Tom Cain - Carver

‘What will you do if Zorn really did plan all this?’ she asked Azarov. ‘I did warn you that I thought there was something suspicious about his scheme.’

Azarov grinned. ‘And I told you that a man should not pick up the dice unless he has the balls to lose everything on a single roll. I am very happy that I placed my money on Zorn. He has certainly rolled the dice. Surely, too, he will win.’

A picture of Nicholas Orwell appeared on the screen, as a presenter’s voice announced that he was missing, believed dead at the scene.

Now Azarov laughed out loud. ‘So he was willing to let his closest ally die to help his plan succeed. Ha! This Zorn is a man with iron in his soul.’

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ Alix insisted. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘And you asked the wrong question, my beautiful darling. It should have been: what are we going to do? And I will tell you. We have been invited to go to the tennis at Wimbledon tomorrow with Malachi Zorn. If he still goes — and he will, I guarantee — then we will go with him. I want to take another close look at this man, and I would like you to do the same. I want to know exactly what he is made of, and a woman’s eye will see what a man’s does not. You know the saying: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I do not yet know whether Malachi Zorn is my greatest friend or my most bitter enemy. But either way, I will stay close.’

Dmytryk Azarov was by no means the only one of Malachi Zorn’s investors to be glued to the TV news. In his suite at Claridge’s, chosen at Charlene’s insistence because it had been designed by Diane von Furstenberg, Mort Lockheimer was cheering every horrific element of the disaster unfolding before his eyes. He had watched Zorn’s BBC interview and been puzzled by the way so much of it had been devoted to the risk of energy terrorism. Now he got it. Zorn had obviously been given some kind of inside information that an attack was imminent — either from the perpetrators or through leaks from the security forces; Lockheimer wasn’t bothered which. Zorn must have set up a bunch of short positions, just like he’d done so many times before. Now he was watching them all pay off in spades. And if Zorn was getting rich, so was Lockheimer.

Lockheimer was at least forty pounds overweight. His entire body was covered in a thick mat of black and grey hair, and the only thing covering it right now was a white towelling bathrobe. ‘What did I tell you!’ he exclaimed, grabbing Charlene in a gleeful bear hug. ‘That little fucker Zorn just hit the fuckin’ jackpot. Didn’t I say you should blow him… didn’t I?’

Charlene looked at her husband appraisingly. ‘He made us a lot, huh? Millions?’

‘Tens of millions, baby!’

She reached down and started undoing the knot of the towelling belt that was holding her husband’s robe together. ‘Well, in that case, sweetie, why don’t I just blow you?’

Rosconway

The Cabinet office staff had arranged for a St John Ambulance crew to be present at the conference, just in case anyone tripped over a pipe, or was taken ill. Somehow they had survived the blast with their vehicle intact. But Carver only had to take one look at the chalk-white skin and dazed eyes of the amateur volunteers to know that they were too traumatized by the overwhelming violence that they had just witnessed to be of any help. It made little difference: he and Schultz knew enough about basic battlefield medicine to tend to Nikki Wilkins’s immediate needs. They climbed up into the ambulance and commandeered the splints, bandages and morphine shots they needed to stabilize her broken leg and head injury, and reduce the pain of the wounds. Then they carried Wilkins, still unconscious, back to the Audi, laid her out along the rear seat, and strapped her in as best they could.

‘Drive,’ said Carver. ‘Head for Pembroke. There’s got to be a hospital there.’

They were less than a mile down the road, still travelling beneath a pall of smoke that was spreading across the sky as far as the eye could see, before Carver had gone online and found both the location of the South Pembrokeshire Hospital and directions for getting there. He was about to offer Schultz his condolences for Tyrrell’s loss — nothing too overwrought, just a simple acknowledgement that a good man had gone — when the phone rang. It was Grantham. His first words were: ‘You’re alive.’

‘Don’t sound so disappointed,’ Carver replied.

‘You know, for once, I might actually be pleased to hear your voice,’ said Grantham. ‘So what the hell just happened?’

‘Someone stuck a dozen home-made mortar barrel tubes in an old Hiace van, loaded them with explosive shells, and blew the shit out of an entire refinery. And I should have stopped them.’

‘How?’

‘I wasn’t at the refinery when the shells hit. I was at the launch site.’

‘What do you mean? Had you found out what was happening?’

‘No, I’d worked out what might happen. I didn’t think there’d actually be anything there.’

‘Well, that’s as clear as mud.’

‘Sorry…’ It struck Carver that he might not be as out of it as that St John Ambulance crew, but his mind was still reeling as it struggled to process what he had just experienced. It was time he pulled himself together.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Here’s how it was done. The van that contained the mortars was parked inside an old barn, at a deserted farmyard about a kilometre from the refinery. The weapon was set to a timer, along with some kind of incendiary device — petrol by the smell of it. The moment the mortars fired, the van was burned out, removing all trace of the people who’d driven it or worked on the weapon. This was a professional job, straight out of the old IRA manual.’

‘Really? You think there were Paddies involved?’

‘Maybe… but it could just as easily have been one of ours. Anyone who served in Ulster during the Troubles, or even did bomb disposal work on this side of the Irish Sea, would have seen things like this.’

‘But how could they have known about the conference today?’

Carver thought for a moment: no, it was out of the question. ‘They couldn’t,’ he said, definitively. ‘Look, this was a totally last-minute event. No one had any warning. That’s why it was such a dog’s breakfast. The organization, the security, the media coverage — it was all a total joke. But this attack was the exact opposite. It was very carefully calculated. Whoever hit the refinery had every single one of those launcher tubes calibrated to the last millimetre, the last bloody fraction of a degree. Each of those things hit a target. And making the launch tubes, the framework to hold them, all the projectiles… getting hold of the explosives… no, there wasn’t anything last-minute about that. I’d say weeks of preparation, even months, went into this.’

‘So what are you saying — that it was just a bloody coincidence? I’m not buying that.’

‘Why not? Stranger things have happened. But even if it was a coincidence that the attack and the conference were planned for the same place at the same time, I don’t think there was anything remotely coincidental about the time and place of the attack itself. Come on… someone blows the crap out of a massive oil refinery the day after Malachi Zorn’s told the whole world that eco-terrorism is the big new threat… What do you think?’

‘I think it’s a bit bloody adjacent, certainly.’

‘Exactly, so what are the markets doing right now? Let me guess: oil price rocketing, stocks crashing, pound through the floor…’

‘All of that and more,’ Grantham agreed. ‘It’s a total nightmare. The economy was weak to begin with. An event like this could send it over the edge.’