Tom Cain - Assassin

‘I’ve been invited to a wedding,’ he told her. ‘Would you like to come?’

‘OK, weddings are good, so long as they’re not mine…’

‘No, it’s a mate of mine called Thor Larsson. He’s this ridiculously tall Norwegian with a big mop of ginger hair. He looks like a Viking Rastaman. We’ve done a lot of work together.’

‘Really? What kind of work?’

Carver shrugged. ‘Hard to describe – security consultancy, that sort of thing. Anyway, Thor’s lived in Geneva for years, like me, but he’s Norwegian and so’s Karin, the girl he’s marrying. The wedding’s going to be in Oslo. Do you want to come?’

‘Of course I’ll come, that would be great. I guess I’ll have to get someone in to look after the horses, but, oh my God… what am I going to wear?’

She was laughing as she said it, but Carver kept his face deadpan.

‘We have to change planes in Paris,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘If we left early we could stop off for a night, do a little shopping in the morning. I need a suit. Maybe you could find something too. My treat.’

She sighed happily, then wrapped her arms around him. ‘You just earned yourself a really fun night,’ she said.

Damon Tyzack was in the field next to the house, spying on the lovers through high-powered binoculars. They’d been standing right in front of the kitchen windows, without any inkling that they were being observed, when the Cross woman took Carver in her arms.

The neckline of her thin cotton top was elasticated and she had pulled it over her shoulders, leaving them bare, so that her sleeves were puffed around her upper arm. He imagined what it would be like to stick his fist in her face, put a knife to her throat, hear her begging him to stop.

Tyzack had never caught quite such an intimate glimpse of Carver and his piece before, but he knew all about their little love nest. One afternoon, when the pair of them were off on yet another ride, he’d left his hide among the trees and come down for a tour of the place.

‘My God, it’s the little house on the prairie,’ Tyzack had muttered to himself, examining what struck him as a distinctly modest, unimpressive property. It was wood-built, with an awning surrounding it on all four sides, supported by rough-cut timbers and hung with baskets of mountain flowers. Inside, the ground floor was all stone-flagged. The walls were treated with some sort of wash to make the wood seem paler. Vases, knick-knacks and piles of embroidered cushions proclaimed that the place belonged to a woman. But it wasn’t hard to see that there was a man about the house.

A big, brass-framed double bed stood in the bitch’s room upstairs. A pair of men’s trousers was draped over one end of the frame. A five-blade razor rested in a mug by the bathroom sink. Carver had made himself right at home.

Later, Tyzack had gone down to the garage where Cross kept her gaudily painted old truck and slipped a small, magnetized tracking device inside one of the rear wheel arches. He wanted to be able to follow the lovers if they ever left their little nest. He, meanwhile, would remain completely undetected, just as he had been when the two of them had been up in the woods, sitting on their horses just yards from his hide, babbling inanely about the trees smelling of vanilla.

The worst of it was, Tyzack could see that Carver was having a high old time. He’d tucked away a nice little pile of cash. He had a pretty girl making goo-goo eyes at him. He was getting his meals cooked. Oh yes, our Samuel was as happy as a sandboy. That happiness angered Tyzack more than anything. It wasn’t right that the man who had wrecked his life should be so at peace with the world. He couldn’t just lie there doing nothing about it. The situation demanded a fly or two in the ointment.

Tyzack put away his binoculars and went back up to the woods. Then he cleaned up his hide, covered his traces and went on his way.

Jake Tolland drove past the endless blocks of Dubai’s building sites, each tower higher than the last, its design more flamboyant, its promises to prospective tenants more outrageous. Yet many of those glittering towers lay empty; many of the building sites were idle. The boom was over, the miracle exposed as a financial sleight of hand. The giant steel skeletons looked like a dinosaur graveyard, Ground Zero for the global economy.

Tolland turned into a quiet residential street in the Jumeirah district, parked his car and approached a metal door set into a high concrete wall. He pressed the button on the intercom and then said, ‘Hello? This is Jake Tolland, from the London Times. I have an appointment to see Mrs Khan.’

There was no response, just a buzzing sound as the door unlocked. Tolland, a tall, bespectacled stringbean in his mid-twenties, with the first signs of hair loss already eating away at his temples, made his way across a dusty yard, dotted with spindly trees. Three small children were playing a game in the dirt, scattering the ground with cheap, brightly coloured plastic toys. A flight of concrete steps led up to a small, boxy, modern villa.

Tolland rang the bell beside the glass front door and watched as a woman, dressed in a plain black trouser suit, her head covered by a grey scarf that wrapped around her neck, crossed the tiled floor of the hallway and opened the door.

He gave a friendly, ingratiating smile. ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I’m-’

‘I know who you are, sweetie,’ said the woman in the hallway, in an accent that came direct from the back streets of Brooklyn. ‘I read you all the time online. Why don’t you come right on in?’

Jake Tolland had always wanted to be a foreign correspondent. Reckoning that a significant proportion of all the bad news – and thus good stories – in the world came from a bloodstained smear of revolution, war, disorder and crime that stretched from Russia, through the Balkans and into the Middle East, he had studied Russian at Cambridge University and then learned Arabic at the Language Centre of London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Armed with these two qualifications and an inquisitive nature, Tolland soon amassed an impressive portfolio of freelance articles and a couple of well-received books that earned him a contract at The Times.

His work also brought him to the attention of talent scouts at MI6, who have long used Fleet Street journalists as auxiliary spies. For the past three years, Tolland had been carrying out low-risk intelligence jobs, gathering information and acting as a conduit between field agents and London. So he had not been in the least surprised to get a call from Bill Selsey, tipping him off to a juicy little yarn about a mysterious Englishman who had been buying and then freeing trafficked prostitutes in Dubai.

‘Go to a place called the House of Freedom,’ Selsey had told him. ‘It’s a refuge run by an American woman called Sadira Khan. She’s married to a Pakistani, hence the name. We think there’s a girl at the refuge called Lara. She was sent there by an Englishman, who appears to have bought her at some sort of slave auction and then freed her – proper Scarlet Pimpernel stuff. We’re interested in him, so be a good chap, see what you can find out, pass it all on to us, and get yourself an exclusive. All I ask is have a word with me before you file. Let me run an eye over what you’ve written, make sure there’s nothing in there we’d rather keep private.’

Like any refuge, the House of Freedom was filled with vulnerable, traumatized women. It had taken Tolland an hour of patient persuasion on the telephone to arrange an appointment, and still more negotiation, sitting around a dining table in a bare, magnolia-painted room, before Sadira agreed to speak to Lara Dashian on his behalf.