Tom Cain - Carver

Carver went up to the nearest guard and produced his Ministry of Defence ID.

‘I need to get into the building,’ he said.

‘No, you don’t,’ said the guard. ‘No one gets in unless they’re on the list. You’re not on the list. You don’t get in.’

He gave a smug, self-satisfied nod, as if delighted by his awesome powers of reasoning.

‘Yes, I do,’ Carver said.

‘You got a problem, mate?’ asked the second security guard, lumbering towards Carver.

‘No… you do. Look at your mate’s head.’

‘What the fuck are you going on about?’

‘Look at his head.’

A red laser dot was glowing right in the centre of the security guard’s forehead.

‘Oh shit…’

‘You got one too, mate!’ the first guard shouted.

‘So here’s the thing,’ Carver went on. ‘You’re both currently under observation by Metropolitan Police snipers. With me so far?’

The men nodded.

‘Now, I’m about to go in this building. Try to stop me and they’ll shoot. Or stand up against the wall, legs apart, hands flat against the wall, and don’t move, and you won’t have a bullet where those red dots are. What do you reckon?’

The men spun round and raced for the wall. Carver walked up the stairs, drawing his gun as he went, relieved that he had not had to use it earlier: if Zorn was in here, he didn’t want him alerted by the sound of gunfire.

Alix ran up the staircase towards the reception. She heard the sound of laughter and then, as she got to the first-floor landing and turned left towards the Livery Hall, it was followed by applause that was merely polite to begin with, but then built to a cheering, hooting, foot-stamping crescendo. When she saw the screens at the very far end of the room, she understood why. Malachi Zorn was about to speak to his loyal disciples, every one of whom expected to be told just how much richer they were this evening than they had been at the start of the week.

She took her eyes from the screen and, all thoughts of Azarov driven from her mind tried to scan the room for Carver. It was no good. She’d never find him in this crowd. Her stomach seemed to be gripped by sharp steel claws as Celina Novak’s words echoed in her memory: ‘You’re much too late.’ No… she couldn’t be. To win Carver back again, only to lose him for ever, would be more than she could bear. She pushed her way through the people, ignoring the protests as she barged against bodies and stepped on toes, turning her head this way and that in the desperate hope that she might, by pure chance, catch sight of the man she loved.

Up on stage, Zorn began to speak: ‘Thank you… thank you… No, really, that’s enough!’ The joke broke the spell, and the laughter faded away into an expectant silence. ‘So… I guess you want to hear how the fund is doing, huh?’

There was another laugh, and a couple of good-humoured heckles from the crowd. ‘Damn right we do!’ shouted one man.

Mort Lockheimer had spent the days since the Rosconway attack working through endless trading permutations in his mind, trying to decide just how much had already been added to the value of his personal Zorn Global fund. Now he was punching the air and whooping like a fan at a ball game. ‘Show me the money!’ he yelled.

‘How come you don’t get that excited over me?’ asked Charlene.

‘Oh, baby, just you wait!’ he replied. Then he tilted his head back and screamed, ‘Mo-ney!! Mo-ney!!’

Zorn watched, enthralled, his fingers jammed in his ears, as Braddock lifted the futuristic black gun to his shoulder and pressed a button on its side. The gun hummed as it charged itself for a few seconds, getting ready to fire. Then Braddock set his sights on the first window: the one directly opposite the stage on which Drinkwater would now be speaking.

Braddock was now seeing the world through his weapon’s fire-control system. In the middle of the viewfinder there was a small red cross. He lined it up on the window, pressed another button, and let the laser-based system calculate the distance to the window and transmit that information to the grenade now sitting in the barrel. He adjusted the range so that the round would explode after it had travelled three metres beyond the window. Then he fired. And even before the noise of the explosion had died away he was swinging the gun towards the next window.

Alix was aware that something had smashed through one of the great windows that ran the length of the room. The air itself seemed to explode as a blast erupted above the guests’ heads, shattering one of the chandeliers, which plunged to the floor. The fragmented metal from the grenade combined with shards of broken crystal from the chandelier to create a flesh-shredding volley of shrapnel that sliced into the people crammed within the blast radius.

Alix screamed in terror. Something hit her skull. There was a momentary burst of pain more intense than any she had ever known. And then everything went black.

Carver heard the gun blast, drew the Sig Sauer from inside his jacket, and ran pell-mell up the next flight of stairs and along the corridor on the floor above. Whatever had just gone off, it was a lot more than a conventional rifle. And from the direction the noise had come from, on the western side of the building, it had been fired in the direction of the Goldsmiths’ Hall. There were five hundred people crammed in there, but Carver only cared about one of them: Alix. He prayed that she was still stuck in traffic. Or that the security people were taking their time letting her in. Or that she was stuck down in the basement, fixing her face in the ladies’ room. Anything would do, just so long as she hadn’t made it to the party.

The noise had come from somewhere along this corridor. The lights weren’t on up here, but someone was certainly home.

Carver took a second to take a breath and calm his racing pulse and heaving chest, then eased open the door to the main conference room and went in, his gun out ahead of him, seeing nothing but the dark shapes of the display panels boasting of Bandekar Technologies’ achievements and the lighting rig above them. There were no lights on here, either, and all the blinds were down. But as his eyes acclimatized to the dark, Carver could detect a door open at the far end of the room, and that the room beyond it was very slightly brighter than this one. At least one blind was open. And that, Carver knew, was where the shooter would be. He made his way forward, trying to combine speed with stealth as best he could. He had no idea that there were two dead bodies lying on the floor, half-hidden behind the panels… not until he tripped on Ashok Bandekar’s outstretched arm, and stumbled and bumped into the side of one of the panels. It wasn’t much noise, just a body against a metal frame, and a slight, involuntary grunt at the shock of the impact. But in that dark and silent room it sounded to Carver like an avalanche.

The routine was easy. Acquire the target, allow the fire-control system to set its range and… what was that? Braddock couldn’t hear much through his ear protectors, but some soldier’s instinct, honed over years of combat, was warning him of danger. He paused for a moment and frowned. Zorn was motionless, his rapt gaze entirely focused on the chaos visible through the shattered window of the Goldsmiths’ Hall. No, the threat was outside the room.

Braddock lowered the Punisher and turned his head in the direction the sound had come from, peering towards the open door to the conference room. He could see the black silhouettes of the display panels, but there was no sign of anything or anyone else. He was half-tempted to fire a grenade through the door, set to explode inside the conference room. That would soon solve the problem, if there was one. But he only had four rounds, and they were all needed to do the job on the Goldsmiths’ Hall. He looked hard for another second, lifting one of the protectors off his ear to listen for any sound on the far side of the door. But he saw and heard nothing. He gave a sharp twitch of irritation, then turned back to the window, raising the gun again. He’d lost several precious seconds, and every one of them represented a fraction less time to get away when the job was done.