Tom Cain - The accident man

He'd long ago concluded that his strength had nothing to do with muscles, guns, or explosives. It lay in his mind and his eyes, in the force of his will and the certainty of his purpose. Somewhere inside him, there was a well of barely acknowledged anger and loss that had always driven him on. But if that fuel ran dry, if that strength of will should ever be diminished, well, what then?

This really might be his last contract, after all. So he'd better make it a good one. And come out of it alive.

The third bomb went in the bedroom, taped to the wall at the head of the bed and covered up with pillows. The woman's bag was right next to Carver as he worked. He caught a faint trace of her scent, rising from her clothes. He wondered whether she knew the truth about her lover. Did she follow the same cause? Or was she just a pretty girl about to die because she let a wealthy man seduce her?

"For Chrissakes!" he muttered to himself. "Focus." He still had another three devices to put in place-the freezer bags filled with explosive putty. He taped one inside the cistern of the toilet, then stuck a tiny radio detonator into it. A second bag and another detonator went inside one of the eye-level kitchen cupboards. The Claymores should penetrate the room, but he wasn't going to count on it. Too many targets had survived assassination attempts because bombs turned out to be less deadly than their users had planned. You needed to kill them twice, just to make sure.

A final bag and detonator were secured beneath a console table in the hall. Every room in the apartment had been turned into a killing field. Now he just had to make all his bombs go off.

He returned to the pack and removed a small plastic box the size of a miniradio. Two wires protruded from the bottom of the box, and on the top were an extendable aerial, an on-off switch, and a tiny red power light. He went back to the coat closet, opened up the main alarm-system box, and wired his little box into the same terminals as the door sensor. Then he switched it on. The red light at the top of the box began to pulse. The unit was on standby.

When the apartment's alarm system was activated, the unit would be fully switched on. Any break in the alarm circuit, such as the opening of a door, would trigger a switch inside it, setting off a sixty-second timer. But unlike the alarm, it couldn't be turned off. Tapping the code into the control panel made no difference. The timer just kept counting down the seconds till it reached zero and sent its deadly signal to the explosives hidden around the apartment.

The trap was set. Carver removed the torch and put it back in the pack, along with the rest of his equipment. He retraced his steps around the apartment, making sure that everything was exactly as he had found it and nothing had been left behind, then moved back out the way he had come in, resetting the alarm as he went. The next time anyone came in through the front door, the whole place would blow.

At the bottom of the stairs, Carver turned toward the back door and went out into the courtyard. He took off his pack and extracted everything he'd need for the rest of the operation, along with the black garbage bag. He opened it up and put the pack and its remaining contents inside, then walked down the street to an alley beside a local bistro, where he slung it into a huge metal bin, burying it beneath a layer of restaurant trash.

As Carver made his way back to his bike, he called Max.

"The apartment's fixed. Where do you want me now?"

He received his instructions, making sure that he was absolutely clear about every stage of the operation. For now, at any rate, those moments of weakness in the apartment had passed.

Less than a mile from the apartment Carver had booby trapped, two men with false names were going about their work in a building with bogus ownership papers. One of them was known to Carver as Max. His face had the deep-lined, half-starved look of a jockey or a Rolling Stone. His steely hair was cropped tight to his skull. He wore rimless glasses, a charcoal suit, a white linen shirt, and a pale mushroom-colored knitted tie.

His stark modernity looked out of place in his immediate surroundings. He had just walked into the drawing room of an eighteenth-century townhouse, decorated with lavish extravagance-twelve-foot ceilings, a marble fireplace, antique furniture, and ancestral portraits with heavy gilt. Whoever had chosen the decorations had been trying to evoke the grandeur of a bygone age.

Max looked around in distaste. The place looked like a bloody museum. He turned his attention to the middle-aged man in beige cords, green sweater, and pale blue button-down shirt standing by the unlit fire, holding a glass of whisky. The man was stocky, powerfully built, just starting to run to fat as time, gravity, and lack of exercise took their toll.

"I got news from Carver, sir."

The other man's job title was Operations Director. Some of his staff referred to him as "O.D." When he wanted to give an impression of friendship, he told people to call him Charlie. But Max preferred "sir." He never liked getting chummy with his bosses. They started taking liberties if you did. Keep it nice and formal, then everyone knew where they stood.

"How's he getting on?" asked the operations director.

His voice sounded tired. He ran a hand through his hair and down the back of his neck. He'd had less than three hours' sleep in the past forty-eight. They'd been working fast, under pressure, cutting too many corners. Max wondered whether the old man was up to it anymore.

"Fine," he said. "Just one thing, though. Looks like he's had a sudden attack of conscience."

"Really? How so?"

"He's worried innocent people might get killed."

The operations director laughed, composing himself when he saw the disapproval on Max's face. "Sorry," he said. "Tension must be getting to me. But you see the irony, surely."

"Oh, yes, I see that."

"Right then, are the Russians in place?" He gave a sharp, frustrated sigh. "I don't like using new people on a job like this. Still, the chairman assures me they're top-notch. He must know what he's talking about."

"They're in position," said Max. "And the observation teams are ready. Once there's a sighting, we'll be ready to move at once."

"Excellent," said the operations director. "Let's wait for the show to begin."

The time was a quarter past midnight. Samuel Carver stood astride the Honda, waiting to go into action. He glanced down at the black metal tube clipped to the bike behind his right leg. It looked like a regular, long-barreled flashlight, the kind that police or security guards use. It was, in fact, a portable diode pump laser, otherwise known as a dazzler. Developed as a nonfatal weapon for U.S. police forces, but taken up with deadly enthusiasm by special forces around the world, it emitted a green light beam at a frequency of 532 nanometers. Its nickname, though, was misleading. When this light shone in somebody's eyes, they weren't just dazzled. They were incapacitated.

A green laser beam left anyone who looked at it disoriented, confused, and temporarily immobile. The human brain couldn't process the sheer amount of light data flooding through the optic nerves, so it acted like any other overloaded computer: It crashed.

Night or day, rain or shine, a dazzler was an accident's best friend.

It would only be a matter of seconds now. Carver was positioned by the exit of an underpass that ran beneath an embankment on the northern side of the Seine. If he turned his head fractionally to the right, he could look across the river at the glittering spire of the Eiffel Tower darting up into the night sky. It was past midnight, but there were still a few pleasure boats out on the water. If Carver had been the slightest bit interested, he'd have seen the lovers standing arm in arm by the rails, looking out at the City of Light. But Carver had other things to think about. He was looking toward the far side of the underpass. All he cared about was the traffic.