his ear: 'Help me, Carver. We must move you. And I need you to help me.'
For the first time, he turned his head to look at her. He blinked several times, trying to restore his vision, then squinted his eyes and peered at her face, searching it for clues.
'It's me,' she said. 'Alix. I came back for you. I'm so sorry, my darling. I was so cruel to you. But I never meant it. You must believe me. I love you. Now please, please try to walk… Do you understand?'
Another frown, more blinks, and then Carver gave a slow, deliberate nod.
'Can you walk?'
A dry, inarticulate croak emerged from the wreck of Carver's mouth. Then his arms and legs quivered, summoning up the energy and will for a massive physical effort. Alix took a step back to give Carver room as he lifted his hands onto the arms of the chair, then pushed with all his might. Slowly, inch by inch, his face grimacing with strain and concentration, he raised himself upright. Then he collapsed into Alix's arms.
She tried again. 'Come on, my darling, walk for me. One step… just one step.'
Carver nodded again, then stuck his right leg forward, with all the stiffness of a man trying out an artificial limb. He shifted his weight forward.
'Well done, that was great. Now, another step.'
He took another stiff-legged step, this time with his left foot. Then he gave a brusque shake of his arm, brushing Alix away, and took two more ungainly strides before falling once more into her arms.
'Anxsch,' he mumbled. He closed his eyes, thought for a moment, then tried again. 'Thanxsch.' He squeezed out the word past his swollen, lacerated tongue and through his loosened teeth.
Alix laughed and blinked away her tears. 'You're welcome. Now, come with me, into this corner, away from the light.'
She led him slowly into the corner under the camera and propped him like a broomstick against the wall.
'You okay?' she said, taking her hands off his shoulders and letting them hover right by him, ready to catch him if he fell again.
'Uh-huh.'
She brushed a quick butterfly kiss against his parched, cracked lips. Then she reached into her bag for the clothes. As she pulled the jeans out, the SIG-Sauer came with them. It crashed onto the floor.
'Gun…' said Carver, looking at the weapon, but not making any move to pick it up. He nodded to himself. 'Good. Need a gun…'
Alix ignored it. She was busy easing the jeans over Carver's feet and pulling them up his thighs and over the vile band of black nylon until, at last, he had a shred of dignity again. There was one last important job to do, but now she felt weirdly shy. Alix couldn't understand it. After all the things she'd done, all the men she'd been with, she was nervous about zipping up Carver's trousers. Why should this seem so much more intimate?
He sensed her unease, and smiled again. For the first time she saw a faint glimmer in his eyes, the merest hint that the real Samuel Carver was coming back to her.
'I can do tha,' he mumbled.
She had to help his fingers find the zipper. He gave a tug and got it about halfway up. She shook her head at her own foolishness and finished the job.
'You love me?' he asked her, as if this were a new idea to him.
Alix nodded, biting her top lip.
'Promise?'
'Yes,' she whispered, so softly that she could barely hear the word herself. Then, fractionally louder, she repeated, 'Yes, I promise.'
He nodded. 'Tha's good…'
She took him in her arms again. 'It's all right, my darling. Everything's going to be all right.'
Then the next thing she knew, Carver had grabbed her with unexpected strength and flung her to the ground as the sound of gunfire shattered the room.
84
Carver's vision was still blurred and dotted with dancing lights. His world was like a film that had been partly burned away, so that the picture was scorched with white shafts of pure light. Gradually, though, he was beginning to get some faint sense of connection to the world outside.
He knew now that the woman with him was called Alix, and he was sure that she was one of the two beautiful golden women that he'd been trying to talk to, the ones who'd kept slipping away from him. She seemed upset, very upset, as though she'd done him harm, and as he thought about it, he did remember a terrible hurt, a pain in his heart, but he couldn't remember when or why that had been. It didn't matter, though, because she said she loved him and everything was going to be all right. She'd promised.
And then he'd seen Dimitrov come through the door. He'd known at once that this was a very bad man, one of the men who'd tried to hurt him, and this bad man was holding a gun. He was aiming it at the two of them. Carver did not want the man to shoot Alix, and a deep, untrammeled, allconsuming rage rose within him, sweeping through his consciousness and blowing all the rubble of Samuel Carver's identity away.
He entered some kind of fugue state in which another unknown identity took over, all violence and all control, sweeping him aside. It was this other persona that threw Alix to the ground, that tumbled forward, ignoring the spray of bullets from Dimitrov's MAC-10, that snatched the SIG in one fluid motion from the floor, crouched in the firing position, and slammed three bullets into the Russian's chest.
Without saying a word, Carver got to his feet, walked across to Alix, and brusquely pulled her upright. She looked into his eyes, startled by his sudden, alien roughness, and was shocked to find no sign of recognition.
'Godda gedd out,' he said. 'Garage. Car.'
He took Alix's hand and dragged her from the room with a power and determination that made no sense to her. It bore no relation to the shattered man she had been tending to just seconds earlier.
They ran down the corridor toward the garage. Upstairs, in Yuri Zhukovski's bedroom, the red numerals on his bedside clock clicked over to 4:15, and then the clock was obliterated as the bomb in the computer case exploded, creating a fireball that expanded at supersonic speed and generating a pressure wave that smashed everything in its path before the vacuum that had been left behind sucked it back to its point of origin again.
Zhukovski too was blasted into smithereens and his remains incinerated. One second he was a billionaire oligarch with thousands of workers under his command. And by the end of that same second, he had simply ceased to exist.
The bomb was a small one. The explosion did little structural damage outside the confines of the master bedroom suite. But the fire it started was soon raging through the house. In the basement, Carver stopped at the sound of the explosion and a grin of pure, inhuman triumph spread across his face.
Alix was staring at him as if uncertain what or who she was looking at.
'Bomb,' he announced. 'Nasty accident. Serve him righ'.' He looked up, cocking an ear for any sound of further explosions. 'Godda geddout,' he repeated. 'Now!'
They hurtled down the corridor and into the garage. Carver looked around for the control that would open the door.
'It's okay,' shouted Alix. 'I know how to do it.'
She pressed a button on the wall and the great metal door swung up and then back, coming to rest under the ceiling.
Outside, they looked back at the chalet. Flames were already reaching out of the gaping holes where the master bedroom's windows had been as the fire grabbed at the night sky. Smoke was billowing across the hillside, and the ground beneath them was covered in glass.
Carver started running up the tarmac drive that curved around to the chalet's main entrance.
Alix hesitated for a moment, then followed him. As bizarre as Carver's behavior had become, he was still her best chance of safety.
As he came around the side of the house, Carver left the drive and melted into the undergrowth. Alix almost fell over him as he crouched behind a large bush. He waved a hand angrily at her, ordering her to get back. Carver
