Samuel Carver was already exhausted and hungry before he even reached Gstaad. Since then, the successive traumas he suffered had weakened him to the point of collapse. He'd made no attempt to resist when they led him back to the cell and strapped him back on the torture chair. When Titov hit him with a final blast from the stun belt, just for the sheer pleasure of hurting him, there was something strangely lifeless about the spasms that had racked his body, as if he were no longer aware of the pain.
Carver didn't feel the teeth being wrenched from his jaw as his head fought against its straps. When the headphones and light box were switched back on, his overloaded brain rejected the barrage of incoherent stimuli, and Carver drifted into a sort of dream state. His dazzled, dessicated eyes were still wide open, but the blazing whiteness had been replaced by images from his subconscious, long-hidden recollections of people and places fused into a new world of their own.
There were two golden women-at least, he thought there were two: Sometimes they seemed to meld into one, and their bodies and faces were never quite the same from one moment to the next. These women seemed to like him. He sensed their bodies close to him. But when he went to touch them, they drifted away and he couldn't make sense of what they were saying, though their faces seemed kind and their smiles let him know how happy they were to see him. He wanted to talk to them, to tell them he felt the same way. But he couldn't speak. No matter how hard he tried, he could not say a word. His mouth just would not move.
He walked through his old school hallways and then straight into the officers' mess at Poole. All his friends were there. There was an older man-what was he named? Carver loved him very much, but then the older man seemed to be angry with him and Carver was suddenly very frightened, just like he'd been during those first terms at boarding school when the teachers got cross with him and he was all alone, far from home, with no one to comfort him.
And then he was standing in a tunnel, with a car coming toward him, its dazzling headlights filling his eyes, and his eyeballs seemed to burn as if they'd been set on fire and he longed to be somewhere safe and dark, and as he spiraled back through his psyche, he came to a place that was absolutely secure. He was floating in water, only it wasn't ordinary water because it was rich and sweet. Now he was being pulled from this warm safe place and being dragged out into the cold. He fought and kicked, but it made no difference. He was ripped out into the open. He screamed and yelled and for a moment, everything was all right again. He was cradled in two warm arms and his head was pressed against something deliciously soft and safe and his mouth was filling again with sweetness. But that too was lost, because other hands were grabbing him and taking him away and he was crying again because he wanted to keep feeling that softness and tasting that sweetness.
Finally he became aware, as if watching from the far end of an impossibly long corridor, that something new was happening to him. A blissful darkness had descended and he could feel gentle hands, warm hands touching his face, stroking his forehead and cheeks. These hands seemed different from the ones in his dream. They were somehow more substantial, more real. And it struck him that his mouth seemed to be moving again and he wondered if he could talk.
'Who are you?' he croaked. 'Who's there?'
82
Andrei Dimitrov was dragged from his deep, vodkasoaked oblivion by the distant sound of gunfire. He propped himself up on his thin horsehair mattress and rubbed a hand across his aching head. He could have sworn he'd heard a pistol being fired, somewhere off in the distance. But now there was nothing but the silence of the early hours.
And then a thought struck him, making his guts swoop like a thrill-seeker on a rollercoaster ride. What was the time? He scrabbled for his watch and tried to make sense of the luminous dial. Ten past four. He was supposed to take over watch duty from Vasili Rutsev at four. If Vasha got pissed off and told Kursk, he'd be in deep shit.
Dimitrov tumbled from his bed and searched around on the floor for his clothes and shoes, trying not to wake Titov, who was snoring and farting in the adjacent bed. His MAC was in a metal cabinet next to the bed. He got it out and stubbed his big toe against the bedstead, adding one more pain to the grim effects of a desperate hangover. Dimitrov groaned under his breath. He was getting too old to drink this much.
He crept past Kursk's bedroom and made it down to the ground floor without getting caught. Still bleary-eyed and aching, he shoved open the door to the basement and headed downstairs.
It was the smell that hit him first, the unmistakable acrid bitterness of a fired gun and the sweet sickliness of spilled blood. Dimitrov woke up fast as the adrenalin hit his bloodstream-the ultimate natural hangover cure. He crept down to the basement corridor.
'Rutsev!' he shouted. 'Vasha!'
There was no reply.
Dimitrov made his way to the control room. The door was ajar. He kicked it open, holding the MAC at his shoulder, ready to fire. Then he let the gun fall to his side when he saw the bloody mess that had once been his comrade's face. God knows, Rutsev had been a sadistic bastard and his friendship with Igor Titov got sicker with every day that passed, but they'd fought together in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and on the streets of Moscow. Who'd have thought he'd get blown away in a luxury chalet in the Swiss Alps?
But who'd shot him? Dimitrov racked his brain, trying to recall whether there'd been any signs of forced entry anywhere in the house. He'd swear not. But no one in the house could have done it. The boss was upstairs screwing that stuck-up tart Petrova. Titov was out cold and Kursk had no reason whatever to attack Rutsev. There'd been no arguments, let alone fights, during the course of the evening.
That left just the Englishman. But he was in no state to kill anyone. And anyway, he was strapped to a chair in a locked room.
Wasn't he?
Andrei Dimitrov looked at the monitor that showed the interrogation room. Then he looked again, and his blood ran cold.
The chair was empty.
83
Alix had been weeping as she stuffed her gun into her shoulder bag and ran across the chilly white room to the hellish tableau at its heart. She could barely see through her tears as she loosened the tape from Carver's eyes and brushed her hand over his face to close his eyelids. She pulled the headphones off his head and then set about undoing the straps that tied him to the chair.
She worked her way down from his head, starting where the suffering was worse. The leather binding that had gagged his mouth had wreaked havoc. As she pulled it away a mass of clotted blood came with it. There was a single tooth stuck like some obscene decoration on the surface of the clot. Alix had to look away for a moment to ease the heaving in her throat before she returned to her task.
The stun belt around his waist was padlocked shut, but the battery packs that powered it could be removed, and with them its power to inflict any more pain. By the time she'd finished, she was kneeling at his feet. She kissed the bleeding flesh where the straps and shackles had bitten into his skin-an echo of his own kiss, all those hours ago. It felt like a kind of atonement.
Yet he made no response and when she got to her feet he was still frozen, eyes and mouth wide open, so motionless that for a moment she feared he might be dead. But no, his flesh was warm, his chest still rising and falling with quick, shallow breaths. Alix then leaned forward and took him in her arms.
When Carver finally spoke in a cracked, quavering voice, confessing his blind helplessness, Alix broke down, sobbing against his shoulder. She had never experienced true compassion before. When men had broken down in her arms, she had counted it a victory. Now she felt as though there was no end to what she could give. She longed to care for the man in her arms, to nurse him and restore him, no matter how long it took.
First, though, she had to get him out of the chair, away from the blazing glare of the light box. She spoke into
