Assassin

54

Arjan Visar had received the technical specifications for the weapon that would be used to kill Lincoln Roberts within seventy-two hours of Tyzack's departure from his villa. He was impressed. Tyzack might be an animal, but it had taken cunning and imagination for him to devise his means of attack, and initiative to commission the design he had in mind.

The finished device, however, depended on an existing piece of technology that could not be purchased without attracting undue attention. So it was that a modest commercial premises tucked away in a mostly residential area of detached family homes in the English Midlands was burned to the ground as a result of an electrical fault. Amidst the damage caused by the blaze itself and the efforts of fire crews to put it out before it could spread to nearby houses, no one noticed the absence of two small units from the company's inventory. Within a couple of hours of the theft, they had been taken to a small engineering company, whose workshop was located under a railway arch in Manchester, and work had already begun on their conversion from the peaceful uses for which they were designed to the deadly intent conceived by Damon Tyzack. As the engineers were getting down to work on their conversion job, Jack Grantham was at Heathrow trying to find a seat on an early-morning flight to Oslo. It wasn't easy. The news that the Norwegian police were looking for an English male – they hadn't specified that he was a suspect, but that was the only inference that could be drawn – had suddenly given what would otherwise be a shocking but relatively minor tragedy a much more powerful domestic angle. When, in the early hours, Oslo University Hospital announced that two of the seriously wounded victims of the King Haakon Hotel bombing had both passed away, and that they were a British pensioner couple, that just added to the feeding frenzy. It had taken a discreet conversation with a senior British Airways executive to squeeze Grantham on to the 7.20 plane, leaving a big-name newspaper columnist fuming as he was bumped on to a lunchtime departure.

On the plane, Grantham returned to the subject that had been nagging at him for hours. He'd spent the previous evening at the movies: even intelligence officers, after all, have wives and social lives that need to be attended to occasionally. When he left the cinema he forgot to switch his phone back on. It wasn't till he was home that he remembered and picked up the text Carver had sent him, which consisted of three short messages topped by two questions and a statement: 'Was this you? If not, who? Framed.'

The answer to the first question was easy: no, it damn well hadn't been him that sent the messages to Carver. So who was it? Well, 'Mrs Z' herself, Olga Zhukovskaya, was still a Deputy Director of the FSB, and strong, reliable rumours suggested she would soon be its Director. Yet there seemed no reason that Grantham could think of why she would want to stage a bombing in the middle of Oslo (and he had spent half the night going through the bombing's casualty list trying to find one), still less plant it on Carver. He had got her out of a very nasty hole in the Waylon McCabe affair. She had no reason to feel anything but gratitude towards him. That wouldn't stop her screwing him if she could gain sufficient advantage from it, of course. But try as he might, Grantham could not think what that advantage might be.

On the other side of the Atlantic, there were senior officers at the CIA who knew about Carver's role in disposing of McCabe. They might well have uncovered Zhukovskaya's involvement by now – Grantham had hardly publicized it at the time – but again, he could not see how the Cousins stood to benefit by what had happened in Oslo. After all, one of the victims – the presumed target, according to some reports – had been a prominent anti-slavery campaigner, and President Roberts was about to go balls-out against slavery.

Grantham was a professional conspiracy theorist. Experience had told him there was no explanation so bizarre that it could not, in fact, be true. So he was willing to consider the possibility, however grotesque, that some headcase at Langley had decided that the death of a photogenic campaigner against human trafficking would give the President's crusade some handy advance publicity. It was not inconceivable, either, that this was a cover-up of some kind. One of the grubbiest aspects of this sordid trade had long been the involvement of senior UN officials, military personnel and corporate leaders in facilitating the passage of trafficked women through territories like Montenegro, Kosovo and Bosnia. Plenty of respectable men, with no desire to be embarrassed, had procured women for themselves. It was not inconceivable that their allies in the CIA might wish to snuff out any embarrassment. But using a man with known links to SIS, the Agency's closest ally, well, that was just bad manners.

And then there was a third possibility. One man knew every detail of Carver's activities, because he knew virtually every detail of Grantham's own working life: Bill Selsey. Grantham hoped, very much, that this had nothing to do with Selsey. They may have had their differences of late, and his deputy's sudden interest in playing office politics had come as an unpleasant surprise, but there was a big difference between professional rivalry and active involvement in cold-blooded murder. Surely Selsey would never have crossed that line?

Still, someone had crossed the line, and Grantham wanted to know who it was. He was flying to Oslo in the guise of a Foreign Office official, concerned about the involvement of Her Majesty's subjects in this unpleasant event. At the airport, a first secretary from the British embassy, who just happened to be the Secret Service's representative there, led him to a waiting Jaguar.

'Are we all set up?' Grantham asked as the car purred away from the terminal.

'Oh yes,' said his officer, who was showing a distracting amount of bare thigh beneath the hem of her skirt. 'Everything's arranged. The detective in charge is called Ravnsborg. He's quite an interesting man, actually, quite subtle – you know, for a policeman. Anyway, he seems very happy to help. In fact, I get the impression he's really keen to meet you.'

'Oh great,' said Grantham, 'an enthusiastic copper. Can't wait.'