Tom Cain - The accident man

"Right, Bill, this is strictly a surveillance job. I don't want people running around the streets of Geneva firing guns and playing at double-o-seven. I just want every scrap of information we can get on the killers Papin claims to have found. And I want to know about every phone conversation, every e-mail, every text message in and out of Geneva this afternoon. And do me a favor, Bill. Get onto Cheltenham and Menwith Hill. Tell them we need saturation coverage."

Grigori Kursk put down his mobile phone, kicked the hungover blond out of bed, and threw some money after her as she grabbed her clothes and scuttled from the room. He reached for the empty vodka bottle on the bedside table and held it up to the light to see if there were any dregs left at the bottom. He needed something to kick-start his day. He'd been given new orders and was getting back to work.

He called Dimitrov's room, just down the hall of their two-star hotel in the center of Milan. "Wake up, you lazy cocksucker! Yuri called. We've got a job, Geneva, three hours' time… Yeah, I know that's not enough time. That's why you've got to get your ass out of bed and down to the lobby. Tell the others. By the front desk, five minutes. Anyone who isn't there, I will personally ram an Uzi up their backside and let rip. Got that?"

Five and a half minutes later, Kursk was at the wheel of a BMW 750, forcing his way into the lunchtime traffic on the Via de Larga. He had 330 kilometers between himself and Geneva, and the cars around him were moving slower than a legless man in a tar pit. He pressed his fist to the horn and kept it there, screaming locker-room obscenities at every other driver on the road. No one around seemed too impressed; in Milan that passed for everyday behavior. Kursk slumped back in the driver's seat. "Fucking Italians. They move fast enough when there's an army after them."

Finally, the lights ahead turned green, the traffic began to move, and they started to make progress. Kursk relaxed a hair. He took a pack of Balkan Stars from his shirt pocket, pulled one out of the pack, then reached for the car's lighter. He took a deep drag and kept driving, one hand on the wheel, the other holding the cigarette.

Sitting next to him, Dimitrov decided it was safe to risk a question. "So, what are we doing in Switzerland?"

Kursk blew smoke toward the windshield. "We're meeting some French bastard and he's going to take us to that whore Petrova and her English lover boy."

"And then?"

"Then we kill the Frenchman and we take the other two back to Yuri. And then, God willing, we kill them too."

Kursk rolled down the window and yelled at the car ahead of them. "Get that useless pile of crap out of my way, you spaghetti-eating son of a whore!"

"Forget it, Grigori Mikhailovich," said Dimitrov. "He doesn't understand Russian."

Kursk pulled his head back inside the car. "Oh no, Dimitrov, that gutless bastard knows exactly what I'm saying."

Carver had been impressed by the way Alix had shopped. On the rare, very rare occasions he'd allowed himself to be dragged along behind a woman on a retail expedition, he'd been bored, exhausted, and massively irritated by the endless trail from one crowded, overheated rip-off joint to the next; the constant riffling through rack after rack of clothes that looked identical to him; the relentless questions-"Does this make me look fat?" "Which do you prefer?" "Will this go with those boots we saw?"-to which he could only silently contemplate the same, unchanging answer: "How the hell would I know?"

But Alix was different. She bought clothes the way he bought munitions. She had a purpose in mind. She knew the effect she wanted to create, and she supplied herself accordingly.

Now she was preparing for her mission with the same professionalism. She showered. She toweled herself off, blow-dried her hair, and came back into the bedroom, where Carver was still lying on the bed, draped in a thick terry-cloth hotel robe, waiting for his turn in the bathroom.

Alix got out her underwear and took off her towel. Carver was intoxicated by the intimacy of watching her as she slipped into her panties and bra. He relished all the sights and sounds that are so normal, even banal, to a woman, yet so fascinating to a man: the slither of fabric over skin, the snap of elastic, the little twists and adjustments of her body, the self-absorption as she examined her appearance in a full-length mirror inside the wardrobe door. Yet there was nothing showy about her actions. She seemed indifferent to Carver's eyes washing over her, as if, like a dancer or model, she were so used to being naked in the presence of other people that any modesty or coyness about her body had long since evaporated. Nor was there any vanity in the way she looked herself up and down. Her expression was serious, her self-examination meticulous. She was getting ready for work.

As she stepped away from the mirror, she finally glanced at Carver.

"What do you think?"

"I think you'd better get dressed fast before I lose all self-control."

"No," she said. "Fun is over. Time for business."

She walked across to the dressing table, which was already dotted with bags of makeup, pots of skin cream, a can of hair-spray, brushes, combs, and a couple of paper shopping bags. One contained a skullcap made of some kind of nylon that looked like thick pantyhose. She put it on, pushing her hair beneath it until every strand had disappeared. As she worked, she caught Carver's eye in the dressing-table mirror.

"So, were you always rich?" she asked.

He looked at her with eyebrows raised, taken by surprise by her question. "Rich? Me? Christ, no! Far from it."

"But you were an officer. I thought in England only the upper classes became officers."

Now he smiled. "Is that what they told you in KGB school?"

"You can tease me, but it's true. The rich lead the poor. It's like that everywhere."

"Maybe, but I didn't become an officer because I was rich. I became an officer because I was adopted."

Now it was her turn to be surprised. She stopped her handiwork and turned her body to face him.

"How do you mean?"

"My mum gave me away. She was just a kid who got pregnant. She came from the kind of family where abortion wasn't an option, but they weren't going to have a teenage daughter pushing a pram around, either. So they sent her to a home for unwed mothers, told everyone she was visiting relatives abroad, and then got rid of the baby as soon as they could."

Alix had turned back to the table and was rummaging through her makeup as she listened to Carver's story. Now she looked into the mirror again, frowning this time.

"Who raised you, then?"

"A middle-aged couple. They'd never had children of their own. They were nice enough and they meant well, but they couldn't cope. In time they realized that they wanted a quiet life more than a scrappy little rascal running around the place, making a racket all day. So they sent me off to boarding school. They felt it was the best thing for me."

"Did they love you?" She was powdering her face.

"I don't know. They never said so, not out loud. But I think they cared for me. You know, in their own way."

"And what about you? Did you love them?"

Carver sighed. He got up off the bed and walked over to a chair, near to the dressing table. "Well, I didn't dislike them," he said as he sat down. "And I was grateful to them. I knew they were making sacrifices for me; I appreciated that. But I don't think I really knew how to love, not from the heart. I mean, why would I? If you don't get that from your mother, you never find out about love until much, much later and then, suddenly, it's like, oh… right… so that's what they were talking about. Comes as quite a shock."