Assassin (20 page)

Ravnsborg read the email and looked at the photograph, scratching his head through a mat of tousled, dirty-blond hair as he did so. Though his body - a little soft around the edges now, but still possessing vast reserves of strength, like a weightlifter retired from competition - was virtually motionless, his mind was darting from one subject to another with a gymnast’s agility.

The bomb had come as a total, devastating surprise. There had been no threat from a terrorist group, nor any warning from the nation’s intelligence service, or its anti-terrorism unit. The city’s police, fire and medical services were stretched to their utmost just coping with the immediate aftermath of the blast in the vicinity of the King Haakon Hotel. He had no officers to spare for a wild-goose chase, looking for a man who was either an innocent irrelevance or a calculating killer with an escape route planned as meticulously as the attack itself. There had not yet been time or enough available manpower to interview hotel staff. Nor was there, as yet, any forensic evidence linking the explosion to the hotel’s internal phone system.

To cap it all, Ravnsborg was profoundly suspicious of the tip-off itself. It had been given anonymously, but who would do such a thing, and to what end? It was, he supposed, possible that the bomber had been sold out by his own people. But, if so, he would surely in turn give up the men who had betrayed him. Perhaps it was a rival group, wanting to undermine its competitors, or a foreign spy, determined to preserve his anonymity. Ravnsborg did not like any of these explanations. Yet he could not afford to ignore a lead as good as this, either.

He looked up to see every eye in the room trained upon him.

‘Berg, Dalen,’ he snapped. ‘Go to the Gabelshus Hotel. It’s in Skillebekk. Pick up a guest, an American, name of Madeleine Cross. Also a friend of hers, one of ours, Thor Larsson. Bring them here. Tell them they are wanted for questioning in connection with tonight’s bomb attack. They are witnesses, not suspects, at this point, but that may change. Don’t let her get away with any crap about calling the American embassy. Just bring them here as fast as you can. Go.’

As the two detectives left the room, Ravnsborg was firing off more orders. All police and security staff were told to be on the lookout for a male, aged thirty-five to forty, six feet tall, dark hair, British, going by the name of Carver.

‘Do we have an eye colour?’ one of his men asked.

Ravnsborg looked mournfully down at the photograph, which lit Carver in a blaze of flash. ‘Red,’ he said, then, ‘That was a joke.’

There was a nervous ripple of forced laughter. Another order was given to make the picture available to TV stations, along with the information that Mr Carver was wanted for questioning by police so that he could be eliminated from their enquiries.

All the time, phones around the office were ringing constantly with updates from the bomb-site, questions from reporters, interruptions from politicians wanting to get in on the act. Ravnsborg had just finished a short, infuriating conversation with the National Police Commissioner, who had simultaneously wished him luck, promised him promotion if the investigation should turn out well, and assured him of a swift relocation to the furthest, coldest reaches of the nation if it did not, when the young policeman approached his desk again.

‘You again,’ Ravnsborg sighed. ‘What do you want?’

‘You’re not going to believe it, sir. But all hell has broken loose down at the opera house.’

Carver rode the moped at walking pace along the broad esplanade that ran between the fancy food and drink joints and the sea. There was something for everyone down here: steakhouses, pizza parlours, gourmet French and specialist seafood. All the restaurants supplied huge fleece blankets so that customers could sit outside and still keep snug. But there were no cosy couples sharing blankets and stealing kisses. Wherever he looked, Carver saw people huddled round radios and phone-screens, taking in the latest news from the bombing. Some of the restaurants had set up TVs in their dining-rooms, as if admitting that no one would be interested in anything else tonight.

No one paid him the slightest bit of attention as he went by. He felt like a shark swimming unseen amidst seaside holidaymakers: a hated killer who would surely be hunted down and slaughtered if he were ever revealed. He felt stained by guilt. He felt like killing Damon Tyzack. But before he could do that, he needed to get away, regroup, and find a better battlefield.

At the police headquarters, the duty press officer completed the release that would be mailed out to all media, along with the photo of the bombing suspect, or ‘key witness’ as Ravnsborg had decided to call him. She was just about to press ‘Send’ when her finger paused above the keyboard.

Better get the boss to take one final look at it first. That way her back was covered.

She hit ‘Print’ instead and waited for the hard copy to emerge from the machine.

Carver could have done with one of those fleeces. The kid’s jacket was pretty flimsy and the sweat that covered his body had chilled in the cool evening air. It would be a lot colder out on the water, but there was nothing else to be done for it. He was determined to get as far away from Oslo as he could. Above all, he wanted to be as far as possible from Maddy.

He still didn’t know if she’d played any part in the set-up, but it made no difference. Either she was working with Tyzack, in which case he wanted nothing whatever to do with her. Or she was innocent, in which case he had to draw attention away from her, towards himself. If the police saw them together, she would automatically be classed as an accomplice. It was bad enough being dumped in the crap himself, without dragging her any deeper into it.

He wished he could call her up to explain his disappearance. But he had to assume that either Tyzack, or the police, or both, were intercepting her phones. All he could hope for was that Larsson would work out what he was doing and explain it to Maddy. If she understood his desertion, perhaps then she would forgive it.

There was nothing to be done about that, so Carver focused his attention on the matter in hand. He needed a boat, something fast, but all he could see moored alongside the pontoons were sailing boats. Up ahead a bridge curved over a waterway: one of the abandoned docks that cut deep gouges out of Oslo’s shoreline. When he reached it, Carver looked down the quayside and his face broke into a smile of grim satisfaction behind his helmet visor. A line of small, fast boats was moored down the full length of the dock, and any one of them would do just fine.

* * *

The press officer’s face was blandly impassive, but inside she was heaving a sigh of relief. Thank God she had brought the text of the release back to Ravsnborg to be checked. He had received new information. Apparently the bomber had gone crazy up on the opera house roof and started shooting people.

‘Make it clear that members of the public are not, under any circumstances, to attempt to apprehend him,’ Ravnsborg told her. ‘This man is armed and extremely dangerous. If anyone spots him, they must call the police immediately. But they must not do anything themselves. I do not want any dead heroes. OK? Now go. I want this out and on the air … Go!’

It took no more than a few seconds for Carver to spot what he was looking for: a 25-foot Scorpion RIB with a 90-horsepower Honda engine sitting on its tail. Rigid inflatable boats were the workhorses of the Royal Marines and SBS alike and Carver had spent more hours than he cared to think about sitting in them, going to and from missions and training exercises. When he got off the moped, took off his helmet and got down into the boat, it felt like a kind of homecoming.

Carver had no ignition keys, but he didn’t need them. He could get an RIB started with nothing more than his belt buckle.

He began by finding the battery, stored beneath the driver’s seat. A red plastic isolator key was inserted in the top. Carver turned it to the ‘On’ position. Now the boat had power.

Next to the battery was a toolkit. In it Carver found a knife. He used it to cut about four inches off the laces of his All Stars. He relaced his shoes before pulling out the boat’s kill-switch, the safety device that shut down the engine if the driver went overboard. Unless the switch was out, the engine would not work. It was held in place by a plastic clip, linked by a lanyard to the driver’s life-jacket. If the line was jerked too far, the toggle was pulled, the switch popped back in and the engine died. Carver tied the cut length of lace around the shaft of the kill-switch, ensuring that it stayed out. Perfect.

Moving to the back of the boat, he lowered the engine so that the propeller was in the water. Then he took off the hood and found the starter motor. It was controlled by a solenoid, whose job was to relay power from the battery to the motor. Carver placed his metal belt buckle over the solenoid’s terminals. That linked the terminal connected to the battery with the terminal connected to the starter motor. A circuit was formed. The engine spluttered into life.

He’d just hot-wired an RIB.

He made his way round the boat, casting off its lines from the quay. Then he stood at the controls, put the boat into reverse and eased his way back into the dock, swinging the boat round so that its bow was pointed at the bridge.

Beyond the bridge lay Oslo fjord, and beyond that the open sea. Somewhere out there was a Baltic ferry. Carver put the boat into forward gear and increased the speed. Once he had passed under the bridge and gone beyond the lines of pontoons against which all the yachts were moored, he flattened the throttle, felt the boat accelerate up to thirty knots and roared off towards the setting sun.

At the Gabelshus Hotel, Ravnsborg’s two men were leading Maddy Cross and Thor Larsson down the steps from the hotel entrance, towards their waiting squad car.

At Oslo police headquarters, the press officer gave the release one last read-through. Yes, she concluded, it was all exactly as her boss had demanded. She sent it off. Within minutes the bomber Carver’s name and face would be on every TV station, every news website, every media outlet in Norway. He would have no hiding place.

Damon Tyzack was sorely tempted to shoot the two men who’d come with him as he’d run up the opera house after Carver. The chopper he’d whistled up, originally to take him and Carver away, couldn’t land on the roof - typical nonsensical modern architecture, not a flat surface anywhere - and they’d had to be winched up one at a time on a rope. It took for bloody ever and did his state of mind no good at all.

He was already feeling stressed that Carver had taken out the other three and vanished. By the time Tyzack had got to the far ramp, Carver had gone. When he heard the sound of the engine, looked over the side and saw a man - it had to be Carver - riding off on a tinpot moped, it was too late for the three of them to make a run for the cars. They’d be better off up in the air. Still, he didn’t feel too clever being hauled up to the chopper like some drowning sailor and then having to wait in the cabin while the other two came aboard. Not with the Oslo police sure to pitch up any moment. He seriously considered leaning out of the door and giving his men the old double-tap, there and then. But Carver was still out there somewhere and there was work to do. He didn’t want to lose any more people just yet. And one of the men was Foster Lafferty: a total oaf, but he had his uses.

So now what?

Tyzack pulled on a headset and told his pilot to head south, over the water, away from the city. He needed to get away from the heat, find a minute to think. If he made a wrong move now, the whole thing could go tits-up. And he couldn’t afford that. Not with a president to kill.

Ole Ravnsborg didn’t like to tell people that his broken nose was the result of a childhood bicycle spill. He didn’t want to disappoint. It pleased everyone to believe that a man built the way he was and with a face so battered must be a tough guy. And that helped when dealing with criminals, most of whom had an essentially bestial, Darwinian view of life. It instilled a degree of respect and it blinded his opponents to the fact that he might just be smarter than them, too.

With women, of course, the dynamic was different. Ravnsborg felt able to display the more thoughtful and to him more authentic aspects of his personality. Those qualities, too, provided their own smokescreen.

He interviewed Maddy Cross in the presence of a female detective. He took his time sitting down and getting himself set. He wanted to take a look at her, not for any prurient reasons - though he was not blind to her attractions - but simply to get a sense of her as an interview subject and possible adversary.

She was confused and uncertain, that much was to be expected, either as a natural reaction to being dragged off to a police station in a foreign country, or as a pose adopted by a professional criminal, playing the role of the vulnerable female. There was something in her eyes, though: not the truculence of a habitual offender, perhaps, but a certain coolness. She had strength in her, this woman; she was self-possessed. Whether that made her anything other than an innocent bystander, only time would tell.

He began by sliding a picture of Carver’s face, cropped from the emailed photograph, across the table between them. ‘Do you know this man, Mrs Cross?’

She looked at it, frowning: ‘Yes, but … I don’t understand. Why am I here? I’ve done nothing wrong. Do I need a lawyer?’

Her voice was rising in pitch as she spoke, anxiety creeping in with every sentence. Ravnsborg was deliberately casual in reply.