out in a slow, steady stream and stood upright again, ready to face the truth. It really had happened, and he was the man who'd done it. The evidence was inescapable. The images on those TV screens, cutting from the devastation in the Alma Tunnel to the princess on her holidays, finally made perfect sense.
He thought back to the moment he'd found Alix's bag in the apartment, his conversation with Max, his attempt to justify what he did by targeting those who deserved their fate and trying to spare civilians. Those principles had come to a cataclysmic, bloody end, hadn't they?
In some distant corner of his consciousness, he was aware of Alix standing beside him. Her face was ashen, her eyes a million miles away. She was moaning, wordlessly, no more able than he was to articulate the conflict of thoughts and feelings tearing through her.
Carver felt as though every eye in the room was on him, that the mark of Cain was burning on his forehead. He told himself that was crazy: They were all too busy trying to cope with what they had heard to worry about anyone else. And then he realized that his instinct had been correct. He was being watched. So was Alix. And the madness was about to begin again.
In the flat, harsh glare of the houselights, Carver saw the Russian. He'd taken his hands off the girls and the drink. Now he was talking into a phone. Every so often he looked in their direction.
'Damn!' Carver spat under his breath. 'We're getting out of here. Now!'
He did not wait for Alix to reply, just grabbed her arm and pulled her from the dance floor. There was a waitress standing by one of the tables near where Carver and Alix had been sitting. He gave her five hundred bucks, pressing the notes into her hand. 'Pour l'addition. Tenez la monnaie. Alors, ou est la cuisine?'
The waitress did not reply, barely even noticing the money in her hand. There were tears streaming down her face. Carver shook her. He asked again where the kitchen was, his urgency forcing her to listen.
'Over there,' she murmured, limply waving an arm toward a double door set into the wall beyond the tables.
'Does it have a staff exit?'
'Yes, but…' She stood there motionless, muttering vague protests as Carver and Alix brushed past her.
Just as they reached the swing doors into the kitchen, Carver glanced back at the table where the fat guy was sitting. He was getting to his feet, gesticulating at two sidekicks who'd suddenly materialized on the floor in front of his table. Carver slipped through the doors and into the noise, the heat, and the smells of a working kitchen, a pungent blend of fish, meat, spice, and sweat.
He turned to look back through one of the porthole windows in the doors.
One of the fat man's underlings was heading downstairs; the other was walking toward the restaurant area, a tall, solidly built guy with pockmarked skin and a ponytail. His suit was an oily blue. His shoes were pale gray. A gold medallion nestled in thick black chest hair, and there was more gold on his wrist and fingers.
Alix was already a few paces ahead of Carver, making her way through the sweaty, food-stained kitchen staff at their stations. A couple of them gave her a whistle and a filthy remark as she went by. Then they saw the look in Carver's eye as he followed and decided that if she belonged to him, they'd be well advised to shut up.
Beyond the kitchen more swing doors opened into a narrow hallway. To the left, it led to a staircase that dropped away to ground level. There were a couple of doors on the far side of the corridor: a storeroom, an office. The lights were out. There was no one in either of them.
'Keep moving,' said Carver. 'Go down the stairs. Make a lot of noise. Go!'
He listened to her running along the uncarpeted floorboards, then ducked into the office. The door opened inward. He stood behind it, holding it almost shut, without letting the catch close completely.
A few seconds later Carver heard the door to the kitchen burst open. He pictured the man with the ponytail standing in the corridor, gun held in front of him, surveying the emptiness in front of him, then hearing the sound of Alix's feet on the stairs.
There were footsteps as the man went by. Carver eased the door open and stepped out into the corridor. He took three quick steps forward. The man heard him on the third step, but it was too late. He couldn't stop, turn, and bring his gun around before Carver raised his left hand, brushed his right arm away and, in the same cobra-fast movement, jabbed two fingers into his eyes.
The Russian squealed in pain, dropped his gun, and held his hands up to his blinded eyes. Carver kept moving. He shifted his weight onto his right foot, rotated his shoulders, and slammed the heel of his right palm into the man's chin. Another shoulder rotation and a shift of weight through the hips brought Carver's left elbow up to crack into the man's cheekbone. Now his right knee piled into the man's defenseless groin. As he doubled over in pain, Carver karate-chopped the back of his neck. The Russian dropped unconscious to the floor. It was the basic five- second knockout-lesson one in the special forces' fighting handbook. Worked every time. Unless the other guy had read the same book.
Carver thought about pulling the man back down the passage by his stupid ponytail, but decided against it and grabbed him under the armpits instead. He dragged the unconscious body into the empty office, then stepped back out into the passage. Now came the interesting bit. He walked to the top of the stairs and peered down into the stairwell. In the dim light from the passage, he could see a flight of steps, then a small landing, then another flight, which turned back the other way and disappeared beneath him.
'Alix?' he hissed.
He wondered if she'd be there. If she'd run he knew for certain he was on his own. If she'd stayed, it wasn't so simple. She might be on his side. Or she could be sticking close so she could help someone else.
Alix appeared on the landing. She looked at Carver.
'So, what are we going to do now?'
'The only thing we can do for now. Disappear.'
21
The operations director tried to rub the exhaustion from his bloodshot eyes. The job was falling apart around him. He was standing with Papin in the street outside the mansion. The city would soon be waking up to discover the horrors that had taken place while it was asleep.
'Okay,' said Papin. 'Let's go through it from the beginning. Forget for the moment whatever happened in the Alma, concentrate on what happened here. No French citizens have been harmed. We will do our best to make it all disappear. But if I am to help you, I must know what happened. And you must deal with any-what do you say?- loose ends. So, to begin. Who owns the house?'
'I don't know. I imagine that when your people start trying to trace the ownership, they will find a mass of shell companies in different tax havens. But I don't know who owns them. And even if I did, I couldn't tell you.' 'How can I help if you play games with me?' 'I'm not playing games. I honestly do not know. And I guarantee that any names I gave you would not appear on any ownership documents anywhere.'
'Okay, I understand. Next problem: Who did this?'
The operations director thought for a moment. Then he breathed a plume of smoke into the early-morning air and said, 'Carver. It has to be. He knew about the explosives in that flat because he put them there. Kursk had no idea. If he'd gone in, he'd have been killed, and the woman with him.'
Papin nodded. 'Okay, so we know a man and a woman went into that apartment. We agree the man must have been Carver. So could the woman be Petrova? Are they working together now? If so, they must have come out together too, because no one died in the explosion. Next question: Did they come here? Well, we have evidence of two weapons. The simplest explanation for that is two shooters. Do we have any other suspects? No. Did Carver have any other female accomplice?'
'No.'
'Eh bien, let's assume that Carver and Petrova were responsible for the killings here. Clearly, they must be eliminated before they cause any more trouble. We need descriptions. So tell me, Charlie, are you sure you do not know what Carver looks like?'
The operations director ground his cigarette stub under his heel. 'We had him watched on a couple of his early jobs. It was an obvious precaution. He's a shade under six feet tall. Call it a meter eighty; maybe seventy-five kilos in weight; dark hair; thin face, intense looking. Other than that, no distinguishing features that I know of. Actually,
