The Accident Man

311 Pages·2016·1.3 MB·English

by  Cain Tom

Annotation
If Princess Diana had been murdered, what sort of man would have killed
her? Breathlessly paced and featuring one of the most intriguing heroes in recent
fiction, Tom Cain’s The Accident Man surprises the reader at every turn. For a
certain sum of money, Samuel Carver will arrange a death. A ruptured gas line,
an automobile crash, a fall from a window; anything can look like an accident.
But when Carver is to carry out a job in a tunnel in Paris, and when the job goes
wrong for him, and when he is pursued by the very forces that hired him, Carver
must execute his most daring feat yet. A thriller of the grandest and most
exhilarating sort, The Accident Man races above and below the streets of Paris,
across Europe, and through storms at sea. It is also a startling introduction to a
hero engaged in acts of moral violence. With the dissolution of world powers,
with everything and anything for sale, how does one justify death? Samuel
Carver, a clouded man of determined action, will come to understand the prices
to be paid. Fans of James Bond, the Jason Bourne films, and Lee Child will thrill
at Samuel Carver’s violent and uncertain world.
Tom Cain
Author’s Note
PRELUDE
TEN DAYS LATER
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SUNDAY, AUGUST 31
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MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1
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TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2
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WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6
Acknowledgements
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Cain
The Accident Man
The first book in the Samuel Carver series, 2007
Author’s Note
The Accident Man was inspired by real events, the worldwide reaction to
them, and the ongoing speculation that surrounds them. Wherever relevant, I
have endeavored to respect the facts as they are known. Nevertheless, this is
explicitly and unambiguously a work of fiction. I am categorically not claiming
to reveal some supposedly genuine conspiracy that has somehow remained
undisclosed or suppressed up to this point. An investigative journalist or police
detective tries to uncover the answer to the factual question “What happened?”
But writing as a novelist, I have used my imagination to devise an answer to a
very different, hypothetical inquiry: “What if…?”
PRELUDE
The night air was weighed down with heat and the sea rippled lazily against
the pebbled beach.
There was a guard on the wooden jetty, but it was past ten o’clock with no
moon in the sky, so the man with the AK-47 did not see Samuel Carver as he
swam beneath the Adriatic waters, didn’t hear him as he surfaced beneath the
jetty, didn’t detect Carver’s presence just beneath his feet.
Slowly, silently, Carver made his way up toward the shore, where the water
was shallowest. He took off his mask, fins, and the buoyancy vest to which his
breathing system was secured. He clipped the mask and flippers to D rings on
the side of the vest, then gently slipped the diving gear back into the water,
letting it settle on the seabed.
Carver waited till he heard the sound of the helicopter in the distance before
he moved to his starting position by the foot of the ladder that led down to the
sea at the deep end of the jetty. He was counting on human nature. When the
chopper passed overhead, the man would look up. Anyone would, particularly if
his boss was onboard.
There were two waterproof pouches strapped to Carver’s thighs. As the
noise of the rotors reached its clattering crescendo, he opened one of them and
extracted a standard veterinarian’s air pistol. He let the glow from the
helicopter’s landing lights pass overhead. Then he took a deep breath, gripped
the side of the ladder, and pulled himself upward.
He landed flat on the planking and looked up to see the guard still watching
the Bell 206B3 JetRanger as it hovered about four hundred meters away before
dropping down to land at the villa’s private helipad. The man’s back made a
perfect target for the tranquilizer dart. Carver dashed forward and caught the
guard before he fell. He removed the dart and threw it into the water. Then he
entered the estate, preparing himself for the job he had to do.
Samuel Carver made very bad accidents happen to even worse people. His
current target was a forty-three-year-old ethnic Albanian named Skender Visar.
The official term for Visar’s business was people-trafficking, but Carver
preferred a more traditional job description. As far as he was concerned, the
Albanian was a slave trader.
Visar shipped human beings in containers from China, Africa, and the
former communist states of Eastern Europe. He sent men to work as indentured
labor in fields and sweatshops, doing jobs that Westerners now felt were beneath
their dignity. He bought women from families so impoverished they would sell
their own kith and kin; he then beat them into submission, strung them out on
drugs, and worked them mercilessly in the brothels, bars, and massage parlors he
owned across Europe and the United States. Few slaves lasted more than two or
three years. By then they had repaid the cost of their purchase, transport, and
pitifully meager upkeep hundreds of times over. And there were always more,
countless thousands more.
Slavery was crime’s growth industry, its profits rapidly catching up with
those to be made from illicit weapons and drugs. In some ways, the business
model was far smarter. You could only sell a gun or a gram of cocaine once you
could sell a sex slave ten times a night. But easy money bred tough competition.
Visar lived in a permanent state of professional paranoia, constantly on the
lookout for enemies, alert to every possible threat to his position, whether real or
imagined.
He’d been taking a break on his 180-foot yacht, cruising the Dalmatian
coast of Croatia with his family, when he heard that one of his senior lieutenants,
Ergon Ali, had been trying to cut a deal with a rival boss. The information was
false, planted to deceive, but it had the desired effect.
Visar sent a four-man team to the Berlin strip club that served as Ali’s base.
They knocked Ali unconscious with the butt of a Mossberg pump-action
shotgun, bundled him into the trunk of an S-Class Mercedes, shot him full of
heroin, and hit the autobahn south. Fourteen hours later they arrived in Split, the
Croatian seaside town that had once been the favored summer resort of the
emperors of Rome.
Visar’s men topped up Ali’s dose to keep him quiet, then drove their Merc
onto the ferry to the island of Hvar, sticking it next to a camper van filled with
Australian students on a round-Europe tour. They spent the three-hour voyage in
the ferry bar, matching the Aussies beer for beer. The only other occupant of the
bar was sitting in the corner, a bearded man in a battered Panama hat, with a pair
of binoculars around his neck, eking out a pot of tea and studiously consulting a
book about bird watching.
When Visar’s men reached the villa, they dumped Ergon Ali, bound and
gagged, in the cellar. They did not want to waste their boss’s time, so they spent
the rest of the night and all the next day beating, electrocuting, and half-
drowning the man who had once been their friend. Only when they felt that Ali
was about to crack did they call Skender Visar to inform him that everything had
been prepared for his arrival. By the time Visar hung up, the blades on his
helicopter had already started to turn. He was on his way to apply the finishing
touches to Ergon Ali’s interrogation. And Samuel Carver, bird watching now far
from his mind, was waiting for him.
Carver crouched in the shadows to the side of the helipad. Visar and his
bodyguard had already walked up the main house where Ergon Ali was awaiting
his fate. The pilot stayed behind for a few minutes to shut down and check his
aircraft, then he too made his way up the path. Carver waited until he was sure
that the area was deserted, then slipped across the pad to the silent machine.
The Bell 206B3 is the workhorse of the skies, first put into service in 1967
and barely changed since. The rear of the aircraft consists of a long tail boom, at
the end of which sit the tail rotor and the vertical stabilizer, which sticks out
above and below the boom like the angled fins of a shark. This stabilizer is
attached to the rest of the helicopter by four bolts, arranged in a rectangle.
Carver put on his gloves, took an adjustable wrench out of his second
pouch, and removed the bottom two bolts. Then he used a minisaw to cut
halfway through each one, making them significantly weaker. He screwed them
back into the housing, taking extreme care not to snap them in two. Next he
unscrewed the top pair of bolts, exactly as before. But this time he cut right
through them, up by the head. He put the shafts back into his thigh pouch, then
used tiny blobs of Blu-Tack to stick the heads of the bolts back on the vertical
stabilizer, exactly where they had been before. An inch-by-inch inspection of the
helicopter would reveal what Carver had done. But his work would certainly
pass a tired pilot’s cursory pretakeoff check.
He ran through the whole procedure one more time in his mind, making
sure he had done everything that was required, and then made his way back to
the jetty. By the time the guard woke from his slumber, Carver was long gone.
Ergon Ali took a long time to die, protesting his innocence and loyalty to
the end. It was dawn by the time Skender Visar got back onboard his helicopter.
He was tired and preoccupied, fearing a dangerous, costly gang war and
wondering who would be next to betray him. He wanted to get back to his boat.
His pilot had no desire to anger him further, so he rushed through his takeoff
procedures and got the Bell off the ground as fast as possible.
They were five miles out to sea when the vibrations started. The pilot’s
instincts told him to turn back, but he knew Visar would not allow it, so he
picked up speed, hoping to get the trip over and done with as soon as possible.
As the helicopter accelerated, air started rushing ever faster around the
vertical stabilizer, bullying it from side to side. If all four assembly bolts had
been solidly in place, they would have kept the stabilizer upright and motionless.
But with the top assembly bolts gone, the weakened bottom bolts became a