Tom Cain - Carver

‘Back off,’ one of them said, as Zorn held out the magnum of champagne so that its neck was tilted upwards over Drinkwater’s glass, ready to pour if required. ‘Mr Zorn has his own personal drinks with him. Someone should have told you that.’

‘No one told me anything,’ Zorn replied, grateful that the guests were so tightly packed and the hubbub of conversation and laughter so loud that no one could hear just how lousy his attempt at a Polish accent really was.

There had sure been an incredible turnout. The assassination attempt on Wednesday had made this an even hotter ticket than it had been before. Everyone wanted to be able to say that they’d been to Zorn’s public resurrection from the apparent jaws of death. Zorn had spotted a couple of investors who’d privately told him they would not be able to make it. One of them had come all the way from Palo Alto, California, another from Kyoto, Japan. They must have flown in overnight. No one wanted to say no to this invitation.

The celebrity eye candy was out in force, too: a smattering of supermodels, actresses, athletes and rock stars, all enticed by the prospect of a fifty-thousand-dollar stake in Zorn Global, just for a walk down the red carpet, a wave to the paparazzi and a couple of hours of their time. But as entertaining as it was to gawp at beautiful women in revealing clothes, or men with Super Bowl rings and Olympic gold medals, Zorn’s real interest was in guests who were far less easy on the eye. With a very few exceptions, the men whose presence he was committing to memory tended to be dressed conservatively, albeit expensively; to be aged fifty and over; and to be deeply dull, if not actually unappealing to look at. But they owned the fashion houses, movie studios, TV channels and sports franchises that kept the celebrities in business. They were the CEOs and chairmen of the banks into which the stars placed their pay cheques. They took the decisions which closed factories in one place, and reopened them thousands of miles away in some cheaper, more convenient location. They were his investors, and it was very important to Malachi Zorn to know precisely who had turned up, because then he would know who was going to die. And once he knew that, he could determine the final few plays in his great game.

‘Almost there, Dad!’ he whispered to himself.

He put the magnum down on the edge of one of the buffet tables and checked his watch. If they were sticking to the original schedule, he was due to start speaking in ten minutes, or rather, Drinkwater was. It was kind of a pity, really, Zorn thought. He was curious to know what ‘he’ was planning to say. But there wasn’t going to be much of a speech. A minute, two at the most after Drinkwater started speaking, Braddock would go into action. Zorn wanted to be at his screen, ready to react to the first market movements when news of the massacre got out. He couldn’t afford to stick around at his party a moment longer.

Leaving the bottle on the table, he turned and made his way as quickly as possible to the staff exit.

Carver was wondering what the hell he was doing. The room was so packed that it was hard to see more than a few metres in any direction. The sound of chit-chat and laughter was so loud that it was almost impossible to overhear anything distinct. He could only catch fleeting glimpses of individual guests. A tall blonde dressed to kill in a scarlet cocktail dress caught his eye; him and every other heterosexual male in the room. Something about her nagged at him, but before he could react in any way, the wall of people had closed again and she had disappeared from view. And that was the problem: if anything did happen, it would be virtually impossible to make his way through the press of people fast enough to take the split-second action that might be required.

His phone buzzed: a text from Alix: ‘Stuck in traffic but on my way, like it or not haha! Ax’

Carver winced. He’d done all he could to persuade Alix not to come, but she’d never been the type to do as she was told: he wouldn’t be interested in her if she were. This time, though, it was serious. Her safety was at stake. He had to think of a way to head her off.

As he was looking at his phone screen, Carver was half-aware of a waiter a few feet away, putting a bottle of champagne down on the table and checking his watch, but he paid him little attention. The human brain is not particularly interested in people or things that are where they might be expected to be, doing what they should be doing. But it reacts immediately to sudden movement: it senses a possible threat and an immediate fight or flight reaction kicks in.

Just as Carver pressed ‘send’, the waiter started walking away from the table, and that unexpected motion acted like a wake-up call, snapping Carver straight back into an alert and focused state of mind. That waiter had moved like a man who had come to a realization of some kind and made a conscious decision to act on it. That wasn’t in itself suspicious. A bored man on minimum wage checks the time, wonders how much more of his shift there is to go, then decides he’d better do some work before he gets a bollocking. But if that were the case, why did the waiter leave the champagne behind? And why did his watch look like a Rolex? It could have been a cheap fake, of course. Or was the watch real, and the waiter an imitation? No one with any half-decent military, police or intelligence training would make such a basic mistake. So the man had to be an amateur of some kind. He could be a reporter looking for a scoop, or a paparazzi with a hidden camera, in which case he was a serious irritation, but posed no immediate danger. Or he could have serious, hostile intent. The attack on Rosconway had been planned by experienced professionals, but executed by gullible beginners, disposable fall guys to be used and thrown away. Was Zorn planning something similar here?

It had taken Carver just a few seconds to collate, analyse and process all this data: considering all the various possibilities, rejecting some, accepting others on an essentially subconscious level. Meanwhile another part of his mind was watching the waiter push and squeeze his way through the crammed guests towards the staff exit. And then the word ‘Zorn’ flashed into his brain like a neon sign.

No, that was impossible. Zorn was a wanted criminal. He was certainly smart enough to have worked out for himself that there would be an unofficial death sentence on his head. It would be an act of utter foolhardiness to walk into a room filled with armed men employed by the government he had publicly humiliated, and with the wealthy, powerful men he’d secretly ripped off. Either that or the act of a supremely confident, even arrogant man, convinced of his own superiority over the common herd, and addicted to the challenge of pitting himself against apparently overwhelming odds and winning.

The waiter had not looked like Zorn, but the differences were superficial: long dark hair instead of short and blond; a heavy moustache where Zorn was clean-shaven; heavy-rimmed glasses for a man with twenty-twenty vision. The height and built, though, were entirely consistent.

There was no guarantee whatever that the waiter really was Malachi Zorn. He could turn out to be completely legitimate. This could all be an example of Carver’s excessive paranoia. But Carver’s willingness to see potential danger in even the most innocent circumstances had helped keep him alive all these years.

Before he had even finished thinking the problem through he was already on the move, easing his way past dark-suited men and brightly dressed women, murmuring brusque apologies as he went, following the waiter like a hunter tracking his prey.