Revenger

86

Grantham had a personal driver, but this wasn’t a journey he wanted recorded on any official log. Instead he walked to Vauxhall underground station and took the Victoria Line to Green Park and then the Jubilee to St John’s Wood. As he scurried down Grove End Road, past the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth en route to Abbey Road, Grantham prayed he wasn’t too late. He might have affected a blasé attitude to Giammetti, but he knew how much danger Alix and Peck were really in. If harm should befall them in a flat owned by an American diplomat, well, it would just be one more rusty nail in the coffin of the not-so-special relationship. And if Giammetti should then choose to reveal the contents of their conversation, then life could get very nasty for J. Grantham too.

Now he’d reached the corner of Abbey Road. He wanted to get to the other side of the road, and there was a zebra crossing right in front of him, but a group of people were standing on it in stupid poses taking pictures of one another, so it was much more difficult to get across it than it should have been. Grantham had never taken the slightest interest in music. He neither knew nor cared what the appeal of this particular crossing might be. He looked at the numbers on the buildings beside him. Not far to go now.

Celina Novak had been given the go signal. She was standing in the shadow of a tree that stood in the forecourt of a Baptist church, just across the road from the glass-fronted building, wondering what the best way was to get access to Trent Peck’s apartment, when she saw the nondescript figure in the dark-blue overcoat walking up Abbey Road. It took her a second to realize that this was Jack Grantham, and she guessed at once that he was coming to warn Petrova of the threat that she was facing. Well, the two of them would soon discover just how great that threat was. As Grantham turned left off the pavement and walked between two rows of ornamental trees towards the front door, Novak slipped out from under the tree and started walking towards that same door.

Grantham pressed the buzzer of the apartment building. It was answered by a man. The sound was muffled and crackly but when the voice said, ‘Hello?’ Grantham thought he detected an American accent.

‘Is that Peck?’ Grantham said.

‘This is he,’ the voice replied, with the grammatical formality that was now far more commonly found among well-educated Americans than the English of any class. ‘To whom am I speaking?’

‘Hello, my name’s Grantham. Your boss just called me.’

‘Jack Grantham?’ Peck said, incredulously.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re kidding me, right?’

‘Trust me, I’m not. I’m here because of Mrs Vermulen. She’s in very serious danger.’

For a few moments there was nothing but interference coming through the speaker. Then Grantham heard the American again: ‘I guess you’d better come up.’

The door buzzed. Grantham pushed it open and stepped through. And as he did he felt something hard in the small of his back, smelled a delicious waft of a woman’s scent and heard a female voice in his ear say, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Grantham. My name is Celina Novak.’

He stopped dead in his tracks, but immediately felt a sharp pain in his kidneys as his back was jabbed again and Novak said, ‘That’s a gun. And I will not hesitate to use it unless you do exactly as I say.’

They proceeded down the hall towards the lift. Novak remained behind Grantham. ‘The deal’s off,’ he said. ‘I no longer require your services. But don’t worry, I’ll pay you in full.’

Novak laughed. ‘What you do or do not require is no longer relevant. I have new orders. Now, I believe we’re going up.’

The lift arrived. The doors opened. Grantham got another shove in the back to remind him to walk in. ‘Fourth floor,’ she said. He pressed the button, the doors closed, and it was only then that the pressure in his back eased and he felt able to turn around and look at the woman who now had him in her power.

She certainly was a remarkable sight. And almost all of it was spectacular to behold. Grantham could hardly fail to notice the length and shapeliness of her legs in her spray-on jeans; or the slimness of her waist; or the fullness of the breasts that were tantalizingly displayed behind her semi-unzipped jacket. He was not blind to the tumble of her hair, the gloss of her lips or the cool inscrutability of her dark glasses. But then he saw past all those things to the waxwork artificiality of her face, and suddenly everything about Celina Novak seemed somehow terribly wrong.

‘She really fucked you up, didn’t she?’ Grantham said. ‘Losing to her must have been bad enough. But losing your looks as well…’

He was trying to make her lose her temper and with it her self-control. If he did that, maybe she’d start making mistakes. But Novak had no intention of giving him that satisfaction. She pressed the ‘pause’ button on the lift and they stopped, halfway between the second and third floors.

‘You will press the doorbell,’ she said. ‘You will introduce yourself. You will not do or say anything at all to suggest that there is anything wrong. When the door is opened, you will go inside. If you do not do these things exactly as I say, you will die. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes.’

Novak pressed the ‘start’ button again and they continued upwards. When they reached the top, the doors opened and Grantham stepped into a small hallway. There were just two penthouse flats on the top floor, with one door on either side of the hall. He went up to Peck’s and pressed the bell.

The door had a small peephole. Novak stood with her back pressed against the wall, just next to Grantham, where she could not be seen. Her gun was still pointed directly at him.

There was a pause while Peck looked through the peephole, examined Grantham and satisfied himself that he really was who he claimed to be. Then the door opened.

Grantham stepped into the flat and walked past Peck, who was still standing right by the door. He seemed to whisper something to Peck as he walked by. Peck turned to catch what he was saying. He caught the words, ‘… a trap’, and tried to respond, but it was too late. Peck still had his back to the door as Celina Novak stepped through it with her gun in her hand and blew his brains out.