padding on around his abdomen to give him a softer, fatter gut, and his normally clean-shaven chin and short, dark hair were now hidden beneath somewhat longer, wavy blond hair and a beard to match. Aviator shades covered his eyes. All the while that he kept Zorn under surveillance he kept turning the same questions over and over in his mind: asking himself what Zorn was really up to in London, and why someone wanted him dead so badly. He had nothing against Zorn, personally. In fact, he was impressed by Zorn’s disdain for the smart seats. It spoke well of him as a man. On the other hand, Carver had paid more than three thousand pounds for his Centre Court ticket. It seemed a pity to waste it.
Zorn seemed to feel the same way. After an hour on Court Two he relented and, to smiles of relief all round, led his party back to Centre Court. As he walked into the most famous tennis arena in the world, Carver was struck by its intimacy. The stands held fifteen thousand spectators, yet the players on court seemed almost close enough to touch. It was easy, too, to pick out individual spectators, Zorn included, in the crowd. From an assassin’s point of view, Centre Court was a gallery full of sitting ducks. That very intimacy, however, meant that it offered precious few positions where a marksman could lurk unseen and take his shot unobserved.
Another practical problem struck Carver the moment he walked into the stands. The gangways between the rows of seats were accessed by entrances, each of which was guarded by two armed forces personnel — one from the army and another from the navy — to make sure that spectators only entered or left the court during breaks in play. These guards were unarmed, but they were, nevertheless, trained fighting men, and their presence only added to the difficulties that Centre Court posed.
Zorn and his guests, meanwhile, were no more aware that Carver was surveying them there than they had been on the walk out to Court Two. At four o’clock they went to the Courtside Restaurant, reserved for debenture ticket holders, for afternoon tea. Tables at the restaurant were limited to six guests. Razzaq slipped away so that Nicholas Orwell could take the final place at the table. The security chief left the group, Carver thought, with the relieved air of a busy man who was glad to be able to get back to work.
Sitting alone, Carver appeared to bury himself in his newspaper, which he was holding in front of him at the table, angled upwards to make it easier to read. The paper concealed the iPad on which Carver was scrolling through the pictures he had taken that morning. Zorn, he noticed, had been wearing an earpiece. That wasn’t necessarily suspicious: he had every reason to want to keep discreetly in touch with his business affairs. But there was something else Carver spotted, and when he saw it, he immediately went back through every other picture he had taken to make sure that he had not just been fooled by a trick of the light. The answer was no. This was no trick — not of the light, at any rate.
Carver slipped the iPad back into his bag with a smile of deep satisfaction on his face. He had just worked out why he had been hired to kill Malachi Zorn. Now it was just a matter of deciding what, precisely, he was going to do with the discovery he had made. By the time he got up from the table to follow Zorn and his party back to their seats he had formulated a plan of action. He now knew the time, location and method by which he would hit Malachi Zorn.
When Zorn left Wimbledon shortly after five thirty, apologizing to his guests that his business commitments made his departure unavoidable, Carver was fifty metres behind Zorn’s dove-grey Bentley on a motorbike. He had by now learned all that he needed to know, but it never hurt to go the extra distance when preparing for a job, so Carver followed his target all the way back to Wentworth.
It had not crossed his mind to be concerned that the multinational crew of waiters and waitresses had included a young Chinese woman among the Poles, Australians and Spanish. Nor had he attributed any great significance to the fact that a couple of times during the day the faces in the crowd, either watching the tennis or trying to make their way from one part of the All England Club to another, had included a slightly older Chinese male, respectably dressed in a lightweight summer suit and tie. Carver’s mind was focused on his job as the perpetrator of one killing. He was not thinking of himself as the target of another.
23
Whitehall, London SW1
Sir Frederick Greenhill, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, looked around the table. ‘So, any other business?’
The question was a formality. The agenda for the meeting had been completed. A couple of the senior intelligence officers and civil servants who comprised the committee membership began gathering up their papers. But then Cameron Young, the Prime Minister’s political advisor, and his personal representative on the JIC, spoke up: ‘Yes, there is one thing, actually.’
Young did not look much like the slick corporate types, with their sharp suits and self-satisfied expressions, who constituted the majority of the Prime Minister’s closest associates. He had pale-ginger hair, a fleshy face, and a bushy drooping moustache — which gave him the slightly morose, doggy air that had long ago inspired his nickname: Fred Basset. This particular hound, however, had claws and teeth worthy of a Dobermann. Young had qualified as a barrister before becoming a political operator. He possessed intelligence and ambition in abundance, not to mention an independently wealthy American wife who had become one of London’s leading political hostesses. He was not a man to be crossed.
‘As I’m sure you’ll be aware, the American financier Malachi Zorn is formally launching a new investment fund in London at the end of this week,’ Young continued. ‘Many of the world’s richest and most influential individuals have placed very large sums of money in this fund, and will be attending the launch party, as will the PM himself. He sees this event as a tremendous vote of confidence in the government and in UK plc, and he wants the world to know about it.’
‘Is that wise?’ asked Sir Charles Herbert, the Foreign Office’s man on the committee. ‘Some of the individuals in question are not necessarily people with whom the PM would want to be associated. The provenance of their fortunes is not always as respectable as one might wish.’
‘I’m sorry?’ asked Young with a frown.
‘He means the money’s dirty,’ snapped Jack Grantham, whose duties as Head of MI6 included attendance at JIC meetings.
‘Then we will make sure that the PM is not photographed standing next to any of them,’ said Young, with an almost imperceptible air of impatience. ‘But he has to make an appearance. There’s just going to be too much money and too much power in the room to ignore. And of course, Mr Orwell will be there.’
‘Well, we wouldn’t want him hogging the front pages while the PM sits at home at Number 10…’ Grantham mused.
‘No, we certainly would not,’ Young agreed. ‘The question that concerns me, however, is this: what are the security implications of this event in particular, and Mr Zorn’s presence here in general? I’m sure many of you will be aware of the interview Mr Zorn gave to the BBC World programme HARDTalk yesterday. He gave a public warning to the UK government that we were at risk from attacks by eco-terrorists. Firstly, let us just establish the facts of the matter. Do you have any reason to believe he’s right, Dame Judith?’
The successor to Agatha Bewley as Head of MI5, Dame Judith Spofforth, was not given to dithering. Her reply was immediate, all the facts at her fingertips: ‘Not at the moment. We keep a weather eye on the most extreme ecological and animal rights groups, of course. They tend to go in for nasty, frequently illegal, but essentially small- scale activity: harassing executives that work for companies of which they disapprove, digging tunnels on the sites of planned motorways, and so on. But there’s no sign any of them have any major stunts in mind.’
Cameron Young turned to Euan Jeffries, the Director of GCHQ. ‘Euan?’
‘I must say, I agree with Dame Judith. We’re not seeing any significant traffic that indicates planning for an attack of that kind.’
‘Jack?’
Grantham thought for a second. To anyone else in the room, it looked as though he was sifting through intelligence data and analysis in his mind, weighing up the threat to the UK. In fact, he was thinking about Ahmad Razzaq and his contract on Malachi Zorn. Strictly speaking, he ought to mention it — the PM would go ballistic if Zorn came to any harm on British soil. But the fact was, Grantham had not been asked about threats to Zorn. He’d been asked about eco-terrorists.
