Tom Cain - Assassin

His driver leaned back, half turned his head and spoke over his shoulder. ‘So Ron didn’t get any joy, then?’ He cackled with laughter.

‘I’m not sure I’d describe an act of sexual congress with Raifa Ademovic as joyous, exactly,’ Tyzack dryly observed.

‘Yeah, know what you mean. She’s a fucking loony, that woman.’

‘Precisely… That’s what I like about her.’ Tyzack put on a baseball cap and pushed the peak down over his face to hide it from any traffic cameras. ‘Pull up, the next chance you get,’ he said. ‘We’ll be there soon. I want to move up front.’

He got back on the line to Geary. ‘Check your weapons, and be ready to move on my signal. Won’t be long now.’

Then he took out his own gun and racked the slide. He had a round in the chamber. He was ready to go.

From the house the watchers saw the front window of the Corsa descend a fraction. A red-nailed hand appeared and threw out a cigarette, and then the window closed again.

‘That’s the bloody limit, the post-coital ciggy… I could bloody use a cigarette myself.’

‘You can’t, it’s illegal.’

‘What?’

‘We’re working, right? So this house is now a place of work. That means no one can smoke here. Not even Selsey.’

‘Sod him, it’s me I’m thinking about.’

‘Well, the law says you can’t smoke.’

‘And this is the country I risk my life to defend… unbelievable.’

Just past New Cross, with darkness finally falling at the end of the long summer evening, the traffic began to thin. A new spirit of urgency seemed to get into Grantham and he started driving more aggressively, flashing his lights at the oncoming traffic as he raced down the wrong lane, overtaking anyone who looked likely to impede him. He ran a red light. He cut up a truck on a roundabout, earning a blast of the trucker’s horn and a V-sign out of the cab.

‘That’s more like it,’ said Carver.

Grantham was doing close to sixty as he raced down Lee High Road, slowed briefly to turn right, across the oncoming traffic, into Burnt Ash Road, then hit the gas again.

Three blocks down, Grantham swung right again, ignoring the white Transit van waiting to turn into the same side road and getting an angry flash of the Transit’s beams in his face, briefly dazzling him. The Jag screeched to a halt by Selsey’s house. Grantham and Carver got out.

Grantham walked up to another parked car, a Ford Mondeo, and leaned down by the window to talk to the MI6 officer inside. Carver stayed where he was and looked up and down the road. As he did, the white van came towards him, slowed briefly opposite the house, then sped up again and moved away down the street. Carver watched it go. Something nagged at him, an instinct that told him Tyzack had been in the van.

‘Grantham!’ he shouted. ‘Give me your keys!’

Grantham looked up from the Mondeo. ‘Why?’

‘That van! Tyzack was in it. I’m sure.’

Grantham stood up, shaking his head. He looked at Carver and started walking back towards him, just as the lights on the Corsa came on, its engine started and it too pulled out into the road and drove away.

‘This is getting out of hand,’ Grantham said when he’d reached Carver. ‘You’re jumping at shadows.’ There was something close to sympathy in his voice as he went on, ‘Look, I understand. You’ve had a hell of a time and he’s given you a proper beating. I’m not surprised you’re traumatized, but you’ve got to calm down. There’s been no communication between Tyzack and Selsey and nothing’s happened apart from a couple of chavs having a shag in a parked car.’

Grantham put a hand on Carver’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. ‘Tell me, honestly, are you sure about this whole US President business? Because I’ve gone a long way out on a limb for you and I don’t want it cut out from under me.’

Carver closed his eyes. For a second he felt almost overcome by a wave of exhaustion. Maybe Grantham was right.

No… he wasn’t going to give in now. He hadn’t imagined what Tyzack had said, and he knew, in his bones, what it meant.

‘Don’t worry,’ Carver said. ‘I’m fine. And I’m right about Tyzack. I’m sure of it.’

‘All right, I believe you. But I still don’t think you’re doing anyone any good charging round London chasing paranoid delusions. I’m going to check in with the people here, make sure everything’s good, then I’m taking you back into town. We’ll get you a hotel room. And then I want you to rest. The President lands in approximately thirty-six hours and I need you fighting fit by then.’

It was only a couple of hours later, as he was lying in bed, on the cusp between wakefulness and sleep, that an image flashed into Carver’s head. It was the man in the passenger seat of the white van, driving past Selsey’s house. He’d been looking into his glove compartment, so Carver hadn’t seen his face. But he had seen the cap and he’d recognized the badge: the New York Yankees. He’d seen the same badge, the same cap somewhere else: outside the hot-dog stand in Cascade, Idaho… the creep who’d walked across to chat up Maddy.

Carver opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling as he whispered two words to himself: ‘Damon Tyzack.’

Chantelle Clemens let Jake Tolland know exactly where he stood and she didn’t mince her words. ‘I just want you to know, if it were down to me, you wouldn’t be getting on this plane,’ she said as they stood at the foot of the steps that led up to the US Air Force C-37A Gulfstream jet that would be taking them to England. ‘The only reason you’re here is because Miss Dashian made a personal request for you to accompany her. Seems the one person in the whole Western world that this young woman trusts is a journalist. Guess that shows how much she’s got to learn.’

She glared at Tolland, just daring him to deny it. Young as he was, he had the good sense to stay silent. Clemens went, ‘Humph!’ and then returned to reading the riot act. ‘Here’s the deal. You do not, repeat not, have any press privileges on this flight, nor at any time leading up to the President’s speech. Everything that happens stays private, and I mean a total embargo. One word gets out before the speech, you’re out on your skinny white ass and I don’t care what Missy says. You hear me?’

‘Absolutely. My lips are sealed. But how about after all this is over, can I write about it then?’

Clemens looked at him as if he’d just broken wind. ‘Maybe,’ she conceded. ‘No promises at all, but maybe. And only after you have received explicit clearance from the Chief of Staff’s office. Now get aboard the damn plane before I change my mind.’

Tolland ran up the steps, followed more sedately by Clemens. As she reached the cabin he was already strapping himself into a set facing backwards, directly opposite Lara, who was smiling at him in a way that made her whole face light up. Suddenly she seemed a totally different creature to the shy, suspicious, obviously traumatized girl who had shuffled across the front hall at the House of Freedom.

Oh my Lord, thought Chantelle Clemens. I do believe that crazy child is sweet on the boy. She sighed, shook her head in wonderment at the resilience and optimism of youth, and made her way to her seat. Then she summoned the steward and said, ‘You can tell the captain we’re ready to go.’

Lara was flown into Fairford airbase well before dawn and shown to a guest suite. Someone told her they’d give her a few hours to rest, but Lara was so filled with a mixture of nervousness, excitement and sheer confusion at the dizzying pace of events that she lay wide awake until someone knocked on the door to take her to breakfast.