Tom Cain - The accident man

"You sound as though you approve."

"Not at all. You asked for an objective assessment, and I gave it."

Grantham nodded. "Agreed. But that leaves us with another hypothetical. If the crash was not an accident, who was responsible?"

Wake smiled and shook his head. "Ah, well, there you have me. I'm afraid I haven't the faintest idea. You'll just have to round up the usual suspects, eh?"

"Indeed we will, which is one of the reasons I'm here."

Wake gave an amused, patronizing chuckle. "Really? Surely I am not on your list? Has my stock fallen that low?"

Grantham ignored the attempt at humor. "Let's not waste each other's time. We both know your record. My predecessors weren't exactly scrupulous in their methods. If they wanted a job done off the books, they came to you. No one knew exactly how you made things happen, or who your contacts were. They didn't want to know. It gave them deniability if anyone started asking inconvenient questions. But you knew."

The old man bristled. "That was all a long time ago, before the wall came down. We were at war with an enemy that would stop at nothing. All anyone wants to talk about these days is the Nazis. Well, they were a danger to this country for six years. Soviet communism was a threat for almost half a century, and I fought that threat. I did my duty. I have no reason to apologize, still less to feel ashamed."

"I didn't say you did. But if anyone's out there taking people out on the basis of what's supposedly best for this country, or its monarchy, or Christ knows what else, you may just know who they are. So I'm asking you a favor: If you do happen to bump into any of your old associates, pass on a message from me. We want this mess cleaned up. No fuss. No scandal. No one running to the papers saying, 'I did it.' Tell them to sort it out or we'll stop turning blind eyes and sort them out ourselves. Do I make myself clear?"

"To them, perhaps," said Wake. "But you're wasting your time if you think I can help. Still, it's been very interesting to meet you. Perhaps we'll see each other again under less trying circumstances. And now, if you don't mind, I've got work to attend to. Good day to you, Mr. Grantham. My secretary will show you out."

Wake let the other man leave the room before he rose from his desk and walked to one of the tall windows that looked down on Eaton Square. He watched a black cab cruise down the road. He followed a mother chasing her child on the sidewalk, heard their innocent laughter ringing like bells through the summer air. Then he turned back to the desk, let out a single heavy sigh, and started to press the numbers on his telephone keypad.

Pierre Papin's taxi pulled up outside the honey-colored stone facade of Lausanne's main railway station a little after nine o'clock. The manager and his staff were properly Swiss, which is to say as efficient as Germans, as welcoming as Italians, and as knowing as Frenchmen.

Within an hour he'd found out everything he needed to know. He followed Carver's trail, taking the train to Geneva, where he walked out of the station into the Place Cornavin, the bustling square whose taxi stands and bus stops were the heart of the city's transportation system. Once he was there it was just a matter of basic old-fashioned police work, canvassing the drivers to find anyone who'd been around late morning the previous day and showing them the CCTV pictures of Carver and Petrova.

Fifteen minutes in, he struck lucky. One of the taxi drivers, a Turk, remembered the girl. "How could I forget that one?" he said with a knowing wink, from one red- blooded man to another. "I watched her all the way from the station, thinking this was my lucky day. I was next in line. The man with her looked like he could afford a taxi, and if I had a woman like that I wouldn't want to share her with the trash who take the bus. But no, he walked right past me, the son of a whore, and stood in line like a peasant."

"Did you see which bus they took?"

"Yeah, the Number Five. It goes over the Pont de l'Ile, past the Old Town to the hospital and back. So, what have they done, these two, huh?"

Papin smiled. "They're killers. Count yourself lucky they didn't get in your cab."

He left the cabbie muttering thanks to Allah and then, still posing as Michel Picard from the federal interior ministry, called the control room at Transports Publics Genevois, the organization that ran the city's bus system. Naturally, they were only too happy to supply the names and contact numbers of those drivers who'd worked the Number 5 route leaving the station around eleven o'clock the previous day. There were three of them, and once his memory had been jogged by Papin's photos, one recalled the couple who'd got on at the station. He also remembered looking in his mirror as the girl got off at a stop on Rue de la Croix-Rouge, crossed the road behind the bus, and started walking up the hill toward the Old Town.

"Some guys have all the luck, right?" he said with a rueful chuckle.

"Don't worry," Papin assured him. "That one's luck is about to change."

Twenty minutes later, he was walking the streets of the Old Town. It seemed an unlikely place for an assassin to hide out. In Papin's experience, most killers were little more than crude gangsters, spending their money on tasteless vulgarity and excess. But the beauty of the Old Town was restrained, even austere. The tall buildings seemed to look down like disapproving elders on the people walking the streets. There were few hotels in the area, and it took little time to establish that neither Carver nor Petrova had checked in anywhere within the past twenty-four hours, under those names or any other aliases.

Petrova came from Moscow, so this must be where Carver lived. And that meant there would be people in the neighborhood who knew him and his exact address. Papin got out his photographs and started canvassing again.

"Well now, there's a surprise." Carver leaned back, tilting his office chair and putting his hands behind his head. Then he looked back at the computer screen, which showed the recent transfers in and out of his Banque Wertmuller-Maier account, and sighed. "Of course those buggers weren't going to pay. They assumed I'd be dead." Even so, he had received faxed notification of a $1.5 million deposit from his account manager. He had a loose end. If he could find a way to give it a good pull, the whole conspiracy might just unravel.

He thought for a moment, then got up and wandered into the kitchen, where Alix was making herself a late breakfast. The TV was on, still showing news about the crash. He wondered whether anyone in the world was watching anything else.

"Any developments we need to know about?" he asked.

Alix pressed the remote control, lowering the volume, then turned to look at him. "People are blaming the paparazzi for chasing the car. There are rumors it was going at almost two hundred kilometers an hour when it crashed."

"Well, that's bullshit, for a start. It was one twenty, max."

"Also, they say that blood tests prove the driver was drunk, more than three times over the limit. And there's a survivor, the princess's bodyguard."

Carver frowned. "The guy didn't drive like a drunk. And there's a bodyguard? Well, no way would any self-respecting bodyguard let a driver get in a car if he was three times over. The guy would have been completely legless, reeling all over the place, stinking of booze. Christ, you wouldn't let anyone get behind the wheel if he was that far gone." He slammed his hand against the kitchen counter. "This is bloody amateur hour. They did a rush job and they've bungled the cover- up. Now every investigative journalist in the world is going to be crawling all over the place, trying to prove it was murder."