Tom Cain: Assassin

‘Now sit down at the table, hands on the table-top, palms down.’

‘Sure,’ said Carver and once again obeyed.

For a while, nothing happened. From where he was sitting, Carver could look past the agent, through the door and into the corridor. So, when footsteps sounded outside the room, he was the first to see the tall, commanding figure dressed in jeans and a windcheater with the presidential insignia on the left breast standing framed in the doorway.

Automatically Carver got to his feet.

‘Sit down!’ screamed the agent, his head suddenly jerking to one side as he realized that his President was in the room.

‘Take it easy, son,’ Roberts said.

Tord Bahr was following right behind the President. He went up to the agent and said a few words in his ear, sending him from the room.

Lincoln Roberts turned his attention to Carver. He stood still, saying nothing, just weighing him up. Finally he said, ‘Sit down.’

Roberts strolled over to the coffee jug and poured himself a cup, nice and easy, just as though this were a casual social visit between friends. After all that had just happened there was something almost unnatural about his aura of calm self-control. His drink fixed, he sat down opposite Carver in the chair that Bahr had been occupying no more than ten minutes earlier. He moved the bowl of cereal out of his way, leaving the table clear between him and Carver. Bahr very deliberately remained on his feet, evidently determined to reassert his unbending sense of duty.

Roberts took a sip of coffee. ‘Mmm, that’s good,’ he said appreciatively. ‘Your sandwich OK?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Carver wasn’t a man who often felt awed by anyone else’s presence. But then he’d never sat down for coffee with a US president before, let alone one he was willing to risk his life for. Most politicians he’d met, he wouldn’t have jumped from a plane at 25,000 feet just to test their security systems. He’d have chucked them out of it, instead, see how that worked.

Roberts, though, had something different about him. When he talked about trying to change things for the better he sounded as though he truly meant it. Maybe he was just a better actor than the rest of them. What was that saying? If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. That could be his secret, though Carver hoped it wasn’t. Time would tell. Meanwhile, Carver resumed chewing on his steak, waiting to see what the President wanted to say.

‘You like my yacht?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ Carver replied. ‘She’s a beautiful boat.’

Roberts nodded over his coffee mug. ‘I agree. She’s thirty years old, you know, got a Brazilian hardwood hull. I had her restored a while back. When I get her out on the water, feel the wind in her sails, breathe in that salt sea air… well, I guess that’s when I’m most at peace with the world.’

The President leaned forward and looked Carver in the eye, and now he wasn’t anyone’s friend. He was a man who had the ambition, the drive and the ruthless focus required to work his way from obscurity to the most powerful job in the world.

‘You want to tell me what you thought you were doing wrecking that peace?’

‘Keeping you alive, sir – making sure you never became another Mountbatten,’ Carver replied. ‘In 1979, the IRA killed Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prince Charles’s “Uncle Dickie”, by blowing up his yacht. Last night, I attached a dummy device to the hull of the Lady Rosalie, right beneath the cockpit, about sixty seconds before I ran like a lunatic across that lawn out there. There was a sensor attached to it that measured boat-speed through the water, wired to explode once the boat reached eight knots. Nothing serious, just a great big bang and a lot of red dye, but I think it made my point.

‘Of course, if I’d been a real assassin, I wouldn’t be sitting here opposite you now. I’d have sneaked back out of your dock, the same way I came in, swum down past the boundary of your property and come ashore. Then I’d have got into the sand-coloured Saturn Astra that’s parked in the lot at the Knotts Island Market, just a mile or two down the road from here, driven to the nearest airport and got a ticket out, bound for any destination on earth. I’d be gone before you even knew what I’d done.’

‘So why attack the house?’ asked the President.

‘I wanted to make a point, sir. Special Agent Bahr asked me to stage an assassination attempt as an exercise to test his agents’ readiness. So I gave them a very obvious assassin, right there in everyone’s face. Once he’d been taken out, they all thought the exercise was over. I don’t blame them: it’s only natural. This morning, they were relaxed, feeling good. The last thing anyone expected at that point was the actual hit. But that was the point: if anyone does this for real, it’s going to be unexpected. Maybe in movies you see nut-jobs posting threatening letters, making the hero run round the streets chasing messages on payphones, letting everyone know there’s a killing on the way. But the guys at the top of this business just come in quietly, do the job, and half the time no one ever knows that there even was an assassination. They think it was an accident.’

‘You sound awfully like a man who’s talking from experience.’

‘Let’s just say I was very well trained, Mr President, and I served in various units with a wide range of duties.’

Roberts did not reply, just drank his coffee. He swallowed, grimaced and murmured, ‘Hmm…’ Then he got up from the table and held out a hand. As Carver shook it, the President said, ‘It’s been very interesting meeting you, Mr Carver. You gave me a lot to think about. You mind if I give you some advice in return?’

‘Of course not, Mr President.’

‘Those things you said about assassinations…’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I’d advise you very strongly not to put any of your ideas into practice.’

‘No, sir, my work these days is based entirely on keeping people safe from harm. I sleep better that way. One thing I learned from active service was that every time you cause someone else to be killed you kill a bit more of yourself. Gets to the point where there’s barely anything left. It’s not a good place to be.’

Roberts frowned. ‘Goodbye, Mr Carver,’ he said. ‘Have a safe journey home.’

The President left the room, but Bahr stayed behind. When the two of them were alone, he told Carver, ‘No one ever finds out about this, do you understand? No one. Ever. As far as we’re concerned – far as the whole world’s concerned – the President came down here, had a peaceful weekend, just like any other. You are way off the record. You want my advice, you’ll keep it that way.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Carver. ‘Can you get me a lift to my car?’

Carver drove back up to Richmond, getting there just in time for a ten o’clock flight to Chicago. He was feeling good about the way the Lusterleaf job had gone. He’d decided to ride his luck, see if it worked for women as well as presidents.

As he sat at the departure gate, he was looking at a text message on his phone. It read: ‘Hey you! 2 long. How come no call?! Maddy xox’.

It had come in three weeks ago, automatically and untraceably rerouted from his standard contact number. Carver thought about the first time she’d left him a message, a scrap of paper left on a bedside table at a hotel in the South of France that read, ‘If you’re ever in Chicago…’ with a number and the same sign-off, ‘Maddy xox’. He’d found it when he woke up and discovered he was alone in his bed. The night before, Madeleine Cross had just about saved his life.

They’d met in the bar of the Hôtel du Cap. Her husband, who’d made millions selling medical supplies to hospitals, had gone off to a casino in Cannes. It said everything about the state of their marriage that he hadn’t invited her to go with him, and she hadn’t invited herself.