The Accident Man

54

The moment he’d seen the tall, massively built figure standing by the Swisscom van, Carver had known it was Grigori Kursk and realized that he’d made a terrible mistake. He should never have left Alix. Her place of safety had turned out to be a trap.

Now he could do nothing to help her. He dared not fire on the van as it hurtled away. Any shot through the side paneling or rear door could easily hit Alix. He couldn’t even aim to blow out the tires. She was unprotected and unsecured. At the speed Kursk was now driving, her body would be battered like a pinball around the vehicle’s interior. Carver, of all people, did not need telling that sudden deceleration could be fatal to a passenger.

So what had happened at the café? Carver ran back down the sidewalk, forcing his way through the knots of people who were already emerging onto the street. Their faces were filled with an anxiety that was rapidly giving way to a greater curiosity, that insatiable desire of human survivors to cast eyes on those who have died. The respectable citizens that Carver shoved out of his path looked like spectators who’d turned up late for a public hanging and felt cheated to have missed out on the big moment.

A dozen or so rubberneckers stood in a circle around two bodies in the street, a man and a woman. Carver recognized them as the couple he’d seen in the blue Vectra. Christ, what had happened here?

Then he heard a single word cried out in a child’s high, keening voice: “Papa-a-a!” Carver forced his way into the café and saw Jean-Louis on his knees, his father’s blood splashed all over his Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas, shaking Freddy’s dead body and crying, “Wake up, Papa, wake up!”

Carver stepped over to the little boy and picked him up, hugging him to his chest. Suddenly it was all too much. He felt surrounded by death, overwhelmed by loss, and racked with guilt for the destruction that seemed to surround him like a virus, afflicting anyone he touched. He felt his chest heave, his breath catch, and then he was staggering to a wall, leaning his back against it and sliding to the floor, the boy still in his arms.

He did not know how long he stayed like that, but the next thing Carver knew, Jean-Louis was being pulled from his grasp. He felt a sharp pain in the side of his leg and dimly realized someone was kicking him and a female voice was screaming, “Your fault! It’s all your fault! How dare you hold my son? His father is dead because of you!”

Carver opened his eyes and saw Freddy’s wife, now his widow, Marianne. He caught a glimpse of a face battered by loss, but eyes within it burning with rage. She bent down and slapped him hard across the face. “Get up! Get up, you pathetic, useless excuse for a man. My man is dead. Your woman has been taken. Why don’t you get up and do something?”

Carver looked up at Marianne, unable to find words to apologize for what he had caused. Then he got to his feet and looked down at the blood that covered Dirk Vandervart’s shiny suit and his flashy designer shirt. He walked across the room and picked up the bag he’d left there less than fifteen minutes earlier, when Freddy had had nothing to fear, when Jean-Louis still thought his daddy was immortal.

“Anywhere I can get changed? The cops’ll be here any moment.”

Marianne opened the door to the stairway, no trace of forgiveness in her face, her voice still harsh and unrelenting. “Up there,” she said. “Leave the dirty clothes. I’ll get rid of them.”

As Carver walked by her, she grabbed his arm. “You want me to think about forgiving you? Well, find the people who did this and kill them. Kill them all!”

By the time he’d washed the blood from his hands and face and got back into his regular clothes, the police had arrived downstairs and were questioning Marianne and Jean-Louis. Carver wanted to get out, but he needed a hat, something to cover his hair and shade his face. He ransacked Freddy and Marianne’s bedroom, searching through chests of drawers and closets until he found an old blue cap emblazoned with the dark red badge of Servette, Geneva’s football club, abandoned on a closet floor. He beat it against his thigh to knock out the dust, shoved it on his head, then climbed out of a bedroom window, down a drainpipe, and into the yard at the rear of the building. Now it was just a matter of acting nice and casual.

He made his way back to the street. There were three police cars and a couple of ambulances jamming the road outside the café. A forensics man was taking pictures of the two bodies on the sidewalk. A few feet away there were two other men, having some sort of an argument. They were speaking in French, but as Carver walked by, he realized one of them had a pronounced English accent.

“I must insist on being allowed to inspect the bodies,” the man was saying. “I represent Her Majesty’s government. These were my colleagues. They may be carrying official documents, which I must retrieve.”

“I bet you must,” thought Carver. The only government officials who went on stakeouts in foreign countries were MI6 agents. They’d moved faster than he’d expected. Now he’d have to move faster still.

At the end of the road, he stopped by his own car, an Audi RS6. It looked like a perfectly normal example of Audi’s solid, ultrareliable midrange model, but appearances were deceptive. Beneath its bland steel gray exterior lay a 4.2-liter V8 engine that would rocket it up to sixty miles per hour in a hair over four seconds. It had four-wheel drive that clung to the road like iron filings on a magnet. There wasn’t a police vehicle in Europe whose driver would give it a second glance. But if any cop ever tried to chase it, he’d discover he couldn’t get within glancing distance anyway.

Carver slipped behind the wheel and got the hell out of town.