Assassin

16

Damon Tyzack was invisible to anyone driving by less than fifty yards from where he lay on the grassy slope. But he could see the cars and trucks on the narrow local road, just off Highway 88 in Amador County, northern California. And he could hear the tyres whispering on the blacktop, like waves on a shingle beach. The landscape, too, possessed a gentle, rolling swell, and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada were softened to a smoky grey by the dying light of a summer dusk. The tourism people hereabouts called their patch the Heart of the Mother Lode, in memory of the forty-niners who'd thronged there during the Gold Rush. These days the mines were gone, or converted into visitor attractions, and the land was given over to vineyards and ranches, like the one that sprawled for a couple of thousand acres on the far side of the road.

The owner was a financier by the name of Norton Krebs, whose business was based in San Francisco, 125 miles away. For the past five years, Krebs had handled investments for corporations controlled by Tyzack and his associates. These investments had lost a great deal of their value and the kind of clients Krebs had cultivated took a less forgiving view than the average investor of a financial adviser continuing to pay himself large fees while delivering poor performance. They saw the destruction of their wealth as, in every sense, a capital offence. So Krebs was marked for death.

The hit would go down within the next few minutes, but the hard work had been done over the past several days. The morning after he'd arrived in San Francisco, Tyzack had ridden Amtrak's California Zephyr train to Salt Lake City, then caught a bus to Boise. There he'd bought a second-hand Toyota Tacoma truck, for cash, using fake ID in Carver's name. He drove it back down to Amador County and spent three full days familiarizing himself with the details of Norton Krebs's life, movements and environment. He took care to speak to people in the towns of Jackson, Iona, Sutter Creek and Amador City, nearest to the Krebs ranch, both to gain information and leave a memory in their minds – a memory of a dark-haired, green-eyed Englishman.

Late on Saturday night, he'd driven across northern California and into Nevada, to the parking garage of the Lake Tahoe casino where Krebs was spending the weekend. That was where Tyzack had replaced the tyre-valves of Krebs's Escalade with valves that looked identical to any casual inspection, but which contained a radio-activated explosive filament. When triggered, they were enough to cause a blow-out that would, if carefully timed and located, cause any but the finest driver to lose control of their vehicle.

The booby-trapped valves were an old Russian trick, but Tyzack had been taught about them when he had served in the British Special Forces. Tyzack hadn't spent long serving Her Majesty. But he'd learned a very great deal.

Beneath him the road curved sharply to the left, following the line of the valley. Just before the turn, the land fell away from the road into a minor ravine around thirty feet deep. A live oak tree grew by the side of the ravine, centuries old to judge by the mighty girth of its trunk and the spread of its evergreen branches.

Between the road and the ravine stretched a barbed-wire fence. Norton Krebs was a perfectionist. He prided himself on demanding nothing but the best. He'd spent a fortune upgrading the boundary of his land with wire that was strong enough to stop a charging bull, stretched tight between posts bedded firmly in the ground. Tyzack was counting on that perfectionism to kill his target.

Krebs, he calculated, was going to approach the lefthander with the confidence and speed of a man who knew the route so well his driving was virtually automatic. His concentration would be impaired by fatigue and the after-effects of the alcohol, cocaine and ecstasy he'd been consuming through most of his waking hours since Friday evening.

Now a car was coming down the road towards Tyzack. Its Xenon headlights were on, but there was still enough ambient light for him to be able to see beyond them and make out the domineering bulk of the Escalade, the Diamond White paint-job and 22-inch chrome wheels identifying it as Krebs's.

Tyzack took his time. He waited until Krebs was just fractionally short of the point where he would have to brake, the car's speed up around 70 mph, before he depressed the control that sent a radio signal to the explosive valves. Then he just let events play out of their own accord.

Just two of the charges detonated. The driver's side tyres remained intact. But that only added to the catastrophic effect of the other explosions, as the functioning wheels kept driving, pushing the car away from the centre of the road, towards the hazards beyond.

Krebs's reactions were as sluggish as predicted. He'd been driving along a dry road on a warm, clear evening with very little traffic about, so there'd been no reason to anticipate any problems. The simultaneous disintegration of two tyres and the immediate, total loss of steering and brakes took him entirely by surprise.

His eyes widened, his mouth dropped open and the Escalade swerved across the tarmac, its high body lurching from side to side. It rocketed off the road and hit the cattle wire at full tilt. The fiery rasping of wheel rims on the road was replaced by the screech of the wire on the car's bodywork as it rode up the radiator grille then over the high, bulbous bonnet, stretching like a bowstring as the nearest fence-posts were torn from their footings.

Then, as the massive white machine approached the edge of the ravine, an invisible hand seemed to let the bowstring loose and it cut through the first six feet of the Escalade's cabin as easily as a wire through cheese, slicing Norton Krebs clean in two below the shoulder. Only then did the barbed wire snap. The release of tension catapulted the Escalade towards the oak tree and then sent it pinballing off its trunk into the ravine, where it finally came to rest, as ripped and lifeless as its owner.

Tyzack let out his breath and gave a slight shake of the head. Then he turned away from the scene of the crime. The unexploded tyre-valves were still down there in the wreckage, but Damon Tyzack did not make any move to retrieve them. He walked away down the road, towards the truck he'd parked half a mile away, without a backward glance.