Tom Cain: No Survivors aka The Survivor

“Can you remember what happened at the beginning of the dream this time?”

Carver thought for a while.

“I don’t know,” he said.

He sounded indifferent, not quite seeing the point of the question.

“Just try,” Alix persisted.

Carver screwed up his face in concentration.

“I was a soldier,” he said. “There was fighting, in a desert… then it all changed.”

“You were probably dreaming about something that actually happened. You really were a soldier.”

“I know,” said Carver. “You told me before. I remember that.”

He looked at her with eyes that sought her approval. For the umpteenth time, she tried to persuade herself that the man she loved was still in there somewhere. She imagined a time when the blankness in his eyes would be replaced by the fierce intensity she had seen in them on the night they met, or the unexpected tenderness he had revealed in those stolen hours when they had been alone together, keeping the world at bay.

They’d both been in Paris, working the same assignment, the night of August 31, 1997. Carver had been standing at one end of the Alma Tunnel, waiting for a car. She had been riding pillion on a high-speed motorbike, firing her flashing camera at the Mercedes, goading the man at its wheel to drive ever faster, whipping him on toward death in Carver’s hands.

The moment they met, she was pointing a gun in his direction. Seconds later, he’d pinned her to the pavement, his knee in the small of her back. Half an hour later, she’d followed him into a building, knowing he’d rigged it with explosive charges, knowing that those bombs were about to go off, but trusting absolutely in his ability to get them both in and out alive.

Now here they were in Switzerland, almost five months later, two people who had been forced into acts of terrible violence, but who, in their few precious moments of shared tranquillity, had each seen in the other a hope, not just of love, but of some small measure of redemption.

For Alix had secrets of her own. On her journey from the drab provinces of the Soviet Union to the gaudy luxuries of post-Communist Moscow, she, too, had compromised her soul. Just like Carver, she longed for an escape. But the past had clung to her and Carver alike, and it had exacted a bitter price on the night of torture and bloodshed that had subjected Carver to agonies so extreme that they had ripped his identity away from its moorings and buried his memories too deeply to be retrieved.

Alix had even begun to wonder if she really did love him anymore. How could you love a person who no longer knew who you were, or what you and he had meant to each other? She had once loved Samuel Carver-she was sure of that. She would still love that man if he were with her. But was he that man any longer? Was he any kind of man at all?

Alix fiddled with Carver’s pillows, plumping them up and rearranging them, pretending to make him more comfortable but really just trying to distract herself from her thoughts, and the guilt she felt for even allowing herself to consider them.

From behind her came the sound of a discreet cough.

A man was standing in the doorway, wearing a somber dark-gray suit and a tie whose pattern was so muted as to be virtually invisible.

“Mademoiselle Petrova?” he said.

“Good afternoon, Monsieur Marchand,” Alix said, making a conscious effort to stand up straight and smile as cheerfully as her stress and fatigue would allow.

She spoke French. That at least had been one positive achievement over the past few months. She had a third language to add to her native Russian and the English she’d been taught by the KGB a decade ago. The same agency had trained her to charm any man she wanted, but Marchand seemed resolutely immune to what was left of her old powers. He was the clinic’s finance director. His sole concern was the bottom line.

“Could you spare me a moment, Mademoiselle Petrova?” he said, managing to combine an obsequious, oily politeness with an unmistakable hint of menace. He waited until she had followed him out into the corridor, out of Carver’s hearing, then spoke again.

“It’s about Monsieur Carver’s account. The payment for last month will soon be overdue. I trust there is not a problem. You should be aware that if patients are unable to settle their accounts, it is the clinic’s policy to terminate their treatment.”

“I quite understand,” said Alix. “There is no problem. The account will be settled.”

Marchand gave a curt nod of acknowledgment and farewell. Alix watched him walk away down the corridor. Only when he had turned the corner and was out of sight did she go back into Carver’s room and slump down in the visitor’s chair, holding her head in her hands.

Somewhere Carver had a fortune, the profits of his deadly trade, banked in an anonymous offshore account, or stashed in safe-deposit boxes and private hiding places. The money would keep Marchand satisfied for years, but only Carver had ever known where it was. And now he had no clue that it even existed.

He had at least been blessed by one benefactor. Thor Larsson, the tall, skinny, dreadlocked Norwegian who was Carver’s technician, computer expert, and closest friend, had given Alix access to Carver’s flat. Using money paid to him by Carver, he had done his best to meet the sanatorium bills. But now that money was running out and Larsson had nothing more to give.

Alix would happily have paid her share, but she had no formal identification papers and no work or residency permits, and thus no way of getting a respectable job. In any case, she spent every day at Carver’s side. All she’d been able to find was a late-night waitress gig in a sleazy bierkeller, whose owner was only too happy to turn a blind eye to Swiss employment law if he could hire pliable, immigrant women on the cheap. As he liked to remind his girls, Switzerland had no minimum wage. Alix just about made ends meet from her tips, but she couldn’t hope to pay Carver’s bills as well. Not if she stuck to waitressing.

Lev Yusov was fifty-two years old, though to Western eyes he would have seemed at least a decade older. He smoked too many coarse, unfiltered cigarettes. He drank too much cheap vodka. His single-room apartment lacked ventilation in the summer and heating in the winter. The walls were peeling and the window frames were rotting. But Yusov was no worse off than anyone else in the 12th GUMO.

The workers of Russia ’s 12th Glavnoye Upravleniye Ministerstvo Oborony, or Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, were just like every other employee of the once-mighty state. Their wages were pitiful, when they were paid at all. Their living conditions got worse by the day. The staff at one 12th GUMO base had recently gone on a hunger strike, demanding to be paid the money and benefits that they had been owed for months. Even officers had started protesting that they couldn’t get by without taking a second job.

This dissatisfaction was significant for one very simple reason. The 12th GUMO was the organization responsible for the administration, storage, security, and safety of Russia ’s nuclear weapons. When its people became angry and resentful, they were in a position to cause serious trouble. And for Lev Yusov, anger and resentment were his default states of mind.

A lifetime spent in the service of the Motherland had left him little more than a glorified filing clerk, sitting behind a counter in a provincial depot, checking papers in and out, taking orders from officers no better than him, or-which was even worse-their stuck-up personal secretaries. He knew he was just an anonymous old drudge in their eyes, an insignificant functionary whose only means of exercising power lay in his ability to be unhelpful. Yusov exercised that power to the full.