Carver - By Tom Cain Page 0,71

also pointed out in his BBC interview, Britain’s energy supplies were dominated by foreign-owned corporations, the knock-on effects were felt on the bourses of Europe. And with the New York Stock Exchange due to open at two thirty in the afternoon, UK time, they would hit Wall Street like a tsunami rolling across the Atlantic.

There was an atmosphere of stunned, speechless despair at 10 Downing Street. There was frenzy in financial institutions. But at Zorn’s hired mansion on the Wentworth estate there was only the exultant laughter of a man for whom Christmas Day has come earlier, and more joyously, than he could have dreamed possible. This was the single biggest financial coup of all time. He had made tens of billions of dollars, pounds, euros, yen and Chinese yuan. Now all he had to do was collect it. If 9/11 was anything to go by, the markets would soon be shut down. He had just a few minutes, maybe less, to get out of all his positions, collecting his winnings on the way. There wasn’t a second to lose.

54

* * *

Kensington Park Gardens

ALIX COULD SEE Dmytryk Azarov’s lips move. She could hear the words he was saying. She knew – because he’d made a point of emphasizing this fact, as if to prove her importance to him – that he’d cancelled an important business meeting to be with her. But he was wasting his breath, because she felt so totally disconnected from him that none of it made any difference. He was as distant from her, and as unimportant, as the reporter on the screen of the television that was on, but ignored, in the far corner of the sitting room.

‘Don’t believe what they say in the papers about these women I was supposed to be seeing,’ Azarov was saying, working himself up into a fever of righteous indignation. ‘These … what do they call them? … party girls, who claim that I slept with them. It is all lies. These women just want money, and journalists are vermin who will spread any slander to sell their filthy rags …’

He felt he had to persuade her, that much was obvious. But Alix didn’t care if he’d slept with one party girl, or ten, or one hundred. Her head was filled with Carver. Her body was still sending reminders that he had been inside her, like pulsing echoes of their lovemaking.

‘All the time I was away, all I thought about was you,’ Azarov went on. ‘You were in my dreams. I missed your body next to mine …’

He didn’t realize that all he was doing was making Alix think of Carver’s body next to her. The memory of his touch was so vivid that it sent a little shiver through her, and made her catch her breath.

Azarov saw that tremor of emotion, and, of course, misinterpreted it. ‘You feel the same way, too! I knew it!’

Alix managed a wan smile as Azarov launched into another declaration of his passion for her. She was wondering how and when she was going to extract herself from Azarov’s life. She couldn’t possibly mention Carver. Irrespective of his own behaviour, Azarov did not take kindly to women who betrayed him, or the men with whom they slept. He would want revenge, and that frightened Alix, not just for Carver’s sake but also Azarov’s. He would not know what he was taking on.

She wondered where Carver was now. She knew what it meant when he disappeared the way he’d done last night. He was working. And she knew what that led to, too: violence, danger, secrecy and the constant worry of never knowing where he was and when, if ever, he would come home. By making love to him, and making herself so vulnerable to the effect he had on her, she had let that back into her life. She’d broken a vow she’d made to herself and …

Alix realized that Azarov had fallen silent. He was looking past her with an expression of total incredulity on his face. ‘Mother of God,’ he gasped, regaining the power of speech.

Alix turned to follow his staring eyes, and saw the television screen go blank, before the picture cut back to a pair of presenters trying to maintain some semblance of professional self-control.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

Azarov walked across to the remote control that was sitting beside the television, and rewound the picture. Alix watched explosions fall in upon themselves to leave intact metal towers and tanks. One