The Accident Man (21 page)

Fifteen minutes in, he struck lucky. One of the taxi drivers, a Turk, remembered the girl. “How could I forget that one?” he said with a knowing wink, from one red-blooded man to another. “I watched her all the way from the station, thinking this was my lucky day. I was next in line. The man with her looked like he could afford a taxi, and if I had a woman like that I wouldn’t want to share her with the trash who take the bus. But no, he walked right past me, the son of a whore, and stood in line like a peasant.”

“Did you see which bus they took?”

“Yeah, the Number Five. It goes over the Pont de l’Ile, past the Old Town to the hospital and back. So, what have they done, these two, huh?”

Papin smiled. “They’re killers. Count yourself lucky they didn’t get in your cab.”

He left the cabbie muttering thanks to Allah and then, still posing as Michel Picard from the federal interior ministry, called the control room at Transports Publics Genevois, the organization that ran the city’s bus system. Naturally, they were only too happy to supply the names and contact numbers of those drivers who’d worked the Number 5 route leaving the station around eleven o’clock the previous day. There were three of them, and once his memory had been jogged by Papin’s photos, one recalled the couple who’d got on at the station. He also remembered looking in his mirror as the girl got off at a stop on Rue de la Croix-Rouge, crossed the road behind the bus, and started walking up the hill toward the Old Town.

“Some guys have all the luck, right?” he said with a rueful chuckle.

“Don’t worry,” Papin assured him. “That one’s luck is about to change.”

Twenty minutes later, he was walking the streets of the Old Town. It seemed an unlikely place for an assassin to hide out. In Papin’s experience, most killers were little more than crude gangsters, spending their money on tasteless vulgarity and excess. But the beauty of the Old Town was restrained, even austere. The tall buildings seemed to look down like disapproving elders on the people walking the streets. There were few hotels in the area, and it took little time to establish that neither Carver nor Petrova had checked in anywhere within the past twenty-four hours, under those names or any other aliases.

Petrova came from Moscow, so this must be where Carver lived. And that meant there would be people in the neighborhood who knew him and his exact address. Papin got out his photographs and started canvassing again.

“Well now, there’s a surprise.” Carver leaned back, tilting his office chair and putting his hands behind his head. Then he looked back at the computer screen, which showed the recent transfers in and out of his Banque Wertmuller-Maier account, and sighed. “Of course those buggers weren’t going to pay. They assumed I’d be dead.” Even so, he had received faxed notification of a $1.5 million deposit from his account manager. He had a loose end. If he could find a way to give it a good pull, the whole conspiracy might just unravel.

He thought for a moment, then got up and wandered into the kitchen, where Alix was making herself a late breakfast. The TV was on, still showing news about the crash. He wondered whether anyone in the world was watching anything else.

“Any developments we need to know about?” he asked.

Alix pressed the remote control, lowering the volume, then turned to look at him. “People are blaming the paparazzi for chasing the car. There are rumors it was going at almost two hundred kilometers an hour when it crashed.”

“Well, that’s bullshit, for a start. It was one twenty, max.”

“Also, they say that blood tests prove the driver was drunk, more than three times over the limit. And there’s a survivor, the princess’s bodyguard.”

Carver frowned. “The guy didn’t drive like a drunk. And there’s a bodyguard? Well, no way would any self-respecting bodyguard let a driver get in a car if he was three times over. The guy would have been completely legless, reeling all over the place, stinking of booze. Christ, you wouldn’t let anyone get behind the wheel if he was that far gone.” He slammed his hand against the kitchen counter. “This is bloody amateur hour. They did a rush job and they’ve bungled the cover-up. Now every investigative journalist in the world is going to be crawling all over the place, trying to prove it was murder.”

“Well, it
was
murder.” Alix’s voice was quiet, but it cut straight through Carver’s bluster. “We did it. Every time I hear about photographers hounding her to her death, all I can think is, no, that was me. I was flashing the camera, forcing them to go faster.”

“Maybe, but if you hadn’t been, someone else would. The real photographers weren’t far behind you. And as soon as they got to the crash, did they try to help? No, they started taking photographs.”

A coldness had descended on Carver, the passion of his lovemaking replaced by impersonal calculation. Alix’s voice rose in intensity as she tried to break through his armor.

“How can you just stand there and talk about this as if we weren’t involved? Don’t you think at all about what you’ve done?”

“Not if I can help it, no.”

For a moment they fell silent; the only noises in the room were the bubbling of the coffeemaker and the muted jabber of an ad from the TV set. Then Carver’s body relaxed slightly. He held out a hand and laid it on Alix’s shoulder.

“Look, I know how callous, how cynical that sounds. I’m not a total bastard. But one thing I’ve learned over the years is not to waste time over people who are already dead. It’s the only way to stop yourself from going crazy. Am I sorry she died? Of course I am. Do I feel bad that it was me at the end of that tunnel? Just a bit. But where does feeling guilty about that get me, or anyone else? Screw feeling guilty. We were tricked into doing something terrible, and I aim to find the people who did that.”

Carver told Alix what he had in mind. It meant her going undercover, playing a role.

“You’ve got a lot of experience using fake identities, right? You can fool a man into thinking you’re someone you’re not?”

“Isn’t that what you’ve been worrying about, that I’m deceiving you?”

“It has crossed my mind, yeah. But forget that for now. I’ve got another part that might interest you.”

He dialed a local number. When he spoke it was with the guttural bark of an Afrikaner accent. “Could I speak to Mr. Leclerc, please? Thank you…. Howzit, Mr. Leclerc? The name’s Dirk Vandervart. I’m what you might call a private security consultant, and you’ve been recommended to me by contacts at the very highest levels. I have a little over two hundred million U.S. dollars, looking for a home. I’m hoping you can help me find one…. Excellent. Well now, I’ll be in meetings with clients all day. Why don’t we meet at my hotel, the Beau-Rivage, at six this evening, ja? We will have a drink and discuss my banking requirements. I will give you all the references you need at that time. In the meantime, my personal holding company is called Topograficas, SA, registered in Panama. You’re welcome to look it up, though I must say you won’t find a great deal if you do…. Ja, absolutely, that is indeed the blessing of Panama! So, are we set, then? Six o’clock, the Beau-Rivage, ask for Vandervart. Thank you. And good day to you too.”

Carver put the phone down with a flourish.

“You sound as though you have done some acting too,” said Alix.

“More than I’d like,” he agreed. “This business is basically one long game of charades.”

“And that company with the crazy name. Does it really exist?”

“Mind your own business,” said Carver. He was smiling as he said it, but internally he was making a note to himself. Close down that shelter as soon as this is all over. And hide all the money behind another Panamanian front.

In the end, it was just a matter of blind luck. Papin was walking down Grand Rue, the street of art galleries and antique shops at the center of the Old Town, when he saw a flash of pale blue out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head in an automatic reflex and there they were, Carver and Petrova, strolling along the street hand in hand like any other couple, he in jeans and a stone-colored cotton jacket, she still wearing the same dress in which she’d left Paris the previous day. Papin pumped a fist in triumph. His gamble had paid off!

His first instinct was to duck into a doorway for cover. Then he reminded himself that they had no idea of his identity. He looked into a gallery window, closely examining some Goya prints, while his targets walked by on the far side of the street. He let them get fifty meters down the road, then casually ambled after them.

Papin had to smile. The woman wanted to go shopping —
mais naturellement
. She’d arrived from Paris without any luggage, she didn’t have a thing to wear, what else could she do? Still, he had to admire her style. She ignored three-quarters of all the shops she passed. Then something caught her eye and she went in, found what she wanted, bought it — courtesy of Carver’s credit cards, Papin noticed — and moved on. She was doing a thorough job too, starting with lingerie and working outward from there. Papin raised an appreciative eyebrow as he watched her pick out a selection of little lacy numbers. Even from across the street and through a shop window, he could tell that Carver was in for an entertaining evening.

In the meantime, the Englishman’s lust appeared to have addled his brain. To be walking around the streets in broad daylight with a fellow suspect was madness. Either Carver was playing a game so subtle that Papin could not fathom it, or he had concluded that he had no hope of survival and might as well enjoy what little time was left to him.

And then, without warning, Papin lost them. They ducked into a crowded department store down by the river with exits onto four different streets. Papin cursed under his breath. Perhaps Carver was not quite as careless as he had assumed.

He tried to follow them through the busy store, then abandoned that attempt and settled for a patrol on foot around the block, hoping to catch them leaving the building or walking down one of the adjacent streets. He knew this was futile. One man had almost no chance of maintaining surveillance under those circumstances.

No matter. He might have lost them for now, but he knew where Carver lived to within a matter of three or four blocks. All he had to do was return to the Old Town and start showing his trusty ID card to all the local barkeepers, café owners, and apartment-house concierges. Some would refuse to cooperate with anyone in authority as a matter of principle. Others, though, would be equally keen to display their credentials as loyal, law-abiding citizens, eager to do their part in maintaining law and order. As any secret policeman knew, it was never hard to find people willing to inform on their neighbors. Papin was sure he would locate Carver’s apartment soon enough. But first it was time to open negotiations.

There was a bar across the road that had a Swisscom public telephone on the wall. “
Merde
!” It only took phone cards, not cash. The barman saw his frustration and gestured across the road at a newspaper kiosk. Papin muttered a curse, then wasted a couple of minutes walking over to the kiosk, paying for a fifty-franc card, and returning to the bar. By the time he was standing in front of the phone again his previous good humor had been replaced by gut-tightening tension. He made a conscious effort to summon up an air of confidence, then called the man he knew as Charlie.

“Good news,
mon ami
. I have found your lost property.”

“Really?” replied the operations director. “That’s great news. Where?”

Papin chuckled. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to tell you that right now. But such information is valuable and I have had to work very hard, at great personal expense, to obtain it. I will require compensation.”

“How much?”

“Five hundred thousand, U.S., payable in bearer bonds, endorsed to me, and given to me in person. I will take you to the property. And just you, Charlie. Don’t try any ambush.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, old chap.”

“So, do we have a deal?”

“I don’t know. Half a mill sounds like a lot of money.”

“In your situation? I don’t think so, Charlie. You have two hours. I will call you again at one thirty p.m. Central European Time. If I don’t get your guarantee of payment then, I’m going elsewhere. Good-bye.”

Papin ended the call, then thought for a moment. He needed some insurance, but why wait for another two hours? He dialed a London number. He could think of more than one organization that would be happy to have his information.

The man in the white coat took off his glasses and rubbed a hand across his bearded face. He looked at Carver through squinted eyes, trying to focus.

“Okay, so we need to induce a sense of relaxation and empathy, yes?”

“Correct.”

“Then we want sexual arousal.”

“That’s right.”

“And finally, we must lower mental defenses, maybe create a sense of disorientation?”

“Exactly, Dieter. That’s the plan.”

Carver and Alix had concluded the first part of their shopping expedition. She had bought the clothes she needed, and a selection of wigs. He had spent ten minutes getting the Swiss version of a number-two cut at a backstreet barbershop, which left his scalp bristling with the military buzz cut a man like Dirk Vandervart might favor. Then he bought a designer suit whose shiny silken fabric went perfectly with an oversize gold watch to create the defiantly tasteless look of a man with a lot of dirty money to wash. The purchases had been packed in a couple of Gucci overnight bags. Where Carver planned to go, they would need expensive luggage.

Together, he and Alix had taken their costumes to an attic studio above a chocolate shop. It had taken a lot of persuasion and even more money to get the studio’s obsessively painstaking Swiss proprietor to compromise his perfectionism and fix them two South African passports on a rush job. They’d changed into their new clothes, posed for photographs, packed their original garments, and Carver had placed two phone calls: one to the reservations department of one of Geneva’s finest hotels, the other to Thor Larsson. Now he had one last errand to run, but he needed professional advice, and Dr. Dieter Schiller was the man to provide it.