overwhelmed him. His muscles ached. His brain felt sluggish and unfocused. He had reached the outskirts of Geneva when another thought hit him: What if the car had been fitted with a tracking device?
He cursed his sloppiness. It should have been automatic: Check an unknown car for a tracker or booby traps. But that hadn’t even crossed his mind until it was far too late. No wonder he wasn’t being followed. They didn’t need to bother. They already knew where he was.
Then he thought of the killer’s phone, still sitting in his coat pocket. As long as it was on, anyone with access to the local networks could use that to locate him, too. He reached inside the coat and switched off the phone. After one last look in the mirror, he pulled over to the side of the road, stopped the car, got out, and looked around. He was somewhere in the ribbon of suburbs and small towns that sprawled northeast from the city and ran right around the northern shore of the lake to Lausanne and on to Montreux. The road he was on ran parallel to a railway line. Up ahead he could see a sign for a station, barely more than a halt on the line, called Creux-de-Genthod. The name rang a bell. He’d been there before.
He started jogging along the road toward the station and had almost reached the entrance when he remembered that there was a restaurant on the far side of the road, down by the lake. He’d taken women for lazy meals by the water. Sometimes he’d hire a boat for the day and sail there, mooring at the jetty just along from the terrace where they put out tables in the summertime. He had a vivid impression of walking up to the place and seeing blue parasols and striped awnings, the girl he was with squeezing his arm, happy to be arriving for a meal by boat. Then he remembered something else, the way he’d felt at times like that: not sharing the other person’s pleasure, but cut off, his mind still processing the death he’d just inflicted, or planning the one to come.
Carver thought about going down to the restaurant to use the phone. It was past midnight and they’d be closing up, but he’d say his car had broken down. He wanted to get in touch with Thor Larsson. He felt badly in need of an ally. But then he saw a flash in the corner of his eye, the gleam of a train’s headlights coming down the track. If he ran, he could catch it and go all the way into town. The journey would take less than fifteen minutes. He’d call Larsson when he arrived.
On the train, he found a seat at the far end of a carriage, from which he could easily monitor anyone who came in through the sliding door beside him, or moved down the aisle between the rows of seats. This probably was the last train of the night; there weren’t too many other people onboard. Still, he couldn’t relax. He stared at the other passengers, trying to work out which of them might pose a threat. He told himself to stop-they’d think he was a nutcase. But he kept doing it anyway. It had been months since he’d been out in the world, surrounded by strangers. It was hard to fit back in.
As he left the train at Geneva, he kept darting glances at the other people walking down the platform. A teenage boy, out with his mates, caught his eye.
“What are you looking at?” the kid shouted.
One of his friends, made bold by the presence of his gang, joined in. “You some kind of pervert or something?”
“He’s a pedophile,” said one of the others, and they broke into a jeering chorus: “Pedo! Pedo!”
Carver turned away from them, his shoulders hunched. By the time he reached the public phones, he was sweaty with embarrassment and shame. He called Larsson.
“Carver?” Larsson sounded like he’d just heard a ghost. “That’s not possible. I mean… how… what happened?”
“I got better. Look, we need to meet. My flat, soon as possible.”
“Hold on,” said Larsson. “Where are you calling from? How come you’re not at the clinic?”
“Had a bit of trouble there. I’m in town now. I need to leave tonight, get right away from here. But there’s a couple of things I’ve got to do first.”
“What kind of things?”
“Nothing dramatic. I just need to start looking for Alix. Look, can you get to the flat or not?”
“I guess so.”
“Great. And bring the keys. You’ve still got them, right?”
“Yeah. Alix had the original set, but I’ve got copies.”
“See you there.”
Carver took a cab, looking out of the window all the way, getting used to the sights of the city again. He made the cabbie drop him off a couple of blocks away from his apartment, started walking off in the wrong direction, then corrected himself and made his way through the warren of narrow, twisting streets at the heart of the Old Town. He was constantly looking back over his shoulder, checking out the parked cars, twitching with nerves at every unexpected movement or sound.
A few doors down from his destination, Carver stopped for a moment outside a small cafe whose front door was set a few feet below ground level, just down a short flight of steps. The building looked familiar, but there was something out of place. It was the sign over the cafe door-he was sure it had been changed. He tried to recall what had been there before, or what the significance of the cafe had been, but this time the image wouldn’t come. He stood there for a second, frowning in concentration, trying to get at the memory that was still so tantalizingly out of reach. He wondered what had happened here that was so bad his brain still refused to acknowledge it. Then he turned away and walked on, cursing himself for standing like that, stock-still, out in the open, where anyone could get at him.
On the other side of the city, a Russian FSB field agent named Piotr Korsakov, the man who had just killed Marianne Marchand and her husband, Clement, hailed a taxi. He gave the driver precise directions to his intended destination: a place to which, his superiors had decided, Carver would most likely head. His next target was on the move. There was no time to waste.
34
On the shores of Gull Lake, Minnesota, with the last traces of daylight fading from the iron-gray sky and the trees on the far side of the lake barely visible, Dr. Kathleen Dianne “Kady” Jones got ready to meet her first live
