He needed to go faster.
Beyond the hotel Karl Johans Gate rose uphill and became a pedestrian zone. There were no cars or motorbikes anywhere. But Oslo is a city of bicycles and many of the people who’d been drawn to the explosion by ghoulish curiosity or a more noble desire to help had simply flung their bikes to the ground when they got close. Carver grabbed one of them and started pedalling.
Carver stood up in the saddle and pumped his legs to get him over the top of the hill. Above him a sign flashed the word ‘Freia’ in swirling script, while a multi-coloured fan of neon lights provided a constantly changing backdrop of red, blue and white that echoed the flashing lights of the police cars, ambulances and fire engines now pulling up outside the hotel.
The people that Carver slalomed around as he rode against the human tide had been hoping for a fun night out. Now they seemed listless, numbed by what had happened and uncertain how they should react. Some were still moving towards the hotel. Others just stood in the street, bereft of the power of decision. Yet others had shrugged their shoulders, accepted that there was nothing they could do and were heading back to their drinks.
He was over the crown of the hill now, and the land fell away in front of him, the broad promenade lined on either side by bars, souvenir shops and clothing stores selling T-shirts and cut-price denims. Carver was pretty sure that the main station was somewhere at the bottom of the slope. He was hoping he could get a night train out of the country, across the Swedish border. Carver was a big fan of the European railway system. The tickets could be bought in cash. There were no customs or passport controls across a vast swathe of the continent, from the northernmost tip of Norway to the furthest-flung Greek island. Trains were a fugitive’s best friend.
In the street outside the King Haakon, Thor Larsson put a comforting arm around Maddy’s shoulder. ‘I’m sure Sam’s fine,’ he said. ‘He’ll be back, don’t you worry.’
‘But he left, and then that happened…’ She stared up at the ruined hotel, round which police were rapidly creating a formal crime zone while firemen and paramedics ventured into the rubble in search of victims and survivors. Maddy had been calling out to any of their number who came near her, begging for information about Carver, but never getting a reply.
She looked at Larsson, her eyes no longer cool and knowing but wide with uncertainty and apprehension. ‘I don’t understand. He hasn’t come back. I think he’s in there somewhere. We’ve got to find him.’
Larsson strengthened his grip as she tried to run towards the wreckage. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, doing his best to sound calm, repressing any hint of the anger seething inside him. He wasn’t going to tell Maddy that he had seen Carver and that he’d been dashing away from the hotel, leaving them both to their own devices. He wasn’t going to call his friend a coward. Not after all that they’d been through. Not to his girlfriend. Not yet.
‘Really,’ he went on, ‘Sam’s been in far worse situations than this. He always pulls through.’
‘Then why isn’t he here?’ she asked, with simple but undeniable logic. ’Why hasn’t he come back for me?’
It wouldn’t be long now, Larsson realized, before her confusion and fear gave way to resentment. For now, she was concerned about Carver. Soon, she would start wondering whether he had deserted her when she needed him most.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing we can do here. We need to be somewhere that Sam will know to look for us. We’ll go back to the hotel. That’s the best place now.’
In the front passenger seat of his car, Damon Tyzack burst out laughing as he was given the latest report on his mobile phone. ‘He’s on a bicycle? Are you sure? Oh, that’s priceless. Who does he think he is, ET? Well, just make sure he doesn’t fly away, then.’
Tyzack snapped the phone shut and looked out of the window, shaking his head. ‘The great Samuel Carver reduced to riding a pushbike,’ he said, talking to himself as much as his driver. ‘My, my… aren’t we coming down in the world?’
38
There was no one following him down the pedestrian precinct of Karl Johans Gate itself, Carver was sure of it. But his route was crossed at intervals by roads that were open to traffic. Up ahead of him, he saw two black Mercedes saloons drive slowly across the next junction and then stop, pulling up by the side of the road nearest to him, directly blocking his path. The cars’ doors opened and half a dozen men got out. They lined up in front of the cars, each a couple of paces apart, forming a picket line across Karl Johans Gate, waiting for him to reach them. And all of them were armed.
The slope had flattened out briefly, but then plunged down again, much steeper than before. Carver was picking up speed, rocketing downhill. He’d be on them in seconds. He looked back over his shoulder. A third Merc had stopped by the junction he had just crossed, preventing him from retreating back the way he had come. On either side of him, the shops and bars lined the street in an unbroken wall of neon and glass. He was as trapped as a rat in a blocked drainpipe.
The distance between him and the waiting men had halved. They stood there, waiting for him, a line of broad shoulders, thick necks and impassive, patient faces. He had two or three seconds at most before he’d be on them. And then, like a crafty, resourceful rat, Carver spotted his way out.
The building on the left-hand corner of the junction was being renovated. There was scaffolding all the way up the walls and a skip outside on the pavement. The workmen had used a plank to run their barrows of rubble and waste up to the skip. And to make the job of pushing the barrow easier, they’d put the plank on the uphill side of the skip.
Carver swooped left, straightened up again, picked up the cadence of his pedalling to take his speed even higher, lined up his front wheel with the plank and prayed.
He hit the plank like a tightrope walker sprinting over Niagara Falls, kept pedalling like a maniac to maintain his momentum, and then gave a quick pull on the handlebars as he hurtled into the air.
He cleared the skip. He saw the nearest man in the line throw himself out of the way. For an instant he thought he was going to smack into the side of one of the Mercs, but instead he landed on the bonnet, wobbled for a moment with the impact, and then ricocheted off it on to the tarmac. Carver swerved between two oncoming cars, jerked the handlebars again to get him over the kerb on the far side of the road, and then kept moving downhill on the next stretch of Karl Johans Gate.
Behind him he heard shouts, slamming car doors, revving engines, a squeal of tyres and furious blaring of car horns. One look back confirmed what his ears had already told him. The Mercs had pulled across the road and on to the pedestrian paving. And now they were coming downhill, right after him, scattering the men and women in their path, in machines whose straight-line speed would run him down in a matter of moments.
They hadn’t shot at him, though, and it told Carver that they wanted him alive. They wouldn’t use their weapons unless they had exhausted all other means of stopping him. But they still had a lot more means up their sleeves.
The leading Mercedes was roaring up behind him, its front bumper almost touching his rear wheel. Carver swung right, picking his way between the people fleeing from the onrushing cars, trying to get some minuscule, temporary advantage from his bike’s manoeuvrability.
He was running down the side of Karl Johans Gate now, sticking close to the buildings. Several of the bars and stores had put signs out on the paving. There were metal litter-bins placed at regular intervals. Their frames were firmly embedded in concrete plinths, as were official signs that marked this as a pedestrian zone. They were as immovable as bollards, so Carver ran between them and the buildings, gaining some small degree of protection as the two Mercedes roared along beside him like tigers in a zoo, eyeing up a tasty child kept from them only by the bars of their cage.
Then just up ahead of him he saw a couple sheltering in a shadowy recess he took at first glance for a doorway. A second look told him it was a narrow alleyway between two shops, almost close enough to touch on either side.
‘Move!’ he yelled.
The guy glanced back over his shoulder, saw Carver and leaped out of his way, pulling his girlfriend with him.
