Carver

95

Alix ran up the staircase towards the reception. She heard the sound of laughter and then, as she got to the first-floor landing and turned left towards the Livery Hall, it was followed by applause that was merely polite to begin with, but then built to a cheering, hooting, foot-stamping crescendo. When she saw the screens at the very far end of the room, she understood why. Malachi Zorn was about to speak to his loyal disciples, every one of whom expected to be told just how much richer they were this evening than they had been at the start of the week.

She took her eyes from the screen and, all thoughts of Azarov driven from her mind tried to scan the room for Carver. It was no good. She’d never find him in this crowd. Her stomach seemed to be gripped by sharp steel claws as Celina Novak’s words echoed in her memory: ‘You’re much too late.’ No… she couldn’t be. To win Carver back again, only to lose him for ever, would be more than she could bear. She pushed her way through the people, ignoring the protests as she barged against bodies and stepped on toes, turning her head this way and that in the desperate hope that she might, by pure chance, catch sight of the man she loved.

Up on stage, Zorn began to speak: ‘Thank you… thank you… No, really, that’s enough!’ The joke broke the spell, and the laughter faded away into an expectant silence. ‘So… I guess you want to hear how the fund is doing, huh?’

There was another laugh, and a couple of good-humoured heckles from the crowd. ‘Damn right we do!’ shouted one man.

Mort Lockheimer had spent the days since the Rosconway attack working through endless trading permutations in his mind, trying to decide just how much had already been added to the value of his personal Zorn Global fund. Now he was punching the air and whooping like a fan at a ball game. ‘Show me the money!’ he yelled.

‘How come you don’t get that excited over me?’ asked Charlene.

‘Oh, baby, just you wait!’ he replied. Then he tilted his head back and screamed, ‘Mo-ney!! Mo-ney!!’

Zorn watched, enthralled, his fingers jammed in his ears, as Braddock lifted the futuristic black gun to his shoulder and pressed a button on its side. The gun hummed as it charged itself for a few seconds, getting ready to fire. Then Braddock set his sights on the first window: the one directly opposite the stage on which Drinkwater would now be speaking.

Braddock was now seeing the world through his weapon’s fire-control system. In the middle of the viewfinder there was a small red cross. He lined it up on the window, pressed another button, and let the laser-based system calculate the distance to the window and transmit that information to the grenade now sitting in the barrel. He adjusted the range so that the round would explode after it had travelled three metres beyond the window. Then he fired. And even before the noise of the explosion had died away he was swinging the gun towards the next window.

Alix was aware that something had smashed through one of the great windows that ran the length of the room. The air itself seemed to explode as a blast erupted above the guests’ heads, shattering one of the chandeliers, which plunged to the floor. The fragmented metal from the grenade combined with shards of broken crystal from the chandelier to create a flesh-shredding volley of shrapnel that sliced into the people crammed within the blast radius.

Alix screamed in terror. Something hit her skull. There was a momentary burst of pain more intense than any she had ever known. And then everything went black.