71

They caught Carver as he sprinted down Eccleston Street, just outside an Italian restaurant. He was going at full pelt, jinking between pedestrians like a rugby player evading tackles, his concentration focused on getting his exhausted body the best part of a mile through a crowded city in seven minutes flat. The only other thought on his mind, the one that was giving him the energy to keep going, was the nagging fear of what was happening to Alix, and what might be done to her if he did not make that evening deadline.

So he didn’t notice the black Ford Mondeo that dropped one passenger off behind him, sped up the street, and deposited another two some fifty yards ahead before coming to rest double-parked by the curb. The first he knew of any of it was when a heavily built man in a black donkey jacket stepped sideways right into his path, bodychecking him.

Carver was sent sprawling onto the pavement, the breath knocked from his lungs. Instantly, the other two men joined their pal in the donkey jacket, picked Carver up, dragged him to the car, and threw him into the back. By the time he woke up to what was happening, the doors on both sides of him had been closed, there were guns pointed at him left and right, and a tough-looking bastard in a Chelsea Football Club sweatshirt was holding out a pair of cuffs.

Carver cursed his carelessness, his stupidity, and the fatigue that had caused both failings. The kidnapping had been handled with practiced precision. But no matter how good the people who’d grabbed him had been, he should have been paying attention, he should have seen them coming.

He wondered whether Percy Wake had sold him out, but he couldn’t work out why. The old man must have known that if Carver went down, he’d be dragged down too. Maybe his Whitehall connections were so strong, he thought he couldn’t be touched.

Or was there another possibility? Maybe this had nothing to do with Wake. Carver looked at the two men sitting next to him in the back of the Mondeo, and the other two in the front. They were calm. They hadn’t said a word apart from a quick radio message, indicating that they’d got their man and they’d be back within five minutes. They didn’t act like criminals of any kind. They didn’t look tense, and they weren’t screaming threats or smacking him around unnecessarily.

Carver thought about the organizations based within five minutes of the Vauxhall Bridge Road that had well-trained men, capable of seizing a dangerous man in broad daylight, right in the middle of London. There were three possibilities. It was just a matter of where the driver went next.

He didn’t make the early left that would take them to New Scotland Yard. So it wasn’t the cops. When they made their way down toward the river Thames, he didn’t go straight over Vauxhall Bridge, so that eliminated MI6. Instead, he turned left onto Millbank and drove along the river till he arrived at the big pale gray building with its castiron ornamental lamps and decorative statues dotting the bland facade like hopeful dabs of makeup on the face of an unattractive woman.

Now Carver knew who’d taken him.