Carver - By Tom Cain Page 0,126

From his silhouette, he looked like the elusive waiter.

Carver came out from behind the panel and dashed for the door, his gun out in front of him.

Braddock turned and pointed his weapon towards Carver, who was already diving for the floor, rolling to one side, hitting the ground as the gun went off. He felt the round punch through the air above his head. It sped through the open door and exploded at the back of the conference room, blasting the wall behind him with a hail of metal fragments. The wall held firm, sheltering Carver and the other two men. Their respite only lasted a matter of seconds.

Carver came to a halt on his stomach, his arms out in front of him, pointing towards the window, both hands still clasping the Sig.

Braddock was getting to his feet, his gun still aiming in Carver’s direction.

Carver fired four times, ignoring the waiter, aiming only at Braddock. The range was no more than five or six metres. The rounds went right through Braddock’s torso and into the window behind him, shattering the glass.

Braddock staggered backwards, dropped the Punisher, lost his balance, and fell backwards through the window, taking the blind, wrapped around him like an impromptu funeral shroud.

Carver took two more steps forward, keeping his gun on the waiter. ‘On the floor!’ he shouted. ‘Face down, arms and legs wide. And don’t move or I’ll blow your fucking head off.’

Carver was expecting a plea for mercy or a desperate cry of, ‘Don’t shoot!’ Instead the words he heard were calm, controlled and completely unexpected: ‘Pick up the grenade launcher.’

He was so taken aback, he could only say, ‘What?’

‘Pick up the damn grenade launcher. Aim it at the window opposite this one. Then fire it. I’ll give you a billion dollars.’

97

* * *

‘YOU MUST BE Malachi Zorn,’ said Carver. ‘Roll over. Up against the wall. Sit on your hands.’

Zorn did as he was told. Then he looked at Carver. ‘I mean it. I’ll give you a billion dollars if you just put a couple more rounds into that hall across the way. But, uh, you’d better do it quick. I have a way out of here, but it won’t stay open long.’

Carver shrugged. ‘Sorry, but I’ve got better things to do. I’m Carver, by the way. I’m the guy you paid to kill you.’ Keeping the gun in his right hand, with his eyes still fixed on Zorn, he put his wrist up to his mouth again: ‘This is Carver. I’m in the Wax Chandlers’ Hall. The shooter is down. I have Zorn. Give me five minutes.’

A voice cut in on the line. ‘You know what you have to do.’ Carver did not have to be told that it belonged to Cameron Young.

He put both hands back on the gun and looked directly at Zorn. ‘Your old friends don’t like you any more. They want you dead. Sounds like they’d rather deal with the fake Zorn than the original.’

‘They won’t feel that way when they realize all the money has gone. There’s over a hundred billion, you know, maybe more after tonight. Depends on how many we got with that first grenade.’

‘Yeah, I heard all about the money. I got the full rundown. And here’s the thing: I couldn’t give a shit.’

Zorn laughed. ‘Me neither … I never cared about the actual dollars and cents. They were just a means to an end.’

‘Which was?’

Zorn sighed. In the half-light from the window he suddenly looked washed out, exhausted: a man whose supplies of adrenalin had just evaporated. He sounded, too, like a man who needed to confess.

‘I just wanted to screw the people who’d screwed me. To get my revenge for my mom and dad. To show the world that all these masters of the universe who run the banks and the hedge funds are just a bunch of crooks – greedy, stupid, arrogant crooks. And the only way to do that was to take their money. They don’t understand anything else. I mean, they screwed the whole world, wrecked the economy, took trillions of dollars from all the regular people they treated like dirt …And even when everyone knew what they’d done, they didn’t say sorry. They didn’t admit they’d got it wrong. They just went right back to ripping the whole world off, all over again. So I wanted to rip them off … and I did.’

‘You also killed hundreds of people. What’s that got to do with getting your revenge on