The Accident Man:A Novel

79

Gstaad is the Saint-Tropez of ski resorts, a beautiful old home for crass new money, a place where age and cash meet youth and beauty, then make a deal that suits them both. Back in the seventies and eighties, Arabs awash with petrodollars swapped sand for snow and rushed to Gstaad. Now it was the Russians’ turn.
The very smartest hoteliers, desperate to preserve at least the illusion of class and exclusivity, had tried to exclude Moscow’s oligarchs and mafiosi, wringing their hands, bowing apologetically, and explaining that the best suites in high season were booked up months, even years in advance. But someone had to buy the jeroboams of vintage Cristal champagne at 7,500 Swiss francs a pop, down in the GreenGo Club beneath the Palace Hotel. Someone had to send their sable-coated lovers teetering, around the jewelers and antique shops. And no one did that quite as willingly, exuberantly, and downright flagrantly as the winners in Russia’s new gangster economy.
Even the Russians, however, tended to go elsewhere in September. Many hotels closed down for a three-month break between the end of the Alpine summer and the first heavy snowfalls of winter. No one came to Gstaad to see the leaves turn red. So Zhukovski’s arrival had not gone unnoticed.
His name was not in any telephone directory or on any property register. But Thor Larsson had only sat down in his second bar of the evening when a big, bearded German Swiss in an immaculately clean and well-pressed pair of workman’s overalls overhead his question to the bartender and growled, “Zhukovski? That Russian? He’s got a big place in Oberport, right out on the edge of town, up there in the forest, heading out toward Turbach.”
That had been three hours ago. Now Larsson was sitting in his scruffy old Volvo, looking down at the shadowy bulk of the chalet, set on the side of a steep hill like a Heidi house on steroids. The main entrance was at the back of the property, up by the tree line. That made sense, Larsson, thought. You’d walk through the chalet to the main reception rooms at the front, with spectacular views down the mountainside, looking right across the whole valley in which Gstaad lay.
There was a large circular driveway and parking area by the door. To the left of the property, a drive made its way downhill, curled around, and then led to a garage directly underneath the ground floor. So a chauffeur could leave his employers by the main entrance, then drive on to take the cars out of sight. And that, Larsson felt sure, was the way Carver had been brought in. It didn’t seem too likely that there’d been a butler waiting to greet him at front the door. Carver wouldn’t be leaving by the front exit, either: he and Alix saying a polite farewell to Yuri Zhukovski, then heading on their way. When you looked at it like that, it was obvious this meeting was going to turn sour.
Even so, Larsson had great faith in Carver’s powers of survival. He clung to the image of him dashing from the chalet, guns blazing and in need of a quick getaway. When that happened, he’d be waiting, engine running.
It was past midnight and he was sitting alone in the darkness, waiting for something to happen, though he didn’t know what or when. The Grateful Dead were playing on the stereo. He had a stone-cold slice of pizza and an even more frigid cup of black coffee. All things considered, it was just like home.




80

Yuri Zhukovski took his time. Three hours passed before Alix heard his footsteps coming up the stairs, then striding down the corridor. She’d been listening to the men drinking downstairs, bragging to one another and singing the filthy locker-room songs they’d learned back in the old Soviet days. At one point the partying stopped, there was a tramp of feet across the flagstone hallway, and then, a little later, a muffled crackle coming from somewhere deep in the belly of the building.
Was that gunfire? Alix tried to pretend that there might be some other explanation, but she could not escape the obvious conclusion: Carver had been shot. She closed her eyes and prayed.
Please God, let him live. Don’t take him from me now.
The men had returned to the living room, the brays of their boastful laughter even louder than before. Finally, the party had broken up. A few moments later, the door to the bedroom banged open and Yuri stood before her, silhouetted against the light from the corridor, one hand holding the computer case.
Alix patted the bedspread next to her. She was arrayed there for his pleasure, on top of the bed, leaning against a pile of snow white pillows in a short, satin nightdress the color of café au lait, trimmed with lace and cut high on the thigh. She had one knee up, the other leg stretched out in front of her, revealing a pair of tiny matching panties.
“Come here, my darling,” she purred. “I’ve been missing you.”
Yuri placed the black bag on the floor, took a few steps into the room, then stood quite still in the middle of the carpet. She knew he must have been drinking with his men, but his voice betrayed no trace whatsoever of drunkenness when he replied, “No. You come here and prove how much you’ve missed me. Prove it on your knees.”
Afterward, she helped him out of his clothes, nuzzling against him, dutifully arousing him as she led him to the bed. But now that Yuri’s immediate physical needs had been satisfied, he seemed more interested in discussing the pain he’d inflicted on Carver.
“We let him stay there for an hour or so,” he was saying as they slipped under the covers. “Then Kursk and his boys burst into the room and dragged him out of his chair. He was totally disoriented. It was obvious that he was completely unable to see, he’d been looking into that light for so long. He was waving his arms around in front of him like a blind beggar.”
Somehow Alix managed to give a little titter, as if amused by Carver’s degradation. Yuri seemed encouraged by her appreciation.
“They led him out of the room, into the garage. Then they put him up against a wall and he stood there, cowering like a whipped dog, looking around with his pathetic staring eyes, still taped wide open. I must say, it made me feel quite nostalgic, just like the old days. And the fascinating thing was, his hands were free. He could have taken the tape off his eyes, closed them for a bit, but he just couldn’t figure it out. I was glad. I wanted him to see what was happening. I wanted him to know.”
“I want him to know too,” said Alix, nibbling Yuri’s ear and wrapping her thighs around his.
“Still, after a while, I ordered Titov to tear off the tape, to see what would happen. Carver blinked a few times and shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he was crying, weeping quite pitifully. Kursk slapped him a few times and that seemed to wake him up. That was when he realized where he was, standing up against a wall with four men pointing guns at him. And then, then—and I must say, this was, perhaps, the most satisfying moment of all—he tried to stand up straight, die like a man . . . and he couldn’t. He fell over. One of the men had to go over and drag him up again, just prop him against the wall. . . .”
Alix had been trying not to listen. It was just too painful. So it took her a few seconds to comprehend what Yuri was saying. He was describing Carver’s death. Her prayer had gone unanswered. It felt like a knife to her heart. She couldn’t breathe. She gasped for air.
“Are you all right?” asked Yuri.
She nodded and smiled apologetically. “Sorry. I’m fine. Tell me the rest of the story.”
He took one of her breasts in his hand and gave the nipple a contemplative stroke with his thumb, his eyes fixed on her face, his expression impassive as she gave a little gasp.
“So as I was saying,” he went on, “the men were all armed with their guns. But the guns were loaded with blanks. So they fired a volley at Carver and he was huddled up against the wall and it took him a second to realize that he was still alive. And then he wet himself all over the floor, like an animal. So naturally I made him get down on his knees and crawl through his own urine. It was really quite satisfying.”
Carver was alive! It was all Alix could do to stop herself rolling off Yuri and simply flopping over on the bed, overwhelmed by relief. Yet that joy was mixed with a bitter shot of anger and shame at the ordeal he was enduring on her account.
“Where is he now?” she asked, raising her head from Yuri’s chest.
“Back in his favorite comfy chair,” Yuri replied.
Alix knew what that meant. Yuri had taken her to see the basement torture chamber the day before, when it was being prepared. It was a test of her loyalty and a warning against betrayal. The unspoken message was clear: You too could end up in that chair.
She tried to keep her voice calm. “Will he survive the night?”
Suddenly Yuri’s eyes turned hard and suspicious, with a new intensity that seemed to cut through the semidarkness of the bedroom.
“Why do you ask? You seem concerned for his safety.”
Somehow, Alix forced a laugh. “Of course I am! I do not want him to die just yet. I want a long, deep sleep. Maybe in the morning I will have a little breakfast in bed. Then I will have a bath, get dressed . . .” She lay back down again so that she was whispering into Yuri’s ear, “In my sexiest new clothes. . . .” She paused again. “And then I want to go downstairs and watch him die with my own eyes, right in front of me.”
Yuri gave a sharp, almost cackling laugh and slapped Alix hard on the rump. “You are a bad, bad woman. That must be why you make me so hard.”
Hating herself for her complicity, Alix let him screw her and pretended to enjoy it. Then she remained motionless and silent until he fell asleep. She was tempted, oh so tempted, to kill Yuri there and then, press a pillow against his smug face until he suffocated. But there was just a chance he might wake up and fight back, and she could not afford to be defeated now.
There was a gun in the bedside table, on Yuri’s side of the bed. Slowly, hardly daring to breathe, agonizingly aware of every sound, Alix slid the drawer open and removed the pistol. It was a SIG-Sauer, like the one Carver had used. The two men in her life had that in common, at least.
The glowing red numbers of the digital clock on the table gave the time as 4:01.
The master bedroom suite had his and hers walk-in closets. In Yuri’s, she found a pair of jeans and a belt and stuffed them into a laundry bag, which she hung over her left shoulder.
Would Carver be in any fit state, mentally or physically, to get dressed and make a run for it? Could he fight his way out if they were discovered? Alix longed to see and hold him again. But that ache of anticipation was undermined by an equally powerful fear of what she might find. Part of her wished she could just run away and hide from the strain of multiple deceptions and the pummeling of repressed emotions. But there was no point trying to close her eyes and wish all this away. Life was as it was. She just had to deal with it.
She pulled on a robe and tiptoed barefoot back across the bedroom to the door, turned the handle with painstaking care, and, never taking her eyes off the bed, opened the door a few inches. Just enough to see into the hallway.
It seemed clear. The men would be upstairs, Kursk in his own small room, the others in an attic dormitory. They would not believe that Carver could possibly escape. Even so, knowing Kursk, there was bound to be a man standing guard somewhere. For all his crude brutality, Kursk was very seldom inefficient and never, ever careless.
The ground floor was completely unoccupied, though the air was still heavy with the stench of stale smoke and spilled alcohol. If there was a guard, he would be downstairs, in the cramped control room next door to the main chamber.
Standing by the heavy door that led down to the basement, Alix thought back to her side-arm training, almost a decade ago. She checked the magazine and made sure that a round was chambered. Then she stepped down the stairs, holding the gun out in front of her, clasped in both hands, ready to fire at any moment.
There was no one in the basement corridor. She stepped noiselessly across the bare concrete floor to the door of the control room. Now she held the gun in her right hand, behind her back. With her left, she eased the door open. If there was anyone inside, she planned to tell him she wanted to see the Englishman suffering. The men all knew she was back in Yuri’s good graces. They would want to indulge her for fear of angering him.
The door swung into the room. Alix slipped in after it, side-on, trying to conceal her handgun. She needn’t have worried. There was a guard in the room, Rutsev, but his piggy, round head was slumped against his chest and the only sound in the room was the slow, even snuffle of his breathing. In the quiet room, with no reason to believe that anything could happen, he had succumbed to the effects of all the vodka he had consumed that night.
Alix wondered what to do next. She could not allow Rutsev to wake up and sound the alarm. But there didn’t seem to be anything in the room that she could use to tie him up or gag him. There was no alternative. She would have to shoot him while he slept.
She held out the gun, barely a hand’s breadth from his head, trying to keep it from trembling, trying to summon up the will to kill another human being in cold blood. She thought of all the times his lecherous eyes had played across her body, the hands he had let slide oh-so-accidentally across her ass and breasts. It wasn’t enough. And then, for the first time since she had entered the room, her eyes were caught by the glow of a TV monitor.
She turned her head and saw Carver, his limbs and body bound, his mouth and eyes forced open, the earphones clamped to his head. It was the absolute silence and stillness that shocked her most of all. He must be undergoing agonies beyond all comprehension. Yet there was no sign whatsoever of his suffering. Even the ability to communicate his pain had been denied him.
Alix couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. For all the horror, there was something mesmerizing about the sight of such pure, unrelieved torment. For ten long seconds she stood there, unmoving, then she tore her gaze from the monitor, spun around, and put two bullets into Rutsev’s skull without an instant’s hesitation.
A stew of blood, brain, bone, and hair sprayed against the bare gray wall behind him, heavy drops of thick red matter clinging to the rough surface of the concrete before they spattered onto the floor. Once again, Alix had killed a man. But this time she did not double over in shock. This time she barely even looked at the remains. Seconds later, she was sliding open the bolts on the white cell door.



81

The main problem with torture lies with the human beings on whom it is inflicted. They have a limited capacity for pain. Even the toughest, best-trained soldiers and agents will reach a point where they will say absolutely anything to relieve their suffering, rendering intelligence gathered by means of torture virtually worthless.
Sometimes, of course, intelligence gathering is not the real aim. Sometimes torture is inflicted for its own sake, for the victim’s punishment and the torturer’s pleasure. But now another problem rears its head: If the body is punished beyond a certain point, it simply shuts down, either through unconsciousness or death. It takes real skill, even artistry, to keep the pain and injury at just the right level—not too gentle that they serve no purpose, yet not so harsh that they become counterproductive. A gifted torturer aims for that Goldilocks balance of pain.
It is then that the question of shutdown arises. A mind that can no longer make sense of the world around it or order the information it receives into any coherent meaning will eventually abandon the attempt and retreat into itself. Hallucination takes the place of reality. Memory fails. A person’s very identity begins to slip away.
Samuel Carver was already exhausted and hungry before he even reached Gstaad. Since then, the successive traumas he suffered had weakened him to the point of collapse. He’d made no attempt to resist when they led him back to the cell and strapped him back on the torture chair. When Titov hit him with a final blast from the stun belt, just for the sheer pleasure of hurting him, there was something strangely lifeless about the spasms that had racked his body, as if he were no longer aware of the pain.
Carver didn’t feel the teeth being wrenched from his jaw as his head fought against its straps. When the headphones and light box were switched back on, his overloaded brain rejected the barrage of incoherent stimuli, and Carver drifted into a sort of dream state. His dazzled, dessicated eyes were still wide open, but the blazing whiteness had been replaced by images from his subconscious, long-hidden recollections of people and places fused into a new world of their own.
There were two golden women—at least, he thought there were two: Sometimes they seemed to meld into one, and their bodies and faces were never quite the same from one moment to the next. These women seemed to like him. He sensed their bodies close to him. But when he went to touch them, they drifted away and he couldn’t make sense of what they were saying, though their faces seemed kind and their smiles let him know how happy they were to see him. He wanted to talk to them, to tell them he felt the same way. But he couldn’t speak. No matter how hard he tried, he could not say a word. His mouth just would not move.
He walked through his old school hallways and then straight into the officers’ mess at Poole. All his friends were there. There was an older man—what was he named? Carver loved him very much, but then the older man seemed to be angry with him and Carver was suddenly very frightened, just like he’d been during those first terms at boarding school when the teachers got cross with him and he was all alone, far from home, with no one to comfort him.
And then he was standing in a tunnel, with a car coming toward him, its dazzling headlights filling his eyes, and his eyeballs seemed to burn as if they’d been set on fire and he longed to be somewhere safe and dark, and as he spiraled back through his psyche, he came to a place that was absolutely secure. He was floating in water, only it wasn’t ordinary water because it was rich and sweet. Now he was being pulled from this warm safe place and being dragged out into the cold. He fought and kicked, but it made no difference. He was ripped out into the open. He screamed and yelled and for a moment, everything was all right again. He was cradled in two warm arms and his head was pressed against something deliciously soft and safe and his mouth was filling again with sweetness. But that too was lost, because other hands were grabbing him and taking him away and he was crying again because he wanted to keep feeling that softness and tasting that sweetness.
Finally he became aware, as if watching from the far end of an impossibly long corridor, that something new was happening to him. A blissful darkness had descended and he could feel gentle hands, warm hands touching his face, stroking his forehead and cheeks. These hands seemed different from the ones in his dream. They were somehow more substantial, more real. And it struck him that his mouth seemed to be moving again and he wondered if he could talk.
“Who are you?” he croaked. “Who’s there?”



82

Andrei Dimitrov was dragged from his deep, vodkasoaked oblivion by the distant sound of gunfire. He propped himself up on his thin horsehair mattress and rubbed a hand across his aching head. He could have sworn he’d heard a pistol being fired, somewhere off in the distance. But now there was nothing but the silence of the early hours.
And then a thought struck him, making his guts swoop like a thrill-seeker on a rollercoaster ride. What was the time? He scrabbled for his watch and tried to make sense of the luminous dial. Ten past four. He was supposed to take over watch duty from Vasili Rutsev at four. If Vasha got pissed off and told Kursk, he’d be in deep shit.
Dimitrov tumbled from his bed and searched around on the floor for his clothes and shoes, trying not to wake Titov, who was snoring and farting in the adjacent bed. His MAC was in a metal cabinet next to the bed. He got it out and stubbed his big toe against the bedstead, adding one more pain to the grim effects of a desperate hangover. Dimitrov groaned under his breath. He was getting too old to drink this much.
He crept past Kursk’s bedroom and made it down to the ground floor without getting caught. Still bleary-eyed and aching, he shoved open the door to the basement and headed downstairs.
It was the smell that hit him first, the unmistakable acrid bitterness of a fired gun and the sweet sickliness of spilled blood. Dimitrov woke up fast as the adrenalin hit his bloodstream—the ultimate natural hangover cure. He crept down to the basement corridor.
“Rutsev!” he shouted. “Vasha!”
There was no reply.
Dimitrov made his way to the control room. The door was ajar. He kicked it open, holding the MAC at his shoulder, ready to fire. Then he let the gun fall to his side when he saw the bloody mess that had once been his comrade’s face. God knows, Rutsev had been a sadistic bastard and his friendship with Igor Titov got sicker with every day that passed, but they’d fought together in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and on the streets of Moscow. Who’d have thought he’d get blown away in a luxury chalet in the Swiss Alps?
But who’d shot him? Dimitrov racked his brain, trying to recall whether there’d been any signs of forced entry anywhere in the house. He’d swear not. But no one in the house could have done it. The boss was upstairs screwing that stuck-up tart Petrova. Titov was out cold and Kursk had no reason whatever to attack Rutsev. There’d been no arguments, let alone fights, during the course of the evening.
That left just the Englishman. But he was in no state to kill anyone. And anyway, he was strapped to a chair in a locked room.
Wasn’t he?
Andrei Dimitrov looked at the monitor that showed the interrogation room. Then he looked again, and his blood ran cold.
The chair was empty.



83

Alix had been weeping as she stuffed her gun into her shoulder bag and ran across the chilly white room to the hellish tableau at its heart. She could barely see through her tears as she loosened the tape from Carver’s eyes and brushed her hand over his face to close his eyelids. She pulled the headphones off his head and then set about undoing the straps that tied him to the chair.
She worked her way down from his head, starting where the suffering was worse. The leather binding that had gagged his mouth had wreaked havoc. As she pulled it away a mass of clotted blood came with it. There was a single tooth stuck like some obscene decoration on the surface of the clot. Alix had to look away for a moment to ease the heaving in her throat before she returned to her task.
The stun belt around his waist was padlocked shut, but the battery packs that powered it could be removed, and with them its power to inflict any more pain. By the time she’d finished, she was kneeling at his feet. She kissed the bleeding flesh where the straps and shackles had bitten into his skin—an echo of his own kiss, all those hours ago. It felt like a kind of atonement.
Yet he made no response and when she got to her feet he was still frozen, eyes and mouth wide open, so motionless that for a moment she feared he might be dead. But no, his flesh was warm, his chest still rising and falling with quick, shallow breaths. Alix then leaned forward and took him in her arms.
When Carver finally spoke in a cracked, quavering voice, confessing his blind helplessness, Alix broke down, sobbing against his shoulder. She had never experienced true compassion before. When men had broken down in her arms, she had counted it a victory. Now she felt as though there was no end to what she could give. She longed to care for the man in her arms, to nurse him and restore him, no matter how long it took.
First, though, she had to get him out of the chair, away from the blazing glare of the light box. She spoke into his ear: “Help me, Carver. We must move you. And I need you to help me.”
For the first time, he turned his head to look at her. He blinked several times, trying to restore his vision, then squinted his eyes and peered at her face, searching it for clues.
“It’s me,” she said. “Alix. I came back for you. I’m so sorry, my darling. I was so cruel to you. But I never meant it. You must believe me. I love you. Now please, please try to walk. . . . Do you understand?”
Another frown, more blinks, and then Carver gave a slow, deliberate nod.
“Can you walk?”
A dry, inarticulate croak emerged from the wreck of Carver’s mouth. Then his arms and legs quivered, summoning up the energy and will for a massive physical effort. Alix took a step back to give Carver room as he lifted his hands onto the arms of the chair, then pushed with all his might. Slowly, inch by inch, his face grimacing with strain and concentration, he raised himself upright. Then he collapsed into Alix’s arms.
She tried again. “Come on, my darling, walk for me. One step . . . just one step.”
Carver nodded again, then stuck his right leg forward, with all the stiffness of a man trying out an artificial limb. He shifted his weight forward.
“Well done, that was great. Now, another step.”
He took another stiff-legged step, this time with his left foot. Then he gave a brusque shake of his arm, brushing Alix away, and took two more ungainly strides before falling once more into her arms.
“Anxsch,” he mumbled. He closed his eyes, thought for a moment, then tried again. “Thanxsch.” He squeezed out the word past his swollen, lacerated tongue and through his loosened teeth.
Alix laughed and blinked away her tears. “You’re welcome. Now, come with me, into this corner, away from the light.”
She led him slowly into the corner under the camera and propped him like a broomstick against the wall.
“You okay?” she said, taking her hands off his shoulders and letting them hover right by him, ready to catch him if he fell again.
“Uh-huh.”
She brushed a quick butterfly kiss against his parched, cracked lips. Then she reached into her bag for the clothes. As she pulled the jeans out, the SIG-Sauer came with them. It crashed onto the floor.
“Gun . . .” said Carver, looking at the weapon, but not making any move to pick it up. He nodded to himself. “Good. Need a gun. . . .”
Alix ignored it. She was busy easing the jeans over Carver’s feet and pulling them up his thighs and over the vile band of black nylon until, at last, he had a shred of dignity again. There was one last important job to do, but now she felt weirdly shy. Alix couldn’t understand it. After all the things she’d done, all the men she’d been with, she was nervous about zipping up Carver’s trousers. Why should this seem so much more intimate?
He sensed her unease, and smiled again. For the first time she saw a faint glimmer in his eyes, the merest hint that the real Samuel Carver was coming back to her.
“I can do tha,” he mumbled.
She had to help his fingers find the zipper. He gave a tug and got it about halfway up. She shook her head at her own foolishness and finished the job.
“You love me?” he asked her, as if this were a new idea to him.
Alix nodded, biting her top lip.
“Promise?”
“Yes,” she whispered, so softly that she could barely hear the word herself. Then, fractionally louder, she repeated, “Yes, I promise.”
He nodded. “Tha’s good. . . .”
She took him in her arms again. “It’s all right, my darling. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Then the next thing she knew, Carver had grabbed her with unexpected strength and flung her to the ground as the sound of gunfire shattered the room.



84

Carver’s vision was still blurred and dotted with dancing lights. His world was like a film that had been partly burned away, so that the picture was scorched with white shafts of pure light. Gradually, though, he was beginning to get some faint sense of connection to the world outside.
He knew now that the woman with him was called Alix, and he was sure that she was one of the two beautiful golden women that he’d been trying to talk to, the ones who’d kept slipping away from him. She seemed upset, very upset, as though she’d done him harm, and as he thought about it, he did remember a terrible hurt, a pain in his heart, but he couldn’t remember when or why that had been. It didn’t matter, though, because she said she loved him and everything was going to be all right. She’d promised.
And then he’d seen Dimitrov come through the door. He’d known at once that this was a very bad man, one of the men who’d tried to hurt him, and this bad man was holding a gun. He was aiming it at the two of them. Carver did not want the man to shoot Alix, and a deep, untrammeled, allconsuming rage rose within him, sweeping through his consciousness and blowing all the rubble of Samuel Carver’s identity away.
He entered some kind of fugue state in which another unknown identity took over, all violence and all control, sweeping him aside. It was this other persona that threw Alix to the ground, that tumbled forward, ignoring the spray of bullets from Dimitrov’s MAC-10, that snatched the SIG in one fluid motion from the floor, crouched in the firing position, and slammed three bullets into the Russian’s chest.
Without saying a word, Carver got to his feet, walked across to Alix, and brusquely pulled her upright. She looked into his eyes, startled by his sudden, alien roughness, and was shocked to find no sign of recognition.
“Godda gedd out,” he said. “Garage. Car.”
He took Alix’s hand and dragged her from the room with a power and determination that made no sense to her. It bore no relation to the shattered man she had been tending to just seconds earlier.
They ran down the corridor toward the garage.
Upstairs, in Yuri Zhukovski’s bedroom, the red numerals on his bedside clock clicked over to 4:15, and then the clock was obliterated as the bomb in the computer case exploded, creating a fireball that expanded at supersonic speed and generating a pressure wave that smashed everything in its path before the vacuum that had been left behind sucked it back to its point of origin again.
Zhukovski too was blasted into smithereens and his remains incinerated. One second he was a billionaire oligarch with thousands of workers under his command. And by the end of that same second, he had simply ceased to exist.
The bomb was a small one. The explosion did little structural damage outside the confines of the master bedroom suite. But the fire it started was soon raging through the house.
In the basement, Carver stopped at the sound of the explosion and a grin of pure, inhuman triumph spread across his face.
Alix was staring at him as if uncertain what or who she was looking at.
“Bomb,” he announced. “Nasty accident. Serve him righ’.” He looked up, cocking an ear for any sound of further explosions. “Godda geddout,” he repeated. “Now!”
They hurtled down the corridor and into the garage. Carver looked around for the control that would open the door.
“It’s okay,” shouted Alix. “I know how to do it.”
She pressed a button on the wall and the great metal door swung up and then back, coming to rest under the ceiling.
Outside, they looked back at the chalet. Flames were already reaching out of the gaping holes where the master bedroom’s windows had been as the fire grabbed at the night sky. Smoke was billowing across the hillside, and the ground beneath them was covered in glass.
Carver started running up the tarmac drive that curved around to the chalet’s main entrance.
Alix hesitated for a moment, then followed him. As bizarre as Carver’s behavior had become, he was still her best chance of safety.
As he came around the side of the house, Carver left the drive and melted into the undergrowth. Alix almost fell over him as he crouched behind a large bush. He waved a hand angrily at her, ordering her to get back. Carver turned his head and scowled at Alix, holding a finger to his mouth and shushing her before returning to his position. He was watching the front door, waiting for the remaining inhabitants of the house to appear.
Kursk was first. He emerged from the chalet, gave three or four hacking coughs, expelling the smoke from his lungs, then stood up and looked around him. He was unarmed, Carver noticed, baring his teeth like a predator spotting prey.
A few seconds later, Titov came out. He had rescued his submachine gun from the fire, but the smoke had affected him more than Kursk. Titov was bent double, his hands on his knees, hacking and wheezing. Kursk gestured at him angrily, wanting him to hand over the gun. Titov seemed unwilling to obey.
Carver rose to his feet and made his way stealthily through the undergrowth. He emerged at the edge of the circular driveway in front of the house and walked toward the two men, the left half of his body painted in tones of red and orange by the conflagration raging beside him.
The two Russians were too involved in their own arguments and discomfort to notice Carver until he was no more than five meters away. He was standing quite still, and he waited until Grigori Kursk saw him, recognized him, and acknowledged the gun in his hand before he put two bullets into him, stomach and crotch. Carver didn’t want a quick, efficient killing. He was shooting to cause pain.
Kursk shrieked, a high-pitched wail that seemed utterly incongruous coming from his massive frame. He was curled up on the ground, his hands grabbing at his torn entrails.
Titov had looked up at the sound of Carver’s gun. The third shot blew the MAC-10 from his hands; the fourth shattered his left knee. Now he was down and howling.
Alix looked on, appalled by a sadism she’d never seen in Carver before. He was repeating the torture he himself had suffered.
He stood over Titov and put another bullet into his thigh, sending a fatal fountain of blood spurting into the air from the femoral artery, black against the brilliance of the roaring flames. Then he turned back to Kursk and kicked him so that for a moment his body unfurled, exposing his chest. Carver shot him in the left lung.
Kursk was still alive, though the screams were just whispers now.
Carver fired twice more.
“Stop!” Alix shouted. “For God’s sake, stop!”‘
The sound of her voice made Carver stand up straight and look around, a puzzled expression on his face. The storm that had raged in him blew itself out as suddenly as it had appeared. The hand that held the gun dropped to his side. He looked back down at the men at his feet as if he didn’t know who they were or how they had got there.
Alix walked across the tarmac and took the gun from Carver’s hand.
“Come on,” she said gently. “Please. It’s over.”
He nodded mutely and let her lead him up the path to the front gate. Alix pressed a button on a nearby keypad, and the big metal gates swung open. They stepped out onto the road outside, and just as they did so, a car engine started up and two headlights flared, shining right at them.
Carver was looking straight into the lights when they suddenly went on. He stopped dead in his tracks, then bent over with his head in his hands, moaning softly.
The car door opened and a tall figure emerged. Alix held out the gun in her right hand, shading her eyes with her left.
“Don’t move!” she shouted.
“Whoa, take it easy.”
Alix relaxed as she recognized Larsson’s voice.
The gangly Norwegian strolled over to where Alix was standing, trying to reassure Carver, who seemed to have reverted to the isolated, unknowing state he’d been in when she first set him free from the torture chair.
“I was beginning to get worried about you guys,” Larsson said.
He looked down at Carver.
“What the hell’s happened to him?”



85

The late-summer sunshine dappled the waters of Lake Geneva, sending dancing waves of light across the ceiling of the sanatorium’s dayroom. It was a large, light, open space, but on this pleasant Saturday lunchtime it was occupied by a solitary patient.
He was sitting in a wheelchair, a few feet away from a television set. The patient seemed lost in a world of his own. He was muttering to himself while his body carried on its own unconscious yet compulsive ritual of tics and twitches. He was not paying any attention to the pictures on the TV screen.
Eight young soldiers in bright scarlet tunics were carrying a coffin draped in a glorious heraldic banner and covered in wreaths of white flowers down the aisle of a vast and ancient church. The coffin processed toward the altar and the congregation began to sing the slow, dirgelike opening of the British national anthem. As the tune rose to its climax in the middle of the verse, with a triumphant cry of “Send her victorious!” the patient suddenly grew quiet, sat up straight, and fixed his eyes on the screen.
He frowned. He gazed at the picture, which was now focusing on an elderly couple, a middle-aged man, and two teenage boys wearing formal black suits and ties. Then he screwed his eyes shut and started to scratch his head with both hands. There was something manic about his movements, and also the suddenness with which they stopped as his attention reverted to the screen, then started up again as he retreated back into himself.
He was a relatively young man, showing no signs of physical disease or malnourishment. He was dressed in a pair of cotton pajama trousers and a white T-shirt and it was readily apparent that his body was lean, well-muscled, and fit. Yet there were red marks around his wrists and ankles—scratches, chafing, and bruising that suggested he had been tied up or restrained in some way. He had the swollen, discolored face of a mugging victim.
This, however, was all just cosmetic damage. More worrying were his eyes. There was a numb blankness in his stare, as though he found it hard to focus on the world around him, and harder still to make sense of what he saw.
The nurses called him Samuel.
Alix Petrova had to stop for a moment outside the sanatorium entrance. She had visited Carver morning and night since she and Thor Larsson had brought him to this very private, exceptionally discreet, and even more expensive facility, two days earlier. But still she had to steel herself for what awaited her within.
The receptionist directed her to the dayroom. A nurse met her as she stepped through the glass-paneled door into the airy room. A name tag on the nurse’s crisp, white uniform read, “Corinne Juneau.”
“How is Samuel today?” asked Alix.
“A little better today,” Nurse Juneau replied. “We’ve got him out of bed, but he’s still terribly confused, the poor man. Look at him, watching the funeral. I don’t think he knows what’s happening at all, bless him.”
She watched her patient for a moment, then added, “he’s so full of fear. . . .” A cloud passed over her kind, caring face. “How could anyone do this to another human being?”
The nurse led the way across the room to the wheelchair. “Wait here,” she said, when they were still a few feet away.
She walked on alone. The TV set was mounted on the wall and controlled by a handset that sat on a console just below. Nurse Juneau picked up the remote control and used it to turn down the volume. When talking to Samuel it was important to keep ones voice as low and calm as possible. Even the slightest loud noise seemed to scare him.
Once the sound of the church music had faded away, Nurse Juneau turned to face Samuel. She was still holding the remote control.
“Hello,” she said, with her sweetest smile. “Your friend has. . . .”
She got no further. Samuel was looking at her, eyes wide, mouth gaping. He was pointing at her and pleading, “No! No!” She took a step toward him and he flinched, curling up in his wheelchair. “Don’t hurt me! I’ll talk!”
Nurse Juneau’s professional composure fractured for a moment. She was fixed to the spot, looking around her, trying to find the source of his distress. Alix hurried to the nurse’s side and took the remote control from her hand. She replaced it on the console, then put a reassuring hand on Nurse Juneau’s shoulder, as if she were the professional and the nurse the visitor.
“It’s all right,” she said. “It wasn’t you. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him now.”
Nurse Juneau hurried to the far side of the room, casting a couple of nervous glances over her shoulder as she went.
Samuel was watching the women through his fingers. His eyes were still wide and staring, but he seemed slightly less afraid now.
Alix crouched down by the wheelchair, not wanting to stand over him. “It’s okay,” she murmured. “You’re safe here. No one can hurt you. I will look after you.”
As she spoke, she gently stroked one of Samuel’s arms. He gave no sign of understanding what she had said. But her soothing tone and the soft touch of her fingers against his skin seemed to relax him. Gradually he uncurled. Alix kept talking to him, keeping her voice low, using simple phrases.
“Everything’s going to be fine, I’m here. . . .”
Samuel seemed more content now. His attention shifted back to the TV screen. He watched in silence for a while, still frowning and scratching and twitching, lost in his own, bleak universe.
Then he pointed up at the picture. “What’s that?” he mumbled through his battered mouth. His voice sounded blank and uncomprehending. “What’s happening?” And then, quite clearly, in a voice that could have been mistaken for that of a normal, healthy man, “Who died?”’
Samuel’s brow furrowed as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. “Did someone die?” he asked, though now the anxiety had returned to his voice.
Alix bit her lip and pressed her eye tightly closed. Then she whispered, “Yes. She was a princess. She had an accident.”
Samuel thought about what she had said, then turned his attention back to the TV. Alix pulled up a chair next to the wheelchair, and they sat there together in silence.
Samuel Carver was watching a line of black cars driving down an empty road. People were standing on bridges across the road. Whenever the cars went under a bridge, all the people threw flowers down onto them. Some of the flowers landed on the cars, but many more fluttered down onto the road, leaving lovely bright colors against the dirty gray tarmac.
He reached out for Alix’s hand. She squeezed it gently, letting him know that she loved him. Then Samuel Carver looked at her, a flicker of recognition danced in his eyes, and he smiled.