reasons, it was coming with him.
So was Max's gray jacket. Carver needed to get out of the clothes he'd been wearing all night, to do something to change his appearance. He looked at the dead men on the floor. Even their trousers were spattered with blood.
Then he struck lucky. Beside the table there was a soft brown leather overnight bag. Max must have had it beside him, ready to leave. Inside there was a fresh white shirt, still in its laundry wrapper. He put it on, then slipped the jacket over the top.
Carver picked up the back nylon computer case. 'Time to go,' he said. But as he walked from the room, he was thinking: If Alix Petrova had never fired a gun in anger before, what the hell had she been doing on this mission?
13
The Pitie-Salpetriere medical complex in southeast Paris dates back to 1656 and the time of the Sun King, Louis XIV. Over the past century it has been modernized and massively increased in size until it is almost a city of its own, devoted to the sick and those who care for them. But tonight its emergency department had turned into a cross between a war zone and a diplomatic cocktail party.
The French minister of the interior was there, along with the prefect of police and the British ambassador. It was past two a.m. when the guest of honor arrived. She was fashionably late, as befitted the world's most famous woman. But she came in an ambulance, rather than the usual limousine.
The operations director was waiting at the hospital. He found himself getting angry with the delay. It was irrational: The more inefficient the Paris ambulance services were, the better it was for him. He wanted the woman dead, after all. More than anything, however, he wanted it all to be over. He turned to the tanned, compact, leather-jacketed man next to him. 'Jesus Christ, Pierre, what took so long?'
Pierre Papin worked in French intelligence. He didn't have a job title. Officially, he didn't have a job. This gave him a certain freedom. Sometimes, for example, he worked on projects even his bosses-the ones he did not officially have-knew nothing about.
'Relax, mon ami,' Papin said, pulling a packet of Gitanes from the pocket of his linen jacket. He wore a pristine white T-shirt and a pair of snug-fitting black jeans. He looked like he'd just come from a night out in Saint-Tropez. 'We don't like to rush things in France. You Anglo-Saxons throw trauma victims into ambulances, drive at a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, and then wonder why your patients are dead on arrival. We prefer to stabilize them at the scene, then take them tres doucement-gently, no?-to the hospital.'
'Well, I hope you explain that to the media. Believe me, they'll sniff a conspiracy in the delay.'
The Frenchman smiled. 'Perhaps that is because there truly is a conspiracy, huh?'
'Not over the bloody ambulance there isn't.'
The operations director's mood was not improved by the trouble he was having getting through to Max. They had not spoken for about an hour, not since Max had called to report that the Russians had been eliminated, exactly according to plan.
It wasn't unknown for Max to disappear off the radar from time to time. His obsessive concern for security, secrecy, and personal survival saw to that. But it was unlike him to go missing before the operation was complete.
The operations director pressed his speed dial again. Again he got no answer. He turned back to Papin.
'What's the latest news from the doctors?'
The Frenchman took a long drag on his cigarette. 'The left ventricle vein was ripped from the heart. The poor woman has been pumping blood into her chest.' Papin looked at the operations director. 'This was not a clean operation. The princess will not survive. But a bullet would have been more merciful.'
'Yes, well, that option wasn't available, was it? What are you doing about the autopsy?'
'The pathologist is waiting outside the room, along with all the other vultures.'
'And the formaldehyde?'
'It will be pumped into the body, immediately after the postmortem. But why is this so important to you?'
'It will create a false positive on any subsequent pregnancy test.'
'So the world will think she was pregnant?'
'So the world will never know for sure.'
Papin frowned. 'Tell me, then, why did she have to die?'
The operations director smiled but did not answer the question. 'Excuse me one moment.'
He turned away from Papin and dialed again. Still no answer from Max. What the bloody hell was going on?
14
There was no way out of Paris at that hour of the morning. Trains weren't running. Carver wasn't going anywhere near an airport. You couldn't hire a car. He could easily steal one, but he never liked to commit minor offenses when he was working. They got Al Capone for failing to pay his taxes. They weren't going to bust him for a stolen car.
So they were stuck. They couldn't risk checking into a hotel, even under assumed names. They needed somewhere to go for a few hours, a place that would stay open till dawn, where they could be anonymous. He didn't think that would be too hard to find, not on a Saturday night.
They walked down the main stairs-Carver, carrying the laptop, stopped to pick up his SIG-Sauer-then out the back of the house, through formal gardens to a small door set into the back wall, where Alix had left her bag. Then they headed down to the Rue de Rivoli. Carver threw his old T-shirt and jacket in a trash can on the way. His actions were methodical and unhurried. Nothing about his manner betrayed the intensity of what he had been through that night. Then, without warning, he came to a sudden stop.
He was standing in front of a shuttered electronics store. Half a dozen televisions in the front window were tuned to the same channel. A news reporter was standing in the middle of a road silently speaking into the camera. He was standing in front of a police line, surrounded by a crowd of other journalists, photographers, and TV cameras. The reporter stepped slightly to one side so that his cameraman could shoot past him.
'Hang on a second,' said Carver, putting out a hand to hold Alix back.
Six images of the Alma Tunnel filled the shop window. The camera zoomed into the tunnel, where an ambulance was parked by the crumpled wreck of a black Mercedes.
Alix stood next to Carver, watching the same images with a look of incomprehension that gave way to shock as their meaning struck her. 'Dear God. Is that the car? The one we…'
'Yeah. That's what I did to it after you and Kursk whipped it in my direction. But what the hell's that doing there?'
'What do you mean?'
'The ambulance. I can't believe anyone got out alive. But if they did, surely they'd be in the hospital by now. I mean, the crash was'-he looked at his watch-'an hour ago. What are they hanging around there for?'
'An hour?' she murmured, half to herself. 'Is that all?'
The pictures had changed. They'd cut back to the studio. A news anchor was sitting behind her desk, a picture of the Princess of Wales inset into the screen. She said a few words, then the picture cut to footage of the princess lounging on a massive yacht, surrounded by smaller boats packed with people trying to get her picture. Carver shook his head. He had nothing against the princess. She'd visited his unit once and charmed every man on the base. When he'd served under an oath of loyalty to the Crown, he'd taken that oath seriously. He'd never had any interest whatever in gossip columns or celebrity gossip.
'Come on, this isn't going to tell us anything we need to know,' he said, moving on down the road.
He walked to the edge of the pavement and watched the late-night traffic cruising down the Rue de Rivoli.
