The Accident Man (41 page)

Carver let his head sag on his shoulders, then mumbled, “It’s over, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Zhukovski. “For you it is.”

The Russian relaxed, confident that Carver was a broken man. He reached his right arm out toward the vodka sitting on the table beside the chair, turning his head toward the glass as he did so. And in that moment of vulnerability, Carver leaped.

He had tensed his feet against the ground, pressing his toes into the carpet, bunching the muscles on his upper thighs and sucking in his stomach. Then he’d pushed up and away from the chair with every remaining ounce of his strength, aiming to smash headfirst into Zhukovski’s face.

He stopped dead in midair as fifty thousand volts jackknifed his body for the fourth time, crashing him down to the carpet, leaving him groveling in agony once again.

“Did you really think I would be that careless?” asked Zhukovski, getting up from his chair. He stood over Carver. “Well, did you?” he repeated. Then he kicked Carver in the guts, driving the breath from his body.

“Don’t you understand who I am?” Zhukovski did not raise his voice so much as refrigerate it, delivering every word with a frozen, deliberate matter-of-factness. “I was a colonel in the KGB. I made dissidents watch as their entire families were burned alive: wives, children, mothers, fathers, everyone. I made prisoners place their hands in boiling water, then peeled their skin off like a tomato. Do you want me to do that to you?”

“No,” groaned Carver. “Please. I beg you. I’ll help you. I can do that. I know the password to the consortium’s computer. I have the key to decrypt all the files. I’ll tell you. Just, please… just stop hurting me.”

“Well now…” Zhukovski was almost whispering to himself. He was walking around Carver, circling his body. “Why would I want to do that?”

He kicked Carver again, this time at the base of his spine, making him arch backward as the wounded muscles went into spasm. As Zhukovski kept moving around him, Carver shrank into a fetal curl. He was dry retching, unable to speak.

Zhukovski stamped on his ankles.

“I’m not impressed,” he said. “I had expected a former member of the special boat service to have a greater resistance to physical pain. Perhaps you have gone soft. Or perhaps you are merely pretending to give in. What do you say?”

Carver’s face was lying to one side on the floor. He was resting the weight of his head on the undamaged side of his jaw. Zhukovski could clearly see the angry red swelling that marked the area where Titov’s punch had connected, so he ground his heel into the center of the bruising, gradually increasing the pressure on Carver’s face, pinning his battered head while his body writhed helplessly. Carver let out a muffled howl of pain.

“No, that was not pretense,” said Zhukovski. “But still, you might have set a trap for me. For a man of your skills, it would be no problem to booby trap a computer. Replace the battery with explosives and one strike of a single key would set it off. I have used that method of assassination myself. Perhaps we will finally discover what secrets are hidden in this ridiculous machine. But if it really is a trap, you will be the one who dies.”

When Alix had said that the sight of Carver was making her physically sick, she was telling the truth. As he lay naked and defeated at her feet, slobbering over her boots, it was all she could do not to retch. She had to kick him away before she vomited right over him.

But she was not nauseated because she held Carver in contempt, she was sickened with herself. She had delivered the only man who truly loved her into the hands of the man who could do him the most harm — a monster. She had played one game too many, told one too many lies. And now Carver was paying the price for her treachery.

She had been furious with him, that last night in Geneva. At first it had just been the sulky irritation that follows a lovers’ tiff. That had given way to sullen frustration at his refusal to take her with him when he went to investigate what was happening. She felt patronized, the little woman left behind while the big strong man went off to work. And then, when Kursk appeared and turned the peaceful café into an slaughterhouse, she had felt the helpless rage that comes with fear and abandonment. She blamed Carver for her seizure and she stoked her anger against him in order to fortify her for what she had to do next.

She would die, she knew, if Yuri Zhukovski ever suspected that her relationship with Carver had been anything other than a professional deceit. Her survival depended on persuading him that she had simply gone back to what she did best: using her powers of emotional and sexual manipulation against a helpless man. So she’d laced her account of the previous three days with sneering mockery. She’d portrayed Carver as a deluded fool, capable enough at combat or sabotage, but a fumbling amateur when he held a woman, rather than a gun, in his hands.

There was a certain truth in that, of course. But that was why she’d liked him so much, why she knew now that she could have loved him, if only she’d let herself. It was Carver’s unexpected emotional vulnerability that made him a complex, lovable human being, not just a killing machine.

She’d told herself that as long as she was alive, there was always hope that somehow she might be reunited with Carver. She did not know how or when, but she felt sure he would try to find a way to get her back. Until then, all she could do was convince Yuri that he had nothing whatever to worry about. So she’d turned off her true feelings and given herself to him, letting him use her as he wished, paying her penance by prostituting herself more utterly than ever before in her life.

Finally, she had done one last service, the one for which she could least forgive herself. When Carver had called, shortly after lunch — less than twelve hours ago, though it seemed like a different age — she played the part of the helpless kidnap victim, crying out to him and squealing in fake pain when Yuri pretended to slap her.

When the telephone had been put down, and Carver set on his way, Yuri had grabbed her by both arms and looked directly into her eyes as if searching for any last sign that she had betrayed him. He did not appear to find any.

“You are a good girl,” he’d said. “I always had faith in you and you did not give me cause to regret it. That was very sensible. I should have hated to have to punish you. But now…” his face cleared and his mood lifted. “Now you deserve a reward. Go into town, one of the men will drive you. Buy whatever you like. Make yourself beautiful again.” He’d ruffled the short, black hair with almost fatherly affection. For once there was a trace of warmth, even affection in his voice. “I miss my pretty, golden girl.”

Alix did as she was told. She’d spent hours trying on the shortest skirts, the highest heels, and the brightest jewels the boutiques of Gstaad — a town well used to expensive women — had to offer. But that was just the start.

Her body was massaged. She had manicures and pedicures. Her face was caked with masks, then soothed with creams. Her hair was lengthened with extensions (“From Russian women, just like you!” the hair-dresser had squealed, thinking this would make her happy rather than deepen her self-loathing), then dyed back to blond, then artfully styled and sprayed. Finally her face and limbs were painted to the absurdly artificial, beauty-queen perfection that a man like Zhukovski would understand best, and she was ready to be delivered into his presence again.

Alix had teetered into the chalet’s vast living room in her stiletto-heeled boots and Stella McCartney microdress to be faced by the hungry, lascivious stares of Kursk and his crew of deadbeat psychopaths. Yuri had greeted her with the flicker of a smile and the words, “Alexandra, my dear, you look magnificent. I cannot wait to see the look on Mr. Carver’s face when he sees you!”

She had been unable to keep the falseness from her laugh.

“Don’t worry,” Yuri had said, taking her reaction as a sign that she wanted nothing to do with the Englishman. “I know how you had to suffer, and I am going to make him pay. We will have dinner first and then he will be brought to us. And then we will be entertained.”

Alix was sitting opposite Yuri in the dining room when she heard the van arrive. It drove past the front door and down the drive that spiraled around the chalet to the basement garage. There was a slamming of doors and a scuffling of feet somewhere down below them in the bowels of the house. When the servants brought in the food, she could not taste it. The vintage champagne was stale on her tongue.

At last, Yuri told the butler, maid, and cook that they could return to their homes in the village. He waited until they had left the building, then rose from the table, took Alix’s arm, and walked her back to the living room. He placed himself in a chair by the fire and patted one of its overstuffed arms, indicating that she should perch there. Alix obeyed. She even forced herself to giggle. “I’m looking forward to this.”

She had expected Carver to walk into the room tall and proud, ready to negotiate with Yuri, man to man. When he was led in like an animal, his body exposed, his head shrouded in black, it was all she could do not to choke, to weep. She forced herself to remain cold and aloof as he suffered the agonies that destroyed his body from within and crushed his spirit before her eyes. And then, at last, she’d been able to escape.

Alix kept her composure until she was out of the room. She’d stifled her sobs until she reached the marble sanctuary of her bathroom, with the door locked behind her. Only then did she weep for her man, for herself, and for the love that had been thrown away.

She ran a bath, partly to cover the sound of her crying, but also as an excuse for her absence. Men took it for granted that women had an almost infinite need to soak themselves in scalding hot water. Besides, she knew that Yuri would have forgotten her by now. She had seen the venom in his eyes when he looked at Carver, and known what that meant.

Alix lay in the bath, breathing the Chanel-scented steam, watching her limbs turn lobster pink in the heat. By the time she rose to her feet, letting the bubbles slide from her body as she reached for her soft, heavy cotton towel, she knew what she had to do. Whatever it cost.

Zhukovski spoke into a telephone. A few seconds later, Kursk, Titov, and Rutsev reappeared. Carver was placed in the middle of a five-man procession. Kursk led the way, carrying a gun, a Beretta 92. He walked side-on, pointing the gun behind him at Carver, whose left arm was held in Rutsev’s heavy grip. Titov came next, holding the belt’s remote control. Zhukovski made up the rear. Only Dimitrov was missing.

The line of men went through the living room and into the hall. Kursk signaled Carver to stop. Then he walked to the far end of the hall, farthest away from the front entrance, to what looked like a standard wooden door set into an alcove under the main stairs. Its domestic appearance was misleading. When Kursk opened it, his grunt of effort suggested a far heavier, more solid construction — something designed as a barrier to people and sound alike. Another sign from Kursk told Rutsev to lead Carver toward him. Once again, Carver was covered twice over: the gun in front of him, the belt control behind.

The side door opened onto a set of bare concrete steps that led down to the basement of the chalet. Kursk went ahead, got to the bottom, turned to face back up the stairs, and shouted, “Okay!” The other men then started to walk down into the basement. The stairs opened into a narrow corridor lit by the harsh flickering of a bare fluorescent tube.

Carver recognized the feel of the concrete beneath his feet. He could smell stale exhaust fumes. The garage where he had first arrived at the chalet must be down here. But that was not his destination. Instead, Kursk led the group through a thick steel door into a completely bare, windowless room, roughly twenty square feet.

The walls were a brilliant chalk white, as were the floor, the ceiling, and the inside of the door. He caught a familiar whiff of new paint. This was the place where he had been left before, blindfolded.

He looked around and realized he had missed some of its salient features. A closed-circuit TV camera at one corner of the ceiling was focused on the room’s only furniture, a single high-backed metal chair, right in the middle of the room. It was bolted to the floor and set at right angles to the door. Leather straps had been attached to the back, the arms, and the legs of the chair, ensuring that anyone sitting in it could be totally restrained. A black wire snaked from a socket on the wall to a pair of headphones resting on a hook attached to the back of the chair. A second hook held a roll of duct tape.

There were more fluorescent lights on the ceiling. On the wall directly opposite the chair a large, shallow box, maybe four feet wide and three high, had been fixed. It had a black frame, but the biggest surface, facing the chair, was made of clear Plexiglas. The interior was white and fitted with yet more lights. They had not yet been switched on.

The room was no warmer than it had been before. Carver could feel the sweat chilling on his skin. He felt dazed, his mind fried by successive electric shocks. His face throbbed. His back and ankles were painfully tender. He longed for a sip of water to ease his raging thirst. But he wanted to take a piss just as badly. It had taken all his concentration not to wet or soil himself when the shocks had ripped through him. Now his bladder was sending stabbing reminders through his guts. He had to hold out. He would not allow Zhukovski to see him reduced to this.

Rutsev pulled Carver over to the chair and shoved him into it. Then he strapped him down, securing his chest, waist, and thighs. The straps’ buckles were fastened behind and underneath the chair. With his hands still cuffed, he had no hope of reaching them. His head, however, was left free. Rutsev had to remove Carver’s leg irons to bind his ankles to the chair legs. Carver longed to kick the fat-faced Russian, just for the pleasure of causing him pain. But the stun belt was still around his waist, its control still safely in Titov’s hands, and Kursk had his gun trained on him. There was no purpose in taking the risk. He had more important things to do.