Carver

4

Mykonos

Over the years, Carver had made a lot more enemies than friends. That was the nature of his business. When you spent your adult life getting rid of criminals, terrorists and malevolent psychopaths of every description, you were bound to provoke a grudge or two.

Carver wasn’t his real name. When his mother had abandoned him as a baby he’d been adopted by a couple who called him Paul and gave him their own surname, Jackson. He began his career as a second lieutenant in the Royal Marines before being selected for the Marines’ own elite-within-an-elite, the Special Boat Service. He quit after a dozen years in uniform, and dreamed of a peaceful, normal life on Civvy Street, until a hit-and-run driver killed the woman he planned to marry. Carver had gone off the rails and been sleeping off a drunken brawl in a police cell when his former commanding officer, Quentin Trench, offered him a job perfectly suited to his particular talents and training.

He became a freelance assassin, his major client a group that called itself the Consortium. It consisted of men whose wealth and influence enabled them to commission work that could not be attributed to any elected government, removing individuals whose guilt had long since been proven beyond any doubt, without recourse to judges or juries. Carver provided them with deniability: calculated hits that either appeared to be random accidents, or could be attributed to another, false perpetrator.

He was very good at his job and paid accordingly, but as long as he possessed a shred of humanity he could not help but be affected by the taking of another man’s life, however evil that life might be. He tried to justify his work mathematically: every guilty life he took saved many more innocent ones, but that rationalization could not stop the steady erosion of his soul, or ease his emotional isolation.

And then, one August night in Paris, in an underpass beside the Seine, Carver committed an act for which there was no justification. He had been set up, and he took fearsome revenge on the men who had deceived and betrayed him. Still, the stain on his conscience had never quite washed away, and his need for atonement had never been satisfied.

This was not, however, a subject on which Carver liked to dwell. He saw no point in trying to repair an unchangeable past or speculate about an unknowable future. He dealt in the here and now, and saved his mental energy for problems he could solve, like the two now confronting him. First he had to deal with the three remaining gunmen pursuing him through the streets of Mykonos. And then he had to get the hell away from the island.

He had not had anything to do with Ginger’s murder, and a decent lawyer might be able to argue successfully that the dead man in the alley had been killed in self-defence. But there was no telling what pressure would be put on the local police and prosecuting magistrate to come up with a guilty man whose arrest and conviction would put tourist minds at ease. Carver had no intention of being that man.

He stepped out of the alley, back on to another crowded shopping street, indistinguishable from the last. The crowds looked no different. The only thing missing was the presence of any threat. Carver scanned his surroundings, searching for any trace of his pursuers, but could see none. He walked out into the middle of the street, clearly visible to anyone who was watching. Nothing happened.

He frowned, made more uneasy by the absence of danger — the dogs that did not bark — than he had been when running for his life, pursued by men with guns. Where had they gone? And why, come to think of it, had they not killed him when they had the chance? These were men who had gunned down a completely innocent victim without a second thought. Yet when he had been running through to the restaurant kitchen they had somehow managed to miss his exposed, defenceless back at virtually point-blank range. And now they were nowhere to be seen.

Carver’s phone rang.

He took it from his pocket, wondering whether to answer.

He looked at the number that had appeared on the screen, recognizing it at once.

Carver pressed the green button, put the phone to his ear, and heard a voice that had recently become very familiar.

‘Hi, baby,’ it said. ‘This is Ginger. If you want to get off the island in one piece, do exactly what I say…’