Tom Cain: Carver

Mykonos

Over the years, Carver had made a lot more enemies than friends. That was the nature of his business. When you spent your adult life getting rid of criminals, terrorists and malevolent psychopaths of every description, you were bound to provoke a grudge or two.

Carver wasn’t his real name. When his mother had abandoned him as a baby he’d been adopted by a couple who called him Paul and gave him their own surname, Jackson. He began his career as a second lieutenant in the Royal Marines before being selected for the Marines’ own elite-within-an-elite, the Special Boat Service. He quit after a dozen years in uniform, and dreamed of a peaceful, normal life on Civvy Street, until a hit-and-run driver killed the woman he planned to marry. Carver had gone off the rails and been sleeping off a drunken brawl in a police cell when his former commanding officer, Quentin Trench, offered him a job perfectly suited to his particular talents and training.

He became a freelance assassin, his major client a group that called itself the Consortium. It consisted of men whose wealth and influence enabled them to commission work that could not be attributed to any elected government, removing individuals whose guilt had long since been proven beyond any doubt, without recourse to judges or juries. Carver provided them with deniability: calculated hits that either appeared to be random accidents, or could be attributed to another, false perpetrator.

He was very good at his job and paid accordingly, but as long as he possessed a shred of humanity he could not help but be affected by the taking of another man’s life, however evil that life might be. He tried to justify his work mathematically: every guilty life he took saved many more innocent ones, but that rationalization could not stop the steady erosion of his soul, or ease his emotional isolation.

And then, one August night in Paris, in an underpass beside the Seine, Carver committed an act for which there was no justification. He had been set up, and he took fearsome revenge on the men who had deceived and betrayed him. Still, the stain on his conscience had never quite washed away, and his need for atonement had never been satisfied.

This was not, however, a subject on which Carver liked to dwell. He saw no point in trying to repair an unchangeable past or speculate about an unknowable future. He dealt in the here and now, and saved his mental energy for problems he could solve, like the two now confronting him. First he had to deal with the three remaining gunmen pursuing him through the streets of Mykonos. And then he had to get the hell away from the island.

He had not had anything to do with Ginger’s murder, and a decent lawyer might be able to argue successfully that the dead man in the alley had been killed in self-defence. But there was no telling what pressure would be put on the local police and prosecuting magistrate to come up with a guilty man whose arrest and conviction would put tourist minds at ease. Carver had no intention of being that man.

He stepped out of the alley, back on to another crowded shopping street, indistinguishable from the last. The crowds looked no different. The only thing missing was the presence of any threat. Carver scanned his surroundings, searching for any trace of his pursuers, but could see none. He walked out into the middle of the street, clearly visible to anyone who was watching. Nothing happened.

He frowned, made more uneasy by the absence of danger — the dogs that did not bark — than he had been when running for his life, pursued by men with guns. Where had they gone? And why, come to think of it, had they not killed him when they had the chance? These were men who had gunned down a completely innocent victim without a second thought. Yet when he had been running through to the restaurant kitchen they had somehow managed to miss his exposed, defenceless back at virtually point-blank range. And now they were nowhere to be seen.

Carver’s phone rang.

He took it from his pocket, wondering whether to answer.

He looked at the number that had appeared on the screen, recognizing it at once.

Carver pressed the green button, put the phone to his ear, and heard a voice that had recently become very familiar.

‘Hi, baby,’ it said. ‘This is Ginger. If you want to get off the island in one piece, do exactly what I say…’

MI6 headquarters

Jack Grantham gave a sigh that seemed to hint at disappointment. ‘Hmm… I don’t suppose there’s too much to worry about. Nicholas Orwell appears to be making a few more bob by helping this Malachi Zorn — and sundry other equally plutocratic types — to become even wealthier than they already are. They’re all consenting adults. If anything goes wrong they have no one to blame but themselves. Who are we to object?’

Piers Nainby-Martin cleared his throat. ‘Well, there’s just one more thing.’

‘Really?’ Grantham became instantly alert, like a hound that has just caught the scent of a distant fox. ‘What would that be?’

‘There’s a freelance reporter in New York called Camilla DaCosta, who helps us out from time to time. I asked her to look into Zorn, tell people she was writing a newspaper profile of him. Well, she managed to get quite a bit of material, including an interview with an old girlfriend of his…’ Nainby-Martin glanced down at his notes. ‘Name of Domenica Cruz, an ex-stripper.’

‘You mean he’s kinky? If he’s vulnerable to blackmail, that could be a problem.’

‘No, that’s not it. The woman was only working at a club to pay her way through college. She sells insurance now…’

‘A rather less honourable profession than stripping.’

‘Quite possibly. Anyway, her views on Zorn’s personal demons caught my attention. And there’s something at the end that might interest you, too.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just a remark she makes. It’s nothing concrete, but it’s been niggling at me. See what you think. I must apologize, by the way, if Miss DaCosta’s interrogation technique is a little, ah, fluffy for your taste.’

There was a suppressed chuckle around the table. Grantham was one of nature’s bad cops, known for the speed and toughness with which he liked to extract information. He took a deep breath, as if preparing himself for the worst, and then said, ‘Let’s see it, then.’

Once again a grainy video image appeared on screen, this time shot at a sidewalk cafe on a busy Manhattan street, two cups of coffee on the table. An attractive brunette in a formal business suit was looking into the lens with a worried look on her face.

‘You promise me that you’re not going to write nasty things about Mal? I mean, I don’t want to end up in some supermarket tabloid,’ she said.

The voice that answered her was that of a young, upper-middleclass Englishwoman. ‘Oh no, I quite understand. That would be terrible. But don’t worry. You’re quite safe with The Times. We were founded more than two hundred years ago and we’re terribly respectable. The paper of record, and all that sort of thing.’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ Grantham groaned.

‘She knows what she’s doing,’ Nainby-Martin assured him.

On screen, Domenica Cruz relaxed a little, though there was still a trace of hesitancy as she said, ‘Well, in that case, I guess it’s OK if I help you.’

‘So tell me about Mr Zorn. You met at the Penthouse Club, isn’t that right?’

A fresh look of alarm crossed Cruz’s face, and she held a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh my God! I was just trying to pay my way through college and…’

‘I think pole-dancing’s terribly sexy,’ said Camilla DaCosta, encouragingly. ‘I went to classes for a while. My boyfriend absolutely loved it!’