Tom Cain - Carver

Carver was there within the hour.

Friday, 1 July

The City of London

English summers are unreliable, and even July evenings can be damp and chilly. This one was no exception. Sunshine earlier in the day had given way to heavy grey cloud and blustery showers, so Ronnie Braddock had a raincoat on and the collar up as he arrived for his interview to be Head of Security at Bandekar Technologies. The legitimate aspects of his career, including his exemplary military service record, made him well-qualified for the role, while the illegitimate aspects were not known to anyone except the people who had hired him. And they certainly weren’t talking.

Braddock was listed as Mr Bandekar’s final interview at 6.00 p.m. on Friday — a last-minute addition to the list. He arrived early, showing his driver’s licence to the goons on the door, neither of whom had ever had anything to do with him. When he got to the conference room, he asked the receptionist if there was a men’s room anywhere near. ‘Pre-match nerves,’ he explained, with an embarrassed smile.

He was given directions to the nearest toilet, but when he left the conference room he forgot all about them. Instead he went to the storeroom where the flight-cases had been stacked. He opened the case with the false bottom, and then removed the two shrink-wrapped packages. Using a Swiss Army knife he then cut open the smaller of the two packages and took out the box it contained. Inside the box was a fully loaded Glock 27 subcompact pistol, an AAC Evolution. 40 suppressor, and a spare eleven-round magazine. Braddock checked the Glock, fitted the suppressor, then placed the fully assembled gun within easy reach while he dealt with the other package. It didn’t take long to be reassured that everything was in order. The XM-25 Punisher grenade launcher that he had gone to such trouble to steal in Afghanistan had made it all the way to the City of London in one piece. It wouldn’t be long now before he found out just how good it really was. First, though, there was one other piece of business to attend to.

He put the Punisher back in the flight-case, closing the top. Then he picked up the Glock and held it down behind his back as he returned to the conference room.

‘Hello!’ said the receptionist cheerfully as she saw him come back in. ‘You were gone a long time. You must have been nervous! Well, there’s no need to worry. Mr Bandekar’s a charming gentleman. Can I get you some tea?’

‘Cheers, that would be great, yeah.’

She got up from behind her desk, and as she did Braddock shot her twice: one bullet in the body, and then another at point-blank range to the head before she had a chance to scream.

The suppressor was very effective, but there’s no such thing as a total silencer. So Braddock needed to move quickly now, before anyone worked out what was happening. He went straight to the door to the inner office, opened it, and shot the interviewee in the back of his head, blowing a chunk of his brains out through his forehead and on to the desk behind which Bandekar was desperately trying to heave his massive bulk to his feet.

‘You’ll need more than two, big boy,’ said Braddock. So he used four bullets on the portly Indian. Then he went to the window and drew the blind, repeating the process with the conference room windows. He did not turn the lights on, so the room was in semidarkness as he dragged the three corpses behind the display panels. It was more to get them out of the way than to hide them; the thick trails of blood smeared across the carpet were like arrows leading the eye to the bodies’ locations.

Braddock was sweaty, panting and irritable by the time he’d finished shifting Bandekar. He took a minute to cool down mentally as well as emotionally before he returned to the storeroom, collected the Punisher and went back to the office. Lifting the blind and peering out, he could see five huge, brightly lit windows across the way. Not long to go now.

Ginger Sternberg was not the kind of woman who is easily impressed, but even she had to admit that the Goldsmiths’ Hall was a spectacularly appropriate location for a gathering of the very rich. It was right in the heart of the City of London, less than half a mile from the Bank of England, and even closer to the Stock Exchange and St Paul’s Cathedral. The main entrance was flanked on either side by massive classical columns that rose the full height of the building. Once inside, she came to a hall whose panelled walls and coffered ceiling were entirely covered

in green, grey and white marble. Directly in front of her, a magnificent staircase rose in a single flight of a dozen wide steps before splitting in two to form a shallow Y.

Ahead of her, Ginger heard a woman with a grating New York accent whining at her fat, balding ape of a husband, ‘Hey, Morty, I want stairs just like this in our next place.’

‘Whatever you want, Charl, whatever you want,’ he replied, humouring her.

Ginger wondered what Mort would be getting his mistress while his wife spent her time redecorating: not marble staircases, that was for sure.

A stream of guests were making their way up to the party itself: the men formally dressed in smart suits, the women dazzling in couture dresses and sparkling jewels. Ginger ignored the men and concentrated on her female competition, instantly noting those who were even remotely worthy of her attention, and grading their dresses, accessories, hair, faces and figures. It was an automatic reflex, combining natural feminine curiosity with professional scrutiny: when you had been trained to seduce men for a living, you very soon learned to determine who might beat you to your target. Tonight, of course, her task was very different. But even so, it gave her pleasure to scan the parade of rich men’s wives, scattered with the occasional famous face, and know that she could still do battle with any of them. Her hair was blonde for the night. Her dress was a Valentino, in his signature red. Her heels were high enough to make her taller than all but a very few men. Other women might have felt self-conscious, looking down on so many people. To Ginger, that was merely the natural order of things.

She moved with the human tide, up the stairs towards the main Livery Hall where the launch was being held. Waiters and waitresses, dressed all in black, lined the way from the stairs to the hall, holding silver trays laden with glasses of champagne. Ginger took a glass, sipped and smiled to herself as she tasted the deliciously rich, sophisticated, complex flavour so characteristic of the Krug that Zorn liked to serve. Most of the people around her would be dead within the hour. But at least their final drink would be a great one.

The hall itself could have been a banqueting chamber in the palace of a Roman emperor or Russian tsar, so massive were its proportions, so rich the colour scheme of scarlet and gold. More mighty columns supported an even more ornate ceiling, and at the far end of the room a velvet-draped alcove was filled with a spectacular display of gold platters, jugs and cups. The most inspiring sight of all, however, came from the four great crystal chandeliers that hung over the centre of the room. They glittered not with electric bulbs, but with almost two hundred actual candles that cast a soft, warm, golden glow over the hall. The light was extraordinarily flattering, and it gave the whole event, whose sole purpose was to worship at the altar of money, an unexpectedly sensual atmosphere.

It was almost a pity, Ginger thought, that it would all soon be destroyed. Almost a pity: but not quite.

‘Would you like some more champagne, sir?’

Malachi Zorn could not resist it. He’d seen Drinkwater across the room, sitting in his wheelchair, playing the same role, but for a new master, and had felt compelled to go right up to his own double. So now here he was in disguise, offering a drink to a man who looked exactly like his real, undisguised self. It was like some crazy hall of mirrors, mixed with a delicious, thrill-ride sensation of fear. If anyone realized what he was doing, he’d be lost. But no one did. The blatantly obvious police protection unit who were attempting to blend into the crowd, despite the unsubtle bulges in their jackets where their guns were holstered, glared at him suspiciously. But they were doing that to anyone who got within ten metres of Drinkwater.