Assassin (9 page)

Now a car was coming down the road towards Tyzack. Its Xenon headlights were on, but there was still enough ambient light for him to be able to see beyond them and make out the domineering bulk of the Escalade, the Diamond White paint-job and 22-inch chrome wheels identifying it as Krebs’s.

Tyzack took his time. He waited until Krebs was just fractionally short of the point where he would have to brake, the car’s speed up around 70 mph, before he depressed the control that sent a radio signal to the explosive valves. Then he just let events play out of their own accord.

Just two of the charges detonated. The driver’s side tyres remained intact. But that only added to the catastrophic effect of the other explosions, as the functioning wheels kept driving, pushing the car away from the centre of the road, towards the hazards beyond.

Krebs’s reactions were as sluggish as predicted. He’d been driving along a dry road on a warm, clear evening with very little traffic about, so there’d been no reason to anticipate any problems. The simultaneous disintegration of two tyres and the immediate, total loss of steering and brakes took him entirely by surprise.

His eyes widened, his mouth dropped open and the Escalade swerved across the tarmac, its high body lurching from side to side. It rocketed off the road and hit the cattle wire at full tilt. The fiery rasping of wheel rims on the road was replaced by the screech of the wire on the car’s bodywork as it rode up the radiator grille then over the high, bulbous bonnet, stretching like a bowstring as the nearest fence-posts were torn from their footings.

Then, as the massive white machine approached the edge of the ravine, an invisible hand seemed to let the bowstring loose and it cut through the first six feet of the Escalade’s cabin as easily as a wire through cheese, slicing Norton Krebs clean in two below the shoulder. Only then did the barbed wire snap. The release of tension catapulted the Escalade towards the oak tree and then sent it pinballing off its trunk into the ravine, where it finally came to rest, as ripped and lifeless as its owner.

Tyzack let out his breath and gave a slight shake of the head. Then he turned away from the scene of the crime. The unexploded tyre-valves were still down there in the wreckage, but Damon Tyzack did not make any move to retrieve them. He walked away down the road, towards the truck he’d parked half a mile away, without a backward glance.

Carver was not a horseman. He’d always left that kind of thing to the fancy-dressed toy soldiers in the Household Cavalry, keeping the tourists happy at Buckingham Palace with their shiny breastplates and plumed helmets. But since arriving at the ranch he’d grasped that if he wanted to know Madeleine Cross and understand who she really was, he’d have to change his ways.

One morning, lying in bed with her head nestled on his shoulder and her legs wrapped around his, the heat of her on his thigh, she started telling him about her childhood.

‘We were absolutely blue-collar,’ she murmured. He could feel her breath on his skin, and her own skin was smooth and warm against the arm he’d draped around her. ‘My father took jobs wherever he could find them, working the fields as a farmhand, or on construction sites. I wore hand-me-downs from the families Mom cleaned for.’

‘If you were so poor, how come you learned to ride?’ Carver asked.

‘I had a horse called Blaze. Well, he belonged to our neighbour, but to me he was mine. I used to ride him bareback in the summer. When I’d dismount you could see the sweat-prints from my legs on his back. You know, it’s crazy, but even now, when I talk about Blaze, or just think about him, I can smell him, that horse-smell, the leather and sweat.’

‘There you go,’ said Carver, ‘horses smell. No wonder I can’t stand them.’

She propped herself on her elbows and he shifted under her, so that they were face to face.

‘But you can stand me, right?’ she asked.

‘Oh yes,’ he said, a greedy smile on his face, his hands moving down to her buttocks, pushing her closer to him.

‘And you desire me very much …’

‘I think that’s pretty obvious.’

She gave a little wriggle. ‘Mmm … seems to be.’

‘So are we going to do something about that?’

He moved his mouth towards hers, closing his eyes, expecting her to meet him. Instead, she pushed away with her hands, slipped out of his grasp and off the bed. By the time he looked up, she was standing several feet away, her naked body glowing in the light that filtered through the bedroom curtains.

‘No!’ she said. ‘We don’t do anything until you at least try to ride one of my horses.’

‘You’re kidding …’

‘Not at all,’ she insisted, opening her underwear drawer and pulling on her knickers.

Carver got out of bed, never taking his eyes off her and stood in front of her, half a head taller and sixty pounds heavier. She remained motionless as he ran his strong hands down the sides of her body, pausing for a moment on her waist before continuing downwards, his fingers spreading over her hips and sliding under the flimsy strips of fabric they found there.

‘I could rip these off right now,’ he said.

‘Don’t,’ she said, quietly, but with absolute seriousness.

Carver’s pulse was racing, his breathing heavy. His hunger for her was overwhelming and he was certain that she wanted him just as much. If he took her now there would be absolutely nothing she could do to stop him, but her trust and faith in him would be lost. Without that, they would have nothing.

So he stepped away from her, slowed his breathing and even let a wry smile play across his mouth as he said, ‘All right then, where are the gee-gees?’

Carver fell off more than his jarred bones, aching backside and injured dignity would have liked, but Maddy taught him to ride Western-style, leaning back in the saddle, the reins in one hand, his stirrups so long that his legs fell straight down the flanks of his horse. With Buster bounding along beside them, they rode out across the open land that took up most of the ranch’s 120 acres and picked their way uphill between the pine trees, where the air was cool. In the early morning, with the dew still glistening under the horses’ hooves, the pines gave off a scent that was as sweet as a pina colada. Carver could smell vanilla, too.

‘Some folks call them Sugar Pines,’ Maddy said.

While they’d been riding through the woods, Buster had suddenly started barking. He’d dashed away into the undergrowth, stopped dead, and then begun digging at the earth with his front paws, growling excitedly. Carver had felt a tremor of danger from a source he could not place, an indeterminate, undefined threat. But then Maddy smiled at him, and the feeling vanished like the shadow of a cloud when the sun comes out, burned away by her presence.

‘He’s just chasing rabbits,’ she said, kicking her horse into a walk. She called the dog. Reluctantly, Buster stopped his digging and trotted after them. A minute later, the whole episode had been forgotten and the main thing on his mind was trying to work out exactly what he had going with Maddy. Whatever it was, pretty soon he’d have to leave. It was going to take three flights and the best part of twenty-four hours to get him to Norway and Thor Larsson’s wedding.

Standing in the kitchen a few hours later, watching Maddy cook supper, a thought struck him.

‘I’ve been invited to a wedding,’ he told her. ‘Would you like to come?’

‘OK, weddings are good, so long as they’re not mine …’

‘No, it’s a mate of mine called Thor Larsson. He’s this ridiculously tall Norwegian with a big mop of ginger hair. He looks like a Viking Rastaman. We’ve done a lot of work together.’

‘Really? What kind of work?’

Carver shrugged. ‘Hard to describe - security consultancy, that sort of thing. Anyway, Thor’s lived in Geneva for years, like me, but he’s Norwegian and so’s Karin, the girl he’s marrying. The wedding’s going to be in Oslo. Do you want to come?’

‘Of course I’ll come, that would be great. I guess I’ll have to get someone in to look after the horses, but, oh my God … what am I going to wear?’

She was laughing as she said it, but Carver kept his face deadpan.

‘We have to change planes in Paris,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘If we left early we could stop off for a night, do a little shopping in the morning. I need a suit. Maybe you could find something too. My treat.’

She sighed happily, then wrapped her arms around him. ‘You just earned yourself a really fun night,’ she said.

Damon Tyzack was in the field next to the house, spying on the lovers through high-powered binoculars. They’d been standing right in front of the kitchen windows, without any inkling that they were being observed, when the Cross woman took Carver in her arms.

The neckline of her thin cotton top was elasticated and she had pulled it over her shoulders, leaving them bare, so that her sleeves were puffed around her upper arm. He imagined what it would be like to stick his fist in her face, put a knife to her throat, hear her begging him to stop.

Tyzack had never caught quite such an intimate glimpse of Carver and his piece before, but he knew all about their little love nest. One afternoon, when the pair of them were off on yet another ride, he’d left his hide among the trees and come down for a tour of the place.

‘My God, it’s the little house on the prairie,’ Tyzack had muttered to himself, examining what struck him as a distinctly modest, unimpressive property. It was wood-built, with an awning surrounding it on all four sides, supported by rough-cut timbers and hung with baskets of mountain flowers. Inside, the ground floor was all stone-flagged. The walls were treated with some sort of wash to make the wood seem paler. Vases, knick-knacks and piles of embroidered cushions proclaimed that the place belonged to a woman. But it wasn’t hard to see that there was a man about the house.

A big, brass-framed double bed stood in the bitch’s room upstairs. A pair of men’s trousers was draped over one end of the frame. A five-blade razor rested in a mug by the bathroom sink. Carver had made himself right at home.

Later, Tyzack had gone down to the garage where Cross kept her gaudily painted old truck and slipped a small, magnetized tracking device inside one of the rear wheel arches. He wanted to be able to follow the lovers if they ever left their little nest. He, meanwhile, would remain completely undetected, just as he had been when the two of them had been up in the woods, sitting on their horses just yards from his hide, babbling inanely about the trees smelling of vanilla.

The worst of it was, Tyzack could see that Carver was having a high old time. He’d tucked away a nice little pile of cash. He had a pretty girl making goo-goo eyes at him. He was getting his meals cooked. Oh yes, our Samuel was as happy as a sandboy. That happiness angered Tyzack more than anything. It wasn’t right that the man who had wrecked his life should be so at peace with the world. He couldn’t just lie there doing nothing about it. The situation demanded a fly or two in the ointment.

Tyzack put away his binoculars and went back up to the woods. Then he cleaned up his hide, covered his traces and went on his way.

Jake Tolland drove past the endless blocks of Dubai’s building sites, each tower higher than the last, its design more flamboyant, its promises to prospective tenants more outrageous. Yet many of those glittering towers lay empty; many of the building sites were idle. The boom was over, the miracle exposed as a financial sleight of hand. The giant steel skeletons looked like a dinosaur graveyard, Ground Zero for the global economy.

Tolland turned into a quiet residential street in the Jumeirah district, parked his car and approached a metal door set into a high concrete wall. He pressed the button on the intercom and then said, ‘Hello? This is Jake Tolland, from the London
Times
. I have an appointment to see Mrs Khan.’

There was no response, just a buzzing sound as the door unlocked. Tolland, a tall, bespectacled stringbean in his mid-twenties, with the first signs of hair loss already eating away at his temples, made his way across a dusty yard, dotted with spindly trees. Three small children were playing a game in the dirt, scattering the ground with cheap, brightly coloured plastic toys. A flight of concrete steps led up to a small, boxy, modern villa.

Tolland rang the bell beside the glass front door and watched as a woman, dressed in a plain black trouser suit, her head covered by a grey scarf that wrapped around her neck, crossed the tiled floor of the hallway and opened the door.

He gave a friendly, ingratiating smile. ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I’m—’

‘I know who you are, sweetie,’ said the woman in the hallway, in an accent that came direct from the back streets of Brooklyn. ‘I read you all the time online. Why don’t you come right on in?’

Jake Tolland had always wanted to be a foreign correspondent. Reckoning that a significant proportion of all the bad news - and thus good stories - in the world came from a bloodstained smear of revolution, war, disorder and crime that stretched from Russia, through the Balkans and into the Middle East, he had studied Russian at Cambridge University and then learned Arabic at the Language Centre of London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Armed with these two qualifications and an inquisitive nature, Tolland soon amassed an impressive portfolio of freelance articles and a couple of well-received books that earned him a contract at
The Times
.