Quentin Trench, Operations Director
“Well, you called upon him, all right, didn’t you?” muttered Jack Grantham to himself, as he put down the report, just one of the files seized when the Consortium had been discreetly, but permanently, shut down.
Grantham was a rising star in the British Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6. His official record was one of constant achievement, flawless political judgment, and immaculate career management. He had, however, made one decision that could, if publicly revealed, ruin his career. That did not make it a bad call, simply one that had unavoidable downsides.
On September 3, 1997, Grantham had captured Samuel Carver, with the help of a colleague in MI5. By then he’d been fully aware of what Carver had done a few nights earlier in that Paris underpass. He knew, however, that a public trial was in nobody’s interest. So he had taken another route. Like a bureaucratic Mephistopheles, he had taken possession of Carver’s soul.
“I own you,” he said. “You have a debt against your name that can never be redeemed. But you can make reparations. You can do things for me, for your country. If you get killed along the way, tough. If you succeed, you’ve done some good to set against the harm.”
Next, he let Carver fly to Switzerland to confront Yuri Zhukovski, the Russian oligarch who had been the silent force behind the Paris attack. Now Zhukovski was dead, and Carver had lost his mind.
It was, in some respects, disappointing that he had been placed so firmly out of action. It would have been useful to have a man like that available: off the books, and totally deniable. Then again, something would have gone wrong. Something always did. Meanwhile, Carver was in no state to tell anyone anything.
On balance, Grantham concluded, that was an excellent result all around.
FEBRUARY
20
Samuel Carver knew that he had once been a marine, but only because Alix had told him. She also said that he’d fought in the Special Forces, and explained to him what that entailed.
“I know how to do parachute jumps and swim underwater,” Carver proudly told people at the clinic. “And I can fire guns and do explosions.”
Yet he had no real concept of what those words meant, no sense of how it felt to do the things they described.
Carver didn’t care. There was a smile on his face that was breaking Alix’s heart.
He was taking a fitness class with half a dozen other patients. Some of them had become his friends. He had introduced them to Alix, these wrecked individuals as helpless and dependent as he was, each one making her feel like a mother confronted with a group of dysfunctional children. But of all of them, only Carver threw himself into it, heart and soul. He really tried, and when the instructor called out, “Good work, Samuel!” his face was suffused with a glow of happiness.
The old Samuel Carver would rather have died than live as this grinning simpleton.
So perhaps it was for the best that he had no memory whatsoever of his previous self. He had no awareness of the confidence he had once possessed in his abilities, nor the power that had come from his absolute faith in his ability to defend himself, protect those he loved, and hurt his enemies. His dry, sardonic sense of humor had vanished. He’d even lost his basic, masculine need for sex.
Alix was tortured by the thought, which slipped unbidden into her mind some days, that she, too, would have been better off if Carver had died. It was a cruel, hateful notion, but it reflected an undeniable truth. As much as she was devastated by his present condition, she was angered by it, too, and angry with him. There was no upside to their relationship anymore. She gained nothing from it, other than the knowledge that she would feel even more guilty if she should ever desert him.
Yet the new Carver was sweet, and this was the strangest of all. Alix had to remind herself sometimes that the man she missed, even mourned, had been a killer whose capacity for calculated brutality was only one step away from making him a sociopath. The childlike creature he’d become was entirely without malice, incapable of doing harm. Even his smile had swapped wickedness for innocence.
But what was to become of him? In her right hand, Alix held a crumpled envelope. It contained a letter from Marchand, the clinic’s financial director. He acknowledged receipt of a little over five thousand Swiss francs, paid over the previous few weeks, but regretted that it was not nearly enough to cover M. Carver’s bills. Sadly, he was left with no option but to issue a deadline. The outstanding sum had to be paid within the next seven days. After that point, the patient would be asked to leave and legal proceedings would begin, with the aim of recovering the debt.
21
Kurt Vermulen came away from his meeting with Waylon McCabe asking himself what he was getting into. He knew he was in no position to be choosy. After all those months of being ignored, he could hardly say no to an influential supporter with billions in the bank. But he wasn’t naïve. He presumed McCabe had an agenda of his own, motivated by religion. For Vermulen, the problem of Islamist terrorism was first and foremost a security issue: He’d emphasized the Christian element in his speech because he knew it would play with the Commission for National Values. McCabe, however, had precisely the opposite priorities and sooner or later would want to go public with his views.
Still, Vermulen had to admit McCabe was right about one thing. It wasn’t enough just to tell people about the threat of Islamist terrorism; he somehow had to show it, too. McCabe was proposing what the military called a false-flag operation, designed to provoke a response by means of deception. Vermulen didn’t feel too comfortable about that. Even if the ends could justify the means, he had no idea what form those means would take. For a fortnight he tried to find a solution. And then, quite by chance, it fell right into his lap.
An old acquaintance, Pavel Novak, came into town and insisted on going to a hockey game, the Caps against the Blackhawks. So Vermulen found himself watching what to him just looked like psychos on skates beating the crap out of one another, while Novak punched him on the upper arm and yelled in his ear, “This, my friend, this is real sport!”
Vermulen wasn’t too sure about that. Football was his game, and the Steelers his team. But then Novak was a Czech. He had grown up in the years when hockey was a symbol of national pride, one way the Czechs could defeat their Russian oppressors. In 1968, when Red Army tanks had rumbled into Prague to crush the Czech government’s faltering steps toward democracy and free speech, Novak had been a junior officer in the VZS, the Czech military intelligence service. When he became a double agent, passing secret information to the Americans, he did not for one moment see it as an act of betrayal against his country. It was an act of defiance against Communist dictatorship, just like the hockey.
The first period ended and the two teams skated from the rink. Novak relaxed in his seat and his face took on a more contemplative air. He had short gray hair, gold-framed glasses, and a full gray mustache that drooped around the sides of his mouth, giving him a permanently downcast expression.
“You know,” he said, “life is simpler when it is like a hockey game. There are two sides. They both want to defeat the other. Sometimes they fight. But always they accept that there are rules. Everyone knows where they stand. Do you understand what I am saying?”
Vermulen shrugged. “I guess.”
“What I mean is, when you were on one side of the Wall, and I was on the other, both sides knew the rules. They had weapons that could destroy the whole planet. Many people thought it was crazy, but it was not so crazy. After all, none of those warheads went off. But now there are no rules. Now there are not two sides, but many sides. Now the game is falling apart and now I start to get worried.”