No Survivors by Tom Cain Page A

wrong. Something always did. Meanwhile, Carver was in no state to tell anyone anything.
    On balance, Grantham concluded, that was an excellent result all around.

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    S amuel Carver knew that he had once been a marine, but only because Alix had told him. She also said that he’d fought in the Special Forces, and explained to him what that entailed.
    “I know how to do parachute jumps and swim underwater,” Carver proudly told people at the clinic. “And I can fire guns and do explosions.”
    Yet he had no real concept of what those words meant, no sense of how it felt to do the things they described.
    Carver didn’t care. There was a smile on his face that was breaking Alix’s heart.
    He was taking a fitness class with half a dozen other patients. Some of them had become his friends. He had introduced them to Alix, these wrecked individuals as helpless and dependent as he was, each one making her feel like a mother confronted with a group of dysfunctional children. But of all of them, only Carver threw himself into it, heart and soul. He really tried, and when the instructor called out, “Good work, Samuel!” his face was suffused with a glow of happiness.
    The old Samuel Carver would rather have died than live as this grinning simpleton.
    So perhaps it was for the best that he had no memory whatsoever of his previous self. He had no awareness of the confidence he had once possessed in his abilities, nor the power that had come from his absolute faith in his ability to defend himself, protect those he loved, and hurt his enemies. His dry, sardonic sense of humor had vanished. He’d even lost his basic, masculine need for sex.
    Alix was tortured by the thought, which slipped unbidden into her mind some days, that she, too, would have been better off if Carver had died. It was a cruel, hateful notion, but it reflected an undeniable truth. As much as she was devastated by his present condition, she was angered by it, too, and angry with him. There was no upside to their relationship anymore. She gained nothing from it, other than the knowledge that she would feel even more guilty if she should ever desert him.
    Yet the new Carver was sweet, and this was the strangest of all. Alix had to remind herself sometimes that the man she missed, even mourned, had been a killer whose capacity for calculated brutality was only one step away from making him a sociopath. The childlike creature he’d become was entirely without malice, incapable of doing harm. Even his smile had swapped wickedness for innocence.
    But what was to become of him? In her right hand, Alix held a crumpled envelope. It contained a letter from Marchand, the clinic’s financial director. He acknowledged receipt of a little over five thousand Swiss francs, paid over the previous few weeks, but regretted that it was not nearly enough to cover M. Carver’s bills. Sadly, he was left with no option but to issue a deadline. The outstanding sum had to be paid within the next seven days. After that point, the patient would be asked to leave and legal proceedings would begin, with the aim of recovering the debt.

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    K urt Vermulen came away from his meeting with Waylon McCabe asking himself what he was getting into. He knew he was in no position to be choosy. After all those months of being ignored, he could hardly say no to an influential supporter with billions in the bank. But he wasn’t naïve. He presumed McCabe had an agenda of his own, motivated by religion. For Vermulen, the problem of Islamist terrorism was first and foremost a security issue: He’d emphasized the Christian element in his speech because he knew it would play with the Commission for National Values. McCabe, however, had precisely the opposite priorities and sooner or later would want to go public with his views.
    Still, Vermulen had to admit McCabe was right about one thing. It wasn’t enough just to tell people about the threat of Islamist terrorism; he somehow had to show it,