Carver - By Tom Cain Page 0,18

I was flying home—’

‘And what was that?’

‘I remembered what happened to Quentin Trench. He double-crossed me: set me up on a job and then tried to have me killed. Clearly he didn’t succeed. In fact, the last time I saw him, he was bobbing up and down in the middle of the English Channel, dead as a doornail, with a distress flare blazing away where the middle of his face used to be … Do you see what I’m getting at here?’

‘Absolutely.’

Carver frowned. He could swear there was a smirk in Shafik’s voice. ‘Glad we’ve got that sorted,’ he said, ignoring it.

He hung up and walked through his apartment to the kitchen. The fittings along two of the walls had been updated a couple of years ago, but the granite-topped island unit in the middle of the room was the same as when he first moved in.

One side of the island was given over to a wine-rack. Carver got down on to his haunches, reached in, and removed a bottle of St Emilion premier cru claret from the second row down, three bottles along. He put the bottle down on the floor beside him, then reached into the space where it had been. At the very back was a small, round, rubber-topped button. Carver pressed it.

There was no other noise in the flat. So it was just possible to hear the soft hum of an electric motor as the centre of the granite top slowly rose from the island, eventually revealing a chromed steel frame within which were fitted six plastic drawers of varying depths.

A thick pad of charcoal-grey plastic foam filled each drawer, with specifically shaped openings cut to fit the different contents: precision tools in the top drawer; specialist power tools in the second; circuit boards, timers, detonators, remote controls, automotive brake and accelerator overrides and explosive tyre valves in the third and fourth; then blocks of explosives, arranged by category, in the fifth. The final and deepest drawer contained the two brands of firearm to which Carver had been loyal since his days in the SBS: the Heckler and Koch MP5K short-barrelled sub-machine gun and the Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with accessories and ammunition.

Tucked in next to the firearms was a bundle of yellow plastic handcuffs that looked like oversized cable-ties. Sometimes it came in handy, being able to immobilize a man without having to stop him permanently. Carver never left home without them.

These were the basic tools of his trade. In his wardrobe he kept a safe containing a variety of passports and credit cards in different identities, plus cash, diamonds and bearer-bonds. These were intended to fund any mission he was likely to undertake and, in the event that he had to disappear fast, get him anywhere in the world and fund a modest lifestyle for the next year or two. If he needed specialist equipment or materials – drugs and poisons, for example – he went to one of a small and very discreet group of expert suppliers. If security measures and customs barriers made it im possible to carry weapons across borders, he specified what he would need from his clients as one of the conditions of his employment.

Still, he found that it helped him to look at his gear when he was contemplating the practicalities of a job. The contents of those foam-lined drawers spoke to him, giving him ideas about the how, what, where and when of what he had to do.

Although, in this case, there was something else for Samuel Carver to consider. Because he hadn’t yet decided who his target would be.

10

* * *

London N1

JACK GRANTHAM WAS having a hard time relaxing. On the surface, everything appeared to be going well. He was sitting in the living room of his Islington flat. He had a glass of Scotch on the table by his side. The TV was on in the background, and he was reading a hardback spy thriller, set in the early eighties, about a KGB sleeper who had penetrated British intelligence. Grantham wasn’t a big fan of spy novels. He spent too many hours dealing with the realities of secret intelligence to bother with the fiction. This, however, was the debut effort by Dame Agatha Bewley, the one-time Head of the Security Service, known as ‘SS’ to Whitehall insiders, and MI5 to the rest of the world. He’d always admired Dame Agatha, despite their regular inter-service disputes, and was now smiling to himself as he enjoyed