Tyzack wasn’t entirely lying. He really did have every intention of checking the explosives he was going to place around the bedroom, sitting area and bathroom that Jana Kreutzmann would soon be occupying. He wanted to make absolutely certain that she could not possibly survive their detonation. Fraulein Kreutzmann had been causing Tyzack a great deal of trouble with her endless investigations into other people’s business. Some of the articles she’d written lately had been getting uncomfortably close to trafficking routes and networks in which he had a direct personal interest. There was every chance that if she were allowed to keep going she might expose him to the kind of public attention that would prove extremely embarrassing. That could not be allowed to happen.
He had been given a pass-key. It let him into a very feminine environment that reminded him a little of the Cross woman’s ranch-house in Idaho. It wasn’t the specific style of furniture or decoration, just the feeling that someone had worked hard to make things pretty. There were raspberry-pink cushions arranged on the creamy sofa and bright green apples in a china bowl made to look like a wicker basket on the glass table in front of it; softer pink curtains over the window behind; a gold and scarlet patterned bedspread. It made Tyzack uneasy to be in the room – it was all too perfect, as though the women who stayed there were somehow better, even happier than him – but the fact that he was about to smash it all to pieces came as a calming, comforting thought.
He was using shaped charges of cyclotol – a 70/30 mix of two explosives: TNT and RDX – designed to provide an intense, highly focused blast. The largest charge was placed in the toilet cistern, with two smaller back-up devices behind an air-conditioning vent and under the sofa. The key to the whole system was the room’s own bedside telephone. Tyzack opened it up and inserted a tiny transmitting device.
When the phone rang, the transmitter would send a detonation signal to all three devices. A separate circuit, however, acted as a safety-catch: nothing would happen until it had been remotely activated.
Tyzack wanted to be sure that the target was in place before he let the bomb do its work. He unscrewed the switch outside the bathroom that controlled the lights inside and put another transmitter in it. When the light was switched on, he would know. It would, of course, have been a simple job to link the switch directly to the bombs. Tyzack, however, had other ideas.
Jana Kreutzmann arrived in Oslo shortly after eight in the evening. The Nobel organization had sent a car to meet her and deliver her to her hotel. By nine she had checked in and was heading up to her room. When she got there, she kicked off her shoes and called room service to order a light supper. It would be with her in twenty minutes, she was told. Perfect, she thought, that would just give her time to take a shower. She was longing to wash away the accumulated cares and stresses of another fourteen-hour day, so she walked over to her bathroom, turned on the light, and then let the water run, building up heat, while she slipped out of her clothes.
The transmitter on the light switch worked perfectly, alerting Tyzack as soon as it was turned on. He looked through a pair of compact binoculars to check that the other elements were in place; then he murmured a single word to himself: ‘Showtime!’
35
Thor Larsson had reserved a table by the window, equally well placed to watch the passers-by outside on Karl Johans Gate, or inside the cafe. Carver took off the jacket he’d worn over his plain black T-shirt, jeans and leather Converse sneakers and slung it over the back of his chair. He understood the choice of restaurant when he saw Maddy look around the room, taking in the rich wooden panelling; the swagged curtains; the half-naked statues mounted on the walls between the windows; the splendid arrangements of white flowers dotted around the room, their petals glowing in the light cast by crystal chandeliers; and the murals of Victorian gentlemen and their ladies, eating, drinking and being merry. If there was anywhere in Oslo calculated to please a visiting American, this was it.
They’d eaten their starters and finished the first bottle of wine when Carver’s phone trilled, letting him know that he had received a text. He grimaced apologetically and checked it out. The message read: ‘Go to hotel lobby. Internal phone. Dial Room 570. Urgent. Grantham’.
The name and number of the sender were withheld. Carver looked up at Thor and Maddy. ‘Excuse me one second,’ he said.
He tapped out a two-word reply: ‘Prove it’.
Less than a minute later a new message arrived: ‘M25 McCabe breakfast Mrs Z. Now do it. Fast’.
‘Are you OK?’
Carver looked up to see Maddy’s concerned expression. He gave an irritable sigh: ‘Just a voice from the past,’ adding, ‘No, not her,’ to prevent Maddy jumping to the wrong conclusion. ‘Just business.’
The combination of keywords could only have come from Grantham. They referred to a series of events: a road accident engineered by Carver; a fundamentalist maniac Carver had prevented from exploding a nuclear bomb over Jerusalem’s most sacred religious sites; and a breakfast meeting with Grantham and Deputy Director Olga Zhukovskaya of the Russian FSB, successors to the KGB, just before he’d taken out McCabe. The tone of the message certainly sounded like Grantham. The snide irreverence of calling Zhukovskaya ‘Mrs Z’ and the blunt arrogance of his commands were typical of the man. So, for that matter, was his habit of turning up unannounced and unwelcome in Carver’s life.
‘I’ve got to take this,’ he said. ‘Won’t be long.’
Carver got up and walked away from the table, leaving his jacket draped on the chair behind him. He passed the bar on his left as he left the cafe and walked down a winding corridor that opened out into the lobby. It was an automatic reflex for Carver to scan the area, noting the elderly couple pottering in from the street; the businessman making a complaint of some kind to the front desk and the blonde receptionist patiently indulging him; the family looking through the rack of tourist brochures by the concierge’s desk.
The concierge directed him to an internal phone placed on a reproduction antique table up against the far wall. As Carver crossed the lobby towards it, he had another flicker of intuition: that same sense of something or someone just beyond his field of vision, perceived but not identified. He drove it from his mind as he reached the phone and called the room.
He heard one ring of the bell.
And then the very air around him seemed to be ripped to shreds as the thunderous reverberation of a massive explosion shook the old hotel, followed a second later by the tinnitus trilling of fire alarms, the shouts of men and screams of women. The lobby, which had been so peaceful just a second earlier now became consumed by chaos as guests rushed out of nearby hotel rooms and restaurants, a smattering at first and then a flood. More people appeared on the stairs, some stumbling as they hurried down. An elderly lady lost her footing in the melee and fell the final half-dozen steps to the ground. She struggled to get up, but no one stopped to help her.
Amidst the panic and desperation, Carver stood still, looking around, his concentration intensified and his focus sharpened. The blast had shattered a large mirror and filled the air with plaster dust, but he saw that there was no structural damage to the area in which he was standing. For most of the hotel’s occupants, the greatest danger now lay in being trampled in the rush to escape. Carver, however, had a more pressing issue on his mind.
He’d been set up. The call had been a trigger, he was sure of it. He had no proof, but he’d bet everything he possessed that Room 570 had just been obliterated along, presumably, with its occupant. And he was the patsy who had dialled the fatal number.
He scanned the lobby, searching for security cameras through the dusty air. None were visible. But he was working on the assumption that there would be pictures of him somewhere, complete with date and time-code, standing with the guest-phone in his hand. He had to get out, that second.
But what about Maddy? Carver did not fear for her immediate safety. The blast had come from the far end of the hotel, well away from the cafe, which had its own separate exit, far from the stampede in the lobby. She should have escaped unharmed, but she’d also be worried sick about him. He wanted to go to her and let her know he was fine, but there was no time. In any case it would be better for Maddy and Thor not to know what had
