Revenger

75

‘Get up!’ Carver commanded Novak.

‘Or what?’ Novak replied, propping herself up on her elbows and looking directly up at him.

‘Or I’ll…’ The words died in Carver’s mouth as he saw her face full-on for the first time. His first reaction was shock, followed by something close to pity — and a personal sense of his own loss as he thought of the times he’d looked down on her during those few days and nights they’d spent together. She’d been lovely then. Her face had glowed with life, personality and humour. It was all put on, of course: everything she did was calculated, every single smile or laugh an act of manipulation. Yet even so she’d been captivating. He thought of the way the freckles had dusted her cheeks, the softness of her lips and the barely perceptible little groove at the very tip of her nose. And now all that had vanished.

It wasn’t so much that her face was now grotesque that made it so disturbing, for her features were where they should be and in the correct proportions. It was that all the life and movement had somehow been drained from her expression. She looked blank, immobile, waxen; like her own death mask. It struck him that this chilly, soulless facsimile of a beautiful woman was actually a much truer reflection of the inner Celina Novak than the deceitful animation of her old face had been.

‘Go ahead, stare,’ she said. ‘But just answer me this. Did your little bitch-whore Petrova ever tell you what she did to make me this way?’

‘What do you mean? How could she possibly—’

‘By smashing my nose against the edge of a counter top. By putting a flame to my face and burning off half my skin.’

‘You’re lying!’

‘You should be proud of her,’ Novak said, ignoring him. Her expression had not changed at all while they’d been talking. She could open and close her eyes but she could not frown. She could open her mouth to talk, but she could not smile. ‘It was the night Zorn died… She took me by surprise. She kicked me in the knee and had me down before I even knew what was happening. And she did it all for you. She thought you were in danger. She thought I could help her save you.’

‘I wasn’t even there,’ Carver said, as though that would somehow disprove what Novak was saying.

‘Well, isn’t that ironic? All of this for nothing… You know, I spent months wrapped in bandages. I had so many operations, so many nerves cut that if my skin is touched I cannot feel it. If I try to smile, it is so twisted, so ugly that I told my surgeon: “Fill me with Botox, that way I can’t even try.”

‘Now I only have one expression, but like they say about a stopped clock, it has to be right at least a couple of times a day… Oh, come on, Carver, wasn’t that funny? Give me a smile. No one’s put Botox in you.’

Carver couldn’t say anything. He was filled with a sense of the world unravelling. First the massacre in the supermarket; now this zombified ghost of a real woman rising up out of the past; and all around the evidence of an entire society falling apart. For the first time in his life, he was in a combat situation and he couldn’t make the next move. Not when the next move meant shooting her in cold blood.

Novak knew it. Her expression was as blank as a showroom dummy, but she could still put a sneer in her voice: ‘At least I still have some fight left in me. You’ve not got the balls for this any more. It’s obvious. If you let me live, I’ll kill you, and the Petrova bitch too. You have to kill me now. But you can’t… can you?’

Carver said nothing. He couldn’t let her walk away. But it was as though Novak had somehow hypnotized him. She was actually getting to her feet, and he was just letting her do it. He forced himself to drive all the memories of last night from his mind. He couldn’t afford to be handicapped by them now. He had to be as callous as the enemy in front of him. He had to… for Alix’s sake.

Now he had a justification. If he didn’t kill Novak, she would surely take advantage of her reprieve and she would do it at Alix’s expense. His eyes narrowed with a newfound resolution. His finger tightened on the trigger.

And then he felt the cold kiss of metal on the back of his neck and a man’s voice with a slight Russian accent said, ‘Drop the gun… And take the other one out of your pants. Hold it in your fingertips… Now drop that, too.’

Carver saw the Glock join the Ruger on the ground in front of him and then his head exploded in pain as the gun-barrel that had been pressed against his skin was lashed across his skull, just behind his right ear.

He fell to his knees, and stayed kneeling for a second or two as he fought to shake off the pain, the tight, sick feeling in his throat and the white noise filling his brain. Then his body slumped forward, face down on the cold, hard, wet ground.

Carver was only unconscious for a minute or two, but when he awoke Novak was gone. He was alone. He was unarmed. And he’d just been betrayed by the one man on earth he’d been stupid enough to trust.