When one of them fired a pair of three-round warning bursts that just missed the car, Maddy finally hit the brakes.
Larsson hardly noticed the men or their weapons. He was too busy grabbing the alligator loppers, kicking the door open and running towards the barn. He was watching the black-clad figures crouching by the double doors at the front of the building. His eyes were wide in horror at what he was seeing. His mouth was forming the word ‘No’ and he was screaming it.
But the sound of Larsson’s voice was drowned by the blast of the shotgun and then, as the door was rammed open, the sound of an explosion and a sudden whoosh and a crackle of timber as the whole barn was engulfed in a blazing yellow and orange sheet of flame.
70
Samuel Carver did not believe in regret, any more than he believed in guilt. There was no point in feeling sorry about something that could not be changed, and even less in mourning an action that could still be put right. Stop whining and do something about it: that would be his reaction. And if you’ve got regrets, but too few to mention, then just stop singing and shut the fuck up.
Like guilt, regret was also a self-excusing emotion. People felt better about themselves for being sorry about bad things they’d done, their character failings, their wealth, or their full bellies when others were starving. They were often so proud of themselves for displaying all this guilt that it seemed to be enough in itself: they saw no need to actually change anything.
Yet as he confronted his death and tried to make peace with himself amidst the pain, the thirst and the noise that assailed him, there were three things Carver wished he’d done before it was too late. Getting the warning through about Tyzack’s hit on Lincoln Roberts was one of them and in the greater scheme of things perhaps that was the most important. But to Carver, the people he loved mattered more.
He wished he’d been able to sit down with Thor Larsson, pour him a beer and ask him a simple question: why? There had to be a good reason Larsson had shafted him. He wouldn’t have done it for money, surely. Unless he’d suddenly developed a cocaine habit or a dangerous taste for casinos, Larsson wasn’t short of cash and anyway he stood to earn more from Carver alive than dead.
Maybe it was something personal. He and Larsson had had the odd fight in their time, but nothing that had left any lasting resentment, not that Carver was aware of anyway. And though Larsson was slow to anger, when there was something eating at him, he wasn’t shy about letting Carver know, even if it meant grabbing him by the throat and shaking some sense into him. Carver smiled to himself as he thought about a night in Geneva when Larsson had done just that. Carver had barely been out of the clinic an hour and he hadn’t been thinking straight, to put it mildly. That was when you knew you had a true friend: when he had the balls and the honesty to let you know you were making a total tit of yourself.
It must have been a threat, then. He’d been frightened into the betrayal. And since he knew that Larsson was no coward, Carver knew it had to be something to do with someone he loved, and that meant Karin. Christ, why hadn’t he just got in touch? Together they could have dealt with anyone. Except they couldn’t have, could they? Larsson had told Carver about his upcoming wedding just a few days before Carver had started work on that Lusterleaf job. He’d been totally wrapped up in that. When his best friend had needed him, he hadn’t been there.
Same with Maddy. If he’d been any kind of normal man, he’d have moved heaven and earth to get back to her after the bomb went off. Instead he’d found every way he could to rationalize running away, and every single one of those reasons had been nothing but crap. The truth was, he just couldn’t deal with the possibility that a woman might actually love him.
But all he wanted now was to put his arms round Maddy one last time. He wanted to feel her, smell her, hear her whispering something filthy in his ear, both of them laughing as they rolled into one another’s arms. He wanted to say sorry for being such a dick and putting her through so much when all she’d wanted was to be together and have a good time. He closed his eyes and concentrated on recalling her with all his senses, hoping that would help him forget the pain, the exhaustion and the fear that racked his mind and body, and buy him a few moments of peace.
That was why it took him a few seconds to register the sound of the helicopter coming into land, loud enough to be heard over the TVs, and a while after that to conclude that it was a different, bigger aircraft than the one that had taken off just after Tyzack had left him. And if it wasn’t him on that chopper… A surge of hope flooded through Carver. Someone was coming for him!
He shouted out, ‘Help! Over here! I’m here!’ but it was only when he’d shouted the same few words over and over again that he realized no one could possibly have heard him. His voice had been reduced to a husky, almost silent croak. Someone standing where Tyzack had been, just a few feet away, would have had a hard time making him out. There was no chance at all of his cries carrying to anyone outside.
Still, it wouldn’t be long till they found him, surely…
… would it?
Time went by, the seconds stretching out like faces in a hall of mirrors, and nothing happened. Carver thought he heard cars arriving. After that… nothing.
He strained to pick up scraps of information from the brief moments of silence between words and music on the BBC news report. Several minutes later two more cars arrived. The next thing Carver heard was the familiar sequence of a forced entry. OK, he thought, so there was another building nearby. That made sense. If this was a barn, there had to be a farmhouse to go with it. They were clearing the buildings one by one. Whoever was out there, they’d get to him soon enough. It was just a matter of keeping cool until they arrived.
It struck him that he would probably be arrested. They were looking for a bomber, not the half-strangled, beaten victim of a psychopath’s obsession. He didn’t mind. If he could just write to Maddy, call her, maybe have one prison visit, that would give him the chance to explain.
The sound of running boots on the path outside and orders being barked told him it would not be long now. Then he heard another engine, the sound of a car being driven right on the limit and he knew – absolutely knew with the certainty that comes from a lover’s deepest instinct – that Maddy was in that car. His heart soared… and then crashed back down again as he heard two short bursts of gunfire. The engine died away.
‘Oh God, please, oh no-o-o-o…’ Carver pleaded. He thought for a second he could hear a voice outside, one he recognized, echoing his own. But then there were more footsteps, the blast of a shotgun against a lock.
And the next thing Carver knew, he had swapped Damon Tyzack’s personal vision of hell for the fires of an all-too-real inferno.
71
Thor Larsson did not stop running. While the men in their black uniforms fled from the blazing barn, he kept moving straight towards it. When he got to the doors, he kicked out at them, sending his foot through the flames that were racing up the green-painted wood and forcing them open so that he could charge right through and into the building itself.
Larsson looked like a man who was already halfway to damnation. His face bore a look of such manic intensity that his old self was all but unrecognizable. Fire was licking at his trouser legs and he held some kind of weapon in his hands. Carver flinched like a whipped dog confronted by a man’s passing boot, but then he saw that the weapon was not intended for him as Larsson reached over him, gripped the bungee cord in the alligator’s teeth and turned on the chainsaw. He was shouting something, the same words again and again, but the rasping buzz of the saw biting at the toughened rubber was so loud in Carver’s ear that he could not make out what it was. It was only by lip-reading that he worked out Larsson was repeating, ‘I’m sorry,’ in an anguished mantra of apology.
The air was rippling with the scorching heat that had turned the barn into a cross between a sauna and a pizza oven, and smoke was curling up walls that had been transformed into satin curtains of gold and scarlet by
