“You okay?” he asked.
“Get us inside,” Carver replied. “I don’t like being stuck out on the street-too exposed.”
His voice was tense, strung out.
“You all right, man?” asked Larsson. “You don’t sound so good.”
“I’m fine.”
“Whatever you say.”
Carver hurried into the apartment building and started making his way up the stairs to his top-floor flat. Larsson let him get ahead a few paces, watching him skeptically, then followed on up the old wooden staircase that wound up through five stories, creaking under his feet with every step. When he got to Carver’s flat, the door was already open. Carver was standing in the living room, looking around, aghast at what he saw-or, rather, didn’t see.
“Where is everything?” he asked.
The room had been stripped bare of furniture.
“We sold it,” said Larsson. “We had to.”
Carver calmed down for a moment as he accepted the truth of what Larsson had said. Then a look close to horror crossed his face, and he dashed off into the kitchen.
“Christ, you didn’t…”
Larsson hurried after him. “Didn’t what?”
“It’s okay…”
Carver was standing by the kitchen island. The wine racks were empty. The low-level built-in fridge had been taken from its housing. All that was left was the carcass. But he didn’t seem too bothered by that.
“I suddenly thought you might have sold the kitchen units,” he said.
Larsson grinned for the first time that night.
“Who’d buy that shit?”
Now it was Carver’s turn to smile, if only for a moment. He leaned down and reached inside the wine rack, in the middle of the second row, three spaces along. He grimaced for a second as his fingers groped blindly, and then his smile reappeared as they found their target.
“Watch,” he said.
There was a barely audible humming sound. Larsson looked in amazement as the center of the granite work surface rose from the island. Its smooth ascent revealed a metal frame, within which was fitted a large plastic toolbox, arranged in half a dozen clear plastic-fronted trays of varying depths.
“Unbelievable!” Larsson gasped.
“Looks like my kit is still in one piece then,” said Carver. He was calming down, reassured by familiar surroundings and the presence of the toolbox.
“Okay, the top two trays should be filled with regular gear…”
He opened it up to reveal a thick pad of charcoal-gray foam, within which a series of custom-cut openings housed a selection of immaculately shiny wrenches, screwdrivers, saws, and hammers. The second tray was devoted to miniature power tools and soldering irons.
“It’s all there,” he said. “Next two trays, I think, are gadgets, electronics, that kind of stuff.”
Larsson sighed contentedly as a selection of timers, detonators, brake and accelerator overrides, and radio remote controls were presented to view.
“Oh, yeah, I recognize some of these babies. Nice to know you gave them such a good home.”
“Okay, next down there should be…”
Larsson was confronted with blocks of plastique and thermite.
“And finally…”
Carver slid open the last, deepest tray. It contained a Heckler & Koch MP5K short-barreled submachine gun, with a suppressor and three magazines, plus a SIG Sauer P226 with the same essential accessories. Larsson gave a knowing nod. Both weapons were standard equipment for British Special Forces.
“There’s something else,” said Carver.
He pulled the toolbox out of its housing and placed it on the floor in front of him. Then he got down on his haunches. The lid of the toolbox was a couple of inches deep. He lifted it to reveal another compartment, inside the lid itself, accessed via a hinged plastic hatch. He opened that to reveal a fat, padded brown envelope, roughly twelve by eighteen inches.
“Little did you know…” he said.
Carver took out the envelope and shut the hatch again. Then he removed the SIG, the suppressor, and two magazines from the bottom tray. He closed up the toolbox, keeping it on the floor as he pressed the button inside the wine rack again. The empty housing disappeared back down into the island. Carver put the envelope and the gun back on top of the work surface.
“That got money in it?” asked Larsson, nodding at the envelope. Suddenly he didn’t feel quite so cheery.
“Yeah.”
“Enough to pay the bills?”
“Easily.”
“And you remembered about it when, exactly?”
There was a bitter, sarcastic edge to the words.
“A few weeks ago, pretty soon after I started coming around.”
“So you didn’t need her money at all, then?”
“Sure I did. As long as it was coming through, I knew she was still alive.”
Larsson was forced to accept the logic of Carver’s argument. But he had a legitimate grievance of his own.
“You owe me, too. More than twenty thousand bucks.”
Carver nodded silently. He reached in the envelope and took out an ornately engraved document. It was a fifty-thousand-dollar bearer bond, registered to a Panamanian corporation and signed by him on the reverse. Effectively, it was as good as cash. He gave it to Larsson.
“Thanks, but that’s way too much,” the Norwegian said.
“It won’t be,” said Carver dryly. “Not in the long run. Look, I’ll pay Alix back, too… but first I’ve got to find her. We should start at the last places she’d have been seen. I know she was working at some late-night place. Do you know where it was?”
“The bierkeller? Of course-I used to give her a lift to work sometimes.”
“Fine-you can give me a lift, too. I just need a couple of minutes to get fixed up.”
Carver picked up the envelope, the gun, and the magazines and left the kitchen. Walking through the living room, he saw the picture of Lulworth Cove on the wall, the only one of his most valuable possessions that hadn’t yet been sold. He remembered talking to Alix about it. She’d been wearing his old T-shirt, curled up in the chair, her body fresh from the shower. He could happily have stood there, eyes closed, just wallowing in the thought of her, but not tonight. He had to keep moving.
In his bedroom, he opened up his closet. His gear was still hanging there, pushed over to one side to make way for Alix’s pathetically small collection of clothes. He picked out a jacket from her end of the clothing rod and held it up to his face, catching a faint trace of her scent, savoring it like a dog about to be let loose on a trail. Then, quite unexpectedly, something clicked inside his brain-an automatic, unbidden reflex that switched off the emotional, indulgent, inefficient side of his consciousness and left him suddenly cold and clearheaded.
The panic and uncertainty had gone. There was no heavy, sickening ache of fear in the pit of his stomach, just a strong sense of urgency and purpose.
He reached up to a shelf above the rod and pulled down a leather traveling bag. Then he strained his arm farther into the shelf and extracted a shoulder holster and a broad money belt. It took him barely thirty seconds to pack the bag with two plain white T-shirts and two pairs of socks and underpants, followed by one pair of jeans and a lightweight fleece, both black. Another minute was spent getting dressed in a set of clothes identical to the ones he had packed, except with a charcoal-gray, V-necked pullover instead of a fleece. He chose a pair of plain black lace-up shoes, with thick cushioned soles.
The money belt went around his waist. From the envelope he took a block of one-hundred-dollar bills and another two bearer bonds, identical to the one he had given Larsson. He also extracted two passports, one Australian, the other Swiss. They were both in different names but bore his photograph. He peeled a few of the bills off the top of the block and stuffed them in a trouser pocket, along with the Swiss cash he’d taken from the hitman at the clinic. Everything else went into the belt. Then he closed the envelope, which was still more than half full, and placed it in his bag.