Assassin

24

'He's just chasing rabbits.'

Carver did not know where the words had come from. Maybe he'd dreamed them. But the moment he opened his eyes, he knew there was a reason his subconscious had pushed them to the forefront of his mind.

It wasn't rabbits Buster had been chasing two days earlier. There'd been someone up on that hill.

Carver looked at the bedside clock. It was 05:32. Through a crack in the curtains he could see the first light of dawn. Maddy was asleep next to him. He got out of bed, pulled on his trousers, a sweatshirt and a pair of trainers and walked round the bed to the door.

He had the handle in his grasp when he paused, and walked back to her side of the bed. She kept a handgun in the drawer of her bedside cabinet: she'd told him about it once when he asked about her security. He slid open the drawer and pulled out a Springfield XD sub-compact 9-mm pistol. The barrel was barely three inches long, and the whole gun weighed just a couple of pounds unloaded, making it the perfect handbag weapon: a smart choice by a woman who knew what she was doing. It would suit him just fine, too.

He slipped out of the room, down the stairs and into the hall, where Buster spent the night curled up in his basket. Carver gave a low whistle and the German Shepherd looked up sleepily, no longer hostile but still not certain whether he was happy to be disturbed by this new addition to the household.

'Walkies,' said Carver.

That made up Buster's mind. He scrambled out of his basket, panting with excitement and wagging his tail. Carver led him out through the back door and across the dewy grass towards the tree-line a couple of hundred yards away.

The woods rose on a west-facing slope. The dawn sun was behind them and the section of the field nearest the house was bathed in its low, amber rays. Beyond that, the rest of the field and the trees were cast in shadow. Anyone watching from the trees would have a perfect spotlit view of Carver. He, on the other hand, had the sun in his eyes and was looking into relative darkness.

He clapped his hands and said, 'Buster!' in a half-whispered voice. Then he broke into a run and dashed across the field, chased by the dog who was delighted to play along with the game.

There were no shots, no response of any kind from the hill.

As he came closer and stepped into its shadow, Carver was no longer dazzled. The light here was low but even, plenty good enough for his purposes. He headed uphill, trying to re-create the route he and Maddy had taken on horseback. Buster followed, nose down, reacquainting himself with the smells of this part of the forest. Carver paid attention, too, inspecting every inch of the forest floor as he walked very slowly between the trees, stopping to look around at the state of the low-lying branches and undergrowth through which he passed.

There was nothing to see: no footprints, no trampled plants, no sign whatever that anyone had been there. More minutes dragged by, and still nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe he'd got himself worked up about nothing.

And then he spotted it: a scattering of oak leaves on the ground. Nothing unusual about that… except that some of the leaves were much darker than the others, more rotten, and therefore older. They should have been lying beneath the top layer of newer, paler leaves. Something had disturbed them.

A few yards further on, Carver found a stone lying slightly to one side of a small depression in the earth from which it had been dislodged. There were no hoof-marks nearby: no horse had done this. Elsewhere, a twig from a sapling had been snapped at shoulder height.

They were only tiny deviations from the norm. Under normal circumstances, no one would notice them. Even to a trained eye, like Carver's, the first impression had been subconscious. Only now did he realize that he must, at some level, have picked up the spoor of a man when he was riding through the woods, but refused to register the information.

The sound of barking echoed through the trees. Carver followed the noise until he came upon Buster, working away at the ground. This was the same place he'd run to when they'd last been up there. Beside him was a hole, filled with three or four empty plastic packets of military rations. Buster wasn't paying any attention to them, though. He had found something far more interesting, and Carver realized what it must be. He took five quick strides towards the dog and yanked on his collar, pulling him away from the hole.

Buster snarled at him, furious to have been denied his prize. At the bottom of the hole the top of another plastic bag was poking through the crumbled earth. Carver did not have to take it out to know that it was filled with human faeces. He'd dug enough holes like this in his time.

Someone had been here all right, someone with military training, used to covering their tracks and lying low in enemy territory. He took a look at the ration bags. There were still fresh scraps of food inside. Whoever had eaten them had arrived within the past few days… just like Carver. That suggested he might have been the one under surveillance, not Maddy. The trash told him something else: the watcher wanted Carver to know that he had been there. Otherwise, he could simply have taken it all away with him.

But who would want to set up an observation post just to watch him fool around with a new girlfriend? And how could anyone have known he'd be there? He hadn't planned to fly to Boise, the whole thing was a last-minute decision.

He racked his brain, trying to remember the airports he'd been through on the way from North Carolina, hoping he could dredge up more anomalous images: people who'd looked out of place, or followed him, or seemed too self-consciously relaxed when he looked in their direction. Nothing came to him.

Carver was walking back downhill now, Buster following reluctantly and disconsolately behind. There was a gnawing, energy-sapping tension in his gut as the realization struck him that if he really were the surveillance subject there was only one possibility left: the watcher in the woods had been directed there by Maddy herself.

Carver thought back to their first meeting, that chance encounter in the Hotel du Cap bar. That could easily have been a set-up. Same with the text message a few weeks ago – had it really been as randomly out of the blue as it seemed? And when Buster had caught the scent of the surveillance, out on that ride, hadn't she been just a little too quick to say that it was a rabbit, too eager to change the subject?

The man who'd walked up to her Bronco at the hot-dog stand, standing so close to the car, talking so confidingly: he'd skedaddled right out of there the moment he'd seen Carver turning back towards the car. Sure, he could have been a creep. But he could also have been her control. Her being pissed off by what he'd said certainly didn't contradict that. Carver had argued with the men who'd given him orders often enough.

And take that whole scene at the diner. Maddy goes to the bathroom. A few minutes later two bozos turn up out of nowhere and start an entirely unprovoked fight. Meanwhile, the same grey car is waiting out in the parking lot. What's all that about?

Now that Carver thought about it, he knew nothing about this woman, beyond what she had told him. He had never met the mysterious Mr Cross. In the time they'd been on the ranch, she'd never introduced him to her family, who supposedly lived so close by. And the ease with which she'd fallen for him… Carver was not given to insecurity or false modesty, but he didn't think he was any kind of Casanova, either. Beautiful women did not line up to throw themselves at him. Yet this one had.

Or maybe he was just being paranoid.

He walked back to the house, telling himself not to let his suspicions wreck everything. He was having a good time. Just enjoy it.

Maddy was in the kitchen, fixing herself some breakfast. 'I was wondering where you guys had got to,' she said as Buster bounded towards her.

'We just went for an early-morning walk in the woods,' Carver said. 'Looked around a bit. Did some male bonding.'

He was watching her eyes. Looking for any tell-tale flicker of alarm when he mentioned looking in the woods. There was none, just the smile of a woman who's pleased to see her man.

'That's great,' Maddy said. 'You want eggs?'