and panic in the studios of TV channels whose presenters were realizing that they had just witnessed the deaths of old friends and colleagues along with all the other casualties.

Then the lost BBC van arrived, and a single feed from Rosconway supplied footage that was sent around the world — footage that sent global financial markets into a frenzy as traders tried to digest the implications of a major US oil corporation suffering a terrorist attack on supposedly friendly soil. It showed an attack that had killed three members of the British government, an EU minister, a senior US diplomat, Nicholas Orwell, and, if rumours already surfacing on the internet were to be believed, the Director of British Special Forces.

Just as on 9/11, the financial implications were immediate, and felt throughout the global economy. Oil prices spiked. So did gold, as investors sought a safe haven. The pound plummeted. Investors started dumping UK government bonds. The Bank of England had not yet raised interest rates, but it could only be a matter of minutes, and that would add further downward pressure to the UK economy. The FTSE index in London plunged almost eight per cent as energy stocks, already softened by recent comments made by Malachi Zorn, collapsed. Insurance companies were hit as the multi-billion cost of rebuilding the refinery became evident. The shares of airlines, airport operators, hotel corporations and online travel agencies on both sides of the Atlantic fell as the markets decided that US travellers, nervous of threats to their safety, would stay away from Britain. Defence stocks, however, rose. It was reasonable to assume that the British government’s savage defence cuts might now be reversed. And since, as Zorn had also pointed out in his BBC interview, Britain’s energy supplies were dominated by foreign-owned corporations, the knock-on effects were felt on the bourses of Europe. And with the New York Stock Exchange due to open at two thirty in the afternoon, UK time, they would hit Wall Street like a tsunami rolling across the Atlantic.

There was an atmosphere of stunned, speechless despair at 10 Downing Street. There was frenzy in financial institutions. But at Zorn’s hired mansion on the Wentworth estate there was only the exultant laughter of a man for whom Christmas Day has come earlier, and more joyously, than he could have dreamed possible. This was the single biggest financial coup of all time. He had made tens of billions of dollars, pounds, euros, yen and Chinese yuan. Now all he had to do was collect it. If 9/11 was anything to go by, the markets would soon be shut down. He had just a few minutes, maybe less, to get out of all his positions, collecting his winnings on the way. There wasn’t a second to lose.

Kensington Park Gardens

Alix could see Dmytryk Azarov’s lips move. She could hear the words he was saying. She knew — because he’d made a point of emphasizing this fact, as if to prove her importance to him — that he’d cancelled an important business meeting to be with her. But he was wasting his breath, because she felt so totally disconnected from him that none of it made any difference. He was as distant from her, and as unimportant, as the reporter on the screen of the television that was on, but ignored, in the far corner of the sitting room.

‘Don’t believe what they say in the papers about these women I was supposed to be seeing,’ Azarov was saying, working himself up into a fever of righteous indignation. ‘These… what do they call them?… party girls, who claim that I slept with them. It is all lies. These women just want money, and journalists are vermin who will spread any slander to sell their filthy rags…’

He felt he had to persuade her, that much was obvious. But Alix didn’t care if he’d slept with one party girl, or ten, or one hundred. Her head was filled with Carver. Her body was still sending reminders that he had been inside her, like pulsing echoes of their lovemaking.

‘All the time I was away, all I thought about was you,’ Azarov went on. ‘You were in my dreams. I missed your body next to mine…’

He didn’t realize that all he was doing was making Alix think of Carver’s body next to her. The memory of his touch was so vivid that it sent a little shiver through her, and made her catch her breath.

Azarov saw that tremor of emotion, and, of course, misinterpreted it. ‘You feel the same way, too! I knew it!’

Alix managed a wan smile as Azarov launched into another declaration of his passion for her. She was wondering how and when she was going to extract herself from Azarov’s life. She couldn’t possibly mention Carver. Irrespective of his own behaviour, Azarov did not take kindly to women who betrayed him, or the men with whom they slept. He would want revenge, and that frightened Alix, not just for Carver’s sake but also Azarov’s. He would not know what he was taking on.

She wondered where Carver was now. She knew what it meant when he disappeared the way he’d done last night. He was working. And she knew what that led to, too: violence, danger, secrecy and the constant worry of never knowing where he was and when, if ever, he would come home. By making love to him, and making herself so vulnerable to the effect he had on her, she had let that back into her life. She’d broken a vow she’d made to herself and…

Alix realized that Azarov had fallen silent. He was looking past her with an expression of total incredulity on his face. ‘Mother of God,’ he gasped, regaining the power of speech.

Alix turned to follow his staring eyes, and saw the television screen go blank, before the picture cut back to a pair of presenters trying to maintain some semblance of professional self-control.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

Azarov walked across to the remote control that was sitting beside the television, and rewound the picture. Alix watched explosions fall in upon themselves to leave intact metal towers and tanks. One helicopter flew backwards from the ground up into the sky, and another was magically reconstituted in mid-air. Then Azarov pressed play and the action was repeated, this time in the correct direction and at the right speed, ending in that terrible blank, dead screen. And as she watched Alix knew, with an intuitive certainty she could not possibly explain, that Carver was there. That blazing oil refinery had been the destination he had been heading for when he had left her lying in his bed.

He was there. And now, so soon after she had found him, Alix feared she had lost him for ever.

But while she worried about the personal cost of what had happened, Azarov was already working through the financial consequences. ‘This is exactly what Zorn said would happen. It’s almost as if… no, that’s impossible.’ He looked at Alix, talking to her now less as his lover than as another businessperson. ‘Do you think he knew this would happen? Or that he made it happen?’

Whatever Alix’s differences with Azarov, she shared with him the instinctive Russian belief that behind any disaster there was always a conspiracy. ‘That’s possible, of course it is,’ she said, her mind now fully engaged in the question. Carver had talked about Zorn, linking him to the woman she had known as Celina Novak. Now she could see connections starting to form in her mind between a string of previously separate elements: her mistrust of Zorn, her conviction that Carver had been at the refinery, and now the suggestion that Zorn had somehow been the instigator of the disaster there.