Carver

79

Parkview Hospital

The man with Malachi Zorn’s face looked blearily around the room, trying to summon up the focus to make head or tail of the surroundings and the men looking down at him from the far end of the bed. One of the men, who had an olive-skinned, Middle Eastern appearance, detached himself from the group and came closer. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘my name is Dr Assim. Don’t worry, you’re in hospital and you’re quite safe. Now, can you tell us who you are?’

The man frowned and screwed up his eyes as he gathered his wits and then replied, ‘My name is Malachi Zorn.’

Assim smiled. ‘It’s all right. You don’t have to do that any more. We know you aren’t Mr Zorn. Who are you, really?’ A look of fear entered the man’s eyes, a shock so palpable that Assim placed his hand on his wrist and assured him again, ‘It’s all right. You’re in no danger.’

The man looked at Assim for a moment, then his lips twisted into a bitter laugh as he said, ‘Sure I’m in danger. I’m a dead man. That’s the whole point…’

‘What do you mean?’ Assim asked. ‘The whole point of what?’

‘Wait.’ The man grimaced as he struggled into a sitting position. ‘I’ll answer your questions… maybe. But first you answer mine.’

‘What would you like to ask?’

‘Well, for a start, how come I’m still alive? I… I can remember an explosion at the front of the car. Then glass smashing right by me, and a gun coming through the window…’ He looked down at his own body and began patting at his chest and stomach. ‘And my clothes… they’re all covered in blood, but I can’t feel any wounds. How did the blood get there?’

Dr Assim took a step back. ‘Mr Carver, perhaps you could help here?’ he said.

‘Sure. I was the guy who fired that gun at you. Sorry about that. It must have been a shock.’

‘Not really… I’d been expecting worse,’ the man replied.

Carver gave a wry smile. ‘Yeah, that makes sense. You were set up to take a bullet. What I actually fired at you was a tranquillizer dart, like the ones they use on wild animals on nature programmes. Then I threw a special effects grenade into the car. Made a lot of noise and splashed a load of pig’s blood all over you and the interior of that Bentley, but it looked a lot worse than it really was.’

‘And you didn’t want to kill me?’

‘Have you ever done me any harm?’ Carver asked.

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘Do you plan to do me any?’

‘Er… no.’

‘Then why would I want to kill you?’

‘Because-’

‘Because a man called Ahmad Razzaq paid me a lot of money to kill Malachi Zorn. That’s true. But you aren’t Zorn, so as far as I’m concerned, you aren’t my target. Now, since I’ve been good enough to keep you alive, why don’t you tell me who you really are?’

The man sighed. ‘Alive? Trust me, it’s a temporary reprieve… a few months: six, maybe nine if I’m lucky. Cancer. You’d have found it if you’d looked any closer, doc, believe me. But anyway, my name… yeah… my name is Michael A. Drinkwater. The “A” stands for Abraham, if you can believe that.’

Grantham got his phone out again and tapped a text to his office, ordering a search for any information on a Michael Abraham Drinkwater.

‘How old are you?’ he asked, looking up from his screen.

‘Thirty-seven. My birthday’s August the twenty-third. Should make that at least.’

‘Home town?’

‘Pensacola, Florida.’

‘Navy brat?’ asked Carver, thinking of the US Navy’s flight-training base there.

Drinkwater nodded. ‘Sure, my daddy flew Tomcats, though he was mostly flying a desk the years he was stationed there. You in the service?’

‘Royal Marines, a long time ago,’ said Carver. ‘So, tell me about Zorn. How did that work?’

‘You mean, apart from waking up every morning and seeing someone else’s face in the mirror?’

‘I mean now, this week. How much of it was you?’

‘That was Zorn — the real one — on that BBC interview. He gave a press conference at his place after ex-Prime Minister Orwell was killed. But that aside, if you ever saw Mr Zorn outside his house or his office, that was me. I was going to go to Wimbledon on Friday, too, and there was going to be some kind of fancy reception that evening, but I was told not to worry about that.’ Drinkwater gave a gentle smile. ‘I was going to be dead by then.’

‘How did Zorn recruit you?’ Carver asked.

‘He made me a deal. Well, his people did… I was at work. I’m a CPA — I guess you guys would just say “accountant”. It’s not exactly exciting. Anyway, these guys came to my office one day in January, near the end of the month. They said they wanted to make me a deal. They said I could make sure that my family would be well provided for. They knew my wife’s name, my kids’ names and ages, everything. I said, “Are you trying to sell me insurance?” and they laughed and one of them said, “I guess you could call it that.”’

‘So what was the deal?’

‘All I had to do was agree to impersonate the guy they were working for — they didn’t tell me his name, not at that time — and my family would receive two million dollars, cash. Invest it conservatively, and they’d be pretty much guaranteed a hundred grand a year for ever. They said they knew that would appeal to me, in my situation. I mean, it was obvious they knew everything about me — my personal finances, my medical records, you name it. So I said, “What’s the catch?” One of them said, “Well, you’ve gotta have a bit of surgery.” And the other one said, “Then you’ve gotta die. But what the hell, huh? At least this way it’ll be quick.”’

‘Remarkable,’ said Cameron Young, almost purring with satisfaction. ‘Truly remarkable.’

‘What do you mean, “remarkable”?’ asked Drinkwater indignantly. ‘What kind of word is that for those bastards?’

‘I apologize, Mr Drinkwater. I meant no offence,’ Young replied. ‘But I can’t help admiring the way Zorn’s mind works. And, if you’ll excuse the inappropriate sentiment, I also can’t help feeling he took a considerable pleasure in conceiving the choice with which you were presented. You knew that you were mortally ill, facing a very painful death, and yet you must have harboured, indeed may still harbour, the hope that somehow you might be spared. All you had to do — and I appreciate that “all” is a very loaded word here — was accept the inevitability of your fate, lose a few last months of life, and you would receive a swift end, courtesy of Mr Carver here, knowing that your family was secure. It’s elegant, don’t you think?’

‘No,’ said Drinkwater. ‘I damn well don’t. And I wouldn’t have taken the deal, either, except for the next thing they told me. Seems I was the third guy they’d approached. The other two had said no. And they were dead already, with not a single cent for their wives and kids.’

‘Well, at least you’re still alive.’

‘Yeah I am… and now we’ve got a problem.’

‘Really?’ asked Young.

‘Yeah, really,’ Drinkwater insisted. ‘See, the second half of that two million was payable on my death. And thanks to you jerks I’m still alive. So the way I see it, you owe me a million dollars.’

Young looked appalled. Carver burst out laughing. But Jack Grantham was looking at his phone screen with a face as grim as a gravestone. ‘That’s not our only problem,’ he said. ‘I just had a message from Wentworth. Zorn got away. Seems the little bastard saw us coming.’