She slapped his hand away in mock annoyance. “Kate!” she said.
“Okay, Kate… well, I’d been a marine for, I dunno, ten years or so. Typical soldier boy – you know, love ’em and leave ’em, nothing serious. But with Kate, I don’t know why, it was much more serious, right from the get-go. I met her at a party. We started talking and we didn’t stop till it was morning. We just cuddled up in this big old armchair and told each other pretty much everything about ourselves. By the end of the night, I knew she was the woman I was going to marry.”
He looked up at Alix. The light had gone from her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said so much.”
“No, I asked.”
“I’ll stop.”
“No, don’t. Tell me everything.”
“There isn’t that much more,” he said, as she laid her head on his chest again and he stared up at the ceiling. “I mean, there is, obviously, but what it all boils down to is that we got engaged. I left the service, planning to start a new life. Her dad ran a charter yacht business and I was going to work with him for a few years before taking it over when he retired. Then… then… well, then we went out to lunch, and I stayed behind for a minute, just a minute, and she walked across the street alone, and some bastard in a stolen car ran a red light… and I wasn’t there…” He screwed up his eyes for a moment, trying to hold the feelings back.
He could see the room where they’d had that last meaclass="underline" him, Kate, and Bobby Faulkner, his closest friend since the day they’d both turned up as marine officer candidates on the same admiralty selection board test. He could hear Bobby telling insulting stories about his past misdeeds, hiding his affection under a smokescreen of mockery.
Then Carver saw the jerks by the bar as they were all walking out, felt the jolt against his shoulder as one of them deliberately bumped into him and accused him of spilling his pint, looking to pick a fight. He watched Kate walking out the door as he said, “Get the car, this won’t take long.”
Then he opened his eyes and said, “She never stood a chance. Killed instantly. That was a blessing, at least. She never suffered, never even knew what hit her.”
Alix brushed a lock of hair off his forehead. “But you suffered.”
“No, I got drunk. I cultivated my rage. Then I made everyone else suffer instead. That’s how I got into this business.”
He told her how much his old commanding officer, Quentin Trench, had meant to him, how he’d pulled him out of that police cell and given him the telephone number that had changed his life.
She balled her fist and tapped his shoulder. “So now you are here and now I am with you. Enough talking. What are we going to do?”
Carver propped himself up on an elbow. “Follow the money,” he said.
33
Sir Perceval Wake pressed the button on the antiquated intercom that linked his study with his secretary’s desk outside. “Send him in.”
The apartment in Eaton Square where he lived and worked occupied two floors of a tall, white house. It stood in a terrace of identical buildings lining a broad boulevard running from the aristocratic playground of Sloane Square to the walls of Buckingham Palace. The government departments of Whitehall were just a five-minute cab ride away. This was one of the world’s most expensive neighborhoods. Wake’s hunger for money and influence had always been as great as his thirst for knowledge.
For decades, Her Majesty’s government had come to Sir Perceval Wake for advice and paid handsomely for the privilege, as had the chief executives of city institutions and multinational corporations. He’d begun his career as a political history lecturer at Oxford University, but he did not linger long among the city’s brilliant but impoverished academics. In 1954 he published a book based on his postgraduate thesis. It was provocatively entitled, Useful Idiots: The Role of Western Intellectuals in the Spread of Communist Dictatorship. At a time when most supposedly progressive, liberal thinkers still believed that the Soviet Union was a force for good in the world, Wake’s ideas exploded like a hand grenade in a barrel of fish. He became a hate figure on the left and an icon on the right.
Within weeks of publication, he was invited to attend a private conference of politicians, financiers, and thinkers from Europe and the United States that met at the Hotel Bilderberg in Arnhem, Holland. The organizers aimed to protect Western democracy and free markets against the Communist tide. That original meeting evolved into an annual event, an institution in its own right. For over forty years, Wake had been an active member of the Bilderberg Group, whose secret meetings, attended by some of the richest and most powerful men on earth, had become the focus of countless conspiracy theories. He regularly attended the World Economic Forum in Davos. He traveled to the 2,700-acre estate of Bohemian Grove in Sonoma County, California, to join the cast of rich, powerful, male Americans parading in torchlight before a giant, fake stone owl and – the conspiracy theorists insisted – hatching plots for global domination.
To Wake, the accumulation of power and influence was a matter of duty as well as a personal pleasure. He believed that people like him, the ones who truly understood the world, were obliged to save its people from the consequences of their own stupidity. Left to their own devices, the masses made distressingly poor decisions. They elected genocidal maniacs like Hitler. They swore allegiance to tyrannical despots like Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. It was really best for everyone if running the planet was left to the experts.
He rose from his desk to greet his visitor. Wake had taken great care to cultivate his appearance, from the artfully unkempt mane of silver hair that he swept back over his ears to the custom-made tweed jackets, soft cotton shirts, and corduroy trousers that signified both his affluence and his status as a free thinker. By contrast, Jack Grantham’s drab suit demonstrated that even as a senior officer of MI6 he was, in the end, just another civil servant. Still, it would be unwise to underestimate him. Grantham did not possess the usual flabby pallor of a desk-bound bureaucrat, and there was a look of measured, skeptical assessment in his gray eyes.
He had the air, Wake decided, of a man who had come a long way, but still had farther to go. His energies had not yet been depleted by the unrelenting grind of the Whitehall machine, and there was a toughness about him that was as much mental as physical. He would not be fobbed off by easy options or the countless excuses that officialdom found for inaction. Wake had been keeping an eye on Grantham’s career for some time. He was curious to see whether his abilities matched his growing reputation.
They exchanged a cordial handshake.
“Jack, my boy, how very good to see you.”
Grantham responded with a single sharp nod of acknowledgment.
“So, how are things down at Vauxhall Cross?” Wake asked, settling back down behind his desk and waving in the direction of a chair to let his guest know that he could sit too.
“Things could be better,” Grantham replied. “That crash in Paris has stirred things up.”
“I daresay it has. No doubt there will be claims that it could have been prevented, but I can’t see that you have any need to be concerned. After all, it was simply an accident. A ghastly, tragic accident, of course, but nothing to worry the secret intelligence service.”
“That depends. We think this might have been a hit. So we’re wondering who might have wanted to kill the princess, or her companion, and why?”
“What does that have to do with me?” Wake leaned forward a fraction. His interest had been piqued.
“Well, you’ve studied every threat to our national security for the past forty years. You’ve known our leaders and half our enemies’ leaders too. You’ve been in the room when people have discussed and even planned operations off the books. So you tell me. Why would anyone want to kill the Princess of Wales?”