‘Let’s just say we’re helping each other out.’
Alix felt calmer now. Maybe this really would just be business. Maybe that would be better. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘OK, this Magda Sternberg… the name means nothing to me. Why should I know her?’
‘Because it’s possible that you trained together. We think she used to be called Celina Novak.’
That name! It took all her years of experience to conceal the shock of it. Alix felt herself taken back to a time when she was still a gauche, provincial teenager, her eyes only recently cured of their squint, her teeth still in the braces that would create her perfect smile. She thought of Celina Novak, the spoilt, vicious daughter of senior officials in Poland’s ruling United Workers’ Party, sent to Russia to be trained by the KGB. She remembered the absolute contempt and disdain with which Celina had regarded her, and felt a sudden rush of the humiliation that used to be her overpowering emotion. It took an effort to control her voice as she said, ‘Do you have a picture?’
Carver held up his phone. On its screen was an old black and white identity photo of a uniformed cadet, her beautiful face set hard as flint.
Alix nodded.
‘Have you met her?’ she asked.
Carver turned his head away from her and cast his eyes towards the poster again. ‘Professionally,’ he said, still not looking at Alix.
‘Then you’ll know she likes to destroy the lives of everyone she meets.’ She wondered what Carver was trying to hide.
Now he turned back to her. ‘But not yours…’
‘I had powerful protectors. I was luckier than I knew.’
Carver frowned. ‘What happened to the ones who weren’t lucky?’
‘There was a girl called Dasha Markova. She hanged herself…’
Alix could not bear to tell the whole story of how Markova had committed suicide after months of psychological torture inflicted by a gang of classmates recruited and led by Celina Novak. She, Alix, had been part of that gang. She’d felt thrilled that Celina had finally allowed her into the inner circle after all the months in which she had herself been excluded and tormented. And, yes, she’d been relieved that someone else had now been the target. The shame of it had only grown over time.
‘Celina can make you do anything,’ Alix said, her voice barely more than a whisper, so that Carver had to strain to hear her over the noise of the gallery crowd.
Her words seemed to affect him, though, because he grimaced.
‘So what happened to her? Did she get kicked out?’ he asked.
Alix gave a bitter smile. ‘No, she graduated with honours.’
Carver mimed the opening of an envelope: ‘And this year’s winner of the Stalin Prize for psychopathic cruelty is…’
Despite herself, Alix could not help but laugh.
Carver said nothing, just looked at her.
Nervous about what he was seeing, she asked, ‘What is it?’
‘Your smile.’
Just the way he said it told her that his feelings had not changed. But maybe she was fooling herself. She realized her pulse was racing. Her mouth was dry.
‘I need a drink,’ she said.
‘Sure.’
A waiter was passing by, his tray laden with glasses of champagne. Carver stepped over to him, took two and offered one to Alix.
She reached for it. Her fingers brushed his, and it was as if an electric circuit had been completed as the energy surged between them. It was all she could do not to drop the glass.
They looked one another in the eye and felt the connection again.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Carver said.
‘I haven’t had my champagne,’ Alix replied.
‘Don’t bother. It’s not the real stuff.’
‘Well, I always want the best stuff there is. Don’t you?’
‘You know I do,’ he said.
Less than a minute later they were hailing a cab.
30
Carn Drum Farm
The weapon had specifically been designed to be as simple as possible. ‘The fewer parts there are, the less there is to go wrong,’ Smethurst had said. ‘People always try to get fancy, you know? Doesn’t matter if they’re the Paddies or the Pentagon, they can’t resist fucking it up with unnecessary complications.’
He’d made sure there would be none of that.
A metal plate had been welded to the base of each of the larger cylinders, with a small hole in the bottom for an electric wire. The wire was passed through the hole into the cylinder, and one of the igniters was attached.
Twelve of these cylinders were placed inside the metal framework, which had already been welded to the floor of the camper van. They were each arranged at fractionally different angles, according to instructions given by Dave Smethurst, who supervised the entire process and checked the results with extreme care. He had spent two hours test-firing shells from that remote cwm, far from prying eyes, then processed the results and determined an individual trajectory for each of his projectiles.
Only when the cylinders were positioned exactly as he wanted them were they filled about one-third deep with the fuel mix of icing sugar and fertilizer, just as an old-fashioned muzzle-loading cannon would have been filled with its load of gunpowder.
The result was a multi-barrel launcher, filled with propellant. All that was missing was something to propel.
That wouldn’t be long in arriving.
Under Smethurst’s direction, two of Gryffud’s men had removed the valves from a dozen of the smaller cylinders. The explosive mix was poured in through the hole where the valve had been, then the fuse and detonator assembly was inserted and the hole resealed.
The small cylinders were placed in the big ones, like one Russian doll inside another, so that the fuse wire from the bottom of the shells nestled in the fuel mix.
The wires from the bottom of each of the launch cylinders were connected to a junction box, along with a thirteenth wire which led to a large plastic jerrycan filled with petrol. The junction box was in turn connected to a timer located by the passenger seat.
The rear door of the van opened vertically. When the multiple launcher was complete and loaded, the door was lowered and welded shut. Then the open top of the camper van was covered with a large sheet of paper, lacquered to improve its strength and water-resistance, and sprayed white to match the van. It was sealed to the roof with clear vinyl tape. Only the closest inspection would reveal that anything had been done to the roof. Only a torrential downpour would break through the lacquered, painted paper. This, too, was another old IRA ploy.
The weapons had been made and loaded. The mission was ready to go.
31
London
Grantham called while Carver and Alix were in the cab. ‘So, did you speak to your old girlfriend?’ he asked.
