Assassin

35

Thor Larsson had reserved a table by the window, equally well placed to watch the passers-by outside on Karl Johans Gate, or inside the cafe. Carver took off the jacket he'd worn over his plain black T-shirt, jeans and leather Converse sneakers and slung it over the back of his chair. He understood the choice of restaurant when he saw Maddy look around the room, taking in the rich wooden panelling; the swagged curtains; the half-naked statues mounted on the walls between the windows; the splendid arrangements of white flowers dotted around the room, their petals glowing in the light cast by crystal chandeliers; and the murals of Victorian gentlemen and their ladies, eating, drinking and being merry. If there was anywhere in Oslo calculated to please a visiting American, this was it.

They'd eaten their starters and finished the first bottle of wine when Carver's phone trilled, letting him know that he had received a text. He grimaced apologetically and checked it out. The message read: 'Go to hotel lobby. Internal phone. Dial Room 570. Urgent. Grantham'.

The name and number of the sender were withheld. Carver looked up at Thor and Maddy. 'Excuse me one second,' he said.

He tapped out a two-word reply: 'Prove it'.

Less than a minute later a new message arrived: 'M25 McCabe breakfast Mrs Z. Now do it. Fast'.

'Are you OK?'

Carver looked up to see Maddy's concerned expression. He gave an irritable sigh: 'Just a voice from the past,' adding, 'No, not her,' to prevent Maddy jumping to the wrong conclusion. 'Just business.'

The combination of keywords could only have come from Grantham. They referred to a series of events: a road accident engineered by Carver; a fundamentalist maniac Carver had prevented from exploding a nuclear bomb over Jerusalem's most sacred religious sites; and a breakfast meeting with Grantham and Deputy Director Olga Zhukovskaya of the Russian FSB, successors to the KGB, just before he'd taken out McCabe. The tone of the message certainly sounded like Grantham. The snide irreverence of calling Zhukovskaya 'Mrs Z' and the blunt arrogance of his commands were typical of the man. So, for that matter, was his habit of turning up unannounced and unwelcome in Carver's life.

'I've got to take this,' he said. 'Won't be long.'

Carver got up and walked away from the table, leaving his jacket draped on the chair behind him. He passed the bar on his left as he left the cafe and walked down a winding corridor that opened out into the lobby. It was an automatic reflex for Carver to scan the area, noting the elderly couple pottering in from the street; the businessman making a complaint of some kind to the front desk and the blonde receptionist patiently indulging him; the family looking through the rack of tourist brochures by the concierge's desk.

The concierge directed him to an internal phone placed on a reproduction antique table up against the far wall. As Carver crossed the lobby towards it, he had another flicker of intuition: that same sense of something or someone just beyond his field of vision, perceived but not identified. He drove it from his mind as he reached the phone and called the room.

He heard one ring of the bell.

And then the very air around him seemed to be ripped to shreds as the thunderous reverberation of a massive explosion shook the old hotel, followed a second later by the tinnitus trilling of fire alarms, the shouts of men and screams of women. The lobby, which had been so peaceful just a second earlier now became consumed by chaos as guests rushed out of nearby hotel rooms and restaurants, a smattering at first and then a flood. More people appeared on the stairs, some stumbling as they hurried down. An elderly lady lost her footing in the melee and fell the final half-dozen steps to the ground. She struggled to get up, but no one stopped to help her.

Amidst the panic and desperation, Carver stood still, looking around, his concentration intensified and his focus sharpened. The blast had shattered a large mirror and filled the air with plaster dust, but he saw that there was no structural damage to the area in which he was standing. For most of the hotel's occupants, the greatest danger now lay in being trampled in the rush to escape. Carver, however, had a more pressing issue on his mind.

He'd been set up. The call had been a trigger, he was sure of it. He had no proof, but he'd bet everything he possessed that Room 570 had just been obliterated along, presumably, with its occupant. And he was the patsy who had dialled the fatal number.

He scanned the lobby, searching for security cameras through the dusty air. None were visible. But he was working on the assumption that there would be pictures of him somewhere, complete with date and time-code, standing with the guest-phone in his hand. He had to get out, that second.

But what about Maddy? Carver did not fear for her immediate safety. The blast had come from the far end of the hotel, well away from the cafe, which had its own separate exit, far from the stampede in the lobby. She should have escaped unharmed, but she'd also be worried sick about him. He wanted to go to her and let her know he was fine, but there was no time. In any case it would be better for Maddy and Thor not to know what had happened to him. That way they would have less to give away, if and when the police caught up with them, and less chance of incriminating themselves along with him. He would find a way of getting word to them later. For now, all that mattered was escape.

He looked around, trying to pick the best way out through the crowd, and then he saw, by the now-abandoned concierge desk, flickering in front of him as people ran across his field of vision, the mocking smile, the pale blue eyes and the flame-red hair of a man who was holding up a phone, clearly enough for him to see; turning it round so that he could clearly see the lens of the camera; taunting him as it flashed.

Only then did Carver become conscious of the weight in his hand. He glanced down and realized that he still had the handset in his hands. Barely ten seconds had passed since the detonation. He hadn't even thought to put it back down.

He flung the phone away, furious with himself. By the time he looked up, the face had gone.

Carver turned towards the door, letting himself be carried along with the torrent of people, out through the hotel's glass doors on to the street.

The pandemonium was even worse out there. The blast had bombarded the area in front of the hotel with a deadly eruption of brickwork, glass, wood and metal. Dead bodies were strewn across the road, bloodied and half buried by falling rubble. Between them, the fatal shards of razor-edged glass glittered in the late evening sun, the prettiness of the flickering light incongruous, even obscene, amidst the slaughter.

Up above a gaping black emptiness had been punched into the hotel. It was fringed at top and bottom by sagging floors and ceilings, their loose planks and beams flopping like unbrushed strands of hair. Yet as shocking as the sight of the atrocity was, the blandly imperturbable look of the untouched facade to either side of the wound was almost as bad. It was as if the rest of the building were simply ignoring the damage that had been done.

Carver heard sirens in the distance as the first police units and emergency services made their way to the scene. He saw a milling group of bemused, leaderless people as the guests fleeing the hotel met both the survivors of the carnage outside and the first rubber-neckers making their way from the neighbouring streets and the great open space on the far side of the road. And then all that was forgotten as he felt the prick of a knife-point in the small of his back, the choking grip of an arm around his neck, and the hot breath against his left ear, as intimate as a lover.

He heard a man's voice, halfway between a whisper and a hiss, 'Hello, old chap… remember me?'

And then it all came back to Carver: the voice, the face, the memories.

'Tyzack,' he croaked. 'It's been a while.'

'Hasn't it just. Feel this?' Tyzack pressed the knife a little harder, just enough to draw blood. 'You do know I could kill you, right now, if I wanted, if you tried anything stupid?'

Carver did not respond. Tyzack jabbed the knife again, making him wince.

'I asked you a question. Answer it.'

'I know you could kill me, yes,' Carver muttered.

'Good,' said Tyzack. 'But I'm not going to… not yet. I want to have some sport first, a bit of fun, just like you did with me. I assume you recall the occasion. You thought you were so much better than me. Well then, prove it. I've dumped you in the shit, see if you can get out of it. You see, the police know you did this. I just sent them the picture. So they'll be after you. And I'll be after you. And when I've finished with you I'm going to do a job that is so far beyond anything you've even attempted, you're not even in the same league.'

Tyzack paused. It was plain to Carver that he was longing to be asked what the job was. So Carver kept silent. He didn't want to give Tyzack the satisfaction. And anyway, he wasn't interested. He'd never possessed any regard for Tyzack and didn't give a damn about his desperate attempts to compete.

'Aren't you curious to know what I'm doing?' said Tyzack, betraying a trace of frustration that his achievements still went unrecognized. 'Oh well, mustn't dally. As you once said to me: "What are you waiting for?" Well, come on… get on with it!'

The blade flashed across Carver's lower back, cutting through his T-shirt and slicing open his skin in a horizontal line, right above the kidneys. He winced, took an involuntary step forward, away from the blade, but there was no second thrust. He turned round to face Tyzack, but he had disappeared again, swallowed in the crowds. When Carver's eye caught a flash of red hair, it belonged to Thor Larsson, maybe thirty yards away.

Larsson's head turned and his eye met Carver for a second. He shouted out, 'Carver!' But Carver had already broken eye contact, as furtive as a petty thief, and was dashing away from Larsson, pushing past anyone who got in his way, oblivious to the broken glass and blood beneath his feet. He knew that Damon Tyzack was right. He had to get out of it. Now.