armed with a Steyr MPi69 submachine gun. All the other players had been searched prior to being allowed into the apartment.
Carver first ensured that all four gamblers were sitting upright around the gaming table. He then proceeded into the apartment’s entrance hall and dragged the bodyguard, who was also unconscious, into the living area.
Next, Carver extracted Wu’s Glock pistol from his shoulder holster, placed it in Wu’s hand, and fired three shots: two into the wall directly behind the bodyguard’s unconscious body, and one into the bodyguard’s skull, where, being a low-caliber round, it lodged, killing the bodyguard instantly.
Using the bodyguard’s submachine gun, Carver then fired a series of short bursts around the mah-jongg table, terminating all four men. He also ensured that a number of rounds missed their apparent targets and hit the plateglass doors, thereby destroying any trace of the hole he had made to gain access.
Having signaled to the helicopter that he was ready to make his exit, Carver then used the gamblers’ cigarettes (all four had been smoking heavily) to start a fire in the apartment. He retraced his steps back onto the terrace and up to the roof. He had been winched back up into the helicopter before the fire alarm sounded in the apartment, triggering automatic sprinklers, which drenched the living area with water, greatly impeding the subsequent work of forensic investigators.
When police detectives were called to the scene, they concluded that the bodyguard had been hired to carry out Wu’s assassination, but had been killed in the attempt. One zealous forensics officer has attempted to point out various anomalies in the blood-spray patterns and body positions of the victims, but his observations have been ignored. Local police authorities and politicians have been far too busy gloating over the death of a major gangster to worry about the finer details of his demise.
Conclusion: This was a daring plan, executed with exemplary resolve and thoroughness by an operative who acts calmly and with extreme ruthlessness in high-pressure situations. My judgment is that Samuel Carver can be trusted with our most important and sensitive operations, and I would not hesitate to call upon his services in future.
Quentin Trench, Operations Director
“Well, you called upon him, all right, didn’t you?” muttered Jack Grantham to himself, as he put down the report, just one of the files seized when the Consortium had been discreetly, but permanently, shut down.
Grantham was a rising star in the British Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6. His official record was one of constant achievement, flawless political judgment, and immaculate career management. He had, however, made one decision that could, if publicly revealed, ruin his career. That did not make it a bad call, simply one that had unavoidable downsides.
On September 3, 1997, Grantham had captured Samuel Carver, with the help of a colleague in MI5. By then he’d been fully aware of what Carver had done a few nights earlier in that Paris underpass. He knew, however, that a public trial was in nobody’s interest. So he had taken another route. Like a bureaucratic Mephistopheles, he had taken possession of Carver’s soul.
“I own you,” he said. “You have a debt against your name that can never be redeemed. But you can make reparations. You can do things for me, for your country. If you get killed along the way, tough. If you succeed, you’ve done some good to set against the harm.”
Next, he let Carver fly to Switzerland to confront Yuri Zhukovski, the Russian oligarch who had been the silent force behind the Paris attack. Now Zhukovski was dead, and Carver had lost his mind.
It was, in some respects, disappointing that he had been placed so firmly out of action. It would have been useful to have a man like that available: off the books, and totally deniable. Then again, something would have gone wrong. Something always did. Meanwhile, Carver was in no state to tell anyone anything.
On balance, Grantham concluded, that was an excellent result all around.
FEBRUARY
20
Samuel Carver knew that he had once been a marine, but only because Alix had told him. She also said that he’d fought in the Special Forces, and explained to him what that entailed.
“I know how to do parachute jumps and swim underwater,” Carver proudly told people at the clinic. “And I can fire guns and do explosions.”
Yet he had no real concept of what those words meant, no sense of how it felt to do the things they described.
Carver didn’t care. There was a smile on his face that was breaking Alix’s heart.
He was taking a fitness class with half a dozen other patients. Some of them had become his friends. He had introduced them to Alix, these wrecked individuals as helpless and dependent as he was, each one making her feel like a mother confronted with a group of dysfunctional children. But of all of them, only Carver threw himself into it, heart and soul. He really tried, and when the instructor called out, “Good work, Samuel!” his face was suffused with a glow of happiness.
The old Samuel Carver would rather have died than live as this grinning simpleton.
So perhaps it was for the best that he had no memory whatsoever of his previous self. He had no awareness of the confidence he had once possessed in his abilities, nor the power that had come from his absolute faith in his ability to defend himself, protect those he loved, and hurt his enemies. His dry, sardonic sense of humor had vanished. He’d even lost his basic, masculine need for sex.
Alix was tortured by the thought, which slipped unbidden into her mind some days, that she, too, would have been better off if Carver had died. It was a cruel, hateful notion, but it reflected an undeniable truth. As much as she was devastated by his present condition, she was angered by it, too, and angry with him. There was no upside to their relationship anymore. She gained nothing from it, other than the knowledge that she would feel even more
