Carver - By Tom Cain Page 0,72

helicopter flew backwards from the ground up into the sky, and another was magically reconstituted in mid-air. Then Azarov pressed play and the action was repeated, this time in the correct direction and at the right speed, ending in that terrible blank, dead screen. And as she watched Alix knew, with an intuitive certainty she could not possibly explain, that Carver was there. That blazing oil refinery had been the destination he had been heading for when he had left her lying in his bed.

He was there. And now, so soon after she had found him, Alix feared she had lost him for ever.

But while she worried about the personal cost of what had happened, Azarov was already working through the financial consequences. ‘This is exactly what Zorn said would happen. It’s almost as if … no, that’s impossible.’ He looked at Alix, talking to her now less as his lover than as another businessperson. ‘Do you think he knew this would happen? Or that he made it happen?’

Whatever Alix’s differences with Azarov, she shared with him the instinctive Russian belief that behind any disaster there was always a conspiracy. ‘That’s possible, of course it is,’ she said, her mind now fully engaged in the question. Carver had talked about Zorn, linking him to the woman she had known as Celina Novak. Now she could see connections starting to form in her mind between a string of previously separate elements: her mistrust of Zorn, her conviction that Carver had been at the refinery, and now the suggestion that Zorn had somehow been the instigator of the disaster there.

‘What will you do if Zorn really did plan all this?’ she asked Azarov. ‘I did warn you that I thought there was something suspicious about his scheme.’

Azarov grinned. ‘And I told you that a man should not pick up the dice unless he has the balls to lose everything on a single roll. I am very happy that I placed my money on Zorn. He has certainly rolled the dice. Surely, too, he will win.’

A picture of Nicholas Orwell appeared on the screen, as a presenter’s voice announced that he was missing, believed dead at the scene.

Now Azarov laughed out loud. ‘So he was willing to let his closest ally die to help his plan succeed. Ha! This Zorn is a man with iron in his soul.’

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ Alix insisted. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘And you asked the wrong question, my beautiful darling. It should have been: what are we going to do? And I will tell you. We have been invited to go to the tennis at Wimbledon tomorrow with Malachi Zorn. If he still goes – and he will, I guarantee – then we will go with him. I want to take another close look at this man, and I would like you to do the same. I want to know exactly what he is made of, and a woman’s eye will see what a man’s does not. You know the saying: keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I do not yet know whether Malachi Zorn is my greatest friend or my most bitter enemy. But either way, I will stay close.’

Dmytryk Azarov was by no means the only one of Malachi Zorn’s investors to be glued to the TV news. In his suite at Claridge’s, chosen at Charlene’s insistence because it had been designed by Diane von Furstenberg, Mort Lockheimer was cheering every horrific element of the disaster unfolding before his eyes. He had watched Zorn’s BBC interview and been puzzled by the way so much of it had been devoted to the risk of energy terrorism. Now he got it. Zorn had obviously been given some kind of inside information that an attack was imminent – either from the perpetrators or through leaks from the security forces; Lockheimer wasn’t bothered which. Zorn must have set up a bunch of short positions, just like he’d done so many times before. Now he was watching them all pay off in spades. And if Zorn was getting rich, so was Lockheimer.

Lockheimer was at least forty pounds overweight. His entire body was covered in a thick mat of black and grey hair, and the only thing covering it right now was a white towelling bathrobe. ‘What did I tell you!’ he exclaimed, grabbing Charlene in a gleeful bear hug. ‘That little fucker Zorn just hit the fuckin’ jackpot. Didn’t I say you should blow him …