No Survivors Page 7

  If that holocaust wasn’t going to happen of its own accord, well, Waylon McCabe was damn well going to make it happen, even if it cost him every last dime he had. And Lieutenant General Kurt Vermulen, whose passionate conviction and desperate need to be believed had left him hopelessly vulnerable to McCabe’s manipulation, was just the man to help him do it.

  19

  Mission Date: September 25, 1995

  Location: Riverview Towers, Charoen Nakorn, Bangkok, Thailand Target: Wu Chiu Wai, alias Tony Wu

  Mission Statement: To eliminate a major drug trafficker, with established ties to U.K. and European heroin trade

  Operative: Samuel Carver (Fee: US $350K)

  Report: The target was known to play a regular weekly mah-jongg game with three of his closest associates, gambling for significant sums of money, with US $1m or more regularly changing hands in a single night. The participants also laid six- and seven-figure bets with one another on the results of soccer matches in Asia and the English Premier League, and horse races in Bangkok, Macao, and Hong Kong. It can reasonably be inferred that both match- and race-fixing took place as a direct result of these wagers.

  The location of the game was a luxury penthouse apartment, on the twenty-fifth floor of a newly built apartment complex overlooking the Chao Phraya River, chosen by Wu for security purposes. It was the sole property on the top floor of the complex. The only internal access to the apartment was provided by a non-stop express elevator, with armed guards at both the ground and top floors. The apartment also possessed its own private water, power, and air-conditioning facilities, separate from those of the complex as a whole.

  Freelance operative Carver determined that these security measures in fact made the apartment more, not less, vulnerable. He made his assault via the roof of the building, at approximately 1:45 A.M. on the morning of September 25. The weather conditions that night were severe, with thunderstorms and torrential downpours. These made the initial stages of the operation far more hazardous, but also provided useful cover.

  Carver made his initial approach via helicopter (see separate accounts sheet for detailed cost breakdown of this and other expenses). It hovered over the Riverview Towers for less than five seconds. Using an SBS-standard two-inch hemp rope affixed to the roof of the helicopter, Carver descended to the roof at high speed, braking with his hands, clad in heavy-duty leather gloves, immediately before impact. Donning protective equipment, he then proceeded to the rooftop vent used to feed the apartment’s air-conditioning system and inserted a canister of fentanyl gas, a fast-acting opium-based sedative.

  Allowing five minutes for the gas to take effect, Carver climbed down to the external terrace running along one side of the penthouse and, having checked that Wu and his associates were sedated, used a glass cutter to break in through the plateglass doors leading from the main living area, where the men had been gambling.

  The only armed men on the premises were Wu, who carried a Glock 22 pistol, and his bodyguard, who was armed with a Steyr MPi69 submachine gun. All the other players had been searched prior to being allowed into the apartment.

  Carver first ensured that all four gamblers were sitting upright around the gaming table. He then proceeded into the apartment’s entrance hall and dragged the bodyguard, who was also unconscious, into the living area.

  Next, Carver extracted Wu’s Glock pistol from his shoulder holster, placed it in Wu’s hand, and fired three shots: two into the wall directly behind the bodyguard’s unconscious body, and one into the bodyguard’s skull, where, being a low-caliber round, it lodged, killing the bodyguard instantly.

  Using the bodyguard’s submachine gun, Carver then fired a series of short bursts around the mah-jongg table, terminating all four men. He also ensured that a number of rounds missed their apparent targets and hit the plateglass doors, thereby destroying any trace of the hole he had made to gain access.

  Having signaled to the helicopter that he was ready to make his exit, Carver then used the gamblers’ cigarettes (all four had been smoking heavily) to start a fire in the apartment. He retraced his steps back onto the terrace and up to the roof. He had been winched back up into the helicopter before the fire alarm sounded in the apartment, triggering automatic sprinklers, which drenched the living area with water, greatly impeding the subsequent work of forensic investigators.

  When police detectives were called to the scene, they concluded that the bodyguard had been hired to carry out Wu’s assassination, but had been killed in the attempt. One zealous forensics officer has attempted to point out various anomalies in the blood-spray patterns and body positions of the victims, but his observations have been ignored. Local police authorities and politicians have been far too busy gloating over the death of a major gangster to worry about the finer details of his demise.

  Conclusion: This was a daring plan, executed with exemplary resolve and thoroughness by an operative who acts calmly and with extreme ruthlessness in high-pressure situations. My judgment is that Samuel Carver can be trusted with our most important and sensitive operations, and I would not hesitate to call upon his services in future.

  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 di
ed 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.”

  Vermulen’s eyes narrowed in concentration. He had spent several years attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. military equivalent to the CIA. Back then he’d been Novak’s handler. A dozen years on, they were both retired, both operating in the private sector. Vermulen was a military lobbyist, a consultant to governments and corporations, an adviser in multinational arms deals. Novak worked out of Prague, a middleman between military, scientific, and intelligence interests in the former Soviet Bloc and the various clients around the world to whom they wanted to sell their respective skills or information.

  “Many sides means many clients, Pavel. I’d say that was good for your business.”

  “Most of the time, yes,” the Czech agreed. “But sometimes . . . You know all those stories that the Russians have lost one hundred nuclear weapons. Suppose I told you that those stories are accurate. . . .”

  “So Lebed was telling the truth?”

  Novak was about to reply when an earsplitting blast of rock music suddenly pounded from the arena’s public-address system. He gave a grimace of discomfort and distaste, shook his head, as if in sorrow at the sullying of his sport, and leaned toward Vermulen.

  “Yes, but he was wrong in one respect.” Novak was practically shouting now, but was still inaudible to anyone more than a few inches away. Even Vermulen had to strain to hear him over the music. “He said that no one knew where the bombs were. That is not completely accurate. The information will soon be available, on the open market. There is a printout. It has locations, codes, everything.”

  That got Vermulen’s attention.

  “Do you have it?”

  Novak frowned and cupped a hand to his ear.

  “Do . . . you . . . have . . . it?” Vermulen repeated.

  The music faded away as suddenly as it had arrived.

  “Not yet,” said Novak, with a sigh of relief. “But I have been approached by someone wishing to sell it, someone who knows of my reputation as, you might say, an honest broker.”

  “But this printout, if it’s accurate, and it fell into the wrong hands . . .”

  “The consequences would be unthinkable. Which is why I am asking myself, Do I want to be involved? Of course, the financial rewards would be very great. But if I were to help terrorists or drug cartels obtain such power, you know, I am not sure I could live with that. Yet how can I just turn my back and let someone else make this sale? The consequences would be just as bad.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “What you always did—take my information to those who need to hear it. You have many friends still at the Pentagon, even in the White House itself. Explain the situation. Maybe we can come to some arrangement, yes? After all, I must cover my costs.”

  “Okay, maybe I can help. But I need more information. These items, on this list, are they all in America?”

  “Not all, no . . . I cannot be certain, but my impression is some are in America, others in Europe, maybe even Asia, too.”

  “Just NATO countries and allies?”

  Novak raised his eyebrows, apparently amazed by Vermulen’s naïveté.

  “Ach, please, my old friend, I do
not need to see the list to know the answer to that question. The Russians despised and feared the rest of the Eastern Bloc even more than their enemies in the West. They knew how much we hated them. I can guarantee you, without any doubt, there will be weapons in Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary . . . all the former Warsaw Pact nations. Yugoslavia, too.”

  Before Vermulen could take the conversation any further, there was another blast of music and a roar from the crowd. The two teams were reappearing for the second period. Novak’s face lit up again. He leaned forward in his seat, all his attention on the ice, ready to follow every shift in the swirling, kaleidoscopic patterns etched by the skaters and the puck.

  Kurt Vermulen, however, sat back, motionless and silent, ignoring the game. An idea had come to him, by no means fully formed, but rich in possibilities. It involved the list that Novak had mentioned and the bombs that it contained. But it had nothing whatever to do with anyone in Washington.

  At the end of the game, the two men said their farewells and went their separate ways. Neither had noticed the man sitting a few seats away with a blue nylon knapsack on his lap. Once Vermulen and Novak had left the arena, the man checked the camera whose peephole lens was peering through the shiny blue fabric. The photographs still needed to be printed. But he had every confidence that they would come out just fine.