Tom Cain: Carver

Braddock lifted the gun again and pointed it at the second window. The distance was set. He just had to add in the three-metre delay.

That was done. He was ready to fire.

From behind the display panel, Carver saw a man holding a stubby weapon that looked like an overweight sub-machine gun peering in his direction. He tried to stay completely motionless, holding his breath until he saw the man turn away from him and move into a firing position, aiming through a half-open window. Another man was crouched beside him, gazing out of the window. From his silhouette, he looked like the elusive waiter.

Carver came out from behind the panel and dashed for the door, his gun out in front of him.

Braddock turned and pointed his weapon towards Carver, who was already diving for the floor, rolling to one side, hitting the ground as the gun went off. He felt the round punch through the air above his head. It sped through the open door and exploded at the back of the conference room, blasting the wall behind him with a hail of metal fragments. The wall held firm, sheltering Carver and the other two men. Their respite only lasted a matter of seconds.

Carver came to a halt on his stomach, his arms out in front of him, pointing towards the window, both hands still clasping the Sig.

Braddock was getting to his feet, his gun still aiming in Carver’s direction.

Carver fired four times, ignoring the waiter, aiming only at Braddock. The range was no more than five or six metres. The rounds went right through Braddock’s torso and into the window behind him, shattering the glass.

Braddock staggered backwards, dropped the Punisher, lost his balance, and fell backwards through the window, taking the blind, wrapped around him like an impromptu funeral shroud.

Carver took two more steps forward, keeping his gun on the waiter. ‘On the floor!’ he shouted. ‘Face down, arms and legs wide. And don’t move or I’ll blow your fucking head off.’

Carver was expecting a plea for mercy or a desperate cry of, ‘Don’t shoot!’ Instead the words he heard were calm, controlled and completely unexpected: ‘Pick up the grenade launcher.’

He was so taken aback, he could only say, ‘What?’

‘Pick up the damn grenade launcher. Aim it at the window opposite this one. Then fire it. I’ll give you a billion dollars.’

‘ You must be Malachi Zorn,’ said Carver. ‘Roll over. Up against the wall. Sit on your hands.’

Zorn did as he was told. Then he looked at Carver. ‘I mean it. I’ll give you a billion dollars if you just put a couple more rounds into that hall across the way. But, uh, you’d better do it quick. I have a way out of here, but it won’t stay open long.’

Carver shrugged. ‘Sorry, but I’ve got better things to do. I’m Carver, by the way. I’m the guy you paid to kill you.’ Keeping the gun in his right hand, with his eyes still fixed on Zorn, he put his wrist up to his mouth again: ‘This is Carver. I’m in the Wax Chandlers’ Hall. The shooter is down. I have Zorn. Give me five minutes.’

A voice cut in on the line. ‘You know what you have to do.’ Carver did not have to be told that it belonged to Cameron Young.

He put both hands back on the gun and looked directly at Zorn. ‘Your old friends don’t like you any more. They want you dead. Sounds like they’d rather deal with the fake Zorn than the original.’

‘They won’t feel that way when they realize all the money has gone. There’s over a hundred billion, you know, maybe more after tonight. Depends on how many we got with that first grenade.’

‘Yeah, I heard all about the money. I got the full rundown. And here’s the thing: I couldn’t give a shit.’

Zorn laughed. ‘Me neither… I never cared about the actual dollars and cents. They were just a means to an end.’

‘Which was?’

Zorn sighed. In the half-light from the window he suddenly looked washed out, exhausted: a man whose supplies of adrenalin had just evaporated. He sounded, too, like a man who needed to confess.

‘I just wanted to screw the people who’d screwed me. To get my revenge for my mom and dad. To show the world that all these masters of the universe who run the banks and the hedge funds are just a bunch of crooks — greedy, stupid, arrogant crooks. And the only way to do that was to take their money. They don’t understand anything else. I mean, they screwed the whole world, wrecked the economy, took trillions of dollars from all the regular people they treated like dirt…And even when everyone knew what they’d done, they didn’t say sorry. They didn’t admit they’d got it wrong. They just went right back to ripping the whole world off, all over again. So I wanted to rip them off… and I did.’

‘You also killed hundreds of people. What’s that got to do with getting your revenge on rich bankers?’

‘What’s it ever got to do with anything? Every new religion, every revolution, people always die. It’s unavoidable.’

‘That’s every terrorist’s excuse. Those deluded idiots you got to blow up that refinery probably said just the same thing. But don’t kid yourself. This had nothing to do with changing the world. It was all about money.’

‘What can I say? I needed to be certain of what was going to happen.’

‘You wanted to make the car crash,’ said Carver to himself.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Just something someone said to me a few days ago about the way the system works: the money system.’

‘Yeah, well, I took their money, a billion bucks at a time,’ Zorn said defiantly. ‘Then I took positions that made profits you wouldn’t believe. And the guys on the other side of the trades were the banks. So every cent I was making, they were losing. A hundred billion, straight off the top. Even to those fuckers, that’s a lot.’

‘What were you going to do with it?’ Carver asked.

‘The hell knows… all I wanted was a hut on a beach somewhere. Malachi Zorn was meant to be dead. So I’d get myself a new name, maybe a new face. Run a bar or something… whatever.’

‘That was never going to happen. You must have known that.’

‘Maybe. And maybe I didn’t care.’

‘That was your final play, wasn’t it? I’m guessing if they killed you, they’d lose the cash. It’s not in the accounts of Zorn Global, right?’

Zorn nodded. ‘Got it in one.’

‘So where is it?’

Zorn laughed at the sheer cheek of the question. ‘You think I’m going to tell you that? No way. That money is my Get Out of Jail Free card. That money is what stops you killing me. You may not care about it, but your masters sure as shit do.’

‘My masters, as you call them, ordered me to kill you. They didn’t say anything about money.’

‘And are you going to kill me?’

Carver looked down at the man at his feet. It would be so easy to take him out: a double tap, point-blank. But the thought of it made him feel as worn out as Zorn looked. He was sick of the presence of death: sick of taking lives for reasons that, if they’d ever made sense to him, certainly didn’t any more. He heard the sound of running footsteps coming from the corridor, then saw the first torch beams cutting through the dusty air of the wrecked conference room.

‘They’ve arrived,’ Carver said to Zorn. A few moments later the first SAS men came through the door.

‘All yours,’ Carver said. ‘I’m out of here.’

He was in the corridor when he called in to the command centre again. ‘Carver here. I just handed Zorn over to your people.’

Cameron Young’s voice buzzed in Carver’s ear. It sounded anxious, ‘Is he alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you find out what he did with the money?’