Assassin (12 page)

He clapped his hands and said, ‘Buster!’ in a half-whispered voice. Then he broke into a run and dashed across the field, chased by the dog who was delighted to play along with the game.

There were no shots, no response of any kind from the hill.

As he came closer and stepped into its shadow, Carver was no longer dazzled. The light here was low but even, plenty good enough for his purposes. He headed uphill, trying to re-create the route he and Maddy had taken on horseback. Buster followed, nose down, reacquainting himself with the smells of this part of the forest. Carver paid attention, too, inspecting every inch of the forest floor as he walked very slowly between the trees, stopping to look around at the state of the low-lying branches and undergrowth through which he passed.

There was nothing to see: no footprints, no trampled plants, no sign whatever that anyone had been there. More minutes dragged by, and still nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe he’d got himself worked up about nothing.

And then he spotted it: a scattering of oak leaves on the ground. Nothing unusual about that … except that some of the leaves were much darker than the others, more rotten, and therefore older. They should have been lying beneath the top layer of newer, paler leaves. Something had disturbed them.

A few yards further on, Carver found a stone lying slightly to one side of a small depression in the earth from which it had been dislodged. There were no hoof-marks nearby: no horse had done this. Elsewhere, a twig from a sapling had been snapped at shoulder height.

They were only tiny deviations from the norm. Under normal circumstances, no one would notice them. Even to a trained eye, like Carver’s, the first impression had been subconscious. Only now did he realize that he must, at some level, have picked up the spoor of a man when he was riding through the woods, but refused to register the information.

The sound of barking echoed through the trees. Carver followed the noise until he came upon Buster, working away at the ground. This was the same place he’d run to when they’d last been up there. Beside him was a hole, filled with three or four empty plastic packets of military rations. Buster wasn’t paying any attention to them, though. He had found something far more interesting, and Carver realized what it must be. He took five quick strides towards the dog and yanked on his collar, pulling him away from the hole.

Buster snarled at him, furious to have been denied his prize. At the bottom of the hole the top of another plastic bag was poking through the crumbled earth. Carver did not have to take it out to know that it was filled with human faeces. He’d dug enough holes like this in his time.

Someone had been here all right, someone with military training, used to covering their tracks and lying low in enemy territory. He took a look at the ration bags. There were still fresh scraps of food inside. Whoever had eaten them had arrived within the past few days … just like Carver. That suggested he might have been the one under surveillance, not Maddy. The trash told him something else: the watcher wanted Carver to know that he had been there. Otherwise, he could simply have taken it all away with him.

But who would want to set up an observation post just to watch him fool around with a new girlfriend? And how could anyone have known he’d be there? He hadn’t planned to fly to Boise, the whole thing was a last-minute decision.

He racked his brain, trying to remember the airports he’d been through on the way from North Carolina, hoping he could dredge up more anomalous images: people who’d looked out of place, or followed him, or seemed too self-consciously relaxed when he looked in their direction. Nothing came to him.

Carver was walking back downhill now, Buster following reluctantly and disconsolately behind. There was a gnawing, energy-sapping tension in his gut as the realization struck him that if he really were the surveillance subject there was only one possibility left: the watcher in the woods had been directed there by Maddy herself.

Carver thought back to their first meeting, that chance encounter in the Hotel du Cap bar. That could easily have been a set-up. Same with the text message a few weeks ago - had it really been as randomly out of the blue as it seemed? And when Buster had caught the scent of the surveillance, out on that ride, hadn’t she been just a little too quick to say that it was a rabbit, too eager to change the subject?

The man who’d walked up to her Bronco at the hot-dog stand, standing so close to the car, talking so confidingly: he’d skedaddled right out of there the moment he’d seen Carver turning back towards the car. Sure, he could have been a creep. But he could also have been her control. Her being pissed off by what he’d said certainly didn’t contradict that. Carver had argued with the men who’d given him orders often enough.

And take that whole scene at the diner. Maddy goes to the bathroom. A few minutes later two bozos turn up out of nowhere and start an entirely unprovoked fight. Meanwhile, the same grey car is waiting out in the parking lot. What’s all that about?

Now that Carver thought about it, he knew nothing about this woman, beyond what she had told him. He had never met the mysterious Mr Cross. In the time they’d been on the ranch, she’d never introduced him to her family, who supposedly lived so close by. And the ease with which she’d fallen for him … Carver was not given to insecurity or false modesty, but he didn’t think he was any kind of Casanova, either. Beautiful women did not line up to throw themselves at him. Yet this one had.

Or maybe he was just being paranoid.

He walked back to the house, telling himself not to let his suspicions wreck everything. He was having a good time. Just enjoy it.

Maddy was in the kitchen, fixing herself some breakfast. ‘I was wondering where you guys had got to,’ she said as Buster bounded towards her.

‘We just went for an early-morning walk in the woods,’ Carver said. ‘Looked around a bit. Did some male bonding.’

He was watching her eyes. Looking for any tell-tale flicker of alarm when he mentioned looking in the woods. There was none, just the smile of a woman who’s pleased to see her man.

‘That’s great,’ Maddy said. ‘You want eggs?’

Arjan Visar looked at the men sitting around him at the table. Every one of them could be counted as his competitor. Each would happily have killed any of the others if there was a profit to be had from that death. Now, though, they had been forced together by a greater, common enemy.

Visar was used to making deals with his supposed enemies. He was an Albanian Muslim. Yet he dealt with gangs run by Catholic Croatians, Orthodox Christian Serbs, and his fellow-Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. All of those groups hated one another, but all recognized that the continued passage of drugs, women and even weapons was more important than any political or religious dispute. So when he heard about the threat posed by President Roberts’s anti-trafficking initiative, Visar understood immediately that any disagreements the men in his business might have were far outweighed by the long-term threats to all their livelihoods if Roberts should happen to succeed.

The venue he chose for his summit meeting was, ironically, the presidential suite of a seven-star hotel in Dubai, just a few miles from the squalid basement bar where Lara Dashian had been bought and sold and Tiger Dey had swallowed one cocktail cherry too many. The city was geographically convenient for the men Visar had in mind and was, in any case, an informal neutral zone for international crime. Asian, former-Communist and European entrepreneurs whose fortunes came from less-than-savoury activities poured huge amounts of cash into the city and largely desisted from the routine violence which was so central to their business models elsewhere.

Visar’s guests around the $25,000-a-night suite’s gold-leaf dining table comprised two Russians, a Chinese and an Indian. One of the Russians owned a Premiership football club, another a Formula 1 motor-racing team. The Indian had a cricket eleven in his nation’s multi-billion-dollar Premier League. The Chinese possessed a string of racehorses that dominated tracks from Royal Ascot to Hong Kong. All had yachts, jets, old masters and young mistresses of the greatest possible beauty and expense, replaced at regular intervals.

For now, the mistresses could wait. There was business to be done.

The meeting was being conducted in English, since that was the only common language for all five men.

‘We all understand the proper way to do business,’ Visar began. ‘We talk to one another and because we are men of honour, we give our word and we make a deal. But sometimes, there is no deal. There is no talk. Sometimes you must strike fast, like a snake that bites a man before the man can tread on its head. That is why we are here. We must strike, like the snake.’

‘And this snake, whom does it bite?’ The voice, a deep, guttural rumble, belonged to Naum Titov, leader of Russia’s Podolskaya crime gang.

‘The American President, Lincoln Roberts,’ replied Visar, the calm matter-of-factness of his voice impressing the other men more forcefully than any melodramatic flourish would have done.

‘What are you, fucking crazy, man?’ Titov exclaimed. ‘Kill President? Forget it. Impossible.’

‘Might one ask why you think this is necessary?’ inquired Kumar Karn, head of the most powerful Mumbai syndicate, in the old-fashioned, oratorical manner of an expensively educated Indian.

‘Because Roberts is the man who will tread on our heads,’ said Visar. ‘If we do not kill him, he will kill us, or at least kill our business. Roberts is about to make a major policy announcement. Trust me, I know this. He will commit the Army of the United States - also the Navy, Air Force, intelligence agencies, everything - to fight, in these words exactly, “the unspeakable evil of the global slave trade”. He is, we can say, declaring war on people-trafficking. I need not tell you what effect this might have on our commercial activities. That is why the President must die. There is no alternative.’

‘American presidents declare many wars,’ remarked Wu Xiao-Long, the 489 or supreme leader of the global Wo Shing Wo triad organization. ‘The wars on drugs and terror failed. Why will this be different?’

‘Perhaps because it will not be opposed, night and day, from within America itself,’ Karn suggested.

He got up from his chair and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling window from which all the lights of Dubai could be seen, glittering in a dazzling profusion that defied all talk of economic collapse. Karn did not stop to admire the view. Instead he turned back to look at the men at the table.

‘Any American president knows that many of his own country’s intellectuals, its celebrities and its young people harbour a profound suspicion of any overseas conflict. They feel obliged to oppose it as a matter of principle. The media, also, exaggerate defeats, but ignore victories. They accuse their own soldiers of atrocities while turning a blind eye to those committed against them. Therefore, wherever and whenever America wages war, its campaigns will constantly be undermined by negativity and hostility from within.

‘But I think that Mr Roberts has been very cunning in his choice of enemy. For who, in America of all nations, can possibly stand up for slavery? This war will appeal to their bottomless feelings of guilt. The same principle will surely apply to Western Europe as well. The very people who are usually most vociferous in their opposition to Uncle Sam will be those applauding his new venture. It is, I think, a most astute and clever war to declare.’

‘Not clever for us,’ growled Titov, thinking of the string of brothels he owned in more than twenty major American cities.

‘My point exactly,’ said Visar, who was Titov’s partner in that operation, and the supplier of more than half the women involved.

‘Then this is serious for sure,’ agreed Wu, refilling his glass. ‘My snakeheads will not be happy. Already they get shit from the US Coast Guards, losing many people, hurting their profits. Now it can only be worse. So, Mr Visar, I agree that we must act. But how? At what time, what place?’

‘Less than two weeks from now,’ said Visar, ‘the President is planning to give a speech at a conference on slavery in Bristol, England. This speech has not yet been announced to the public. But the US Secret Service is already in Bristol, preparing for the visit.’

‘Then they are surely more prepared than are we,’ remarked Karn. ‘That must be to our disadvantage.’

‘Perhaps so,’ Visar conceded. ‘But the President is not making it easy for his staff. He will not make his announcement indoors at the conference itself, before an audience of a few hundred delegates. Instead, he will speak to a crowd of thousands in the open air. Lincoln Roberts wants to make his war on slavery a movement of the masses, so that his opponents must battle against a great weight of public opinion.’

‘Surely, then, public outrage will be all the greater if any harm should befall him,’ said Karn. ‘Roberts is popular, indeed he is loved. To be associated with his demise could be counter-productive in the extreme.’

‘We will not be associated,’ said Visar. ‘Any US president has enemies aplenty. Let the Americans argue about which of them did this. Maybe someone will choose to claim responsibility. There is a man who hides in the hills of Waziristan. He would be happy to make the world think he could kill an American president. Or maybe we will find some other man, and place the blame on him.’

Naum Titov grunted in approval. ‘Then let us have our killing.’