The personal fear at last surged through Carver, at what he was about to do and say, the familiar skin- tingling, stomach-hollowing sensation. ‘You haven’t heard the tape.’
The two men at the desk stared, initially unspeaking, at Carver. Without breaking his gaze Delioci told Brescia: ‘Go get a player.’
Burcher said: ‘You stupid man. You idiotically stupid little man.’ He still didn’t raise his voice, just sounding each sound like a bell’s funeral toll.
Brescia re-entered within minutes with a small cassette player and, unasked, fitted in the tape and pressed the start button. Burcher’s voice echoed into the silent room. It’s good of you to see me at such short notice. And then Carver’s. Particularly as you weren’t able to leave a name.
The recording apparatus throughout the Northcote building had been professionally fitted and the quality was perfect. Still no one spoke or moved, the lawyer and Delioci looking fixedly at Carver as the tape unwound with the identification of the companies and the quietly spoken and intentionally ambiguous innuendoes from Burcher. It was at Carver’s denial of any knowledge of the computer hacking that Delioci stopped the tape with an impatient finger flick.
The roared shout – ‘You’re the total fucking idiot!’ – at the lawyer and the fist crashing against the desktop was so unexpected that everyone physically jumped. Delioci rose, leaning towards Burcher, raging on. ‘Like a fucking amateur you let yourself get wired like this…’
Burcher was ashen and there was a tremor in his hands, the middle finger on his left tapping against his thigh as if he were sending a signal. How could it have gone this wrong? How could everything – his coup, his dismissal of the Deliocis – go so wrong?
Delioci’s head came around to Carver. ‘So you’ve got a copy of the tape, which means you’ve got a copy of everything you’ve given back today and you’re going to tell me that if we don’t let go, you’re going to turn it all over to the Feds, right?’
‘I want the separation of my firm,’ rasped Carver, hoarsely.
‘Let me tell you what you’re going to do,’ said the man, controlled again. ‘You’re going to drive back into Manhattan, to the bank…’ He nodded towards the finger-tapping lawyer. ‘You’re going to take him with you, right into the safe-deposit room and completely clear your box. I want everything…’ He turned towards Burcher. ‘You hear that? I said everything.’
‘Yes,’ said Burcher, almost a whisper.
The man came back to Carver. ‘And when you get back here I’m going to tell you how you’re going to work for us for the rest of your goddamn fucking life. But here’s the thing I’m going to tell you right now, give you all the time you need to understand. You ever try – think of trying – another half-assed move like this and you’ll get a choice. The choice will be who gets killed, your wife or your girlfriend. Yours to pick…’ He switched to Burcher. ‘And when you get back I’ll have spoken to a lot of people who’ll sure as hell want to speak to you…’
With only two of them in the rear of the car there was room for Carver to sit apart from Brescia and Carver did, as far as he could. Burcher hunched forward next to the driver, rocking very slightly back and forth.
Brescia said: ‘You fucked up big time, Stan. Good job we’re around to look after you.’
It was payback time, Burcher accepted. They were going to make him pay for every insult, real or imagined. ‘It’s going to be all right.’
‘You’d better believe it,’ said the other man.
Burcher stopped rocking, swivelling almost completely around in his seat to face Carver. ‘Is everything in the box?’
Carver nodded, not speaking, his mind too jumbled to even think of words except those that echoed again and again in his head. You’re going to work for us for the rest of your goddamn fucking life. And then: The choice will be who gets killed, your wife or your girlfriend. You pick… The car swept up on to the expressway and began going over the bridge, back into Manhattan.
‘Everything that was hacked?’ persisted Burcher.
‘Everything I copied,’ managed Carver. But the printouts were in the box! He’d have to say he did it, to save Alice. But they’d ask him how and he didn’t know. Didn’t know what Alice had meant about using English cut-outs – what a cut-out was, even – and they’d find out it was Alice and they’d kill her, because she had knowledge that could destroy them. And because they’d imagine it to be a fitting punishment for him.
‘I suffer, you suffer, asshole,’ confirmed Burcher. ‘It all gets settled today. All of it.’
He had to fight, determined Carver. And then at once the questions. How? With what? The bank. That was the chance. His only chance. Last chance. Get Burcher into the vault with the security man, for the two-key opening procedure. Jump the lawyer there. Hold him and yell for the security man to help. Subdue Burcher and call the police, the Bureau, whoever. Get these other two in the car arrested. Then the shouting man back in the warehouse. Get protection. Alice had been right. The only way.
They turned into Wall Street. Carver could see the bank. He felt sick. He’d never fought anyone before. Not punched a man, wanting to hurt him. He wanted to hurt Burcher: hurt him as much and as badly as he could. And he could do it. He knew he could do it. He was physically bigger, stronger, than Burcher. It would help that he’d seen the security people, less than three hours ago. They knew who he was. Would react, when he called for help.
‘You ready, asshole?’ demanded Burcher.
Carver nodded. He was definitely ready.
The driver said: ‘We get moved on, I’ll go round the block.’
Carver saw the blue and white of the police car as he began to get out of theirs. It was coming in the opposite direction, slowed by other traffic. The decision was instant, unthinking, panic-spurred. He thrust the waiting Burcher as hard as he could out of his way, sending the man sprawling on to the pavement, and ran around the front of the car waving his arms and shouting, seeing the police driver and the observer turn in his direction, their lips moving, both frowning. Then Carver heard the bellow of the air horn behind him and twisted to see the truck for the briefest second before it hit him, knocking him beneath its tandem-mounted front wheels, which ran completely over his chest, crushing it far worse than George Northcote’s had been crushed.
The frantically waiting Alice Belling saw the coverage on Live at Five, the story angled on the astonishing coincidence of the fatalities. She ran – literally – grabbing a case already packed. She didn’t know how they’d done it to look like yet another accident: all she could think of was that they knew her name and that she would be next on the list.
Seventeen
The uniformed sergeant frowned up at Hanlan’s entry, gesturing to a chair already set out, and said: ‘The Bureau doing traffic accidents these days?’
‘All kinds of things,’ said Hanlan.
‘Coffee?’ The nameplate on the desk said Sergeant P. David Hopper. He was a small man bulged from sitting too long behind a desk and living even longer off relish-filled torpedo sandwiches.
‘Coffee’s good,’ accepted Hanlan. It was like the hundred other police offices in the hundred other police precincts he’d ever been in, a scuffed, chipped, overused cell without bars in which people like P. David Hopper filled the drawers and cabinets with the stuff they brought from the previous scuffed, chipped, overused cell before moving on to the next. Hopper didn’t have sufficient citations or plaques or souvenirs to cover all the clean patches left by previous occupants, leaving the wall pockmarked white. The coffee, from a percolator on top of a filing cabinet, came in an I Love NY mug.
‘So what’s all kinds mean?’
The apparent friendliness and immediate readiness to see him – rare from police to Bureau and vice versa – would be from curiosity, Hanlan knew. There’d been a lot of attention as he passed through the front hall and he guessed his presence would already be known about on the top floor. ‘John Carver.’
Hopper shrugged. ‘What can I tell you? Total mystery, why it happened, how it happened.’
‘That’s what I want to talk about, the mystery.’
The frown came back. ‘I meant why a guy like Carver suddenly runs in front of a thirty-five-ton truck.’
