mouth, uttering soft, wordless moans, while his limbs thrashed in random, spastic movements. His twitching became more frantic and his cries grew in volume.
By the time Carver woke, he was screaming.
“Wake up, wake up!”
Alexandra Petrova placed her hands on Carver’s shoulders and tried to free him from the nightmare’s grip, gently shaking him back into consciousness. His body felt weak and flabby, softened by months of inactivity. His face was rounder, his features less clearly defined as the bones disappeared behind pouches of flesh. His eyes were red-rimmed and fearful.
The screams petered out, replaced by a confused, semiconscious muttering and then the familiar sequence: the panicked, darting looks around the room, his body half raised from the bed; the gradual relaxation, sinking back onto his pillows as she stroked his hand and reassured him; finally the answering squeeze, the attempt at a smile, and the single whispered word, “Hi.”
And then another, “Alix.”
It was Carver’s name for her, the one he’d used in the days they’d spent together, before his months of confinement in this private clinic on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was a sign that he recognized her, and was grateful for her company, though he could not yet recall what she had meant to him before. But then, he did not know who Samuel Carver truly was, either: what he had done and what others had done to him.
“Still the same dream?” she asked.
He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment as if to drive the last fragments of the horror from his mind, then answered, “Not the same dream. But the same ending, like always.”
“Can you remember what happened at the beginning of the dream this time?”
Carver thought for a while.
“I don’t know,” he said.
He sounded indifferent, not quite seeing the point of the question.
“Just try,” Alix persisted.
Carver screwed up his face in concentration.
“I was a soldier,” he said. “There was fighting, in a desert… then it all changed.”
“You were probably dreaming about something that actually happened. You really were a soldier.”
“I know,” said Carver. “You told me before. I remember that.”
He looked at her with eyes that sought her approval. For the umpteenth time, she tried to persuade herself that the man she loved was still in there somewhere. She imagined a time when the blankness in his eyes would be replaced by the fierce intensity she had seen in them on the night they met, or the unexpected tenderness he had revealed in those stolen hours when they had been alone together, keeping the world at bay.
They’d both been in Paris, working the same assignment, the night of August 31, 1997. Carver had been standing at one end of the Alma Tunnel, waiting for a car. She had been riding pillion on a high-speed motorbike, firing her flashing camera at the Mercedes, goading the man at its wheel to drive ever faster, whipping him on toward death in Carver’s hands.
The moment they met, she was pointing a gun in his direction. Seconds later, he’d pinned her to the pavement, his knee in the small of her back. Half an hour later, she’d followed him into a building, knowing he’d rigged it with explosive charges, knowing that those bombs were about to go off, but trusting absolutely in his ability to get them both in and out alive.
Now here they were in Switzerland, almost five months later, two people who had been forced into acts of terrible violence, but who, in their few precious moments of shared tranquillity, had each seen in the other a hope, not just of love, but of some small measure of redemption.
For Alix had secrets of her own. On her journey from the drab provinces of the Soviet Union to the gaudy luxuries of post-Communist Moscow, she, too, had compromised her soul. Just like Carver, she longed for an escape. But the past had clung to her and Carver alike, and it had exacted a bitter price on the night of torture and bloodshed that had subjected Carver to agonies so extreme that they had ripped his identity away from its moorings and buried his memories too deeply to be retrieved.
Alix had even begun to wonder if she really did love him anymore. How could you love a person who no longer knew who you were, or what you and he had meant to each other? She had once loved Samuel Carver-she was sure of that. She would still love that man if he were with her. But was he that man any longer? Was he any kind of man at all?
Alix fiddled with Carver’s pillows, plumping them up and rearranging them, pretending to make him more comfortable but really just trying to distract herself from her thoughts, and the guilt she felt for even allowing herself to consider them.
From behind her came the sound of a discreet cough.
A man was standing in the doorway, wearing a somber dark-gray suit and a tie whose pattern was so muted as to be virtually invisible.
“Mademoiselle Petrova?” he said.
5
“Good afternoon, Monsieur Marchand,” Alix said, making a conscious effort to stand up straight and smile as cheerfully as her stress and fatigue would allow.
She spoke French. That at least had been one positive achievement over the past few months. She had a third language to add to her native Russian and the English she’d been taught by the KGB a decade ago. The same
