Assassin (13 page)

Damon Tyzack was met at Heathrow by a uniformed chauffeur and told that Arjan Visar wanted to meet him. Immediately.

He was driven straight to Farnborough airport, less than twenty miles away, where a private jet was waiting to take him to Malaga on the Spanish Costa del Sol. From there a helicopter ferried him on a fifteen-minute journey to the private landing pad tucked away behind Visar’s villa.

Tyzack was not a man given to being impressed, but even he was astounded by the opulence in which Visar lived. The main house was built around a colonnaded courtyard with an ornate stone fountain at its centre. Marble mosaics, crafted in a gaudy profusion of patterns and colours, covered the floor of every room. Massive sofas were strewn with shiny satin cushions decorated with swirls and curlicues of golden thread. The vulgarity of it all was overpowering. This was a retreat fit for a Roman emperor, and a Nero or a Caligula at that.

Arjan Visar, when he appeared, was oddly out of keeping with his home. Small and scrawny with the pallid skin of a sickly child, he was dressed in plain black shirt and trousers. Strands of hair were plastered unconvincingly over his balding scalp. Tyzack could have broken him like a twig. But then, any of the thugs who took Visar’s orders could have done the same. And yet they did not. They accepted Visar’s control over an operation that he had grown from its beginnings amongst the petty brigands of rural Albania to its current position of dominance over a trade that stretched from the furthest backwaters of China, Africa and the former Communist states to the greatest cities in Europe and North America.

Visar caught Tyzack gazing at his surroundings and smiled apologetically. ‘This was my brother’s property. It is not to my taste. But my wife likes it very much, so …’ He shrugged as helplessly as any other henpecked husband.

Tyzack knew that Visar would have his wife killed without a second thought, if he ever thought it necessary or deserved. Rumour had it that he had been behind the death of his own brother, which had led to his taking total control of the clan. That, too, was worthy of an emperor.

A servant appeared at Visar’s side. ‘You have had a long journey,’ said Visar. ‘Would you like a drink, some food maybe? Whatever you want, the kitchens can supply.’

‘Just a glass of water, please,’ said Tyzack, determined to keep a clear head. He had carried out jobs for the Visars many times. But his orders had come from Visar’s henchmen, communicating by phone and email. This was his first personal contact with Visar himself. That meant he was either in for very good news, or very, very bad. Tyzack told himself that Visar would hardly have carted him all this way just for a bollocking, or even a bullet in the back of the head. There had to be more to it than that.

‘I congratulate you on your recent work, Mr Tyzack,’ said Visar. ‘Now I have more for you.’

Visar clicked his fingers and another servant stepped silently out of the shadows. He carried a laptop, which he placed on a table in front of Visar and then opened.

‘Thank you,’ the Albanian said as his servant disappeared again. He looked up from the screen and caught Tyzack’s eye. ‘Let me explain …’

* * *

Tyzack had switched from water to an ice-cold San Miguel beer. He had wolfed down a freshly made club sandwich. And all the time he had been going over the information Visar had given him. Tyzack had never been regarded as academically gifted but, contrary to some of his teachers’ scathing reports, he lacked neither intelligence nor application. He simply needed to be interested before he made an effort. The mechanics of killing interested him very much indeed. It was his special subject.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think I can do it. Won’t be easy, of course. He’s the President of the United States. He has a lot of very clever, well-trained people working very hard to stop him getting hurt. So let’s cut out the things we can’t do. No point trying to attack Air Force One. There’s no aircraft on the planet with better, newer countermeasures against any missile known to man.

‘The landing’s a no-no, too. He’s coming into RAF Fairford. That’s actually a US Air Force base and they keep B2 stealth bombers there, so it’s already sealed up tighter than a gnat’s arse - if you’ll excuse the expression. No way anyone’s breaking in unless they’re on a suicide mission. And I’m not.’

‘You did not strike me as that type,’ said Visar.

‘From Fairford, he’ll take Marine One to Bristol, call it twenty minutes’ flight time, give or take,’ Tyzack continued. ‘The exact route won’t be determined till the day, which makes it virtually impossible to guarantee a hand-held missile strike. He’s landing at College Green, opposite Bristol Cathedral, and you can bet they’ll have Cadillac One pulled up right under the chopper’s disc. He’ll be out one door and in the next in three seconds, and if there’s an angle for a shot from anywhere at any point, then some Secret Service agent’s made a cock-up. Forget that.

‘The President’s car itself is totally impregnable. They may call it Cadillac One but the only thing about it that’s a Caddy is the badge. That thing is a tank. Even the windows are transparent armour. You can’t shoot it, gas it, blow the tyres, nothing. And there’ll be twenty-odd motors back and front of it, stuffed with armed men. It’s only a few hundred yards from the landing site to the stage at Broad Quay so the motorcade’ll be almost as long as the journey.’

‘I get the point, Mr Tyzack. You do not think the President can be attacked on the road.’

‘Exactly. The only point he’s going to be vulnerable is when he’s actually onstage. So … may I?’

He gestured at the laptop. Visar nodded and swivelled it round so that the screen was facing Tyzack, who spent a few seconds typing instructions before turning the computer again so that both men had a view of the screen.

‘Google Earth,’ he said, ‘best innovation in the history of crime. Gives any man his own private spy satellite. For example, let’s find the precise grid references of the point on which Roberts’s stage will be constructed. Here we go: fifty-one degrees, twenty-seven minutes and eight-point-five-seven seconds North, and two degrees, thirty-five minutes, fifty-one-point-four-seven seconds West.’

‘I can read a reference, Mr Tyzack, is that really necessary?’

Tyzack grinned broadly. ‘Oh yes, Mr Visar, it is absolutely necessary. That reference is what will kill the President. And I know just how I’ll do it.’

‘Ten million dollars,’ said Visar when Tyzack had finished his explanation. ‘That is a very generous figure and it is not open to negotiation. I will pay you half in cash. The other half I will give you in kind: women, territories, rights to certain operations. Over time, these properties will prove far more valuable than a straight payment. Before we conclude our agreement, however, I need to be sure that the technical side of the plan is feasible. Can you be certain of that?’

‘Don’t see why not,’ Tyzack replied. ‘I’ve got a chap who can work out the basic design. But he may not be able to do the actual construction, so I’ll need help with that. And someone will have to get hold of the basic components, either buy them or steal them. I have some business of my own to conduct over the next few days. But so long as your men keep to the schedule and do what I ask, we’ll be fine.’

Visar nodded. ‘Good. But understand this, Mr Tyzack. You cannot afford to be distracted by this business you have to do. You must be in Bristol, and you must do your job. I cannot tolerate failure.’

‘But you’ll give me the help I need?’

‘Of course, anything.’

‘Then we’re on.’

At Malaga airport, walking between the chopper and the private jet, Tyzack made a phone call. He gave a set of specific instructions, then listened impatiently, his face clouding over with anger, to what the other speaker had to say.

‘Are you quite finished?’ he said at last. ‘Right, then, let me make myself clear. I don’t give a damn if you’re busy, or you have other things to think about. This is what you’re thinking about now. I need that design, so remember those pictures I sent you? Think about them. Think about the people you love. Now go away and do what you’re told.’

Tyzack was still fuming as he ran up the steps, barged past the pretty, smiling flight attendant standing at the aeroplane door and slumped down sullenly in the nearest seat.

The attendant turned to look at the co-pilot, who had been watching through the open cockpit door. She raised her eyebrows, widened her eyes in mock-horror, gave an exaggerated sigh and mouthed the words, ‘What’s got into him?’

At his villa, Visar put in a call to the Albanian embassy in Washington. ‘Get a message to Kula,’ he said. ‘I need him to create an application for an iPhone, a guidance system. The precise specifications will be sent to him soon. Tell him this is a job that will gain him great favour.’

‘Consider it done,’ said the diplomat on the other end of the line.

On their first afternoon in Paris, they got Carver a suit for the wedding. The next morning Maddy went clothes shopping by herself. She said she wanted to give him the morning off. He tried to believe her. A voice in Carver’s head told him Maddy wanted to get rid of him so she could meet a contact or speak to her handler, but he was determined not to let his paranoia wreck their trip. If he made himself live in the moment and not think about anything else, several hours at a time could go by without him wondering whether the woman next to him was lying with everything she said and did.

Carver hadn’t brought a laptop with him, but there was a computer downstairs in the hotel lounge. He decided to log on to a few news sites and drink a cup of coffee while he worked out how to spend the morning.

The front page of
The Times
carried the usual mix of economic misery and political bluster. The only news that caught Carver’s eye was the announcement that Lincoln Roberts was planning a flying visit to Bristol to speak at an anti-slavery conference. At the bottom of the story there was a link to a related feature. Its headline read: ‘Pablo the sex-slave Pimpernel, and …’

Carver grinned: Pablo. It had been a while since he’d heard that name.

He clicked on the link and a page opened up with the full headline. The final words were, ‘and a mysterious death in Dubai’.

Well, he could see why people were making that the number-one story. Sex, crime, death, an exotic location and a bloke with a funny name - what more could anyone want?

Carver started reading Jake Tolland’s story. It described Lara’s enslavement, her rape and her trafficking to Dubai. Then it followed her to a dingy nightclub, where she met an Englishman who was looking to buy a girl of his own. Through Lara’s eyes, Tolland described the man. He was slim, not conventionally handsome, but attractive. He had dark hair and green eyes - strange green eyes, said Lara, though she could not describe what precisely was wrong or unusual about them.

By now, Carver was no longer reading for entertainment. As his eyes raced over the following paragraphs, the ache in the guts that he had felt when he first suspected Maddy - and that had hung around him, on and off, ever since - now gripped him more tightly than ever. His throat felt constricted. He felt a stab of pain in his jaw and only then noticed that he had been grinding his teeth so hard that his mouth was virtually clamped shut.

Tolland told how Pablo had freed Lara Dashian, given her money, told her to go to the women’s shelter, and then disappeared entirely off the face of the earth. But Lara’s pimp had been found shot to death in the hotel parking lot, and Tiger Dey - one of the masterminds of the people-trafficking trade in the whole Gulf region - had been taken to hospital hours later with a fatal attack of what appeared to be ricin poisoning.

‘Do you know how it was administered?’ Tolland had asked a senior Dubaian police officer.

‘Not for certain, no,’ the detective had admitted. ‘But we believe that the killer may have hidden a small pellet of poison in a cocktail cherry. Mr Dey was very fond of them and ate several while he was in the club that night. We also have witnesses, including Miss Dashian, who testify that the man called Pablo gave Mr Dey a cherry. That may have been the way it was done.’

‘But you cannot be certain?’

‘No.’

‘So you cannot build a definitive case against Pablo?’

‘Not at this point,’ said the policeman. And then Tolland described the cop as he stubbed out a cigarette, looked up at the reporter and said, ‘But I will tell you one thing, Mr Tolland. I believe that this man is a cold-blooded killer, almost certainly a professional assassin. It is my opinion, and that of my superiors, that he represents a significant danger to the security of Dubai and its citizens. And it is my job to protect the people of Dubai. By whatever means necessary.’

Carver closed the laptop and leaned back in his chair, staring blankly at the ceiling. He thought about the name Pablo, and the people who knew its significance for him. He took another look at all the phrases used to describe a man whose identifying features were so similar to his own. He checked the date the story gave for that night at the Karama Pearl Hotel. It was a few days before he did the job at Lusterleaf, the job that he could not mention to anyone, and would be denied by anyone and everyone close to the President. Not that it would make any difference what Bahr or even Lincoln Roberts himself might say. When the mysterious Pablo had been in Dubai, Carver had been deep undercover, living off the grid, leaving no trace of his presence anywhere … and thus creating no alibi.