The accident man: a novel

335 Pages·2008·1.23 MB·English

by  Cain Tom

“This is the best first thriller I have read since The Day of the
Jackal, and that was a long time ago. With one mighty
bound, Tom Cain has vaulted over Archer and Grisham
and stands close on Frederick Forsyth’s tail.”
—Wilbur Smith
“The attention to detail, the skillful building and relaxing of
tension, the imaginative violence, the consistency and
human frailties of his characters—all make this a tour de
force, especially for a first-time novelist. I found myself
favourably comparing Cain’s storytelling with the best of
Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum as I dashed from one page
to the next, easily polishing off the 320-page novel in two
sessions. This is a franchise with legs, and it should come as
no surprise that the movie rights have already been snapped
up by Paramount.”
—Calgary Herald
“Audacious, authentic, full of tension and tradecraft. . . .
Maybe it’s true and maybe it isn’t, but either way it’s a great
thriller read. I loved it.”
—Lee Child
“This audacious first novel takes the events surrounding the
death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and melds them with an
utterly fantastic conspiracy in this tale of assassin-for-hire
Samuel Carver.”
—Ottawa Citizen
Also by Tom Cain
No Survivors
a cognizant original v5 release november 12 2010
THE
ACCIDENT
MAN

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First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division
of Pearson Canada Inc., 2008
Published in this edition, 2009
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)
Copyright © Tom Cain, 2007
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no
part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the
copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Designed by Nancy Resnick
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request
to the publisher
American Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data available
ISBN: 978-0-14-305598-3
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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
T
he 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