He let go of her for a moment, clambered up into the back of the Bronco, then turned to give her a hand as she climbed up to join him.
The last words she said before his mouth covered hers were, ‘Remember, slow and gentle…’
A while later they walked back up to the house, arm in arm, with Buster bounding along beside them, wagging his tail so hard it was making circles in the air. He didn’t seem too traumatized. They took a shower that seemed to take a little longer than the business of getting clean necessarily required. Then Carver sat on the edge of the bed and watched Maddy dry and brush the tumbling mane that fell halfway down her back.
She looked at him over her shoulder and said, ‘So, you freaked out by a girl who does her own auto- mechanics?’
‘Not at all. I respect all forms of competence. I like people who are good at things.’
There was just the hint of a dirty undertone in his voice as he said that.
‘I agree, skill is very important,’ she said with impeccably ladylike cool.
Carver wasn’t sure he had the strength to take that thought any further, so he took the conversation on to safer ground: ‘Seriously, how did you learn all that stuff?’
‘I was an only child. I guess Dad didn’t have anyone else to pass on his knowledge to, so he took me hunting every season for deer, pheasants and grouse. I learned how to shoot, how to keep a weapon properly maintained, how to service his truck. Maybe he thought I could be the boy he never had…’
‘Not too much like a boy, thank God.’
Maddy was silent for a few moments, brushing her hair, her mind elsewhere.
‘Suits you, being single,’ he said. ‘You look more relaxed, like you’re a real woman, not someone’s prize possession.’
Maddy gave her hair one last brushstroke, ran her hands through it to get precisely the right degree of artless tumble, then got up from her dressing table.
‘Feel like some brunch?’ she said.
‘Thank God,’ said Carver, ‘I thought you’d never ask.’
14
Bill Selsey was sitting at his desk at the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, at Vauxhall Cross, London. If he got up and walked to the windows looking out on to the river Thames he could see the Gothic towers and spires of the Houses of Parliament across the water, a few hundred yards downstream. He had given his entire working life to this agency, protecting the values that parliament embodied. Now he was about to betray it all. True, it wasn’t as terrible a deception as those of some of the traitors who had gone before him. He wasn’t working for enemies bent on his country’s destruction: he was just doing favours for a gangster. But in a way, that pettiness only made it worse. He couldn’t claim he was working for any great cause. He was simply selling out.
It had all begun with Sir Perceval Wake. Selsey had helped destroy Wake’s Consortium and consign him to an enforced, ignominious retirement, deep in the Shropshire countryside. But the old man had always been a compulsive networker and the love of intrigue had never left him. He had enticed Selsey down to his modest farmhouse with the promise of new revelations about the Consortium’s activities. Wake had thrown Selsey a few titbits of useful information, just so that he did not return to his superiors empty-handed. That task accomplished, it had proved simple – surprisingly so, to both men – to persuade Selsey to carry out a few straightforward orders for which he would be rewarded on a scale that far outstripped his modest government salary.
Money, of course, has always been a motive for treachery. As Selsey well knew, it provided the ‘M’ in ‘MICE’, the intelligence-business acronym that described the four motivations through which undercover spies could be recruited: the other three being ‘ideology’, ‘coercion’ and ‘ego’. Neither ideology nor coercion applied to Selsey. But ego, he admitted to himself, yes, that might have had something to do with it.
For years, Selsey had been a loyal second-in-command to Jack Grantham, a younger but more brilliant, more driven man. Selsey had always told himself, and anyone else who asked, that he was happy to leave the heavy lifting to someone else. Let Grantham suffer the stresses of leadership and the poison of inter-departmental politics: Selsey was happy to do a good day’s work, then head home to a quiet life in the south London suburbs. But much like a loyal spouse, too long taken for granted, Selsey had begun to harbour feelings of bitterness and an urge to upset the status quo. When he was offered the chance to go behind Grantham’s back, to withhold secrets and to mislead him with false information, it was as enticing as a pretty young woman offering the promise of an affair.
And it was, after all, such a little thing that had been asked of him. At some point, as yet to be determined, a mechanism would be set in motion that would end in Samuel Carver’s death. Selsey had no particular reason to feel any loyalty to Carver. Nor would he be responsible for any harm that Carver suffered. He would just be one cog in a much bigger machine, one step on a long road, and for this small favour he would receive a total of two hundred thousand pounds, tax-free, in a Cayman Islands account.
The first fifty thousand was already sitting there, enough to enable Selsey to think, I’ve earned more than you this year, old boy, whenever Grantham’s casual arrogance became more than usually irritating. The second instalment would soon follow. For Selsey had just received his first instructions.
He was ordered to investigate the poisoning of an Indian people-trafficker called Tiger Dey. To help him in this task, he was advised to examine the passenger manifests of an Emirates Airlines flight from London to Dubai, and to check relevant CCTV footage at both Dubai and Heathrow airports. He was also given a contact in the Dubai police, who would provide him with access to the official investigation of Dey’s murder – an investigation that had, unusually, begun while its subject was still, just, alive. Finally, he was supplied with the number of a recently opened account at a Zurich bank, and the name of a former prostitute who would be able to assist in his inquiries.
Taken together, he was assured, these leads would provide a great deal of information. All he had to do, for now at any rate, was to use this information to arouse Jack Grantham’s interest, and persuade him that Samuel Carver had started killing again. From then on, events would take care of themselves.
Selsey had assigned a junior agent to do the donkey work. Provided with the passenger list he had quickly spotted the name ‘James Conway Murray’ and recognized it at once as one of Carver’s known aliases. He had the relevant footage pulled from Heathrow Terminal Three’s cameras. As always, the footage was infuriatingly indistinct, but there certainly was a man who answered to Carver’s general description, carefully keeping his face away from any direct exposure to the cameras with a skill that only an experienced professional would possess.
Selsey asked for any records of further flights by Murray and was rewarded with a BA ticket to San Francisco, leaving three days after the Dubai job. There was no flight yet between Dubai and London – he would have to keep looking for that. Meanwhile Murray had gone to the States. That would be a lead worth following in due course.
He put in a call to Dubai, beginning the negotiations that would get him the police reports. The local detectives had already concluded that Dey’s killer must have been the Englishman who had sat with him at the Karama Pearl Hotel. They had interviewed Dey’s bodyguards without success: they would not squeal to the police, not even on their boss’s killer. But Selsey’s call made the Dubaians suspect that someone in London knew who the man was. So the deal was obvious: the reports in exchange for the name. Selsey told them he would think about it.
He also had to start the process of extracting information from the Swiss bank. With any luck the people there would be cooperative: the Swiss were far more open than they used to be. Otherwise he’d have to use more underhand methods. He also needed a way into that refuge where the prostitute was hiding. All that would require resources, and for that he needed Grantham’s approval. It was time to approach his boss… and start lying in his face.
Jack Grantham sat back in his chair and rubbed his forehead, trying to ease his tension and fatigue. He let out a long slow exhalation, then leaned forward and looked at Selsey standing on the far side of his desk.
‘I’m sorry, Bill, but I just don’t buy it. The last I heard, Carver was doing high-end security work. He tells nervous billionaires and politicians how to keep themselves safe. He even does dummy attacks, just to test their
