Tom Cain - The accident man

The moment the door was opened, the burglar alarm warning started beeping, set off by a standard magnetic door contact. Carver had thirty seconds before the alarm went off. A small control pad was fixed to the wall immediately to the left of the door, just as the plans he'd been sent had promised. The code too was exactly as Max had said. The beeping stopped.

Ahead of him, leading off the hall, there was a short passage, lined with cupboards. The left-hand side was broken by a door, which opened onto a tiny kitchenette. Carver turned the other way and opened the cupboard on the right-hand side of the passage. There were a couple of winter coats hanging there. Behind them was the white metal box that contained the heart and brain of the apartment's alarm system. He gave a satisfied nod, then closed the cupboard door.

At the far end of the passage was a large, open-plan living room. The place was classier than Carver had been expecting, given the kind of man who owned it and what he used it for. There were no flashy glass-and-chrome tables, no mirrored ceilings or semipornographic nudes. Instead, the room had pale walls, with an antique wooden dining table at one end, decorated with a vase of fresh flowers. Beyond it, three large, creamy white sofas were arranged around a Persian rug. Other than that, the floors were bare wood, echoed in the massive, black wooden beams that supported the ceiling. A fireplace was set into the far wall, next to bookshelves that housed a mini hi-fi system, a couple of rows of books, and a small collection of crystal vases, small pots, and miniature sculptures. Two infrared motion detectors blinked at him from opposite corners of the room, there to catch intruders coming in through the windows.

Carver put his pack down in the middle of the floor, extracted the torch, strapped it around his head so that both his hands were free, and took a long, detailed look at the hifi. Then he banged his hand against the wall behind it, checking to see that it was a solid, load-bearing structure, and nodded to himself, satisfied.

He returned to the pack and removed the screwdriver, the wire cutters, and three small, oblong plastic cases, each roughly the size and depth of a paperback book, but very slightly curved along their longer sides.

These were M18 Claymore antipersonnel mines, configured for remote detonation. Each consisted of a kilo slab of C4 explosive, around which were wrapped seven hundred tiny steel ballbearings, encased in a polystyrene and fiberglass outer shell.

He lifted down the mini hi-fi, unscrewed the back of the speaker cabinets, opened them up, and cut away the speaker units themselves. Then he placed a Claymore inside each of the empty cabinets, closed them up again, and replaced them exactly as they had been, complete with leads from the amplifier. When they went off, the deadly pellets would be fired in an arc across the room and through the flimsy partition walls that separated it from the kitchenette and the hall. Anyone in their way would be shredded into bite-size chunks. Carver tucked his screwdriver and wire cutters away in his outside thigh pocket and took another look at the finished job.

The switch was undetectable. If Narwaz turned on his hifi within a minute of walking into the apartment, he might be suspicious when no sound came from the speakers. But then, if Narwaz came back to the apartment that night, he'd just have survived an assassination attempt. He wouldn't be in the mood for music.

Carver was working without undue haste, settling into a steady rhythm that would get him out of the apartment as quickly as possible, without rushing into careless mistakes. He picked up the pack and walked from the room, down the passage, and across the hall to the bedroom. Again, the walls were pale, the floors wooden, the window and drapes full length. This time there was just one motion sensor. The bed was the one extravagance in the place, a magnificent piece of Victorian brass, its gleaming rails topped by extravagant swirls of twisted metal.

He was about to move on when something caught his eye at the end of the bed. When he shone his torch on it he realized it was an overnight bag. The pattern on the fabric was Louis Vuitton. It was open and half-filled with women's clothes. Nearby was a small, shiny Chanel carrier bag. A pair of white jeans had been thrown on the bedspread next to a short denim jacket. Two slip-on Keds sneakers, in matching white, were lying on the floor next to the bed. Carver walked around the bed and over to another door that led into the en suite bathroom. On the shelf above the basin there were a couple of bags, one filled with makeup, the other, bigger one stuffed with shampoo, body lotions, and other bath-time paraphernalia.

The discovery jolted Carver out of his smooth, complacent routine. Max hadn't told him that Narwaz had a girlfriend in town. She'd obviously arrived, changed, and then gone out again. If she was with Narwaz now, she was going to die with him tonight. Carver pulled out his phone and dialed a UK-based mobile line.

"You didn't tell me about the woman."

"Why would I? Makes no difference to the mission."

"It makes a difference to me. I came here to eliminate a serious terrorist. The girlfriend's a civilian. You know I don't hit civilians, Max."

Carver heard a laugh come down the line.

"Course you do. You just don't like to admit it. That Albanian-you think his helicopter flew itself? He had a pilot, Carver."

"The pilot knew what he was doing. He was getting paid."

"Oh what, and the bird isn't? Look, it doesn't matter if the target has a girlfriend, a driver, a bodyguard, or his entire family with him. I don't care if he invites the Dagenham Diamonds drum majorettes around to his place for a party and we blow them all to smithereens. This mad bastard wants to start a holy war. There could be millions of lives at risk. So he has to go. The collateral damage is not our problem."

Carver said nothing. He'd spent his military service fighting blood-soaked dictators who lost wars but stayed in power. He'd gone after psychopathic terrorists who somehow morphed into peace-loving politicians, greeted with handshakes at Number 10, and smiles on the White House lawn. He and his men had seized countless old freighters and fishing boats filled with drugs or guns. But it never made a damn bit of difference. No one ever paid for what they'd done. No government ever stopped them from doing it in the first place.

Now he was able to trade with the bad guys in their own currency. He believed he made the world a better, safer place. Sometimes people got caught in the crossfire. That was the price of doing business. He forced his doubts out of his conscious mind, locking them up in the same mental dungeon where so many of his scruples, fears, and emotions had been shut away.

Max broke the silence. "You still with me there, mate? 'Cause if you're not up for this job, just tell me now. I can't have anyone screwing this up."

"Tell you what, Max. Why don't you come down here? Walk through the front door and wait sixty seconds. Find out if I'm up for it yourself."

"That's more like it. For a moment there, I thought you might have lost it. You're not losing it, are you, Carver? I'm starting to worry about you."

"Piss off, Max."

Carver's tone was aggressively self-confident. Inside, though, he asked himself whether Max might be right. Was he losing it? In terms of straightforward competence, he was certain the answer was no. He kept himself in good shape; he didn't throw away his money on drugs or divorces; he wasn't one of those military relics who hung around the pubs of Hereford and Poole telling pathetically exaggerated war stories to other old soldiers as lost and purposeless as themselves. So no, he hadn't lost his ability to do the job. But maybe he was losing the taste for it.