Read Assassin for Free Online Page A

The agent looked as though he was having a hard time holding on to his composure. His nerves were fraying. If they snapped, he might do something foolish. With the minimum possible fuss, Carver did as he was told.
    ‘Now sit down at the table, hands on the table-top, palms down.’
    ‘Sure,’ said Carver and once again obeyed.
    For a while, nothing happened. From where he was sitting, Carver could look past the agent, through the door and into the corridor. So, when footsteps sounded outside the room, he was the first to see the tall, commanding figure dressed in jeans and a windcheater with the presidential insignia on the left breast standing framed in the doorway.
    Automatically Carver got to his feet.
    ‘Sit down!’ screamed the agent, his head suddenly jerking to one side as he realized that his President was in the room.
    ‘Take it easy, son,’ Roberts said.
    Tord Bahr was following right behind the President. He went up to the agent and said a few words in his ear, sending him from the room.
    Lincoln Roberts turned his attention to Carver. He stood still, saying nothing, just weighing him up. Finally he said, ‘Sit down.’
    Roberts strolled over to the coffee jug and poured himself a cup, nice and easy, just as though this were a casual social visit between friends. After all that had just happened there was something almost unnatural about his aura of calm self-control. His drink fixed, he sat down opposite Carver in the chair that Bahr had been occupying no more than ten minutes earlier. He moved the bowl of cereal out of his way, leaving the table clear between him and Carver. Bahr very deliberately remained on his feet, evidently determined to reassert his unbending sense of duty.
    Roberts took a sip of coffee. ‘Mmm, that’s good,’ he said appreciatively. ‘Your sandwich OK?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    Carver wasn’t a man who often felt awed by anyone else’s presence. But then he’d never sat down for coffee with a US president before, let alone one he was willing to risk his life for. Most politicians he’d met, he wouldn’t have jumped from a plane at 25,000 feet just to test their security systems. He’d have chucked them out of it, instead, see how that worked.
    Roberts, though, had something different about him. When he talked about trying to change things for the better he sounded as though he truly meant it. Maybe he was just a better actor than the rest of them. What was that saying? If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. That could be his secret, though Carver hoped it wasn’t. Time would tell. Meanwhile, Carver resumed chewing on his steak, waiting to see what the President wanted to say.
    ‘You like my yacht?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes, sir,’ Carver replied. ‘She’s a beautiful boat.’
    Roberts nodded over his coffee mug. ‘I agree. She’s thirty years old, you know, got a Brazilian hardwood hull. I had her restored a while back. When I get her out on the water, feel the wind in her sails, breathe in that salt sea air … well, I guess that’s when I’m most at peace with the world.’
    The President leaned forward and looked Carver in the eye, and now he wasn’t anyone’s friend. He was a man who had the ambition, the drive and the ruthless focus required to work his way from obscurity to the most powerful job in the world.
    ‘You want to tell me what you thought you were doing wrecking that peace?’
    ‘Keeping you alive, sir - making sure you never became another Mountbatten,’ Carver replied. ‘In 1979, the IRA killed Lord Louis Mountbatten, Prince Charles’s “Uncle Dickie”, by blowing up his yacht. Last night, I attached a dummy device to the hull of the Lady Rosalie , right beneath the cockpit, about sixty seconds before I ran like a lunatic across that lawn out there. There was a sensor attached to it that measured boat-speed through the water, wired to explode once the boat reached eight knots. Nothing serious, just a great big bang and a lot of red dye,