Tom Cain - No survivors

"His name is Kurt Vermulen," said Grantham. "Until a few years ago, he was a three-star general in the U.S. Army."

He gave a quick rundown of the general's military career.

"Captain America," said Carver.

"Something like that."

"So why do you want me to kill him?"

"I didn't say we did."

"Why else would you come all this way?"

"Depends," said Grantham.

"On what?"

"On what he's really up to…"

Grantham opened a new page. It showed a series of grainy color photographs of Vermulen, now dressed in civilian clothes. Some were lifted from closed-circuit TV footage, others had been shot by photographers. He was in the crowd at a fancy theater, walking by a Venetian canal, standing by a crossing on a busy city street.

Carver looked at them all with equal indifference.

"Well, good luck with that," he said. "I've got other business to take care of."

"I know," Grantham said. "Just like old times, isn't it? But before you go, there's something else you should see."

"I don't think so." Carver got up to leave.

Grantham remained unruffled. "I'd stay if I were you. You'll want to see this."

Carver looked at him. Grantham had the calm of a man who was absolutely sure of his hand. The only way to see what he had was to call him on it.

"Okay," said Carver, still standing. "Show me."

"Take another look at these," said Grantham, flicking through the shots of Vermulen once again.

"I told you already-I'm not interested."

Grantham smiled. "Now watch," he said.

He opened a new file. Up popped the same set of photographs, but this time the frames of the pictures were wider. They revealed the figure who had been cropped from the first set, the woman who was standing next to Vermulen in a satin evening dress at the Vienna opera, who was with him, and a black couple, outside the Hotel Gritti in Venice, who was sightseeing with him in Rome. And then, in a final sequence of new pictures, they showed Vermulen and the woman on a yacht; him in white Bermudas and a polo shirt, her in a bikini, sunglasses pushed up into her blond hair. The shots were grainy, extreme long distance. The couple was standing under an awning near the stern of the boat. In the first shot they were talking. Then she put her hand on his chest. Carver couldn't work out if she was playing, or trying to ward the man off. By the third frame his hands were on her upper arms. In the fourth he was leading-or was it dragging?-her into one of the yacht's staterooms. And they were gone.

"You shit," hissed Samuel Carver.

"Yes," said Jack Grantham. "Thought that would do the trick."

Ever since he'd started putting himself back together, Carver had been wondering what he really felt about Alix. As his recovery progressed he began to piece together images of the few short days and nights they had spent together. A woman brushed past him in a store in Beisfjord, and as he caught a waft of her perfume in the air he knew at once, without thinking, that Alix had worn the same scent, and suddenly it was as if she were lying next to him again. And of course, he and Thor Larsson had talked about her, Larsson telling stories of the months in Geneva before her disappearance, or joking about his own first sight of Alix, dressed in La Perla lingerie and a brunette wig. She'd been getting ready to seduce a Swiss bank official who was their only link to the hidden men who had bought Carver's deadly services, betrayed him, and then tried to have him killed.

"Man, she looked good," Larsson had said wistfully. "I was seriously jealous of you. I mean, I could tell what you'd been doing!"

Larsson had laughed out loud and Carver had laughed along with him. But though he could recall a vague image of Alix in that hotel room, and though he knew, as a historical fact, that they had made love that afternoon, the memories were fleeting and insubstantial, unreal ghosts of a time that had vanished beyond recovery.

And then he saw the picture of Alix on the yacht, being grabbed by another man's hands, and all the emotions that had been hidden out of his reach burst through, and the pain he felt was like a branding iron on his heart.

"Sit down," said Grantham. "I'll get you a drink. You look like you could use it."

He flicked a finger at one of his men, as if summoning a waiter. "Whiskey, chop-chop."

Carver looked at Grantham's smug features.

"You don't give a toss, do you?"

Grantham let the anger wash over him.

"On the contrary-I certainly give a toss about the job I do, and the country I do it for. That's why I'm here. Someone assigned Alexandra Petrova to do a honeytrap on Kurt Vermulen. And I'm sure you've worked out, same as I have, that she's gone back to her roots, working for the Russians. I don't know why. Maybe she got bored sitting around, waiting for you to wake up-"

"She was paying my bills," said Carver.

"How admirable. Sacrificing her somewhat tarnished virtue for the man she loves."

Carver looked at Grantham, glanced across at his men, then leaned forward.

"It's a funny thing, the way my memory comes back. You talking like that reminds me of the last time we met. You made another one of your smart-arsed remarks, and I pointed out that I could kill you with your own pen. Do you remember that?"

"Point taken," said Grantham. "It was a cheap shot. So let's get down to business. Do you know how they got to Petrova, put her up to this escapade?"

"It was Yuri Zhukovski's widow. She went to the place where Alix was working. Alix tried to escape. Obviously, she didn't make it."

"Ah, yes," murmured Grantham appreciatively. "We thought this had the touch of Deputy Director Zhukovskaya-a very powerful, impressive lady, that one. Call me a cynic, but it strikes me Miss Petrova may well have been working for her all along."

"I doubt it. Alix was screwing her husband."

"Exactly. Zhukovskaya was controlling her husband's mistress. That's the kind of woman she is. Brilliant…"

For a moment Grantham seemed lost in admiration. Then he recovered himself.

"Anyway, let me tell you what Petrova has been doing since you last saw her. We think she got her hooks into Vermulen in Washington-that's his normal base-but they've been in Europe the past few weeks, charging about like demented honeymooners. I can see why the Russians are curious, because Vermulen is certainly on some kind of a mission. He had a meeting in Amsterdam, though we don't yet know who with. Next he went to Vienna to see a chap called Novak, who makes a murky living trading arms and information. His Venice contact was a former U.S. Army colleague, name of Reddin. As you can see from the picture, Mrs. Reddin came along, too, so it's conceivable that was just a social encounter, though I doubt it. After that was Rome. We tracked him to another meet there, but the pictures were hopeless and we couldn't identify the other party. Now they're on a yacht that Vermulen has rented, ostensibly for a Mediterranean holiday.

"Those last shots I showed you were taken a couple of days ago, off the Corsican coast. My interpretation is that they're having some kind of an argument. Or maybe she's getting cozy, calming him down. Look, she's operating alone, without backup. She has to do whatever it takes to keep him sweet. But the closer she gets, the more pissed off he'll be if he ever discovers she's been deceiving him. She can't try to run for it, because then he'll know for sure. She's in the shit, Carver. And it's all because of you."

"So what do you want me to do?"

"I thought you'd never ask."

Grantham opened up a new file on his laptop. This time the photographs showed a U.K. passport photo of a man in his mid-thirties, with sandy hair and a defiant, uncompromising expression.

"That," said Grantham, "is Kenny Wynter. And two days from now, he's due to meet Kurt Vermulen for lunch at the Hotel du Cap, on the coast between Nice and Cannes, down in the South of France."