The Geneva Deception

EIGHTEEN

Via Galvani, Testaccio, Rome

18th March – 3.12 p.m.

The speaker crackled into life.

‘Mitto tibi navem prora puppique carentem.’

Allegra hesitated, her mind racing. She understood the Latin, of course – I send you a ship lacking stern and bow. But what did it mean? How could a ship not have a stern and a bow? Unless…unless it was referring to something else. To the front and the back? The beginning and the end? The first and the last? Latin for ship was navem, so if it was missing its beginning and its end, its first and last letters perhaps…

‘Ave,’ she replied with a smile. Latin for hello.

‘Ave, indeed,’ the voice replied with a chuckle. ‘Although I can’t claim the credit this time. That was one of Cicero’s.’

The door buzzed open and Allegra made her way to the lift, smiling. She’d first met Aurelio Eco at La Sapienza, before heading off to Columbia for her Masters, where he’d been a visiting professor in the university’s antiquities department. Before that, he’d spent fifteen years as the Director of the Villa Giulia, Rome’s foremost Etruscan museum, during ten of which he had also headed up the Ufficio Sequestri e Scavi Clandestini, the Office of Clandestine Excavations and Seized Objects. Unfortunately for her, these posts seemed to have provided him with an inexhaustible supply of riddles, which he delighted in asking her as a condition of entry to his apartment. A latter-day Sphinx to her Odysseus.

As usual the door was open and the kettle boiling. She made herself a strong black coffee and Aurelio an Earl Grey tea with lemon, an affectation of his from a brief stint at Oxford in his twenties that he had never been able, or wanted, to shake off.

He was waiting for her in his high-backed leather chair, the split in the seat cushion covered by a red-and-white keffiyeh purchased during an exchange posting to Jordan. His dusty office was full of such mementoes – photographs of him at various digs over the decades, framed maps and faded prints, prayer beads and inlaid boxes picked up in dusty Middle-Eastern souks, fragments of inscribed Roman tablets, shards of Etruscan pottery, carved remnants of Greek statues. At times it seemed to Allegra that his entire life was held in this small room, each piece invested with a particular meaning or memory that he only had to glance at or hold to live all over again.

And yet this primitive mental filing system was as chaotic as it was effective, pictures hanging askew, books stacked any which way on the shelves with dirty cups and glasses squeezed into the gaps, the floor covered in a confetti trail of newspaper cuttings and half-read books left facedown, alongside a stack of index cards inscribed with notes for a forthcoming lecture. And while a favoured few of his artefacts had been placed in a glass display cabinet, the rest were scattered indiscriminately around the room, some squeezed on to his desk and the marble mantelpiece, others lining the edges of the bookshelves like paratroopers waiting for the order to jump.

Despite his cheerfulness on the intercom, Aurelio now seemed to have sunk into what Allegra could only describe as a sulk, his bottom lip jutting out, brows furrowed. Funny, she thought, how old age seemed to have given him an almost childlike ability to flit between moods on a whim.

‘Maybe you shouldn’t come any more,’ he sighed. ‘Spend time with your real friends, instead, people your own age.’

‘Don’t start that again,’ she sighed. ‘I’ve told you, I’m too busy to have any friends. Besides, I like old things.’ She winked. ‘They smell more interesting.’

Approaching seventy, Aurelio had no family left now, apart from a distant cousin who only seemed to show up when he needed a handout. As they had got to know each other, therefore, Allegra had taken it upon herself to look in on him whenever she knew she would be in the area. And sometimes, like today, when she knew she wouldn’t.

‘But you said you’d be here for lunch,’ he continued in a hurt tone, although she could sense that her reply had pleased him. ‘You’re late.’

‘And whose fault is that?’

He grinned, his sulk vanishing as quickly as she suspected it had appeared. He had a kindly face, with large light brown eyes, a beaked nose and leathered skin that spoke of too many long summers spent hunched over an excavation trench. He was dressed in an open-necked shirt and a yellow silk cravat, another hangover from his Oxford days. As ever, he was wearing a motheaten grey cardigan for warmth, his refusal to pay the ‘extortionate’ prices demanded by ‘piratical’ energy companies condemning his apartment to a Siberian permafrost for at least three months of the year.

‘So they did call you?’ he crowed.

‘I knew it!’ she remonstrated angrily. ‘Who did you speak to? What did you tell them?’

‘The GICO wanted an antiquities expert. They called the university. The university put them on to me. I told them I’d retired and recommended you instead.’

‘Did they tell you what they wanted?’

‘Of course not. It’s the GICO. They never tell you anything.’ He paused, suddenly concerned. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

With a deep breath, Allegra recounted the events of the past twenty-three hours. The inverted crucifixion at the site of Julius Caesar’s assassination. The carefully staged beheading in the Pantheon. The apparent link to two Caravaggio masterpieces. Aurelio listened intently, shaking his head at some of the more gruesome details, but otherwise remaining silent until she had finished.

‘So the man they found in the Pantheon…?’

‘Was Annibale Argento’s twin brother, Gio.’

‘Merda,’ he swore, for what could well have been the first time since she’d known him. ‘They must be lapping it up.’

They, she knew, referred to the media, an industry he despised, having been tricked a few years ago into authenticating a forged Etruscan vase by an investigative reporter. He gave a contemptuous wave of his hand towards an imagined TV set in the corner of his room, as if trying to further distance himself from an object he had already demonstrably banished from his life.

‘I’ve spent half the day trying to see if there’s anything else that links the two sites or any of Caravaggio’s other works. Gallo is trying to get me seconded on to the case full time.’

‘I’m sorry, Allegra. I didn’t know…I didn’t mean to get you involved in anything like this.’

She shrugged. It was hard to be angry with him. It was Aurelio after all who, guessing that she would quickly tire of academia, had encouraged her to apply to the art and antiquities unit of the Carabinieri in the first place. He’d only been trying to help.

‘I know.’

‘Anything to go on?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Plenty to go on. Just no idea where to start,’ she sighed. ‘Which reminds me. There’s something I wanted to ask you.’

‘Anything, of course.’

‘Both victims had what looked like an antique coin in their mouths.’

‘To pay Charon,’ Aurelio guessed immediately.

‘That’s what I thought. Except it wasn’t a coin. It was a lead disc.’

‘Lead?’ Aurelio frowned. ‘That’s unusual.’

‘That’s what I thought. I seem to remember reading that Roman forgers used to fake coins by casting them in lead and covering them in gold leaf, but I wondered if there was some other reference to the Classical world that might.’

‘Unusual, but not unprecedented,’ he continued, interrupting her. ‘Can you reach that red book down for me.’

She extricated the book from between the fifteen or so other academic texts he had written and handed it to him. He held it for a few seconds, his eyes closed, fingers resting lightly on the leather cover as if he was reading braille. Then, opening his eyes, he leafed through it, the brain haemorrhage that he’d suffered some fifteen years before betraying itself in his slow and deliberate movements.

‘Here,’ he fixed her with a knowing smile, about halfway in.

‘Here what?’

‘Threatened by the Persian empire, several Greek states came together in the fifth century BC to form a military alliance under the leadership of the Athenians,’ he read. ‘Members had to contribute ships or money, and in return the alliance agreed to protect their territory. Symbolically,’ he paused, Allegra remembering that he used to employ the same theatrical technique in lectures when he was about to make a particularly compelling point. ‘Symbolically, upon joining, representatives of the member states had to throw a piece of metal into the sea.’

‘Lead,’ Allegra breathed. He nodded.

‘Normally a piece of lead. The alliance was to last until it floated to the surface again.’

There was a pause, as she reflected on this.

‘And you think…?’

‘You asked about a link between lead and the Classical world.’ He smiled. ‘Thinking’s your job.’

‘What was the name of this alliance?’

Aurelio pretended to consult the book, although she could tell it was just an excuse for another of his dramatic pauses.

‘They called themselves the Delian League.’

NINETEEN

J. Edgar Hoover Building, FBI headquarters, Washington DC

18th March – 9.37 a.m.

The door buzzed open. Tom didn’t bother to look round. He could tell from Ortiz’s shuffling steps and Stokes’s heavier, wider stride, who it was.

‘How long are you going to keep me here?’ he demanded angrily.

‘A federal agent’s been killed, Mr Kirk,’ Stokes replied icily, no longer even attempting to mask his instinctive hostility. He dragged a chair out from under the table and extravagantly straddled it. ‘So we’re going to keep you here pretty much as long as we like.’

‘You don’t have to tell me she was killed, you pompous bastard,’ Tom hissed, holding out a sleeve still flecked with Jennifer’s blood. ‘I was holding her hand when she died, remember?’

In a way he was glad that Stokes was acting like this. It gave him a reason to be angry, to give himself over to his rage, to feel its intoxicating opiate course through his veins and his pulse quicken. Better that than allow his sadness to envelop him, feel the paralysing arms of grief tighten around him as he subjected himself to a Sisyphean analysis of what he could and should have done to save her.

Even as this thought occurred to him, he felt Jennifer’s image forming in his mind. An image he’d tried to suppress ever since he’d seen the gurney disappear into the bowels of the hospital, and then been escorted back on to Kezman’s jet and flown to this windowless interview room. But there she was, bloodied, her face shrouded by an oxygen mask, arms pierced by wires. A martyr? A sacrifice? But if so, for what and by whom?

‘If we’re going to catch the people who did this, we’re going to need your help.’ Ortiz, standing to his right, had adopted a more conciliatory tone which Tom sensed was genuine, rather than some clumsy attempt at a good cop, bad cop routine. His cheeks were shadowed by stubble, his eyes tired.

‘You’re not going to catch anyone, stuck down here,’ Tom retorted. ‘The longer we talk, the colder the trail. We should be in Vegas.’

‘SOP says we pull back and let an IA team step in when an agent falls in the line of duty,’ Stokes intoned, sounding as though he was reciting from some sort of manual. ‘They’re on the ground there already, reporting directly to FBI Director Green.’

‘To FBI Director Green?’ Tom asked, momentarily encouraged. He knew Jack Green, or at least had met him a few times when working with Jennifer. He had first-hand experience of the help Tom had given the Bureau in the past. ‘I want to talk to him. Does he know I’m here?’

Ortiz’s eyes flickered questioningly towards the large mirror that took up most of the left-hand wall. Tom’s heart sank. Not only did Green know he was here, but, judging from the uncomfortable expression on Ortiz’s face, he was probably watching. Jennifer’s death had clearly reset the clock. Until they knew exactly what had happened, he wasn’t going to qualify for any special treatment.

‘You can talk to us instead,’ Stokes snapped. ‘Tell us what happened.’

‘You know what happened. You were there. You saw the whole damn thing.’

‘All I know is that twelve hours after Browne brought you into the case, she was dead.’

‘You think I had something to do with it?’ Tom’s anger was momentarily overwhelmed by incredulity.

‘Twenty million dollars is a lot of money.’ Stokes’s eyes narrowed accusingly. ‘Even for you.’

‘So that’s your theory? That this was some sort of botched heist?’ Tom wasn’t sure whether Stokes was being deliberately provocative, or just plain stupid.

‘I think that shooting a federal agent is a pretty good diversion. If one of our agents hadn’t secured the suitcases, who’s to say -’

‘If all they’d wanted was a diversion, they could have shot anyone in that place,’ Tom countered. ‘They could have shot me.’

‘Exactly.’ Stokes raised his eyebrows pointedly, as if Tom had somehow proved his point.

‘Except they didn’t. They chose Jennifer. Maybe you should be asking yourselves why,’ Tom insisted.

‘What are you talking about?’ Stokes said with an impatient shrug.

‘Jennifer told me that two weeks ago she’d stumbled across an antiquities smuggling ring,’ Tom said, looking to Ortiz who acknowledged this point with a nod. ‘Then, out of the blue, a longlost Caravaggio shows up. One of the few works in the world guaranteed to ensure that Jennifer gets the call. You think that’s a coincidence?’

‘You don’t?’ Ortiz asked him with a frown.

‘I did until last night.’ Tom shrugged. ‘But now I’m thinking that there never was any Caravaggio; never was any exchange. That it was all a set-up. That that’s why the priest started stalling. Because he was expecting Jennifer. Because he wanted to give the gunman enough time to find her.’

‘This was about the money, and you know it,’ Stokes said with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘We just got to it before you or anyone else could.’

‘Jennifer told me that the dealer you arrested in Queens had given you a name. Someone in Italy,’ Tom said to Ortiz, still ignoring Stokes. ‘Who was he? Did he have any ties to the mafia?’

‘Why? What do you…?’

‘That’s classified,’ Stokes interrupted angrily before Ortiz could answer. ‘Browne trusted you with too much, and you shouldn’t be encouraging him.’ He jabbed his finger at Ortiz.

‘The mafia control the illegal antiquities business in Italy,’ Tom explained. ‘They decide who can dig where, and take a cut on everything that comes out of the ground. It’s worth millions to them. The same mafia who, if you believe the rumours, have been holding the Caravaggio all these years.’

‘What are you saying?’ Ortiz breathed, ignoring Stokes’s venomous gaze.

‘I’m saying it was a professional hit. I’m saying that something she’d stumbled across had made her a threat and that the painting was just a way of flushing her out into the open.’

‘If you’re right…’ Ortiz said slowly.

‘If I’m right, then we’re already too late to catch the killer. You can run a DNA test on the blood traces, but people like that are ghosts. You’ll get nothing. But I might still be able to find whoever ordered the hit.’

‘You might be able to find them?’ Stokes gave a hollow laugh. ‘We’ve got a long way to go yet before we’ll even let you take a piss without someone holding your dick for you.’

‘Let me see her files.’ Tom turned to Ortiz. ‘I can go places you can’t, speak to people you don’t know. But I need to move fast. I need to move now.’

Ortiz went to say something, but then hesitated, his eyes again flickering towards the mirror.

‘Yeah, sure!’ Stokes gave a rasping laugh. ‘Get a load of this guy. Our necks are already on the line and now he wants us to bend over and drop our pants too?’

‘Then either charge me with something, or let me go,’ Tom shouted angrily, rising to his feet. ‘Right now you’re just wasting my time.’

‘Like I said, Kirk, you’re going nowhere,’ Stokes said coldly, standing up and swiping the door open.

‘I’m sorry, man,’ Ortiz shrugged, joining him in the doorway. ‘But he’s right. This is how it’s got to be.’

The door sealed shut behind them and the electronic reader flashed from green to red. Saying nothing, Tom reached into his trouser pocket and felt the hard outline of the swipe card Jennifer had pressed into his hand in the helicopter.

Even then, as she lay dying, she’d known how this would play out. Even then, she’d known what he would have to do.

TWENTY

Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, Isola Tiberina, Rome

18th March – 3.51 p.m.

Allegra had left Aurelio in yet another of his sulks. She had arrived late and was now leaving early, he had complained as she hurriedly saw herself out. She had pointedly reminded him that she was only leaving so she could follow up on a case that he was responsible for her being involved with in the first place. But by then he had turned the radio on and was pretending he couldn’t hear her. No matter. All would be forgiven and forgotten by tomorrow, she knew, his moods breaking and clearing as quickly as a summer storm.

Allegra wasn’t sure whether the link between the lead discs and the Delian League was meaningful or not, but one thing that she was almost certain about was that Gallo would want to know about it ASAP, so he could make that decision for himself. Normally she would have called him, but his phone appeared to have been switched off. According to his assistant, this was because there was no reception in the mortuary basement levels, where she would still catch him if she hurried.

Having signed in, she headed down to the cold store in the basement. A young man wearing a white lab coat – a medical student, she guessed, judging by his age – was manning the reception desk and glaring at a monitor.

‘Colonel Gallo?’ she asked, flicking her wallet open. He jumped up, deftly minimising a game of solitaire.

‘You just missed him,’ he replied anxiously, leaning over the top of the counter and peering down the corridor behind her as if he still might be able to see him. ‘Signor Santos is still here, though.’

‘Who?’

‘He came in for the formal ID on Argento. Colonel Gallo thought it better that they leave separately.’

She glanced at the door he had indicated and with a curious frown stepped towards it. Peering through the porthole she could see that it opened on to a large and resolutely featureless rectangular room, the only splash of colour coming from a few moulded blue plastic seats that were huddled for warmth around a water cooler bolted to the right-hand wall. Opposite these were a series of evenly spaced square aluminium doors, perhaps eight across and three high, each with a large levered handle and a name-tag slot. One of the doors was open; the drawer had been pulled out. A man was standing to one side of it, his back to her.

‘Signor Santos?’

She pushed the door open and announced herself with a warm smile and an outstretched hand. Santos turned slowly at the sound of her voice. He was in his late forties and looked slim and fit, with a tanned face and teeth the colour of polished ivory. His closecropped dark hair was sprinkled with silver and started high up his head where his hairline had begun to recede a little. He was immaculately dressed in a Cesare Attolini navy blazer and white flannel trousers that had been cut to crease at just the right place to slightly ride up over a pair of brown Church’s. His creamy pink shirt was from Barba in Naples, his striped tie from Marinella, and his belt by Gucci, although given the obvious excellence of the tailoring, this last item was clearly worn for sartorial effect rather than to keep his trousers up.

He gave her a wary, even suspicious look that prompted her into an explanation.

‘Lieutenant Allegra Damico,’ she introduced herself, holding out her ID. ‘I’m working with Colonel Gallo.’

‘I see.’ He smiled, returning her wallet with a nod. ‘Apologies. I thought you might be from the press.’

‘They’re looking for you?’

‘They’re looking for an opportunity to snatch a photograph of an elected official grieving over his dead brother’s butchered corpse. I’m here to make sure they don’t get that chance.’

‘Deputy Argento asked you to identify his brother’s body instead of him?’ she guessed.

‘Actually, Colonel Gallo suggested it,’ he corrected her. ‘He thought it might help…simplify matters.’

‘How did you know the victim?’

‘My apologies -’ Santos stepped forward with an apologetic shrug, his hand rising to meet hers – ‘I haven’t introduced myself. I am Antonio Santos, President of the Banco Rosalia.’

He handed her his business card, the way he held it out with both hands suggesting he had lived, or at least done a lot of business in the Far East. It was stiff and elaborately engraved with a sweeping copperplate script that identified him as:

Antonio Santos

President & Director-General

Banco Rosalia

‘Gio used to work for me.’

Allegra moved over to stand on the other side of the open drawer, her ghostly form reflecting indistinctly in the adjacent door’s dull aluminium surface.

Giulio Argento was lying in between them, naked and shrouded by a white sheet apart from his uncovered face and where it had fallen away from his left arm, revealing a bar-coded tag fixed to his wrist like a supermarket label. She barely recognised his waxen and hollow features but there was no mistaking, though, the ugly welt of the sword strike where it had opened up his neck like a second smile.

‘Liquorice?’

She refused. There seemed something strangely inappropriate about the way Santos was shaking the ornate tin over Argento’s body.

‘I read that Roman soldiers could go for ten days without eating or drinking with liquorice in their rations,’ he said, popping two pieces into his mouth and then slipping the tin back into his pocket. Allegra nodded, deciding against mentioning that she had read somewhere else that too much liquorice could reduce a man’s testosterone levels. ‘So? Any leads? Any clues as to who did it? Why they did it?’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t…’

‘I understand.’ He shrugged. ‘Due process, jeopardising a live investigation, respect for the victim’s family…Gallo spun me a similar line.’

‘It’s for your own protection,’ she insisted.

A pause. Santos looked back down at the body.

‘You know, the traffic was terrible the day they found the body,’ he said eventually, a strangely vacant expression on his face, as if he couldn’t quite see Argento and yet knew he was there. ‘Half the streets seemed to have been barricaded off. I remember being angry that it had made me late for a meeting. I never realised that…’

‘What did Signor Argento do for you?’

‘God’s work.’

‘In a bank?’ The words came out sounding more sceptical than she had intended.

‘The Vatican Bank is our largest shareholder,’ he explained with the weary patience of someone who had had to give this explanation many times before. ‘We take deposits in the normal way and then lend money at subsidised rates to worthy projects that might not otherwise get funding. Gio had responsibility for managing the relationships with some of our larger accounts.’

‘So no reason to think that anyone would want to -’

‘This?’ Santos gestured with disgust. ‘This is the devil’s work.’

‘The devil?’ she asked, not sure from his expression if he meant it literally or had someone in mind.

‘I trained as a priest in Rio before I realised that my true calling lay in financing God’s will rather than trying to live by it.’ He fiddled with the buckle of his belt, aligning it with his shirt buttons. ‘But I still recognise the hand of evil when I see it.’

‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘Of course.’ With the memory of Ricci’s staring eyes and Argento’s congealed scream still fresh in her mind, it was hard not to agree with him.

‘The irony, of course, was that, despite working for us, poor Gio was not a true believer.’ Santos glanced up at Allegra with a rueful smile. ‘He used to say that life was too short to waste it worrying about what might happen when he was dead. At times like this, when it almost seems that God might have deserted us, I almost understand what he meant.’

Folding the sheet back over Argento’s face, Santos made the sign of the cross and then eased the drawer back into the wall and swung the door shut. It closed with a hollow metal clang, the echo reverberating around them as if a stone slab had been dropped over a tomb. Allegra turned to leave, then paused.

‘I wonder, did he ever mention an organisation or group called the Delian League?’

‘The Delian League? Not as far as I remember.’ Santos shook his head, frowning in thought. ‘Why, who are they? Do you think they…?’

‘It’s just a name I’ve come across,’ she reassured him with a smile. ‘It probably means nothing. Shall I see you out?’

A large Mercedes with diplomatic plates was waiting for Santos on the street outside. The chauffeur jogged round and held the rear door open for him.

‘A small perk of the job,’ Santos smiled as he shook her hand. ‘Saves me a fortune in parking tickets.’

He slipped inside and peered up at her through the open window, an earnest look on his face.

‘Gio had many faults, but he was a good man, Lieutenant Damico. He deserved better. I hope you catch whoever did this to him.’

‘We’ll do our best,’ she reassured him with a nod.

The windo hummed shut and Santos settled back into his seat. As the car drew away, he reached for his phone.

‘You know who it is. Don’t hang up,’ Santos said carefully when the number he had dialled was answered. ‘I need a favour. And then I’m gone. For good this time, you have my word.’

TWENTY-ONE

Hotel Bel-Air, Stone Canyon Road, Los Angeles

18th March – 7.12 a.m.

Verity always sat at the same table for breakfast. In the far left corner, under the awning, behind a swaying screen of bamboo grass. It was close enough to the entrance to be seen by anyone coming in, sheltered enough not to be bothered by anyone walking past.

‘Good morning, Ms Bruce.’ Philippe, the maître d’, bounded up to her, his French accent so comically thick that she wondered if he worked on it at home. ‘Your papers.’

He handed her meticulously folded copies of the Washington Post and the Financial Times, both still warm from being pressed. Politics and money. The cogs and grease of life’s little carousel, even if the deepening global economic downturn had rather slowed things recently

‘Your guest is already here.’

She pushed her sunglasses back on to her head with a frown and followed his gaze to where Earl Faulks was sitting waiting for her, absent-mindedly spinning his phone on the tablecloth.

‘He tried to sit in your seat,’ Philippe continued in an outraged whisper. ‘I moved him, of course.’

Faulks had just turned fifty but was still striking in a gaunt, patrician sort of way, his dark hooded eyes that seemed to blink in slow motion looming above a long oval face and aquiline nose, silver hair swept back off a pale face. He was wearing a dark blue linen suit, white Charvet shirt with a cut-away collar, Cartier knot cufflinks and one of his trademark bow-ties. Today’s offering was a series of garish salmon pink and cucumber green stripes that she assumed denoted one of his precious London clubs.

‘Verity! Looking gorgeous as always.’

He rose with a smile to greet her, leaning heavily on an umbrella, an almost permanent accessory since a riding accident a few years ago. She ignored him and sat down, a waiter pushing her chair in for her, the maître d’ snapping her napkin on to her lap.

‘Muesli with low-fat yogurt?’ he asked, his tone suggesting he already knew what her answer would be.

‘Yes please, Philippe.’

‘And a mineral water and a pot of fresh tea?’

‘With lemon.’

‘Of course. And for monsieur?’ He turned to Faulks, who had sat back down and was observing this ritualistic exchange with a wry smile.

‘Toast. Brown. Coffee. Black.’

‘Very well.’ The maître d’ backed away, clicking his fingers at one of the waiters to send him running to the kitchen.

Verity reached into her handbag and took out an art deco silver cigarette case engraved with flowers. Opening it carefully, she tipped the thirty or so pills it contained into a small pile on her side plate. They lay there like pebbles, an assortment of vitamins and herbal supplements in different shapes and sizes and colours, some of the more translucent ones glinting like amber.

‘Verity, darling, if you go on being this healthy, it’ll kill you,’ Faulks warned as their drinks arrived.

He was American, a shopkeeper’s son from Baltimore, if you believed his detractors – of which he had amassed his fair share over the years. Not that you could detect his origins any more; his affected accent, clipped way of speaking and occasional Britishisms reminded her of a character from an Edith Wharton novel. She’d always thought it rather a shame that he didn’t smoke – she imagined that a silver Dunhill lighter and a pack of Sobranies would have somehow suited the casual elegance of his slender fingers.

‘I mean, what time did your trainer have you up this morning for a run? Five? Six? Only tradesmen get up that early.’

‘I’m still not talking to you, Earl,’ she replied, watching carefully as the waiter strained her tea and then delicately squeezed a small piece of lemon into it.

‘You were the one who wanted to meet,’ he reminded her. ‘I was packing for the Caribbean.’

She ignored him again, although she couldn’t help but feel a pang of envy. Faulks seemed to ride effortlessly in the slipstream of the super rich as their sumptuous caravan processed around the world: Gstaad in February, the Bahamas in March, the La Prairie clinic in Montreux in April for his annual check-up, London in June, Italy for the summer, New York for the winter sales, and then a well-earned rest before the whole gorgeous procession kicked off again.

She began to sort her pills into the order in which she liked to take them, although she had long since forgotten the logic by which she’d arrived at this particular sequence. Satisfied, she began to take them in silence, washing each one down with a mouthful of water and a sharp jerk of her head.

‘Fine, you win,’ Faulks said eventually, throwing his hands up in defeat. ‘What do you want me to do? Apologise? Wear a hair shirt? Walk up the Via Dolorosa on my knees?’

‘Any of those would be a start.’ She glared at him.

‘Even when I come bearing gifts?’ He unfolded his napkin to reveal three vase fragments positioned to show that they fitted cleanly together. ‘The final pieces of the Phintias calyx krater that you’ve been collecting for the past few years.’ He smiled at her. ‘In our profession, patience truly is a necessity, not a virtue.’

‘The same fragments I seem to remember you wanted a hundred thousand for last year,’ Verity said archly. ‘Are you feeling generous or guilty?’

‘If I had a conscience I wouldn’t be in this business,’ he replied with a smile, although there was something in his voice that suggested that he was only half joking. ‘Let’s call it a peace offering.’

‘Have you any idea of the embarrassment you’ve caused me?’

‘You have nothing to be embarrassed about,’ he assured her.

‘Tell that to Thierry Normand and Sir John Sykes. According to them, I paid you ten million dollars for something that was at best “anomalous”, at worst a “pastiche”.’

‘Pastiche?’ Faulks snorted. ‘Did you tell them about the test results? Don’t they know it’s impossible to fake that sort of calcification?’

‘By then they weren’t listening.’

‘You mean they didn’t want to hear,’ he corrected her. ‘Don’t you see, Verity, darling, that they’re all jealous. Jealous of your success. Jealous that while their donors have pulled back as the recession has begun to bite, the Getty remains blessed with a three-billion-dollar endowment.’

‘Sometimes I think it’s more a curse than a blessing,’ she sniffed. ‘Do you know we have to spend four and a quarter per cent of that a year or lose our tax status? Have you any idea how hard it is to get through one hundred and twentyseven million dollars a year? Of the pressure it puts us under?’

‘I can only imagine,’ he commiserated, shaking his head. ‘That’s why the kouros was a smart buy. After all, don’t you think the Met would have made a move if they’d been given even half a chance? But you beat them to it.’

‘Vivienne Foyle is close to the Met.’ She nodded grudgingly, remembering how she had twisted the knife right at the end. ‘She’s never liked me.’

‘The problem here isn’t the kouros,’ Faulks insisted, his full baritone voice taking on the fervent conviction of a TV evangelist. ‘The problem is people’s unwillingness to accept that their carefully constructed picture of how Greek sculpture developed over the centuries might need to be rewritten. They should be thanking you for opening their eyes, for deepening their understanding, for extending the boundaries of their knowledge. Instead, they’re seeking to discredit you, just as the church did with Galileo.’

She nodded, rather liking this image of herself as an academic revolutionary that the establishment was desperate to silence at all costs. The problem was, she didn’t have the time or the temperament to become a martyr.

‘I agree with you. If I didn’t, the kouros would already be on its way back to Geneva. But the damage is done. Even if they’re wrong, it’ll take years for them to admit it. Meanwhile the director can’t look me in the eye, the trustees have asked for a second round of tests, and the New York Times is threatening to run a piece at the weekend. I mean, what if something else comes out?’

‘Nothing else will come out,’ Faulks said slowly, his voice suddenly hard. ‘Not unless someone’s planning to talk. And nobody’s planning to talk, are they, Verity?’

It was phrased as a question, but there was no doubting that he was giving her a very clear instruction. Maybe even a warning.

‘Why would I risk everything we’ve achieved together?’ she said quickly.

‘You wouldn’t,’ he said, his eyes locked unblinkingly with hers. ‘But others…well. I don’t like to be disappointed.’

There was an icy edge to his voice and she gulped down a few more pills, wishing that she’d packed some Valium as well. Almost immediately, however, Faulks’s face thawed into a warm smile.

‘Anyway, let’s not worry about that now. I understand that you’re upset. And I want to make it up to you. What are you doing tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow?’ She frowned. ‘Tomorrow I’ll be in Madrid. The US ambassador is hosting a two-day cultural exchange. We fly out this afternoon. Why?’

‘There’s something I want to show you.’ He reached inside his jacket and handed her a Polaroid. ‘I was hoping you might come to Geneva.’

‘Do you really think that, after what happened yesterday, the director is going to let me buy anything from you again?’ she asked, taking the photo from him with an indifferent shrug.

‘You won’t have to. It’ll come to you as a donation.’

She glanced down at the photo, then heard herself gasp.

‘Is it…?’ she whispered, her mouth suddenly dry, her hands trembling, her chest tight.

‘Genuine? Absolutely,’ he reassured her. ‘I’ve seen it myself. There’s no question.’

‘But no one has ever found…’

‘I know.’ He gave her a schoolboy’s wide grin. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’

‘Who’s it by?’

‘Come now, Verity – 450 BC? Can’t you guess?’

There was a pause, her eyes still not having lifted from the photograph.

‘Where is it now?’

‘On its way to me.’

‘Provenance?’

‘Private Lebanese collection since the 1890s. I have all the documentation.’

Another pause as she carefully placed the photograph on the table, sipped some water and then looked up hungrily.

‘I have to see it.’

TWENTY-TWO

Headquarters of the Guarda di Finanza, Viale XXI Aprile, Rome

18th March – 4.25 p.m.

The headquarters of the Guarda di Finanza was located to the north-east of the city centre, just beyond the Porta Pia. It occupied a Spanish-looking building, with shutters at every window and its walls painted a dusty yellow and rich ochre colour. The main entrance was surmounted by the Italian and European Union flags, but these were sagging limply, the light breeze that was chasing the rain clouds away registering only in the rustling fronds of the palm tree that stood to the left of the door.

In a way, Allegra reflected as she stepped out of her taxi, it was perhaps better for her to catch up with Gallo here, rather than at the mortuary. This, after all, was where the physical evidence from the two murders was being kept, giving her the opportunity to have another look at the lead discs in the light of what Aurelio had told her and to get her story straight before seeing him.

Not that the decision to house the evidence here would have been a simple one, given all the different law enforcement agencies with a potential stake in this case. The Guarda di Finanza, for one, was a sprawling empire, covering not only Gallo’s organised crime unit but a variety of money-related crimes such as tax evasion, Customs and border checks, money laundering, smuggling, international drugs trafficking and counterfeiting. A military corps, it even had its own naval fleet and air force.

Allegra’s art and antiques unit, meanwhile, was part of the Arma dei Carabinieri, a paramilitary force with police duties that also oversaw counterterrorism operations, the forensic bureau, the military police, undercover investigations and, bizarrely, sanitary enforcement.

Then, of course, there was the state police, a civilian force that, as well as having responsibility for routine patrolling, investigative and law enforcement duties, also oversaw the armed, postal, highway and transport police forces. And this was not to forget the various layers of provincial, municipal and local police, prison officers, park rangers and the coast guard who further crowded the picture.

In fact, Allegra seemed to remember from one of the induction lectures she had had to endure upon first joining up, any one area in Italy could theoretically be under the jurisdiction of up to thirty-one different police or police-type forces. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a sea-fog of overlapping responsibilities, unclear accountabilities and red tape that more often than not led to the different agencies competing against each other when they should have been collaborating.

Allegra’s temporary secondment from the Carabinieri to their fierce rivals at the Guarda di Finanza was, therefore, a relatively unusual request on Gallo’s part, as proved by the raised eyebrows of the duty officer who buzzed her in and directed her towards the basement.

Following the signs, she found the evidence store next to the armoury. It was secured by a steel door with a lock but no handle, suggesting that it could only be opened from the inside. Next to it, a low counter had been chopped out of the reinforced concrete wall. An elderly officer in a neatly pressed grey uniform with gold buttons and a green beret was sitting on the other side behind a screen of bullet-proof glass. Allegra knocked on the window and then placed her ID flat against it.

‘You’re a long way from home, Lieutenant.’ The man gave her a quizzical look over the top of his glasses, his feet up and the newspaper resting across his knee. His badge identified him as Enrico Gambetta.

‘I’ve been seconded on to the Argento case,’ she explained.

‘You’re working with Colonel Gallo!’ Gambetta struggled to his feet, anxiously peering out into the corridor as if he half expected Gallo to jump out of the shadows.

‘Until he decides he doesn’t need me any more,’ she said, unable to stop herself wondering what strange gravitational anomaly was securing Gambetta’s trousers around his enormous waist.

‘So he got my message?’ he asked excitedly. ‘He sent you to see me.’

‘Your message?’ She frowned.

‘About the other murder.’

‘I haven’t spoken to him all afternoon,’ she said with a shrug. ‘I was just hoping to take another look at the lead discs from the Argento and Ricci killings before I see him.’

‘The lead disc – exactly!’ He beamed, looking like he might break into a lumbering jig. ‘Like the ones you found in their mouths, right?’

‘How do you know that?’ Allegra asked sharply.

‘When you’ve been around as long as I have, you get to hear about most things.’ He winked. ‘Now, I can’t really let you sign it out, but…’ He paused, clearly trying to decide what to do. ‘Wait there.’

A few moments later there was the sound of bolts being thrown back and the steel door opened. Gambetta stuck his head out into the corridor and, having checked that it was empty, ushered her inside.

‘Are you sure I’m allowed to…?’ she began, frowning.

‘I won’t tell if you won’t,’ he whispered, as if afraid of being overheard. ‘But I need to show somebody. Are you carrying?’

‘Yes.’ She swept her jacket back to reveal the gun holstered to her waist.

‘Pick it up on your way out.’ He tapped his desk, the determined look on his face telling her that this was one rule he clearly wasn’t prepared to turn a blind-eye to.

‘Of course.’

The room was divided into five narrow aisles by a series of floor-to-ceiling metal shelving units. Waddling unsteadily, Gambetta led her down the second aisle. Allegra blinked as she followed him, her eyes adjusting to the anaemic glow of the overhead strip lighting that was competing for ceiling space with a snaking mass of heavily lagged water pipes and colour-coded electrical cabling. Even so, she could see that the shelves were crammed with hundreds, if not thousands, of cardboard boxes and plastic evidence bags, each one sealed and diligently identified by a white tag.

‘They think that all we do down here all day is sit on our arses and read the paper,’ Gambetta moaned, grabbing hold of a small set of steps and wheeling them ahead of him, one of the wheels juddering noisily on the concrete. ‘They forget that we have to check every piece of evidence in, and every piece out.’

‘Mmm.’ Allegra nodded, wondering how on earth he managed to bend down to tie his shoes every day, until she realised that he was wearing slip-ons. Not that that accounted for his socks.

‘Most of the time they barely know what the people in their own teams are doing, let alone the other units,’ he called back excitedly over his shoulder. ‘That’s why they missed it.’

The neon tube above where he had stopped was failing, the light stuttering on and off with a loud buzzing noise, creating a strange strobing effect. Climbing up the steps, he retrieved a box that Allegra could see was marked Cavalli and dated the fifteenth of March.

‘It’s the Ricci and Argento cases I’m interested in,’ she reminded him impatiently, but he had already placed the box on the top step and ripped the seal off.

‘Three murders in three days. They may have me stuck down here in the dark with the rats and the boiler, but I’m not stupid.’ He tapped the side of his head with a grin.

‘Three murders?’ She frowned.

‘I left the details on Gallo’s answer machine: Luca Cavalli. A lawyer from Melfi they found hanging from the Ponte Sant’ Angelo with this in one of his pockets -’

He reached into the box and handed her a clear evidence bag. It contained a small lead disc, the plastic slippery against its dull surface as if it had been coated with a thin layer of oil. And engraved on one side, just about visible in the flickering light, was the outline of two snakes and a clenched fist.

TWENTY-THREE

J. Edgar Hoover Building, FBI headquarters, Washington DC

18th March – 10.31 a.m.

Tom had given them half an hour or so before making his move. Long enough for Ortiz, Stokes and whoever else had been lurking on the other side of the two-way mirror to have dispersed, but not so long for them to feel the need to check up on him again.

Stepping quickly to the door he flashed Jennifer’s pass through the reader. The device beeped, its light flashing from red to green as the magnetic seal was released. The FBI was good at many things but, as he had suspected, operational efficiency wasn’t one of them. News of Jennifer’s death would still barely have reached the Bureau’s higher grades, let alone filtered down to the foot soldiers who manned the IT and security systems. That gave him a small window of opportunity that would last until someone joined the dots and triggered whatever protocol disabled her access rights and log-ons.

Tom found himself momentarily clinging to this thought. In a way, it was almost as if she wasn’t really dead yet, kept alive instead in a sort of digital limbo. Not that it would last, he realised with a heavy heart. Soon a remorseless and faceless bureaucracy would see to it that the delicate electronic threads to Jennifer’s life were severed. One by one, bank accounts, driver’s licence, social security number, email addresses would all lapse or be cancelled, each heavy keystroke and deleted file wiping a little more of her from the world, until all that would remain were his fading memories.

Swallowing hard and trying to clear his head, Tom ripped the fire evacuation instructions off the back of the door and stepped out into a white corridor. Not wanting to appear lost amidst the thin trickle of people making their way along it, he immediately turned to his right and followed the arrows on the map at the top of the laminated sheet towards what looked like the main fire escape stairwell.

Just before he reached it, however, he came across an open doorway. Glancing inside, he could see that it appeared to be some sort of storeroom – a photocopier idling in the corner, pens, paper and envelopes carefully sorted by type and size stacked on the shelves. More promising was the blue FBI jacket that someone had left hanging over the back of a chair and the internal phone screwed to the wall. Darting inside he slipped the jacket on as a rudimentary disguise, then dialled the operator.

‘I’m trying to find Jennifer Browne’s office,’ He explained when the call was answered. ‘She’s normally based in New York with the Art Crime Team, but she’s been spending some time here lately. I wanted to swing by and surprise her.’

‘Let’s see,’ the voice came back, her fingernails tap-dancing noisily on her keyboard in the background. ‘Browne, Jennifer. Oh yeah, she’s got her calls diverting to Phil Tucker’s office up on five while he’s on leave.’

Memorising the room number, Tom slipped back out into the corridor and headed for the stairwell. He knew that this was a long-shot, that the odds of him getting out of this building undetected and with what he needed were slim. But he’d rather take his chances out here, where he at least had some say in the outcome, than sit in a dark room while Jennifer’s killer slipped even further over the horizon. He owed her that at least. He wouldn’t allow her to fade away.

Clearing the call, the operator immediately dialled another extension.

‘Yes, good morning, sir, it’s the switchboard. I’m sorry to bother you, but you asked that we should let you know if anyone asked for the location of Special Agent Browne’s office. Well, someone just did.’

TWENTY-FOUR

Headquarters of the Guarda di Finanza, Viale XXI Aprile, Rome

18th March – 4.36 p.m.

‘When was this?’ Allegra asked, returning the bag containing the lead disc with a puzzled frown.

‘The fifteenth,’ Gambetta replied, placing it carefully back in the box.

‘The fifteenth?’ she shot back incredulously. ‘He died on the fifteenth of March? Are you sure?’

‘That’s what it said in the case file,’ he confirmed, looking startled by her reaction. ‘Why?’

The fifteenth was the Ides of March, the same day that Caesar had been killed over two thousand years before. Cavalli and Ricci’s murders weren’t just linked by the lead disc. They were echoes of each other.

‘What was he doing in Rome?’ she asked, ignoring his question.

‘He owned a place over in Travestere. Was probably up and down here on business.’

‘Who found him?’

‘River police on a routine patrol. He was hanging from one of the statues on the bridge – the Angel with the Cross, from what I can remember. Their first thought was that it was a suicide, until some bright spark pointed out that his wrists were tied behind his back. Not to mention that the rope would have decapitated him if he’d jumped from that height.’

‘You mean he was deliberately lowered into the water?’ Allegra asked in a sceptical tone.

‘The current there is quite strong. Whoever killed him clearly wanted to draw it out. Make sure he suffered.’

She detected the same hint of horrified fascination in Gambetta’s voice that she’d noticed in herself when she’d first caught sight of Ricci’s body.

‘Why’s the GDF involved? It sounds more like one for the local Questura.’

‘It was, until they impounded his Maserati near the Due Ponti metro and found fifty thousand euro in counterfeit notes lining the spare wheel. Anything to do with currency fraud gets referred here.’

She nodded slowly, her excitement at this unexpected breakthrough tempered by the depressing thought that this was probably going to make an already difficult case even more complicated. Something of her concern must have shown in her face because Gambetta fixed her with a worried look.

‘Is everything okay? I hope I haven’t…’

‘You did the right thing,’ she reassured him. ‘I’m sure Colonel Gallo will want to come down here in person to thank you.’

Gambetta beamed, a vain attempt to pull his stomach in and push his chest out making his face flush.

‘Do you mind if I have a quick look through the rest of Cavalli’s stuff?’

‘Of course not. Here, I’ll move it over there where you can see properly.’ He scooped the box up and led her a short way further down the aisle to where a battered angle-poise lamp decorated with the small stickers found on imported fruit had been arranged on a folding table. ‘That’s better.’

‘Much,’ she smiled. ‘You’ve been incredibly -’

There was a rap against the counter window at the far end of the room. Gambetta placed his fingers against his lips.

‘Wait here,’ he whispered conspiratorially. ‘I’ll get rid of them.’

He lumbered back towards the entrance, leaving Allegra to go through the rest of the contents of the box. Much of it was what you’d expect to find in someone’s pockets: a mobile phone – no longer working – some loose change, reading glasses, a damp box of matches and an empty pack of Marlboro Lights. His wallet, meanwhile, as loaded with the standard everyman paraphernalia of cash, bank cards, identity card and an assortment of disintegrating restaurant receipts.

There was a nice watch too – round and simple with a white face, elegant black Roman numerals and a scrolling date. Unusually, apart from the Greek letter Gamma engraved on the back of the stainless steel case, it seemed to have no make or logo marked anywhere on it, featuring instead a distinctive bright orange second hand which stood out against the muted background. Finally there was a set of keys – house and car, judging from the Maserati key fob.

An angry shout made her glance up towards the entrance. Gambetta seemed to be having an argument with the person on the other side of the window, his voice echoing towards her. As she watched, he stepped away from the window, unclipped his keys from his belt, and waved at her to get back.

Allegra didn’t have to be told what to do. Still clutching Cavalli’s keys, she retreated to the far end of the aisle and hid. Gambetta had done her a favour by letting her in here and the last thing she wanted to do was get him in trouble. Even so, she couldn’t quite resist peering around the edge of the pier as he unbolted the door.

She never even saw the gun, the rolling echo of the shot’s silenced thump breaking over her like a wave before she’d even realised what was happening. The next thing she knew, Gambetta was staggering back, his arms flailing at his throat, legs buckling like an elephant caught in a poacher’s snare. He swayed unsteadily for a few moments longer, desperately trying to stay on his feet. Then, with a bellow, he crashed to the concrete floor.

TWENTY-FIVE

J. Edgar Hoover Building, FBI headquarters, Washington DC

18th March – 10.37 a.m.

The fifth floor was much busier than the one he had just come from. Even so, Tom wasn’t worried about being recognised. Of the eight thousand or so people who worked out of this building, he doubted whether any more than five knew who he was. And rather than hinder him, the floor’s bustling, largely open-plan configuration made it easier for him to blend in and move around unchallenged.

What was immediately clear, however, was that here, news of what had happened last night in Vegas had already spread. There was a strained atmosphere, people going about their usual business with a forced normality, judging from their sombre faces and the irritable edge to their voices. Tom, it seemed, wasn’t the only one who was finding comfort in anger’s rough-hewn arms. And yet, amidst the bitterness, he detected something else in people’s eyes, something unsaid but no less powerfully felt. Relief. Relief that it hadn’t been them. He wondered how many people had called up their wives or boyfriends or children this morning upon hearing what had happened, just to hear the sound of their voice. Just to let them know that they were okay.

As the operator had suggested, Tom found the room Jennifer had been camping out in the northeastern quadrant of the building. Like all the other offices that lined the perimeter of the floor, it was essentially a glass box, albeit one with a view of 9th Street and a nameplate denoting the identity of its rightful owner – Phil Tucker. Unlike the rooms which flanked it, however, its door was shut and all the blinds drawn in what Tom assumed was a subtle and yet deliberately symbolic mark of respect. Less clear was whether this was a spontaneous reaction to Jennifer’s death or part of some well-defined and yet unwritten mourning ritual that was observed whenever a colleague fell in the line of duty. Either way, it suited him well, concealing him from view once he had satisfied himself that no one was watching him and slipped inside.

Almost immediately, Tom’s heart sank. Perhaps without realising it until now, he had secretly been hoping to find a bit more of Jennifer here, even though he knew that this had only ever been a very recent and temporary home for her. Instead it boasted a sterile anonymity that was only partly lifted by Tucker’s scattered photographs and random personal trinkets. Then again, he couldn’t help but wonder if Jennifer’s hand wasn’t perhaps present in the clinical symmetry of the pens laid out on the desktop and the ordered stack of files and papers on the bookshelf, that he suspected had probably been littering the floor when she had first taken ownership of the room. And there was no debating who was responsible for the lipstick-smeared rim of the polystyrene cup that was still nestling in the trash. He gave a rueful smile. She had been here, after all. He was a guest, not an intruder.

The safe was in a cupboard under the bookshelf. With a weary sigh, he saw that it was protected by both a password and voicerecognition software, two red lights glowing ominously over the small input screen. Tricky. Very tricky, unless…He glanced up at her desk hopefully. The light on her phone was glowing red to indicate that somebody had left her a voicemail. With any luck, that also meant that she’d recorded a greeting.

He picked the phone up and dialled Jennifer’s extension, the second line beeping furiously until it tripped over into the voicemail system.

‘You’ve reached Special Agent Jennifer Browne in the FBI’s Art Crime Team…’ Tom’s stomach flipped over at the sound of her voice, as if he’d just gone over a sharp hump in the road. She sounded so close, so real that for a moment it was almost as if…It was no use, he knew. This was an illusion that would dissolve the moment he tried to warp his arms around it. He needed to stay focused. ‘Please leave a message…’

He replaced the handset. That would do. Now for the password. He bent down and opened each of the desk drawers, guessing that the lipstick on the cup was a sign that Jennifer, for all her refusal to play conventional sexual politics at work, had still occasionally worn make-up. He was right. The third drawer down yielded a small make-up bag and within that, a powder brush.

Kneeling next to the safe, he gently dusted the brush over the keys and then carefully blew away the excess. The result certainly wasn’t good enough to lift prints from, but it did allow him to see which keys had been most recently and heavily used, the powder sticking more thickly to the sweat left there.

Reading from left to right, this highlighted the letters A, C, R, V, G, I and O. Tom jotted them down in a circle on a piece of paper, knowing that they formed an anagram of some other word, although there was no way of telling how many times each letter had been used. The key was to try and get inside Jennifer’s head. She would have chosen something current, something relevant to what she had been working on. A name, a place, a person…Tom smiled, seeing that the last three letters had given him an obvious clue. G, I, O – Caravaggio, perhaps? He typed the word in and one of the two lights flashed green.

Reaching the phone down from the desk, he listened to Jennifer’s greeting a few more times to get a feel for the timing of exactly when she said her name. Then, just at the right moment, he placed the handset against the microphone before quickly snatching it away again. The second light flashed green. With a whir, the door sprang open.

He reached inside and pulled out a handful of files and a stack of surveillance DVDs. Returning the discs to the safe, he flicked through the files, discarding them all apart from one that Jennifer had initialled in her characteristically slanting hand.

Sitting at the desk, he unsealed the file and scanned through it, quickly recognising in the typed pages and photographs the details of the case that Jennifer had laid out for him on their way to Vegas. The anonymous Customs tip-off. The discovery of the Eileen Gray furniture hidden in the container. The tracing of the container to a warehouse in Queen’s. The raid on the warehouse and the discovery of an Aladdin’s cave of illegally exported antiquities. The panic-stricken dealer’s stumbling confession. A copy of his doodled sketch of the two snakes wrapped around a clenched fist, the symbol of the so-called Delian League that the forensic lab had reconstituted from strips of yellow paper recovered from his shredding bin. Bank statements. An auction catalogue. And, of course, the name provided by the dealer which Jennifer had passed on to the Italian authorities who had rewarded her with an address in Rome and a promise to follow-up: Luca Cavalli, Vicolo de Panieri, Travestere. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

Closing the file with a satisfied smile he stood up, only to brush against the mouse as he turned to leave. The log-on screen immediately flickered on, the cursor flashing tauntingly at him. He stared at it for a few moments and then, shrugging, sat down again. It was worth a try.

TWENTY-SIX

Headquarters of the Guarda di Finanza, Viale XXI Aprile, Rome

18th March – 4.41 p.m.

Allegra snatched her head back, heart thudding, fist clenched, the teeth of Cavalli’s keys biting into her palm. Gambetta shot. No, executed. Executed here, right in front of her, in the basement of the Guarda di Finanza headquarters. It was ridiculous. It was impossible. And yet she’d seen it. She’d seen it and she only had to close her eyes to see it all over again.

Now wasn’t the time to panic, she knew. She needed to stay calm, think through her options. Not that she had many, beyond staying exactly where she was. Not with her gun stranded on the edge of Gambetta’s desk and only the length of the room separating her from the killer. Perhaps if she was quiet, she reasoned, he wouldn’t even realise…

The sudden hiss of polyester on concrete interrupted her skittering thoughts. She frowned, at first unable to place the noise, until with a sickening lurch of her stomach she realised that it was the sound of Gambetta’s corpse being dragged towards her.

She knew immediately what she had to do. Move. Move now while she still could; while the killer was still far enough away not to see or hear her. In a way, he’d made things easier for her. Now all she had to do was figure out which aisle he was coming down. As soon as she knew that, she’d be able to creep back to the entrance up one of the other ones. At least, that was the idea.

She shut her eyes and concentrated on the noise of the fabric of Gambetta’s uniform catching on the tiny imperfections in the concrete, fighting her instinct to run as the ticktock of the killer’s breathing got closer and closer, knowing that she had to be absolutely sure. Then, when it seemed that he must be almost on top of her, she opened them again. The second aisle. She was sure of it. The one she’d been standing in a few moments before when looking through Cavalli’s evidence box.

Taking a deep breath, she edged her head around the pier and peeked along the first aisle. It was empty. Her eyes briefly fluttered shut with relief. Then, crouching down, she slipped her shoes off and began to creep towards the exit, her stockinged feet sliding silkily across the cold floor. But she’d scarcely gone ten yards before suddenly, almost involuntarily, she paused.

She could see the killer.

Not his face, of course, but his back; through a narrow gap between the shelves as he dragged Gambetta towards her. Maybe if she…? No, she dismissed the thought almost as soon as it had occurred to her. It was stupid; she needed to get out of here while she still could. But then again, she couldn’t help herself thinking, what if someone here was working with him? It would certainly explain how he had got in. What if they now helped him escape in the confusion once she raised the alarm? She couldn’t risk that, not after what he’d done. A glimpse of his face, that was all she needed. Just enough to be able to give a description, if it came to that. If she was careful and stayed out of the light, he wouldn’t even know she was there.

Her mind made up, she edged carefully forward, trying to find a place where she could stand up without being seen, occasionally seeing the blur of the killer’s leg and his black shoes through cracks in the shelving as he backed towards her. Then, without warning, when he was almost parallel to her, Gambetta’s feet fell to the floor with an echoing thud.

Sensing her chance, she slowly straightened up, occasional gaps and openings between the shelves giving her first a glimpse of a belt, then the arrow tip of a tie, followed by the buttons of his jacket and finally the starched whiteness of his collar and the soft pallor of his throat. Through a narrow slit between two boxes.

There. She could see his face, or rather the outline of it, the overhead neon tube having blinked off yet again. Holding her breath, she waited until, with a clinking noise, the light stuttered on again, the image strobing briefly across her retina until it finally settled.

It was Gallo.

She instinctively snatched her head back, but the sudden blur of movement must have caught his eye because he called out angrily.

There was no time to think. No time to do anything. Except run. Run to the door, throw the bolts back, tumble through it, stumble up the steps and stagger out into the street, gasping with shock.

The world on its head.

TWENTY-SEVEN

J. Edgar Hoover Building,FBI headquarters, Washington DC 18th March-10.47 a.m.

Tom had found Jennifer’s password taped to the underside of the stapler. No great mystery there. It was always the same in these large organisations. Obsessed by security, IT insisted on people using ‘strong’ passwords that had to be changed every five minutes, and then claimed to be surprised when people chose to write them down. What else did they expect when most people struggled to remember their wedding anniversary, let alone a randomly assigned and ever-changing tencharacter alphanumeric code. The government was the worst offender of all.

He typed the password in and hit the enter key. Almost immediately the screen went blue. Then it sounded a long, strident beep. Finally it flashed up an ominously bland error message.

User ID and password not recognised. Please remain at your desk and an IT security representative will be with you shortly.

The phone started to ring. Tom checked the display and saw that it was Stokes, presumably tipped off by some clever piece of software that someone was trying to access Jennifer’s account. The Bureau was clearly more nimble and joined up than Tom had given them credit for earlier.

Shoving the file under his jacket, he leapt across to the door and, gingerly lifting the blind, looked outside. To his relief, everything seemed normal, the people working in the open-plan team room on the other side of the corridor still gazing into their screens or talking on the phone. Checking that no one was coming, he slipped out of the office and headed back towards the stairs and swiped the door open.

Almost immediately he jumped back, the stairwell thundering with the sound of heavy footsteps and urgent shouts that he knew instinctively were heading towards him. He glanced around, looking for somewhere to hide and realising that he had only moments to find it. But before he could move, he felt a heavy hand grip his shoulder. He spun round. It was Ortiz, his chest heaving, eyes staring.

‘This way,’ he wheezed, urging him towards an open office. ‘Quickly.’

Tom hesitated for a fraction of a second, but the lack of a better option quickly made up his mind for him. Following him inside, Tom watched as Ortiz shut the door behind him and let the blinds drop with a fizz of nylon through his fingers.

‘Can you really find them?’ he panted, peering through a narrow crack as a group of armed men, led by Stokes, charged past them towards Jennifer’s office.

‘What?’ Tom asked, not sure he’d heard right.

‘Jennifer’s killers? Can you find them?’ Ortiz repeated, spinning round to face him, his face glistening, the half-hidden tattoo on his neck pulsing as if it was alive.

‘I can find them.’ Tom nodded. ‘If I can get out of here, I can find them.’

Ortiz stared at him unblinkingly, as if trying to look for the trap that might be lurking behind Tom’s eyes.

‘Where are you going to go?’

‘It’s probably better you don’t know.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Whatever I have to,’ Tom reassured him in a cold voice. ‘What you can’t. What Jennifer deserves.’

Ortiz nodded slowly and gave a deep sigh, Tom’s words seeming to calm him.

‘Good.’ He stepped forward and pressed his card into Tom’s hand, pulling him closer until their faces were only inches apart. ‘Just call me when it’s done.’

Releasing his grip, Ortiz reached out and with a jerk of his wrist, flicked the fire alarm switch. The siren’s shrill cry split the air.

‘Go,’ he muttered, his eyes dropping to the floor. ‘Get outside with everyone else before I change my mind.’

With a nod, Tom sprinted back towards the stairwell, the siren bouncing deliriously off the walls. Taking the steps two at a time, he raced down towards the ground floor, doors above and below him crashing open as people streamed on to the staircase, their excited voices suggesting that they knew this wasn’t a drill.

As he cleared the first-floor landing, however, he was forced to slow to a walk, the crowd backing up ahead of him. Peering over their heads, he saw that a line of security guards was quickly checking everyone’s ID before allowing them to leave the building. Had Stokes tipped them off, guessing that he might be using the alarm as cover? Either way, Tom had to do something and do something quickly, before the tide of people behind him swept him into the guards’ waiting arms.

Waiting until he was almost at the bottom of the penultimate flight of stairs, Tom deliberately tripped the man ahead of him and, with a sharp shove, sent him crashing into the wall opposite. He smacked into it with a sickening crunch, a deep gash opening up in his forehead, the blood streaming down his face.

‘Let me through,’ Tom called, hauling the dazed man to his feet and throwing his arm around his shoulder. ‘Let me through.’

‘Get out the way,’ somebody above him called.

‘Get back,’ someone else echoed. ‘Man down.’

Seeing Tom staggering towards them, one of the guards stepped forward and supported the injured man on the other side. Together they lifted him along the narrow path that had miraculously opened through the middle of the crowd, people grimacing in sympathy at the unnatural angle of the man’s nose.

‘He needs a doctor,’ Tom called urgently. ‘He’s losing a lot of blood.’

‘This way, sir.’

The line of guards parted to let them through, another officer escorting them clear as he radioed for a medic. Reaching a safe distance, they sat the still groggy man down on the sidewalk, an ambulance announcing its arrival moments later by unnecessarily laying down three feet of rubber as it stopped. The paramedics jumped out, threw a foil blanket around the man’s shoulders and pressed a wet compress against his nose to stem the flow. Tom stepped back, leaving the two guards to crowd round with words of advice and encouragement. Then, seeing that no one was watching, he turned and walked away.

Standing at a seventh-storey window, FBI Director Green watched Tom disappear down D Street with a smile. Smartly dressed with a crisp parting in his brown hair, plump cheeks and perfectly capped teeth, he was engaged in a running battle with his weight, the various scarred notches on his belt showing the yo-yo fluctuations of his waistline.

He knew Kirk well enough to guess that he’d find a way out of that room and that, when he did, he’d head straight for Browne’s safe. That’s why he’d ordered her swipe card not to be cancelled. That’s why he’d briefed the operator to let him know if anyone called asking for directions to her office.

The truth was that Kirk was her best chance now. While the Bureau was holding its collective dick worrying about who was going to get blamed for one of its most promising young agents getting killed, Kirk would be out there making things happen. Browne had trusted Kirk with her life many times before now. It seemed only right to trust him with her death too.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Viale XXI Aprile, Rome 18th March-4.51 p.m.

Panting, Allegra sprinted on to the Via Gaetano Moroni and then right on to Via Luigi Pigorini, the cars here parked with typical Roman indifference -some up on the kerb, others end-on to fit into an impossibly narrow gap.

Gallo…a killer? It made no sense. It was impossible. But how could she ignore what she’d seen? The shots fired from the doorway; Gambetta staggering backwards and toppling to the floor like a felled tree; Gallo’s animal grunt as he had hauled the carcass across the concrete; his stony face and cold eyes.

She found her stride, her ragged breathing slowly falling into a more comfortable rhythm, her thoughts settling.

Had Gallo seen her face? She wasn’t sure. Either way, it wouldn’t take him long to pull the security footage. The only thing that mattered now was getting as far away from him as she could.

Seeing a taxi, she flagged it down and settled with relief into the back seat as she gave him her home address up on the Aventine Hill.

Whether Gallo had seen her or not, at least his motives seemed pretty clear. He’d killed Gambetta so that he couldn’t tell anyone else about his discovery of the links between the murders. Why else would he have paused under the faltering neon light where Gambetta had taken Cavalli’s evidence box down from its shelf. He’d been looking for the lead disc, so that no one else would think or know to make the connection. No one apart from her.

‘What number?’ the driver called back over his shoulder ten minutes later as they drew on to the Via Guerrieri.

‘Drive to the end,’ she ordered.

With a shrug, he accelerated down the street, tyres drumming on the cobbles as Allegra sank low into her seat and peered cautiously over the edge of the window sill.

There. About fifty yards past the entrance to her apartment. A dark blue Alfa with two men sat in the front, their mirrors set at an unnatural angle so they could see back up the street behind them. She didn’t recognise the driver as they flashed past, but the passenger…the passenger, she realised with a sinking heart, was Salvatore. Not only had Gallo clearly seen her, but he had already unleashed his men on to her trail.

‘Keep going,’ she called, keeping her head down. ‘I’ve changed my mind. Take me to…Take me to the Via Galvani,’ she ordered, settling on the only other place she could think of. ‘It’s off the Via Marmorata.’

Making a face, the driver mumbled something about women and directions, only to roll his eyes when they reached the Via Galvani ten minutes later and she again asked him to drive down it without stopping.

‘Do you even know where you’re going?’ he called back tersely over his shoulder.

‘Does it even matter as long as you get paid?’ she snapped as she warily scanned the street. This time there was no sign of Gallo or any of his men. ‘Here, this will do.’

Paying him, she got out and walked back up the street towards Aurelio’s apartment.

‘Ego sum principium mundi et finis sæculorum attamen non sum deus,’ came the voice from the speaker.

‘Not now, Aurelio,’ Allegra snapped. ‘Just let me in.’

There was the briefest of pauses. Then the door buzzed open. She made her way to the lift. Aurelio was waiting for her on the landing, a worried look on his face.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked as she stepped out.

‘I’m in trouble.’

‘I can see that. Come in.’

He led her silently into his office and perched anxiously on one arm of his leather chair rather than settling back into his seat as usual. Pacing from one side of the room to the other and speaking in as dispassionate a tone as she could, she described what she’d seen and heard: the Cavalli murder; the engraved discs; Gambetta’s shooting; the flickering shadow of Gallo’s pale face. Aurelio listened to all this while turning over a small piece of broken tile in his hands, studying it intently as if looking for something. When she eventually finished, there was a long silence.

‘It’s my fault.’ He spoke with a cold whisper. ‘If I’d known…I should never have got you involved with any of this.’

‘If you want to blame someone blame Gallo,’ she insisted with a hollow laugh.

‘I know someone. A detective in the police,’ Aurelio volunteered. ‘I could call him and-’

‘No,’ she cut him off with a firm shake of her head. ‘No police. Not until I understand what’s going on. Not until I know who I can trust.’

‘Then what do you need?’

‘A place to stay. A coffee. Some answers.’

‘The first two I can help with. The third…well, the third we might have to work on together.’

‘Two out of three’s a good start.’ She bent down and planted a grateful kiss on his forehead.

‘I should offer to make the coffee more often.’ He grinned. ‘Here, sit.’ Aurelio stood up and pulled her towards his chair. ‘Rest.’

She shut her eyes and tried to clear her mind, finding the familiar smell of Aurelio’s aftershave and the merry clatter of pans and clink of crockery as he busied himself in the kitchen strangely comforting. For a few seconds she imagined herself back at home, perched on the worktop, eagerly telling her mother about what had happened that day at school while she prepared dinner. But almost immediately her eyes snapped open.

Rest? How could she rest, after what she’d just seen? How could she rest, that Gallo was out there somewhere, looking for her.

She jumped up and padded cautiously to the window, standing to one side so she could check the street below without being seen. It was empty. Good. As far as she knew, she’d never spoken to Gallo or anyone else on the team about her friendship with Aurelio, so there was no reason to think they would come looking for her here. Not that she was in a position to put up much of a fight if they did, given that she was unarmed.

The realisation made her feel strangely vulnerable, and she patted her hip regretfully, missing her weapon’s reassuring solidity and steadying ballast. If only…she had a sudden thought and glanced across at Aurelio’s desk. Somewhere inside it, she seemed to remember, he had a gun. It was completely illegal, of course-a Soviet Makarov PM that he’d picked up in a souk to protect himself from the local bandits while working on a dig in Anatalya. But right now, she wasn’t sure that mattered.

She crossed over to the desk, noticing the closely typed notes for a lecture that according to the cover page Aurelio was giving at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj the following day. Crouching down next to it, she tried each of the overflowing drawers in turn, her fingers eventually closing around the weapon at the back of the third drawer, behind some cassette tapes and a fistful of receipts.

She slid out the eight-round magazine. It was full and she tapped it sharply against the desk in case the spring was stiff and the bullets had slipped away from the front of the casing. The gun itself was well maintained and looked like it had recently been oiled, the slide pulling back easily, the hammer firing with a satisfyingly solid click. It wasn’t much, she knew, but it was certainly better than nothing. Satisfied, she slapped the magazine home.

Deriving a renewed confidence from her find, she sat down again in Aurelio’s chair and tried to clear her head. But she soon found her thoughts wandering again. To Gambetta and what he’d told her; to Gallo and her escape; to Salvatore and how close she’d come to falling into his grasp; to Aurelio and the sanctuary he was providing. And annoyingly, to the riddle that she had ignored earlier, but which had now popped back into her head.

‘I am the beginning of the world and the end of ages, but I am not God.’ She repeated the line to herself with a frown.

The beginning of the world-Genesis, dawn, a baby? But then how were any of these the end, she asked herself. And who else but God could claim to be at the beginning and end of time? Maybe she needed to be more literal, she mused-the Latin for world was mundi and for ages was sæculorum, so the beginning of mundi was…her eyes snapped open.

‘It’s the letter M,’ she called out triumphantly. ‘The beginning of mundi and the end of sæculorum is the letter M.’

Grinning, she walked into the kitchen. To her surprise it was empty, the kettle boiling unattended on the stove. Frowning, she turned the hob off and then stepped back into the hall.

‘Aurelio?’ she called, reaching warily for the gun.

There was no answer, although she thought she heard the faint echo of his voice coming from his bedroom. She stepped over to it, a narrow slit of light bisecting the worn floorboards where the door hadn’t quite been pulled to. Not wanting to interrupt, she pressed her ear against the crack and then froze. He was talking about her.

‘Yes, she’s here now,’ she heard him say in an urgent voice. ‘Of course I can keep her here. Why, what do you need her for?’

She backed away, the gun raised towards the door, her face pale, heart pounding, the blood screaming in her ears. First Gallo. Now Aurelio too?

Her eyes stinging, she turned and stumbled out of the apartment, down the stairs and on to the street, not knowing if she was crying from sadness or anger. Not sure if she even cared.

Not sure if she cared about anything any more.

TWENTY-NINE

Villa de Rome apartment building, Boulevard de Suisse, Monte Carlo, Monaco 18th March-5.23 p.m.

It was earlier than usual, but then Ronan D’Arcy figured he’d earned it. After a bloodbath in the first few months of the year, some of his shorts were finally beginning to pay off and the latest round of Middle Eastern sabre rattling had pushed his oil futures back to historic highs. If that didn’t warrant a drink, what did?

A helicopter droned overhead, circling low over the palace up on the hill, and then swooping back around to perch gracefully on the deck of one of the larger yachts lying at anchor in the harbour, the sea glittering like gold in the sinking sunlight. D’Arcy gave a rueful smile. It didn’t matter how good the market was or how well you thought you were doing, someone else, somewhere, was always doing better. It was a lesson that this place seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in beating into him at every opportunity. Still, he wasn’t going to let it spoil his little celebration.

He stepped off the balcony back into his office and quickly scanned the six trading screens that formed a low, incandescent wall on his desk to check that some random market sneeze hadn’t wiped out a good month’s work. Reassured, he picked up the phone and dialled the internal extension to the kitchen. If it had been a beer he could have fixed it himself, of course-he wasn’t that lazy. But celebrations called for cocktails, and cocktails called for mojitos, and Determination was the mojito-master.

Determination. He’d never get used to that name. It was from Botswana, or some other spearchucking African country that he’d never been able to find on a map. He’d heard of names such as Hope and Faith and Temperance. Even a Chastity, if you could believe that. But Determination…?

Maybe it wasn’t the name but the irony of it that jarred, D’Arcy reflected, his tanned forehead creasing in annoyance as the phone rang unanswered. Indolence. That would have been a more appropriate name. Lethargy. Torpidity. Yes, that was a good one. Where was the shiftless bastard now?

He slammed the phone down and clicked his mouse to bring up the apartment’s internal closed circuit TV system. The kitchen, laundry room, gym and billiard room were all empty. So too were the sitting rooms and the dining room. Which only left the…

D’Arcy paused, having suddenly noticed that, according to the camera in the entrance hall, the front door was wide open.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he swore. What was the point of flying in a specialist security company from Israel to fit armoured doors if the stupid fucker was going to leave them wide open?

Muttering angrily under his breath, he turned to leave, and then paused. The lights were on in the corridor outside, the travertine marble floor reflecting a narrow strip of light under his office door. But the pale band was broken by several dark shapes. Someone was standing outside, listening.

He punched the emergency shut-down button on his trading system and then sprang across to the bookcase. In the same instant the door burst open and two men came tumbling through the gap, guns raised. D’Arcy hit the panic-room release button. A section of the bookcase slid back and he leapt inside. The men started firing, the silenced shots searing the air with a fup-fupping noise. He slammed his hand against the ‘close’ switch, the door crashing shut with a hydraulic thump, leaving him in a strange deadened silence that echoed with the rasping gasps of his adrenaline-charged breathing.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck…’ Frantically he scrabbled in the sickly light for the phone. It was dead, his clammy fingers sliding on the moulded plastic as he stabbed at the hook switch. There was no dial tone, the line presumably cut at the junction box downstairs.

‘Mobile,’ he breathed, patting his jacket and trouser pockets excitedly until, his heart sinking, his eyes flicked to the monitor which showed a picture of his office. His phone was still where he’d left it on his desk.

He quickly reassessed his situation. Without a phone, there was no way of letting anyone know he was in here. That meant he’d have to wait until someone came looking for him. The chances were that his brokers in London would raise the alarm when he missed their usual morning call. That would be in-he checked his watch-less than sixteen hours’ time. In the meantime he was quite safe. After all, he’d had this place installed by a Brazilian firm who specialised in kidnap prevention. It had five-inch-thick steel walls, fortyeight hours of battery life if they cut the power, access to the CCTV system and a month’s worth of supplies. He might as well make himself comfortable and enjoy the show.

He sat back, his pulse slowing, and watched the men with an amused expression. They were arguing, he noticed with a smile. Probably trying to figure out which of them would carry the can for him having got away. At least he only planned to fire Determination, he thought to himself. Judging by their brutal methods, he doubted whether whoever had sent these two would be as forgiving when they learnt of his escape.

Suddenly he sat forward, his face drawn into a puzzled frown. The arguing had stopped, the men now intent on emptying the bookcase on to the floor and arranging its contents into a large uneven mound that pressed up against the panic room’s concealed entrance. Seemingly satisfied, they turned their attention to the walls, ripping the paintings down and tossing them on to the pile. They reserved special treatment for his Picasso, one of the men punching his fist through the Portrait of Jacqueline that had found its way to D’Arcy after being stolen a few years before from Picasso’s granddaughter’s apartment in Paris. Then he sent it spinning through the air to join the others.

D’Arcy shook his head, swearing angrily. Did they think he would come charging out to save a few old books and a painting? He valued his life far more dearly than that. Their petty vandalism was as pointless as it was…

He lost his train of thought, noticing with a frown that one of the men seemed to be spraying some sort of liquid over the jumble of books and canvases and wooden frames, while the other had lit a match. Glancing up at the camera with a smile, as if to make sure D’Arcy had seen them, the man with the match stepped forward and dropped it on to the pile. The screen flared white, momentarily blinded by a whoosh of fire.

D’Arcy was gripped by a chilling realisation. His eyes rose slowly from the screen to the small metal grille positioned in the right-hand corner of the panic room. To the thin tendrils of acrid smoke that were even now snaking through its narrow openings. To the acid taste at the back of his throat as he felt his lungs begin to clench.

THIRTY

Vicolo de Panieri, Travestere, Rome 19th March-7.03 a.m.

Tom had booked himself on to the afternoon flight out of DC, taking the obvious precaution of using another name. He never travelled without at least two changes of identity stitched into his bag’s lining and luckily the FBI had not thought to check whether he had left anything with the concierge at the hotel he’d been staying in the previous night.

There had been a relatively low-key police presence at Reagan International. Understandable, given that the FBI would probably be focusing all their efforts on the Vegas area if they were serious about catching him. After all, he’d dropped a pretty strong hint to Stokes that that was where he’d head in the first instance to pick up the killer’s trail.

He’d managed to snatch a few hours’ sleep, recouping a little of what he’d lost over the past two days, and then spent the rest of the flight reading through Jennifer’s file in a bit more detail. Most of it was by now familiar to him, although he had paused over the witness statements, bank records and various other documents that the FBI had seized in their raid on the art dealer’s warehouse in Queen’s which he hadn’t seen before. One, in particular, stood out and had triggered the call he was making now as his taxi swept into the city along the A91, accompanied by the dawn traffic and the chirping tones of the driver’s satnav system.

‘Archie?’ he said, as soon as he picked up.

‘Tom?’ Archie rasped, jet lag and what Tom guessed had probably been a heavy night at the hotel bar combining to give his voice a ragged croak. ‘What time is it? Where the hell are you?’

‘Rome,’ Tom answered.

‘Rome?’ he repeated sleepily, the muffled noise of something being knocked to the floor suggesting that he was groping for his watch or the alarm clock with one hand while digging the sleep out of his eyes with the other. ‘What the fuck are you doing in Rome? You’re meant to be in Zurich. What number is this?’

‘Jennifer’s dead,’ Tom said sharply. ‘It was a setup. The Caravaggio. The exchange. They were waiting for us.’

‘Shit.’ Any hint of tiredness had immediately evaporated from Archie’s voice. ‘You all right?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘What the fuck happened?’

‘Sniper,’ Tom said, trying not to think about what he’d seen or heard or felt, concentrating on just sticking to the facts. ‘Professional job.’

‘You’re sure she was the target?’

‘Pretty sure. Have you ever heard of an antiquities-smuggling operation called the Delian League?’

‘No. Why? Is that who you think did it?’

‘That’s what I’m in Rome to find out. That’s why I need you in Geneva.’

‘Of course,’ Archie replied instantly. ‘Whatever you need, mate.’

‘There’s a sale at Sotheby’s this afternoon,’ Tom said, glancing down at the circled entry in the Geneva auction catalogue that had been included in the file. ‘One of the lots is a statue of Artemis. It looks like Jennifer thought it was important. I want to know why.’

‘No worries,’ Archie reassured him. ‘What about you? What’s in Rome?’

‘A name. Luca Cavalli. He was fingered by someone Jennifer arrested in New York. I thought I’d start with him and work my way back up the ladder.’

A pause.

‘Tom…’ Archie spoke haltingly, for once lost for words. ‘Listen, mate, I’m sorry. I know you two were…I’m really sorry.’

Tom had thought that sharing the news of Jennifer’s murder with Archie might help unburden him in some way. But his hesitant awkwardness was so unusual that it was actually having the opposite effect, forcing Tom to reflect yet again on the events that had brought him here, rather than focus on the immediate task at hand.

‘Are you going to be all right?’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Tom said. ‘Just call me on this number when you get there.’

About fifteen minutes later the taxi pulled up. Tom stepped out.

It was a wide, cobbled street largely populated by neat four-storey buildings with symmetrical balconies and brightly coloured plaster walls. Cavalli’s house, by contrast, was a feral, hulking shape. Long and only two storeys high, its stonework was grey and wizened by age, the roof sagging under a red blister of sun-cracked tiles, the flaking green shutters at its upstairs windows betraying years of neglect. An old horse block stood to the right of the front door, while to the left, a large dilapidated arched gate suggested that the building had once served as some sort of workshop or garage.

For a moment, Tom wondered if he’d been misled by the sat-nav’s confident tone and been dropped off in the wrong place. But the seals on the door and the laminated notice declaring the premises a court-protected crime scene removed any lingering doubts. He was definitely in the right place. It just looked as though he was too late.

Hitching his bag across his shoulders and checking that the street was empty, Tom clambered quickly up the drainpipe, glad that he had changed out of his suit. Reaching across to the window, he could see that although it had been closed shut, the frame was warped and the latch old and loose. Pushing a knife into a narrow gap, he levered the blade back and forth, shaking the window so that the latch slowly worked itself free, until it popped open and he was able to clamber inside.

He found himself in what he assumed was a bedroom, although it was hard to be sure, the contents of the wardrobe having been swept on to the floor, the bed propped against the wall and the chest flipped on to its back, its emptied drawers lying prostrate at its side. It struck Tom that there was a deliberate violence in the way that the room had been upended. The police, for all their clumsiness, usually searched with a little more restraint. The people who had done this, however, hadn’t just been looking for something. They’d been trying to make a point.

He exited the bedroom on to a glass and stainless steel walkway that ran the length of the building and looked down on to a wide, doubleheight living space. Here the décor was as modern as the outside had been neglected, the back wall made of folding glass panels and looking out on to a small walled garden, the floor a dull mirror of polished concrete, the galley kitchen a mass of stainless steel that looked like it might double as an operating theatre.

Tom stepped along the walkway past a bathroom and another bedroom that had been similarly turned upside down. Then he made his way down a glass staircase to the ground floor, its icicle-like glass treads protruding unsupported from the wall. Down here, the brutality of the assault was, if anything, even more marked-the large plasma screen lifted off its brackets and broken almost in two across a chair; the seats and backs of the leather furniture slashed open, their innards ripped out in handfuls through the deep gashes; the coffee table overturned and its metal legs stamped on so that they were bent into strange, deviant shapes; the bookcase forced on to its front, crushing its contents underneath. There was a distinctive and unpleasant aroma too, and it was a few moments before Tom was able to guess at its meaning-not content with defeating these inanimate foes, the assailants had, it seemed, chosen to mark their victory by urinating on them.

A sudden noise from the front door made Tom look up. Someone was coming in, the bottom lock clunking open, the key now slipping into the top one. He knew immediately he wouldn’t have enough time to make it back upstairs.

That only left him one option.

THIRTY-ONE

19th March-7.22 a.m.

The seal ripped as the door opened. Someone stepped inside and then quickly eased it shut behind them. They paused. Then, with careful, hesitant footsteps, they walked down the small entrance hallway towards him.

Tom, his back pressed to the wall, waited until the intruder was almost level with him and then leapt out, sending their gun spinning across the floor with a chop to the wrist. Rather than press his advantage, however, Tom paused, surprised by the sudden realisation as he caught sight of their dark hair, that it was a woman. But this momentary hesitation was all the invitation she needed to turn and crash her right fist into his jaw, the force of the blow sending him staggering back with a grunt. Spinning round, she stretched towards the gun, but Tom stuck out a leg and tripped her, sending her sprawling headlong into an upturned chair. In a flash he was on top of her, digging his knee into the small of her back, trying to pin her arms to her sides. But with surprising force, she reached behind and, grabbing his arm, flipped him over her head and on to the floor, winding him.

Again she turned and scrambled towards the gun, but Tom, still coughing and trying to get his breath just managed to grab one of her ankles and drag her back, her leg thrashing wildly until she was able to kick herself free. Struggling to her feet, she reached down and grabbed one of the dislocated struts from the coffee table and then lunged at him with it, her face contorted with rage. Tom sidestepped the first downward swipe aimed at his head, but the second wild swing struck him with a painful thump at the top of his right arm, momentarily numbing it. Her attack provided him with an opening, however, because with his other hand he reached out and grabbed the end of the metal rod, and then yanked it sideways. The woman went with it, tripping over a small pile of books and collapsing on to her knees. By the time she was on her feet, the gun was in Tom’s hands and aimed at her stomach.

‘Trovisi giù,’ he wheezed. Her chest heaving, she gave him a long, hateful look and then lay face down on the floor as he’d ordered. Tom quickly patted her down, finding her wallet in her jeans pocket.

‘Siedasi là,’ he ordered as he opened it, waving the gun at a chair. Her eyes burning, she pulled herself to her feet, righted the chair he had indicated, and then sat in it.

‘Siete un poliziotto?’ he asked in surprise, the sight of her ID made him feel a little less embarrassed about his sore chin and throbbing arm. Tall and obviously strong, she was wearing jeans, a tight brown leather jacket and red ballet-style pumps. She was also very striking, with olive skin, a jet-black bob that was cut in a square fringe around her face and mismatched blue and brown eyes embedded within a smoky grey eye shadow. There was something odd about her appearance, though. Something that Tom couldn’t quite put his finger on yet, that didn’t quite fit.

‘Congratulations,’ she replied. ‘You’ve managed to assault a police officer and trespass on a crime scene before most people have got out of bed.’

‘Where did you learn English?’ Tom’s Italian was good, but her English, while slightly accented, was almost faultless.

She ignored him. ‘Put the gun down.’

‘You tell me what you’re doing here and I’ll think about it,’ he offered unsmilingly.

‘Who are you working for? Gallo?’ she shot back, ignoring his question.

‘Who’s Gallo?’

‘He didn’t send you?’ There was a hint of hope as well as disbelief in her voice.

‘Nobody sent me,’ he said. ‘I work for myself. I’m looking for Cavalli.’

A pause.

‘Cavalli’s dead.’

‘Shit,’ Tom swore, pinching the top of his nose and shutting his eyes as he gave a long, weary sigh. Cavalli had been his main hope of working his way back up the Delian League to whoever had ordered the hit. ‘How?’

She shook her head, eyeing him blankly, refusing to be drawn.

‘What does it matter, if he’s dead?’ Tom insisted.

Another pause as she considered this, before answering with a shrug.

‘He was murdered. Four days ago. Why?’

‘I wanted to talk to him.’

‘About what?’

‘This for a start-’ Tom held up the photocopied page showing the sketch of the symbol of the two snakes wrapped around a clenched fist. ‘I hoped he might…’

‘Where did you get that?’ she gasped.

‘You’ve seen it before?’

‘C-Cavalli,’ she stammered. ‘They found a lead disc in his pocket, that was engraved on it!’

‘Do you know what it means?’ Tom pressed, hoping that her obvious surprise might cause her to momentarily lower her guard to his advantage. But she quickly regained her composure, again glaring at him defiantly.

‘It means that you’ve got about five minutes to get out of here before someone comes looking for me.’

Tom studied her face for a few moments. She was bluffing.

‘Why wait?’ he said, offering her his phone. ‘Call it in.’

She gazed at the handset for a few moments, then lifted her eyes to his.

‘What are you doing?’

Tom smiled.

‘No one even knows you’re here, do they?’

She ignored his question, although the momentary flicker of indecision across her otherwise resolute face effectively answered it for him.

‘Just let me go,’ she repeated. ‘You’re in enough shit as it is.’

Tom went to reply and then paused, having suddenly realised what it was about her appearance that had been troubling him earlier. It was her hair, or rather the ragged way it had been cut, especially around the back, which seemed at odds with the rest of her. She’d clearly cut it herself. Recently. Probably dyed it too, given its unnaturally deep lustre.

‘Where did you put the bottles?’ he asked.

‘What?’ She shook her head, as if she wasn’t sure she’d heard him properly.

‘The empty dye bottles and the hair you cut off. Did you lose them somewhere safe? Because if you didn’t and whoever’s looking for you finds them, it won’t take them much to figure out what you look like now.’

Allegra gave him a long, curious look.

‘Who are you?’

‘Someone who can help,’ Tom said with a tight smile. ‘Because right now, I’m guessing you’re in a lot more shit than me.’

Leaning forward, he offered the gun to her, handle first.

THIRTY-TWO

Headquarters of the Guarda di Finanza, Viale XXI Aprile, Rome 19th March-7.22 a.m.

‘Colonel? We’ve got her.’

‘About time!’ Gallo grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair, pausing in front of the mirror to do up the silver buttons and centre his tie. ‘Her phone?’

‘She switched it on about ten minutes ago,’ Salvatore nodded, still standing in the corridor and leaning into the office.

‘How long for?’

‘Long enough. The signal’s been triangulated to a street in Travestere.’

‘Cavalli’s house?’ Gallo snapped, looking up into the mirror to seek out Salvatore’s eyes over his left shoulder.

‘Could be.’

Salvatore flinched and then relaxed into an uneasy smile as Gallo turned and raised his hand and gave him a sharp clap on the back.

‘Well done.’

Fixing his peaked cap on his head, he strode towards the lift. Twenty seconds later they stepped outside and walked outside towards two waiting cars. They climbed in, but just as Gallo was about to turn the key in the ignition, Salvatore’s phone rang. Gallo paused, glancing across questioningly as he took the call.

‘We know where she stayed last night,’ Salvatore explained, still listening, but with his hand shielding the microphone.

‘A hotel?’ Gallo guessed.

‘Out near the airport. The manager saw her picture this morning and called it in.’

‘They ran the story?’

Salvatore reached across to the back seat and handed Gallo a copy of that morning’s La Repubblica. Allegra ’s face dominated the front page under a single shouted headline:

Killer cop on the run.

‘Apparently she checked in late last night and paid in cash. I guess we got lucky.’

‘Funny how much luckier you get when you load the dice,’ Gallo growled as he scanned through the article. He wouldn’t normally have leaked the details of a case, but he’d seen enough of Allegra to realise that, for all her inexperience, she was smart. And in a city of 2.7 million people, that was more than enough to hide and stay hidden. The more people who knew what she looked like, the better. As long as he found her first.

Salvatore ended his call. Gallo turned the key.

‘Who else is running it?’

‘Everyone.’

‘What about the old man?’

‘Professor Eco?’

‘Is that what he calls himself?’ Gallo shrugged as he checked his mirrors and swung out, tyres shrieking.

‘According to him, she took off before telling him anything.’

‘I want him watched anyway,’ Gallo insisted. ‘Just in case she tries to contact him again.’

‘She’s probably armed now, by the way. Eco had a gun. Illegal. Says he can’t find it any more.’

‘Even better.’ Gallo gave a satisfied nod. ‘Gives us an excuse to go in heavy.’

Smiling, he punched the siren on.

THIRTY-THREE

Vicolo de Panieri, Travestere, Rome 19th March-7.27 a.m.

Allegra wasn’t about to take any chances. Snatching the gun from Tom’s grasp, she immediately turned it back on him. Unflustered, he settled into his chair.

‘Who are you running from?’ he asked.

The easy thing, the smart thing, she knew, would be to walk away right there and then. She had enough of her own problems already, without getting swept up into his.

But it wasn’t that simple. For a start, it was hard to ignore that, whoever this man was and whatever dark secret had drawn him to this place, it seemed to involve Cavalli and the mysterious symbol that had been linked to three different corpses. What’s more, he’d just placed his fate in her hands by handing her the gun. It was, she knew, a rather unsubtle attempt to win her trust. But it was a powerful gesture all the same, and one that had, if nothing else, earned him the right to be heard.

‘How can you help me?’ she demanded, answering his question with one of her own.

There was a pause, and she guessed from the slight twitch of his left eye that he was debating how much he should tell her.

‘Thirty-six hours ago a friend of mine was murdered,’ he said eventually. ‘Shot by a sniper in a casino in Vegas. I think they were killed because they were closing in on someone.’

‘“Closing in”? What was he, a cop?’ Allegra guessed with a surprised frown. This guy didn’t look or feel like any policeman she’d ever met.

‘She was FBI,’ he corrected her. ‘Special Agent Jennifer Browne. Cavalli was fingered by a man she arrested in New York. A dealer for a tombaroli smuggling ring. She found a drawing of the symbol I showed you in his trash. I’ve got the case file, if you want to see it,’ he offered, leaning forward to reach into his bag.

‘Wait,’ she said sharply. ‘Kick it over here.’

With a shrug, he placed his bag on the floor and slid it towards her with his foot. Keeping her eyes fixed on him, she felt inside it, her fingers eventually closing around a thick file that she pulled on to her lap. Seeing the FBI crest, she shot him a questioning, almost concerned look.

‘Don’t tell me you’re FBI too?’

‘No,’ he admitted.

‘Then where did you get this?’

A pause.

‘I borrowed it.’

‘You borrowed it?’ She gave him a disbelieving smile. ‘From the FBI?’

‘When one agent gets killed, another one gets blamed,’ he said, an impatient edge to his voice for the first time. ‘Everyone was too busy covering their own ass to worry about finding Jennifer’s killer. I did what I had to do.’

‘And came here? Why? What were you hoping to find?’

‘I don’t know. Something that might tell me why Jennifer was murdered, or what this symbol means, or who the Delian League is.’

‘The Delian League?’ she shot back. ‘What do you know about them?’

‘Not as much as you, by the sound of things,’ he replied with a curious frown.

‘I just know what it used to be,’ she said, his story so far and the reassuring weight of the gun in her hand convincing her she wasn’t risking much by sharing a little more of what she knew.

‘What do you mean, “used to be”?’

‘There was an association of city states in Ancient Greece. A military alliance, formed to protect themselves from the Spartans,’ she explained. ‘The members used to throw lead into the sea when they joined, to symbolise that their friendship would last until it floated back to the surface.’

‘Lead. Like the engraved disc you found on Cavalli?’

‘Not just on Cavalli,’ she admitted, trying not to think of Ricci’s sagging skin and Argento’s tortured smile. ‘There have been two other murders. The discs were found with them too.’

‘Did Cavalli know them?’

‘I doubt it,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Cavalli was an attorney based in Melfi. Adriano Ricci was an enforcer for the De Luca crime family. While Giulio Argento worked for the Banco Rosalia, a subsidiary of the Vatican bank. A priest would have more in common with a prostitute than those three with each other.’

‘But the same killer, right?’

Allegra’s eyes snapped to the door before she could answer, the sound of approaching sirens lifting her to her feet.

‘You must have been followed,’ Tom glared at her accusingly.

She ignored him, instead picking up a chair and swinging it hard against one of the sliding glass doors. It fractured on the third blow, the safety glass falling out in a single, crazed sheet. They leapt through the frame as they heard three, maybe four cars roar up the street outside.

‘Here-’

Tom cradled his hands and gave Allegra a boost, then reached up so she could help haul him up on to the garden wall beside her.

‘You’ll slow me down,’ she said with a firm shake of her head.

‘You need me,’ Tom insisted.

‘I’ve done okay so far.’

‘Really? Then how do you explain that?’ Tom glanced towards the muffled sound of the police banging on the front door.

‘They got lucky,’ she said with a shrug, readying herself to jump down.

‘You mean they got smart. Let me guess. You turned your phone on just before you got here, right?’

‘How did you know…?’ she breathed, Tom’s question pulling her back from the edge. She had briefly switched it on. Just long enough to see if Aurelio had left her a message. Something, anything, that might explain what she had overheard. But all there had been was a series of increasingly frantic messages from her boss to turn herself in.

‘It only takes a few seconds to triangulate a phone signal. You led them straight here.’

She took a deep breath, a small and increasingly insistent voice at the back of her head fighting her instinct to just jump down.

‘Who are you?’

‘Someone who knows what it’s like to be on the run,’ he shot back. ‘Someone who knows what it takes, keep running fast enough to stay alive.’

Sighing heavily, she reached down, her hand clutching on to his.

THIRTY-FOUR

Verbier, Switzerland 19th March-7.31 a.m.

It had snowed last week-recently enough for the village’s blandly functional concrete heart to still be benefiting from its decorative touch, long enough ago for the briefly pristine white streets to have been turned into a dirty river of slush and mud-stained embankments.

Faulks had never seen the point of skiing, never understood the attraction of clamping his feet into boots that in another age would have likely been in the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, and then hurling himself off a mountain on two narrow planks just to only to get to the bottom so that he could have to queue and pay for the privilege of repeating the whole infernal experience again. And again.

Glancing up from his phone as they drove past, he almost felt sorry for them, a few early starters clomping noisily down the street trying not to break their necks on the ice, skis balancing precariously on their shoulder, their edges sawing down to the bone. It seemed a heavy price to pay to ensure you could hold your own at the school gates with the other parents or be able to join in with the dinner party circuit chit chat.

Still, if there was one thing he’d learnt over the years it was that there was no limit to people’s ingenuity when it came to devising irrational ways to spend their money. And the richer they were, the more irrational and ingenious they seemed to become. It was a status symbol. A badge of honour. In fact, compared to some things he’d witnessed over the years, skiing was almost sane.

Chalet Septième Ciel was perched in an isolated spot high above the village, facing westward and with a breathtaking view over the valley below. Converted from an old school, its name meant Seventh Heaven; strangely inappropriate, given that most of its occupants, Faulks was fairly sure, were fated for a far warmer destination when their time came. Maybe that was why they chose here, Faulks mused. The prospect of an eternity roasting in the fires of Hell was perhaps all the incentive they needed to pay the extortionate fees this place charged. Anything to spend their final days somewhere cold.

Faulks’s silver 1963 Bentley S3 Continental pulled up and Logan got out to open his door for him. A former paratrooper from the outskirts of Glasgow, he’d done two tours in Afghanistan before realising that he could make more in a year as a private bodyguard than ten being shot at for Queen and country. Wearing a suit and his regimental tie, he had straw-coloured hair and a wide, round face, his nose crooked and part of one earlobe missing. His jaw was permanently clenched, as if he was chewing stones.

A female voice answered the intercom.

‘I’m here to see Avner Klein,’ Faulks announced in French.

The door buzzed open and he stepped inside, a dark-haired nurse in a white uniform rushing forward to greet him, a stern expression on her face.

‘Visiting hours aren’t until nine,’ she informed him icily.

‘I know, but I’ve just flown in from Los Angeles,’ he explained apologetically. ‘And I have to be back in Geneva mid morning. I knew that if I didn’t at least try to see him now…’

‘I understand,’ she relented, her face softening as she placed a comforting hand on his sleeve. ‘In this case…well, time is short. I’m sure he’ll see you. He’s not been sleeping well recently. Follow me.’

She led him downstairs and down a long, dark corridor, Faulks marking every third step with the sharp clip of his umbrella against the wooden floor. Reaching the last door she knocked gently. From the other side came a faint call that seemed barely human to Faulks, but which the nurse clearly took as permission to enter, nodding at him to go in.

‘Mrs Carroll is having breakfast on the terrace,’ she called as she retreated back along the corridor before he could stop her. ‘I’ll let her know you’re here.’

The curtains had been partly drawn, throwing a narrow ribbon of light across the otherwise dark room. This had unravelled along the floor and then spooled up and across the bed, revealing the pale hands of the person lying in it, his face wreathed in darkness.

‘Avner?’ Faulks said, his eyes straining to adjust to the sepulchral half light.

‘Earl, is that you?’ a thin voice rasped from the bed.

‘How are you doing, sport?’ Faulks stepped across to the bed with what he hoped was an encouraging smile.

Klein looked barely alive, his cheeks hollowed out, eyes sunk into the back of his head, hair missing, skin wrinkled and sagging. Wires from several machines disappeared under the white bedclothes that shrouded his body, their monitors flashing up a hieroglyphic stream of numbers and graphs and pulsing dots. There was a drip too, Faulks noticed, the line seeming to vanish somewhere in the direction of Klein’s groin, the livid purple patches along his wizened forearm suggesting that they couldn’t find a vein there any more.

‘I’m dying,’ Klein replied, the very effort of blinking seeming to make him wince in pain.

‘Rubbish,’ Faulks assured him breezily. ‘You’ll be back on your feet in time for the Triple Crown. I’ve got a killer tip on the Derby this year. A guaranteed winner!’

Klein nodded weakly, although his empty smile told Faulks that they both knew he was lying.

‘Thank you for visiting,’ Klein wheezed. ‘I know you’re busy.’

He nodded at the drink next to the bed and Faulks reached across and held it for him, trying not to wrinkle his nose in disgust as Klein’s cracked lips sucked at it greedily, a drop escaping from the corner of his mouth and trickling down his chin like a tear.

‘Never too busy for an old friend.’ A pause. ‘And there is something I wanted to show you.’

‘Oh?’

Rather than curiosity, there was a resigned sadness in Klein’s voice, as if Faulks had somehow confirmed a rumour that he’d been hoping wasn’t true.

‘I knew you wouldn’t want to pass up a chance like this,’ Faulks enthused, opening his wallet and extracting a small Polaroid. ‘Look-’

Klein lifted himself forward and then almost immediately collapsed back on to his pillow, convulsing under the grip of a sudden hacking cough.

‘Verity Bruce wants it,’ Faulks continued through the noise, glancing lovingly at the picture. ‘I’ve brought all the paperwork ready for you to sign. All you need to do is authorise the payment and-’

Faulks broke off as Deena Carroll, Klein’s second wife, stormed into the room behind him, gold bangles and earrings clanging like a Passing Bell.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she said, roasted coffee bean eyes blazing out of a leathered face crowned by a swooping wave of dyed platinum blonde hair.

‘Visiting an old friend,’ Faulks shrugged. ‘I mean, old friends,’ he added with a small bow of his head.

‘You’re no friend,’ she hissed contemptuously, snatching the photograph from him and waving it in his face. ‘Friends don’t try and hawk their grimy trinkets to a dying man.’ She flicked the photograph to the floor. ‘You make me sick, Earl.’

‘Those grimy trinkets have made the Klein-Carroll collection one of the greatest in the world,’ he reminded her tersely as he knelt down stiffly to retrieve the photograph. ‘And now that you’ve donated it to the Met, a permanent monument to your taste and generosity.’ He spat these last two words out, as if he’d just bitten into a bar of soap.

‘We both know what that collection is and where it came from,’ she said with a hollow laugh. ‘And if it’s a monument to anything, it’s to your greed.’

‘Be careful, Deena,’ Faulks said sharply, still smiling. ‘I’ve buried a lot of bodies for Avner over the years and dug up even more. And I can prove it. You should think about how you want him to be remembered.’

She went to answer but said nothing, glancing instead at Klein. Hands clasped together on the crisp sheets, grinning lovingly at her, he had quite clearly not followed a word of their exchange. She walked over to his side and smiled, tears welling as she stroked the few wisps of hair that clung stubbornly to his scalp.

‘Just go, Earl,’ she said in a toneless voice. ‘Find someone else to dig for.’

THIRTY-FIVE

Lungotevere Gianicolense, Rome 19th March-7.37 a.m.

They had found a battered old Fiat a few streets from Cavalli’s house, Tom preferring it to the Mercedes parked just behind it. It was a suggestion that Allegra was already rather regretting, the rusted suspension jarring with every imperfection in the road as they headed north along the river. And yet she couldn’t fault his logic-the Fiat was coated in a thick layer of rainstreaked dirt that suggested that it hadn’t been used for weeks, and so was less likely to be missed.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked as she suddenly cut across the Ponte Principe Amedei di Savoia and pulled in on the Largo dei Fiorentini. ‘We can’t stop here. We’re still too close. If anyone’s seen us…’

‘If you want to get out, now’s your chance,’ she snapped, leaning across him and pushing his door open. ‘Otherwise, I want some answers.’

‘What sort of answers?’

‘How about a name?’

He sighed, then slammed the door shut.

‘It’s Tom. Tom Kirk.’ He made a point of holding out his hand so that she had to shake it rather formally. ‘Can we do the rest of the Q and A somewhere else?’

‘You said you knew what it was like to be on the run. Why? Who are you?’ she demanded.

‘You really want to do this here?’ he asked, his face screwed into a disbelieving frown. She returned his stare, jaw set firm. ‘Fine,’ he said eventually with a resigned sigh. ‘I…I used to be a thief.’

‘A thief?’ She smiled indulgently before realising that he wasn’t joking.

‘What sort of thief?’

‘Art mainly. Jewellery too. Whatever paid.’

She nodded slowly. It was strange, but it was almost as if she’d been expecting him to say something like this. It certainly seemed to fit him better than being police or FBI.

‘And now?’

‘Now I help recover pieces, advise museums on security, that sort of thing,’ he replied.

‘What’s any of that got to do with Cavalli?’

‘I told you. Jennifer had asked me to help her on a case before she was killed. Cavalli was the best lead I had as to who might have ordered the hit.’

‘So we both went there looking for answers,’ Allegra said with a rueful smile.

‘Why-what’s Cavalli to you?’

‘It’s what he is to Gallo that I care about.’ She turned back to face the front, her hands clutching the wheel.

‘Who’s Gallo?’ Tom frowned. ‘The person you’re running from?’

‘Colonel Massimo Gallo,’ she intoned in a bitter voice. ‘Head of the GICO-the organised crime unit of the Ministry of Finance-and the officer in charge of the two Caravaggio killings.’

‘What?’

‘Ricci and Argento,’ she explained impatiently. ‘The other murders I told you about. Their deaths had been staged to mirror to two Caravaggio paintings.’

‘Jennifer was lured to Las Vegas to help recover a Caravaggio stolen in the 1960s,’ Tom explained with the triumphant finality of someone laying down a winning poker hand.

‘You think…?’

‘Don’t you?’

There was a pause as she let this sink in. First the symbol. Then the mention of the Delian League. Now Caravaggio. Perhaps he was right. These surely couldn’t all be coincidences?

Speaking fast and confidently, she plunged into an account of the past few days-the murders of Ricci and Argento; the choice of locations; the references to Caesar; the Caravaggio staging of the murder scenes; what she knew about Cavalli and his death; Gallo’s cold-blooded execution of Gambetta. It was only when she got to describing Aurelio’s treachery that her voice faltered. The memory of his betrayal was still too fresh, too raw for her to share anything more than the most basic details. Instead she quickly switched to her tortured flight from his apartment and the restless night that she had spent in the grimy airport hotel until, unable to sleep, she had decided to visit Cavalli’s apartment for herself and see what she could find there.

Tom listened to all this without interrupting and she realised when she had finished that it had been strangely calming to talk things through, even if she barely knew him. There had been so much going on, so many thoughts tripping over each other inside her head, that it had been surprisingly cathartic to lay all the different elements together end to end.

‘Somehow, it’s all linked,’ he said slowly when she had finished. ‘The murders, Caravaggio, the symbol…we just need to find out how.’

‘Is that all?’ she said with a bitter laugh.

‘Sometimes you just need to know who to ask.’

‘And you do?’ she asked in a sceptical tone.

‘I know someone who might be able to help.’ He nodded.

‘Someone we can trust?’

Tom took a deep breath, then blew out his cheeks.

‘More or less.’

‘What sort of an answer’s that?’ she snorted.

‘The sort of answer you get when you’re out of better ideas.’

There was a pause. Then with a resigned shrug she started the engine.

‘Where to?’

THIRTY-SIX

Fontana di Trevi, Rome 19th March-8.03 a.m.

Allegra heard the fountain before she saw it, a delirious, ecstatic roar of water that crashed and foamed over gnarled travertine rocks and carved foliage, tumbling in a joyful cascade into the open embrace of the wide basin below. This was no accident, Allegra knew, the Trevi having been deliberately positioned so that, no matter what route was taken, it could only be partially seen as it was approached, the anticipation building as the sound got louder until the monument finally revealed itself.

Despite the relatively early hour, the tourists were already out in force, some seated like an eager audience on the steps that encircled the basin’s low stage, others facing the opposite direction and flinging coins over their shoulders in the hope of securing their return to the Eternal City. Oblivious to their catcalling and the popcorn burst of camera flashes, the statues ranged above them silently acted out an allegorical representation of the taming of the waters. Centre stage loomed Neptune’s brooding figure, his chariot frozen in flight, winged horses rearing dramatically out of the water and threatening to take the entire structure with them.

‘Was there a Trevi family?’ Tom asked as they paused briefly in front of it.

‘Trevi comes from Tre Via, the three streets that meet here,’ she corrected him in a curt voice. ‘Are we here for a history lesson or to actually see someone?’

‘That depends,’ he said with a shrug.

‘On what?’

‘On whether you can keep a secret.’

She gave a dismissive laugh.

‘How old are you, ten?’

Tom turned to face her, face set firm.

‘You can’t tell anyone about what you see.’

‘Oh come on,’ she snorted impatiently.

‘Yes or no?’ he insisted.

There was a pause. Then she gave a grudging nod.

‘Yes, fine, whatever.’

‘No crossed fingers?’

‘What?’ she exploded. ‘If this is some sort of…’

‘I’m only joking.’ He grinned. ‘Come on. It’s this way.’

He led her round to the right to the Vicolo Scavolino where a small doorway had been set into the side wall of the building directly behind the fountain. A flock of pigeons rendered fat and tame by years of overfeeding, barely stirred as they waded through them.

‘Here?’ she asked with a frown, glancing up at the carved papal escutcheon suspended over the entrance.

‘Here.’ He nodded, knocking sharply against the door’s weather-worn surface.

A few moments later it opened to reveal a young Chinese man dressed in black, his hair standing off his head as if he had been electrocuted. From the way he was awkwardly holding one hand behind his back, Allegra guessed that he was clutching a gun.

‘I’m here to see Johnny,’ Tom announced. ‘Tell him it’s Felix.’

The man gave them a cursory look, then shut the door again.

‘Felix?’ Allegra shot him a questioning look.

‘It’s a name people used to know me by when I was still in the game,’ he explained. ‘I try not to use it any more, but it’s how a lot of people still know me.’

‘The game?’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘Is that a word people like you use to make you feel better about breaking the law?’

The door reopened before Tom had a chance to answer, the man ushering them inside and then marching them along a low passageway, through a second door and then up a shallow flight of steps into a narrow room, with a stone staircase leading both up and down.

‘Where are we?’ Allegra hissed.

‘Listen,’ Tom replied.

She nodded, suddenly realising that the dull ringing in her ears was no longer the angry echo of the shot that had killed Gambetta but the muffled roar of water through the thick walls.

‘We’re behind the fountain,’ she breathed.

‘The Trevi was pretty much tacked on to the façade of the Palazzo Poli when they built it,’ Tom explained as the man ordered them up the stairs with a grunt. ‘This space was bricked off as a maintenance shaft, to provide access to the roof and the plumbing in the basement. Johnny cut a deal with the mayor to rent the attic.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘Why? How else do you think he paid for his re-election campaign?’

They climbed to the first floor, then to the next, the fountain’s low rumble slowly fading, until it was little more than a distant hum. In its place, however, Allegra was increasingly aware of a whirring, rhythmical clattering noise. She glanced at Tom for an explanation, but he said nothing, his expression suggesting that he was rather enjoying her confusion.

Another man was waiting to greet them on the second-floor landing, a machine gun slung across his oversized Lakers shirt, in place of the rather less threatening Norinco Type 77 handgun that their escort was sporting. The higher they climbed, the more lethal the weaponry, it seemed.

The second man signalled at them to raise their arms and then quickly patted them down, confiscating Tom’s bag and Allegra’s gun and keys. Then he nodded at them to follow him to the foot of the next flight of stairs, where an armoured steel door and two more guards blocked their way. Unprompted, the door buzzed open.

Swapping a look, they made their way upstairs.

THIRTY-SEVEN

19th March-8.12 a.m.

The staircase led to a long, narrow attic room that seemed to run the width of the entire building. A line of squat windows squinted down on to the square below, their view obscured in places by the fountain’s massive stone pediment. And running down the centre of the room, hissing and rattling like an old steam engine under the low ceiling, was a huge printing press.

‘The sound of the fountain masks the noise of the machine,’ Tom called to her over the press’s raucous clatter as she approached it. ‘It’s actually five separate processes, although the machines have been laid out end to end. A simultan machine to print the background colours and patterns. An intaglio machine for the major design elements. A letterpress for the serial numbers. An offset press for the overcoating. And obviously a guillotine right at the end to cut the sheets to size.’

Allegra stepped closer to the press, trying to catch what was coming off the machine’s whirling drum, then looked back to Tom in shock.

‘Money?’

‘Euros.’ He nodded. ‘Johnny runs one of the world’s biggest counterfeiting operations outside of China. He used to print dollars, but no one wants them any more.’

‘Johnny who?’ she asked, looking back along the room and noticing the small army of people in blue overalls tending silently to the press.

‘Johnny Li. His father is Li Kai-Fu. Runs one of the most powerful Triad gangs in Hong Kong,’ Tom explained in a low voice. ‘A couple of years ago he posted his five sons around the world, via Cambridge, to help grow the family business. Johnny’s here, Paul’s in San Francisco, Ringo’s in Buenos Aires…’

‘He moved to Rio,’ a voice interrupted him. ‘Better weather, cheaper women.’

‘Johnny!’ Tom turned to greet the voice with a warm smile.

Li was young, perhaps only in his late twenties, with long dark hair that he was forever brushing from his eyes, a pierced lip, and a dotted line tattooed around his neck as if to show where to cut. He was also the only person on this floor not in overalls, dressed instead in a white Armani T-shirt, red Ferrari monogrammed jacket, expensively ripped Versace jeans with a stainless steel key chain looping down one leg, and Prada trainers. Flanked by two unsmiling guards and balancing Allegra’s gun in his hand as if trying to guess its weight, his face was creased into an unwelcoming scowl.

‘What do you want, Felix?’ He had an unexpectedly strong English accent.

‘Bad time?’ Tom frowned, clearly surprised by his tone.

‘What do you expect when you turn up at my place with a cop?’ Li snapped, stabbing a rolledup newspaper towards him. ‘Even she is bent.’

Tom took the paper off him and scanned the front page, then handed it to Allegra with an awkward, almost apologetic look. She didn’t have to read much beyond the headline to understand why. Gallo was pinning Gambetta’s death on her. There she was, looking slightly arrogant in her crisp Carabinieri uniform, she had to admit. Beneath it was an article describing her ‘murderous rampage’, the text scrolling around her, as if the words themselves were worried about getting too close. She felt suddenly dizzy, as if the floor was moving under her, and was only vaguely aware of Tom’s voice.

‘She’s with me, now,’ he said.

‘Why, what do you want?’ Li shot back, flashing Allegra a suspicious glance.

‘Your help.’

‘I thought you’d retired?’ Li’s question sounded more like an accusation.

‘A friend of mine has been killed. We’re both after the people who did it.’

Li paused, glancing at Tom and Allegra in turn. Then he handed Allegra her gun back with a grudging nod.

‘What do you want to know?’

Tom handed Li the drawing of the symbol.

‘What can you tell me about this?’

Li took it over to an architect’s desk on which he had been examining a sheet of freshly printed notes under a microscope and angled it under the light. He glanced up at them with a wary look.

‘Is this who you think killed your friend?’

‘You know what it means?’ Allegra asked excitedly.

‘Of course I do,’ he snorted. ‘It’s the symbol of the Delian League.’

Allegra gave Tom a look. As they had both suspected, far from being a footnote in some dusty textbook, the Delian League, or rather some bastardised version of it, was clearly alive and well.

‘Who runs it?’ Tom pressed.

Li sat back.

‘Come on, Tom. You know that’s not how things work.’ He smiled indulgently as if gently scolding a child. ‘I’m running a business here, not a charity. Even for deserving causes like you.’

‘How much?’ Tom asked wearily.

‘Normally twenty-five thousand euro,’ Li said, picking at his fingernails. ‘But for you and your friend I’m going to round it up to fifty. A little…five-o surcharge.’

‘Fifty thousand!’ Allegra exclaimed.

‘I can get it.’ Tom nodded. ‘But it’s going to take some time.’

‘I can wait.’ Li shrugged.

‘Well, we can’t,’ Tom insisted. ‘I’ll have to owe you.’

‘No deal.’ Li shook his head. ‘Not if you’re going up against the League. I want my money before they kill you.’

‘Why don’t you just pay yourself?’ Allegra tapped her finger angrily against the sheet of uncut notes on the desk.

‘This stuff is like dope,’ Li sniffed. ‘You never want to risk getting addicted to your own product.’

‘Come on, Johnny,’ Tom pleaded. ‘You know I’m good for it.’

Li took a deep breath, clicking his front teeth together slowly as he considered them in turn.

‘What about a down-payment?’ he asked. ‘You must have something on you?’

‘I’ve told you, we don’t…’

‘That watch, for example.’ Li nodded towards Tom’s wrist.

‘It’s not for sale,’ Tom insisted, quickly pulling his sleeve down.

‘Think of it as a deposit,’ Li suggested. ‘You can have it back when you bring me the cash.’

‘And you’ll tell us what we need to know?’ Allegra asked in a sceptical tone.

‘If I can.’

‘Tom?’ Allegra fixed Tom with a hopeful look. Unless they wanted to wait, it seemed like a reasonable deal. Tom said nothing, then gave a resigned shrug.

‘Fine.’ Sighing heavily, he took the watch off. ‘But I want it back.’

‘I’ll look after it,’ Li reassured him, fastening it carefully to his wrist.

‘Let’s start with the Delian League,’ Allegra suggested. ‘Who are they?’

‘The Delian League controls the illegal antiquities trade in Italy,’ Li answered simply. ‘Has done since the early seventies. Now, nothing leaves the country without going through them.’

‘And the tombaroli? Where do they fit in?’

‘They control the supply,’ Li explained. ‘Most of them are freelance. But since all the major antiquities buyers are foreign, the League controls access to the demand. The tombaroli either have to sell to them, or not sell at all.’

‘And the mafia?’ Tom interrupted. ‘Don’t they mind the League operating on their turf?’

‘The League is the mafia,’ Li laughed, before tapping his finger on the symbol. ‘That’s what the two snakes represent-one for the Cosa Nostra. One for the Banda della Magliana.’

‘The Banda della Magliana is run by the De Luca family,’ Allegra explained, glancing at Tom. ‘They’re who Ricci worked for.’

‘The story I heard was that the Cosa Nostra was getting squeezed out of the drugs business by the ‘Ndrangheta. So when they realised there was money to be made in looting antiquities, they teamed up with the Banda della Magliana who controlled all the valuable Etruscan sites around Rome, on the basis that they would make more money if they operated as a cartel. The League’s been so successful that most of the other families have sold them access rights to their territories in return for a share of the profits.’

‘Who runs it now?’ Tom asked. ‘Where can we find them?’

Li went to answer, then paused, crossing one arm across his stomach and tapping his finger slowly against his lips.

‘I can’t tell you that.’

Tom gave a hollow laugh.

‘Can’t or won’t?’

‘It’s nothing personal, Felix,’ Li said with a shrug. ‘I just want my money. And if I give you everything now, I know I’ll never see it.’

‘We had a deal,’ Allegra said angrily. Li had tricked them, first reeling them in to show them how much he knew and then holding out when they’d get to the punchline.

‘We still do,’ Li insisted. ‘Come back tomorrow with the fifty k and I’ll tell you what side of the bed they all sleep on.’

‘We need to know now,’ Allegra snapped.

Another pause, Li first centring Tom’s watch on his wrist and then wiping the glass with his thumb.

‘What about the car?’ he asked without looking up.

‘What car?’ Tom frowned.

‘Cavalli’s Maserati,’ Allegra breathed, as she recognized the set of keys that Li had produced from his pocket as the ones that had been confiscated from her on the way in.

‘Do you have it?’ Li pressed.

‘No, but I know where it is,’ she replied warily, his forced indifference making her wonder if he hadn’t been carefully leading them up to this point all along. ‘Why?’

‘New deal,’ Li offered. ‘The car instead of the cash. That way you don’t have to wait.’

‘Done,’ Allegra confirmed eagerly, sliding the keys over to him with a relieved sigh. ‘It’s in the pound, but it should be easy enough for you to get to.’

Smiling, Li slid the keys back towards her.

‘That’s not quite what I had in mind.’

THIRTY-EIGHT

Via Principesa Clotilde, Rome 19th March-8.35 a.m.

Ten minutes later and they were skirting the eastern rim of the Piazza del Popolo, Tom catching a glimpse of the Pincio through a gap in the buildings.

‘Who gave it to you?’ Allegra asked, finally breaking the silence.

‘What?’ Tom looked round, distracted.

‘The watch? Who gave it to you?’

There was a brief pause, a pained look flickering across his face.

‘Jennifer.’

A longer, more awkward silence.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise…’

‘We didn’t have much choice,’ Tom said, sighing. ‘Besides, as long as we can get him the car, he’ll give it back.’

‘It shouldn’t be too hard,’ she reassured him. ‘Three, four guards at most.’

‘It’s worth taking a look,’ he agreed. ‘It’s that or wait until I can get him the cash tomorrow.’

‘Why does he even want it?’ She frowned, checking her mirrors as she turned on to the Lungotevere Arnaldo da Brescia.

‘He collects cars,’ Tom explained. ‘Has about forty of them in a sealed and climate-controlled private underground garage somewhere near Trajan’s Column. None of them paid for.’

They followed the river in silence, heading north against the traffic as the road flexed around the riverbank’s smooth contours, the sky now bright and clear. Tom caught Allegra glancing at herself in the mirror, her hand drifting unconsciously to her dyed and roughly chopped hair, as if she still couldn’t quite recognise herself.

‘Tell me more about the Banda della Magliana,’ he said eventually.

‘There are five major mafia organisations in Italy,’ Allegra explained, seeming to welcome the interruption. ‘The Cosa Nostra and Stidda in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples, the Sacra Corona Unita in Apulia and the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria. The Banda della Magliana was a smaller outfit based here in Rome and controlled by the De Luca family.’

‘Was?’

‘You might remember that they were linked to a series of political assassinations and bombings between the seventies and the nineties. But since then they’ve been pretty quiet.’

She leaned on her horn as she overtook a threewheeled delivery van that was skittering wildly over the worn tarmac.

‘And Ricci worked for them?’

‘Gallo said he was an enforcer,’ she nodded. ‘As far as I know the family’s still controlled by Giovanni De Luca, although no one’s seen him for years.’

‘What about the Cosa Nostra, the Banda della Magliana’s partner in the Delian League? Who heads them up?’

‘Lorenzo Moretti. Or at least that’s the rumour. It’s not the sort of thing you put on your business card.’

The car pound occupied a large, anonymously grey multi-storey building at the end of a treelined residential street. Two guards were stationed at each of the two sentry posts that flanked the entry and exit ramps. Seeing them walking up to the counter, the officers manning the entrance jumped up and tried to look busy, one of them having been watching TV inside their small office, the other sat outside reading the paper, tipped back on a faded piece of white garden furniture.

‘Buongiorno.’ Allegra flashed a broad smile and her badge in the same instant, snapping it shut before they could get a good look at her name or the picture. ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ she continued. ‘But my friend has had his car stolen.’ The two men glanced at Tom accusingly, as if this was somehow his fault.

‘It’s probably in a container halfway to Morocco by now,’ one of them suggested gloomily.

‘That’s what I told him,’ Allegra agreed. ‘Only one of his neighbours says they saw it being towed. And this is the closest pound to where he lives.’

‘If it’s been towed it will be on the database,’ one of the officers said to Tom. ‘Pay the release fee and you can have it back.’

‘He’s already looked and it’s not there,’ she said with a shrug before Tom could answer. ‘He thinks that someone might have made a mistake and entered the wrong plates.’

‘Really?’ The men eyed him like they would a glass of corked wine.

‘He’s English,’ she murmured, giving him the sort of weary look a mother might give a naughty child. The officers nodded in sudden understanding, a sympathetic look crossing their faces. ‘Is there any chance we can go up and take a quick look to see if it’s here? I’d really appreciate it.’

The two men glanced at each other and then shrugged their agreement.

‘As long as you’re quick,’ one of them said.

‘When did it go missing?’ the other asked her, ignoring Tom completely now.

‘Around the fifteenth of March.’

‘We store all the cars in the order they get brought here,’ the first officer explained, pointing at a worn map of the complex that had been crudely taped to the counter. ‘Cars for that week should be around here -in the blue quadrant on the third floor.’ He pointed at a section of the map. ‘The lift’s down there on the right.’

A few moments later the doors pinged shut behind them.

‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’ Tom said in a reproachful tone.

‘It could have been worse,’ she said with an amused smile. ‘I could have told them you were American.’

The lift opened on to the southern end of the third floor. It was a dark, depressing place, most of the neon tubes missing or broken, the walls encrusted with a moulding green deposit, the ceiling oozing a thick yellow mucus that hung in cancerous clumps. The floor was divided by lines of decaying concrete pillars into three long aisles, with cars parked along both sides and a spiralling up-and-down ramp at one end linking it to the other levels like a calcified umbilical cord.

They made their way over to the area pointed out by the guard, dodging around oily lakes of standing water, until they were about halfway down the left-hand aisle. Jennifer took out the keys and pressed the unlock button. Cavalli’s car eagerly identified itself with a double flash of its indicators-a souped-up Maserati Granturismo, worth almost double what Johnny was asking for. No wonder he’d pushed them into this.

‘What are you doing?’ Tom called in a low voice as Allegra opened the boot and leaned inside. ‘It must have been searched already.’

‘That doesn’t mean they found anything,’ she replied, her voice muffled.

‘Let’s just get out of here before they…’

She stood up, triumphantly holding a small piece of pottery that had been nestling in a fold in the muddy grey blanket that covered the boot floor. About the size of her hand, it featured a bearded man’s face painted in red against a black background.

‘It’s a vase fragment. Probably Apullian, which dates it to between 430 and 300 BC.’

‘Dionysius?’ Tom ventured.

‘Yes,’ she said, looking impressed. ‘I’d guess it was part of a krater, a bowl used…’

‘For mixing wine and water,’ Tom said, grinning at her obvious surprise. ‘My parents were art dealers. My mother specialised in antiquities. I guess I was a good listener.’

‘Notice anything strange?’ she asked, handing it to him with a nod.

‘The edges are sharp.’ He frowned, gingerly drawing his finger over one of them as if it was a blade.

‘Sharp and clean,’ she agreed. ‘Which means the break is recent.’

‘You mean it was done after it was dug up?’ Tom gave her a puzzled look, still holding the fragment.

‘I mean it was done on purpose,’ she shot back, Tom detecting a hint of anger in her voice. ‘See how they’ve been careful not to damage the painted area so they can restore it.’

‘You mean it’s been smashed so it can be stuck back together again?’ he asked with a disbelieving smile.

‘It makes it easier to smuggle,’ she explained with a despairing shake of her head. ‘Unfortunately, we see it all the time. The fragments are called orphans. The dealers can sometimes make more money selling them off individually than they would get for an intact piece, because they can raise the price as the collector or museum gets more and more desperate to buy all the pieces. And of course, by the time the vase is fully restored, no one can track where or who they bought each fragment from. Everyone’s protected.’

‘Then Cavalli must have been working either with or for the League,’ Tom said grimly as she dropped the boot lid. ‘Perhaps they found out that the FBI had his name and killed him before he could talk?’

The noise of an engine starting echoed up to them from one of the lower floors, and drew a worried glance from Tom towards the exit.

‘We should go.’ He opened the passenger door to get in, but then immediately staggered back, coughing as a choking chemical smell clawed at his throat.

‘You okay?’ Allegra called out in concern.

‘It’s been sprayed with a fire extinguisher,’ he croaked, pointing at the downy white skin which covered most of the car’s interior, apart from where it had been disturbed by the police search. ‘Old trick. The foam destroys any fingerprint or DNA evidence.’

‘Which Cavalli’s killers would only have done if they’d been in the car,’ Allegra said thoughtfully, opening the driver’s side door and standing back to let the fumes clear.

‘Where did they find the car keys?’ He asked, rubbing his streaming eyes.

‘In his pocket, why?’

‘I’m just wondering if he was driving. Based on that I’d guess he was.’

‘How do you work that out?’

‘Because I doubt his killers drove him out to wherever the car was dumped and then planted the keys on him before killing him.’ Tom shrugged.

“What does it matter either way?’

Taking a deep breath, Tom disappeared inside the car. Leaning over the passenger seat, he plunged his hand down the back of the driver’s seat, wisps of foam fluttering like ash caught by the wind. Feeling around with his fingertips, he pulled out first some loose change, then a pack of matches, and finally, pushed right down, a folded Polaroid. He stood up, brushing the sticky white paste from his clothes.

‘If Cavalli was driving, that’s about the only place he would have been able to hide something once he realised what was going on,’ he explained, enjoying the look on Allegra’s face. ‘Here.’ He leant over the roof and handed the photo to her. ‘Any ideas?’

‘Some sort of statue fragment,’ she said slowly. ‘Greek, I’d guess, although-’

She was interrupted by a shout.

‘Rimanga dove siete!’ Stay where you are!

THIRTY-NINE

19th March-8.51 a.m.

Spinning round, Allegra immediately recognised the two officers they had talked their way past downstairs. One was hunched over the wheel of the blue Fiat squad car that had ghosted up the ramp behind them, its headlights now blazing through the darkness. The other was standing next to it, his voice echoing off the car park’s low ceilings, gun drawn.

‘We found the car after all,’ Allegra stepped towards him with a smile, switching back into Italian. ‘My friend just needs to pay…’

‘I said stay where you are,’ the officer barked again, his trigger finger twitching.

‘I don’t think he’s buying it any more,’ Tom whispered out of the corner of his mouth.

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Get in!’

Diving through the open doors, she jammed the key in the ignition, fired up the engine and selected reverse. Tom jumped in alongside her, the crack of a gun shot whistling overhead. The car leapt backwards and swung out, swiping the rear wing of the car parked next to them and setting off the harsh shriek of its two-tone alarm.

‘You’re facing the wrong way,’ Tom shouted, their windscreen now engulfed by the glare of the squad car’s headlights as it accelerated, wheelsspinning, towards them.

‘Don’t tell me how to drive,’ she retorted indignantly, turning to look back over her shoulder. ‘If I’d tried to reverse out the other way I’d have wrapped it around the pillar.’

She stamped on the pedal, the car springing backwards and then yawing wildly as she fought to keep it straight, traces of foam making the wheel slick in her hands. Tyres screaming, they rounded the corner and then doubled back on themselves, the engine protesting with an angry whine as they sped down the central aisle, the revs climbing steeply.

Another shot rang out. They both flinched. One of their headlights exploded.

‘Head down a floor,’ Tom suggested. ‘Try and get far enough ahead of them to flip it around.’

She cannoned the wrong way on to the upramp, the gloom suddenly lit by a blaze of sparks as she glanced off the concrete and used the ramp’s curved walls to guide herself down to the second level.

‘Someone’s coming up the other way,’ Tom warned her as a second squad car, siren pulsing, stormed up the ramp towards them, the sweep of its headlights circling beneath them as it rose, like a shark closing in on a seal.

She steered them off the ramp on to the flat, the floorpan slapping the concrete with a heavy bang. From behind them came the angry squeal of brakes as the squad car chasing them fishtailed to avoid colliding with the second police car coming up the other way. Allegra sensed her opportunity. Leaning on the clutch, she yanked on the handbrake and jerked the wheel hard to spin them round so that they were facing forward, then shoved the car into gear and accelerated away along the left-hand aisle, tyres smoking.

‘You’ve got one right behind, one to the right,’ Tom shouted over the engine noise, pointing to where the second car was now speeding down the central aisle, roughly parallel to them.

‘They’re going to try and cut us off at the end,’ she guessed, before glancing down at her lap. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

Tom had leant forward and was feeling under the dashboard between her knees.

‘Looking for something,’ he said, straining to reach.

‘I can see that,’ she hissed through gritted teeth, his head almost resting on her lap.

‘There-’ he sat up, ‘the front air-bag switch. They put it down there in case you want to disable them.’

She nodded in immediate understanding.

‘Hold on.’

Checking in her mirror to see how close the car behind her was, she stamped on the brake. The ABS kicked in, the car juddering to a halt and forcing their pursuers to run into the back of them, the impact knocking them five or six feet forward and wrenching their boot open, so that it was flapping around like a half-opened tin can. What damage they had sustained was as nothing compared to the Fiat, however, which had, unsurprisingly, come off second best with both front tyres burst, the engine block almost in the front seat, and the bonnet concertinaed back on itself.

Allegra glanced across at Tom with a satisfied grin, but he was pointing at the second police car, which was already at the far end of the second aisle and rounding the corner towards them.

‘Here comes the cavalry.’

Dropping the Maserati into gear, she pulled forward and cut through a gap in the parked cars to her right to reach the central aisle and then spun round, so that she was facing back towards the exit ramp.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked with a frown.

‘Enjoying myself,’ she breathed.

Gunning the motor hard, she took off, glancing across at the squad car racing down the adjacent aisle to make sure she was far enough ahead, its surging shape strobing across her eyes as she caught glimpses of it through gaps between the cars and the concrete pillars.

‘Now!’ Tom called, pulling his seat belt tight across himself and hanging on to the grab handle.

She steered away from the line of cars to her right and then carved back in, ramming an Alfa square on. It jumped forward as if it had been fired from a cannon, colliding with the front of the VW parked only a few inches opposite it, which in turn T-boned the squad car as it came past, sending it ploughing into the line of parked cars on the far side of the aisle.

There was an abrupt, empty moment of calm, the squad car’s blue light pulsing weakly in the gloom. Then a jarring chorus of car alarms kicked in, each singing in a different key and to a different tempo, roused by the force of the crash.

‘Where did you learn to drive like that?’ Tom asked with an approving nod.

‘Rush hour in Rome.’ She smiled, breathing hard.

‘Do you think Johnny will notice the damage?’

She glanced in the mirror and saw the boot lid flapping around behind them like a loose sail, then looked along the crumpled bonnet at the cloud of steam rising from the cracked radiator.

‘It’ll polish out.’ She grinned.

Reversing out, the steering pulling heavily to the right, she nursed the car down the exit ramp and then made her way out on to the street.

FORTY

Desposito Eroli, Via Erulo Eroli, Rome 19th March-9.23 a.m.

‘I thought you told these idiots to hold off until we got here when they called?’ Gallo said in an accusing tone as Salvatore hurried towards him, his notebook clutched to his chest.

Misfortune was snapping at his heels like one of those annoying handbag dogs, it seemed. First the triangulation of Allegra’s mobile phone signal, only for her to have vanished by the time they got there. Then a sighting reported by the officers here, only for her to slip through his fingers a second time, it now seemed.

‘I did,’ Salvatore sighed wearily. ‘Apparently they were trying to lock down the area in case they drove off.’

‘Lock down the area? The stupid bastards have been watching too much TV,’ Gallo glowered at the two men in neck braces being stretchered past him into a waiting ambulance. ‘It’s just as well she’s put them in hospital. She’s saved me the trouble.’ Cursing under his breath, he lit a cigarette.

‘You mean they saved you the trouble,’ Salvatore corrected him.

‘She wasn’t alone?’ Gallo glanced up, surprised, brushing his long silvery hair back behind each ear.

‘There was a man.’

‘What man?’

‘Not sure yet.’

A pause, as Gallo let this sink in. He’d not banked on her teaming up with someone. Certainly not this soon.

‘What were they doing here?’

‘They were seen opening up a black Maserati. Registration number…JT149VT,’ Salvatore read from his notebook.

‘Presumably not hers? Not on a lieutenant’s salary.’

‘Cavalli’s.’

Gallo span round to face him.

‘Cavalli’s?’ he spat. ‘What the hell was she looking for?’ He glared at the building behind him as if it was somehow at fault and owed him an answer. To his surprise, it gave him one.

‘There must be a camera up there!’ He pointed at the lens fixed above the entrance. ‘Get me the disc.’

A few minutes later they were seated around a small monitor in the sentry post, Salvatore forwarding to the time of the last entry in the log. For ten, maybe twenty seconds, the grainy black-and-white footage showed nothing but parked cars and the wet concrete floor, but then, just as Gallo was about to hit the fast forward button again, two people appeared in the shot.

‘That’s not her,’ Salvatore said with a shake of his head.

‘Yes it is,’ Gallo breathed, reluctantly putting his glasses on so he could see properly. ‘She’s cut her hair. Dyed it, too. Clever girl.’ His face broke into a grudging smile. ‘And who are you?’ He leaned forward and hit the pause button, squinting to try and make out the face of the man walking next to her.

‘Never seen him before,’ Salvatore shrugged.

‘Get a print of this off to the lab when we’ve finished,’ Gallo ordered, starting the disc again. ‘Get them to run it through the system. Interpol too.’

‘Where did she get his car keys?’ Salvatore asked with a frown as they watched Allegra beep the car open and then step round to the boot.

‘Evidence room, they were probably on the same set as…’ Gallo broke off with a frown as he saw Allegra retrieve something from the boot. He paused the footage again. ‘What the hell is that?’

‘Christ knows.’ Salvatore shrugged. ‘The picture’s too dark. I’ll ask the lab to see what they can do with it.’

‘I thought you said that car had been searched?’ Gallo barked angrily.

‘I…I thought it had,’ Salvatore stammered. Coughing nervously, he restarted the film only to pause it himself a few moments later.

‘He’s got something too,’ he said, squinting as he tried to make out the image. ‘Looks like…a piece of paper. Or maybe a photo?’

‘I want the names of whoever searched that car,’ Gallo said through gritted teeth. ‘Their names and their fucking badges.’

A squad car suddenly appeared at the top edge of the screen and one of the guards Gallo had just seen being loaded into the ambulance stepped out. He ejected the disc, lip curled in disgust.

‘Put out a revised description of Damico and get something worked up for this guy, whoever he is,’ he ordered. ‘Then-’

‘Colonel, we’ve found the car!’ A young officer had appeared at the door, breathing hard. ‘Abandoned in the Borghese Gardens.’

‘And Lieutenant Damico?’

‘No sign of her, I’m afraid.’

Salvatore stood up, giving Gallo an expectant look.

‘Go.’ He nodded. ‘Take whoever you need. Find her. She can’t have got far if she’s on foot.’

Gallo waited until the room was empty and then dug his phone out of his pocket and dialled a number.

‘It’s me.’ He lit another cigarette and took a long drag. ‘We just missed her again.’

He listened, making a face.

‘She came looking for Cavalli’s car…I don’t know why, but she found something he’d hidden in it…If I had to guess, a photograph.’

Another pause as he listened, his expression hardening.

‘How should I know what was on it?’ he said angrily. ‘I was rather hoping you could tell me.’

FORTY-ONE

Spagna Metropolitana station, Rome 19th March-9.27 a.m.

The train galloped into the station, its metal flanks elaborately embroidered with graffiti-the angry poetry of Rome’s disenfranchised youth delivered at the point of an aerosol can. In a few places, the authorities had scrubbed the carriages clean, no doubt in the hope of protecting the wider population from these dangerously subversive voices. Their efforts, however, had largely been in vain, the ghostly outline of the censored thoughts still clearly visible where the chemicals had bleached them, like a scar that refused to heal.

The doors hissed open and a muscular human wave swept Tom and Allegra through the tunnels and up the escalators, until it broke as it reached the street above, beaching them in the shadow of the Spanish Steps.

‘Let’s head into the centre,’ Tom said, shaking off the street hawkers tugging at his sleeve and pointing himself towards the seductive windows of the Via Condotti. ‘Stick with the crowds.’

‘I know a good place for a coffee,’ Allegra suggested with a nod.

Ten minutes later and they were opposite each other in a small cubicle at the rear of a bar on the Piazza Campo Marzio, tucking into pastries and espressos.

‘Too strong for you?’ Allegra asked with a smile as Tom took a sip.

‘Just right.’ He grimaced, licking the grit from his front teeth as he glanced round.

The place didn’t look as though it had been touched in thirty years, its floor tiles cracked and lifting, the brick walls stained yellow by smoke and festooned with faded Roma flags, tattered banners and crookedly framed match-day programmes. Pride of place, behind the battlescarred bar, had been given to a signed photograph of a previous Roma club captain who, in what looked like more prosperous times, had clearly once stopped in for a complimentary Prosecco. Apart from Tom and Allegra, it was more or less deserted, a few construction workers loitering at the bar. One had his foot resting on his hardhat, like a hunter posing for a photo with his kill.

‘Did you choose this place on purpose?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Caravaggio killed a man near the Campo Marzio.’

‘I’d forgotten.’ She frowned. ‘Some sort of a duel, wasn’t it?’

‘An argument over the score during a game of tennis,’ Tom explained, emptying another sugar into his coffee to smooth its bitter edge. ‘Or so the story goes. Swords were drawn, and in the struggle…’

‘Which is how he ended up in Sicily?’

‘Via Naples and Malta,’ Tom confirmed. ‘He painted the Nativity while he was still on the run.’ A pause. ‘That’s the wonderful thing about Caravaggio. That he could be so deeply flawed as a person, and yet capable of such beauty. They say his paintings are like a mirror to the soul.’

‘Even yours?’ she asked, Tom detecting the hint of a serious question lurking behind her teasing smile.

‘Perhaps. If I had one.’ He smiled back.

Allegra ordered another round of coffees.

‘So what are we going to do about Johnny?’ she asked as the waiter shuffled away.

‘What can we do?’ Tom shrugged. ‘Even if we hadn’t trashed the car, the cops will be all over it by now. We’re just going to have to wait until Archie calls and then pay him the cash instead.’

‘Archie?’

‘My business partner,’ Tom explained. ‘He’s on his way to Geneva, but he knows people here. The sort of people who can lend us fifty grand without asking too many questions. It might take until tonight, but as soon as we have it we go back to Johnny, hand it over and see what he knows.’

One of the workers made his way past them, returning a few moments later wiping his hands on his trousers and fastening his fly, the toilet flushing lustily behind him.

‘Show me that photo again,’ Allegra said, when he was out of earshot.

Reaching into his pocket, Tom laid the Polaroid down between them. It showed a sculpted man’s face against a black background, a jagged edge marking where part of his chin and left cheek had broken off.

‘It looks like marble. A statue fragment,’ she said slowly, turning it to face her. ‘Beautifully carved…’ She ran her fingers across the photo’s surface, as if trying to stroke its lips. ‘Almost certainly looted.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘Tomb-robbers always use Polaroids. It avoids the risk of sending negatives off to be developed. And they can’t be as easily emailed around as digital photos, allowing you to keep track of who has seen what.’

‘Are you sure it’s marble?’ Tom frowned. ‘It looks pretty thin. Almost like some sort of mask.’

‘You’re right,’ she said, peering at the image. ‘Strange. To be honest, I’ve never really seen anything like it before.’

‘Then we need to find someone who has. The photo was pushed too far down that seat to have fallen there accidentally. Cavalli must have hidden it for a reason.’

‘Well the obvious person is…’ Allegra began, breaking off as she realised what she was saying.

‘Your friend, the professor?’ Tom guessed.

‘I wasn’t thinking.’ She shook her head. ‘There’s no way I’m-’

‘You won’t have to, I’ll do the talking,’ Tom reassured her. ‘Where can I find him?’

‘Forget it,’ she sighed impatiently. ‘Gallo will have someone watching his apartment.’

‘He must go out?’

‘Not if he can avoid it,’ she said with a shake of her head. ‘Bad hip and a completely irrational fear of weeds.’

‘Weeds?’

‘He’s old. It’s a long story.’

Tom noticed that, for the briefest of moments, she allowed herself to smile. Then, just as quickly, her face clouded over again.

‘Then I’ll have to find a way in. There must be-’

‘What time is it?’ she interrupted, gripping Tom’s arm.

‘What?’

‘The time?’

He glanced up at the pizza-inspired clock tethered to the wall over the toilet.

‘Just after ten. Why?’ Tom asked as she excitedly stuffed the photograph into her pocket.

‘He’s giving a lecture this morning,’ she exclaimed, sidling along the bench so that she could stand up. ‘I saw his notes yesterday. Eleven o’clock at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj.’

Tom jumped up, throwing a handful of change down.

‘That doesn’t give us much time.’

FORTY-TWO

Hotel Ritz, Madrid, Spain 19th March-9.48 a.m.

‘Oh. It’s you.’

Director Bury’s face fell, either too jet-lagged or annoyed to conceal his disappointment. It was hard to tell.

‘Yes, sir.’ Verity Bruce nodded, trying to sound like she hadn’t noticed. ‘It’s me.’

There was a long pause, and he looked at her hopefully, as if she might suddenly remember that she needed to be somewhere else, or that she had accidentally knocked on the wrong door. But she said nothing, playing instead with the silver locket around her neck in the knowledge that it would draw his eyes towards the bronzed curve of her breasts.

‘Yes, well,’ Bury coughed nervously, his eyes flicking to his feet and then to a point about three inches above her head. ‘You’d better come in.’

To say that he had been deliberately avoiding her since the unveiling of the kouros would have been going too far. They’d both had lunch with someone from the mayor’s office the previous day, for example, both sat in the first-class cabin together on the flight over and both been guests at that morning’s cultural exchange breakfast at the embassy. But to say that he had been avoiding being alone with her would have been entirely accurate. He had sought safety in numbers, inventing a reason to leave the lunch early so they wouldn’t have to share a taxi back to the museum, arriving at the breakfast late to avoid getting trapped over muffins and orange juice. That’s why she’d followed him back to his hotel suite now. She’d known he would be alone and out of excuses.

He walked over to the desk and perched on its edge, indicating that she should sit in one of the low armchairs opposite. She recognised this as one of his usual tricks; a clumsy attempt, no doubt picked up from some assertiveness training course, to gain the psychological advantage by physically dominating the conversation.

‘I’ll stand, if that’s all right,’ she said, enjoying his small flicker of anxiety.

‘Good idea.’ He jumped up, clearly not wanting to get caught out at his own game. ‘Too much sitting around in this job.’

‘Dominic, I thought it was time we talked. Alone.’

‘Yes, yes.’ Bury seemed strangely pleased that she’d said this, like someone who was desperate to break up with their partner, but too chicken to bring it up first. He gave a nervous laugh. ‘Drink?’

The offer appeared to be directed more at himself than her. She shook her head, her eyebrows raised in surprise.

‘It’s a little early, isn’t it?’

‘Not in Europe,’ he said quickly. ‘When in Rome and all that, hey?’

There was another strained silence as he busied himself over a bottle of scotch and some ice, the neck of the bottle chiming against the glass’s rim as his hand trembled while he poured.

‘Cheers!’ he said, with a rather forced enthusiasm.

‘About the other day…’ she began.

‘Very unfortunate,’ he immediately agreed, refilling his glass. ‘All those people, all those questions…’ He knocked back another mouthful, swallowing it before it had touched the back of his throat. ‘It doesn’t look good, you understand.’

‘The kouros is genuine,’ she insisted. ‘You saw the forensic tests.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Only sometimes it’s easier for people to attack us than it is for them to accept that their fixed views on the evolution of Greek sculpture might be wrong,’ she said, paraphrasing Faulks’s rather more eloquent argument from the previous day.

‘I know, I know.’ Bury sat down wearily, momentarily forgetting his usual mind games, it seemed. ‘But the trustees…’ he said the word as if they were a local street gang who he suspected of vandalising his car. ‘They get nervous.’

‘Building a collection like ours isn’t risk free,’ she observed dryly. ‘Their canapés and cocktails come with some strings attached.’

‘They don’t understand the art world,’ he agreed. ‘They don’t understand what it takes to play catch-up with the Europeans and the Met.’

‘They’re out of their depth,’ she nodded. ‘And they’re dragging us under with them.’

He shrugged and gave a weak smile, not disagreeing with her, she noted.

‘They just want to wake up to the right sort of headlines.’

‘Then I have just the thing for them,’ she jumped in, sensing her moment. ‘A unique piece. Impeccable provenance. I’m flying to Geneva tomorrow to see it.’

‘Verity-’ he stood up again, as if he sensed a negotiation looming and therefore the need to physically reassert himself once more ‘- I have to tell you that it’s going to be a while before the trustees, or me, for that matter…’

She thrust the Polaroid Faulks had entrusted her with towards him. He sat down again heavily, his face pale. ‘That’s…’

‘Impossible? Wait until I tell you who I think carved it.’

FORTY-THREE

Piazza del Collegio Romano, Rome 19th March-10.49 a.m.

This was Aurelio’s Eco’s favourite art gallery. Quite an accolade, when you considered the competition. Yes, the Capitoline Museum was richer, the Vatican Museum bigger, the Galleria Borghese more beautiful. But their fatal flaw was to have been crudely sewn together from larger collections by different patrons over time, leaving ugly and unnatural scars where they joined and overlapped.

The Doria Pamphilj, on the other hand, had been carefully built over the centuries by a single family. In Aurelio’s eyes this gave it a completely unique integrity of vision and purpose that stretched unbroken, like a golden thread, back through time. It was a sacred flame, carefully tended by each passing generation and then handed on to the next custodian to nurture. Even today, the family still lived in the palazzo’s private apartments, still owned the fabulous gallery that sheltered within its thick walls. He rather liked this-it appealed to his sense of the past and the present and the future and how they were inexorably wedded through history.

He paused on the entrance steps and snatched a glance over his shoulder, tightening his scarf around his neck. Gallo’s men weren’t even trying to pretend they weren’t following him now, two of them having parked up near where he’d been dropped off by his taxi and following on foot about thirty feet behind. He felt more like a prisoner than protected, despite what they’d told him. With a helpless shrug, he placed his hand on the door and heaved it open.

‘Buongiorno, Professore,’ the guard on reception welcomed him cheerily.

He was early, but then he liked to leave himself enough time to check the room and have a final read through his notes. It was funny, but even at his age, after doing this for all these years, he still got nervous. That was the problem with an academic reputation. It was brittle, like porcelain. All those years of care could be shattered in one clumsy moment. And even if you managed to find all the pieces and reassemble them, the cracks invariably showed.

‘Expecting a big turnout today?’

‘An interpretation of the archaeological remains of the Etruscan bridge complex at San Giovenale,’ Aurelio recited the title of his lecture in a deliberate monotone. ‘I almost didn’t come myself.’

‘In other words, I’ll be turning people away as usual.’ The guard’s laughter followed him along the entrance hall.

The one thing Aurelio didn’t like about this place was the lift. It was ancient and horribly cramped and seemed to rouse a latent claustrophobia that years of archaeological excavations had never previously disturbed. Still, it was only one floor, he thought to himself as the car lurched unsteadily upwards, and with his hip the way it was, it wasn’t as if he had much choice.

Stepping out, he limped though the Poussin and Velvets rooms to the ballroom, where two banks of giltwood and red velvet chairs had already been laid out. Enough seating for fifty, he noted with a smile. Perhaps the turnout wouldn’t be so bad after all.

‘Are you alone?’

He turned to see a man closing the door behind him, the key turning in the lock.

‘The lecture doesn’t start until eleven,’ he replied warily.

‘Are you alone, Aurelio?’ A woman stood framed in the doorway to the small ballroom, her face stone, her voice like ice.

FORTY-FOUR

Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome 19th March-10.57 a.m.

‘Allegra?’ Aurelio gasped. ‘Is that you? What have you done to yourself?’

‘How many?’ Tom growled in Italian.

‘What?’ Aurelio’s eyes flicked back to him.

‘How many men followed you here?’

‘Two,’ he stuttered. ‘Two, I think. Gallo’s. They’ve been watching me ever since…’

‘Ever since you betrayed me?’ Allegra hissed. It was strange. She’d felt many things for Aurelio since yesterday afternoon. Sadness, disbelief, confusion. But now that he was actually standing in front of her, it was her anger, instinctive and uncontained, that had come most naturally.

‘We haven’t got time for that now,’ Tom warned her, bolting shut the door that gave on to the adjacent ballroom. ‘Just show it to him.’

‘I’m sorry, Allegra. I’m so sorry,’ Aurelio whispered, reaching pleadingly towards her. ‘I should have told you. I should have told you everything a long time ago.’

‘Save it,’ she snapped, stony faced, then pressed the photo into his hands. ‘What is it?’

He gazed down at the picture, then looked up, open mouthed.

‘Is this real?’ he croaked.

‘What is it?’ Tom repeated.

‘It looks Greek,’ Allegra prompted. ‘I thought the marble could be from Pentelikon.’

‘Greek, yes, but that’s not marble.’ He shook his head excitedly, his eyes locking with hers. ‘It’s ivory.’

‘Ivory?’ she repeated breathlessly. It was obvious, now he’d mentioned it. Obvious and yet impossible.

‘It’s a mask from a chryselephantine statue,’ Aurelio confirmed. ‘Circa 400 to 500 BC. Probably of the sun god Apollo.’ A pause. ‘Are you sure this is real?’ he asked again.

‘Chryselephantine means gold and ivory in Greek,’ Allegra quickly explained in English, seeing the confused look on Tom’s face. ‘They used to fix carved slabs of ivory on to a wooden frame for the head, hands and feet and then beat sheets of gold leaf on to the rest to form the clothes, armour and hair.’

‘It’s rare?’

‘It’s a miracle,’ Aurelio replied in a hushed tone, almost as if they weren’t there. ‘There used to be seventy-four of them in Rome, but they all vanished when it was sacked by the Barbarians in 410 AD. Apart from two fire-damaged examples found in Greece and a fragment in the Vatican Museum, not a single piece has survived. Certainly nothing of this size and quality.’

Their eyes all shot to the door as someone tried the handle, rattling it noisily.

‘Time to go,’ Tom said firmly, snatching the photo from his grasp. ‘The private apartments should still be clear. We can go out the same way we came in.’

‘Wait,’ Aurelio called after them. ‘Don’t you want to know who it’s by?’

‘You can tell that from a photo?’ Allegra frowned, something in his voice making her pause.

There was a muffled shout and then a heavy drum roll of pounding fists.

‘Not definitively. Not without seeing it,’ he admitted. ‘But if I had to guess…there’s only one sculptor from that period that we know of who was capable of something of that quality. The same person who carved the statue of Athena in the Parthenon. The same person who carved the statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.’

‘Phidias?’ Allegra guessed, her mouth suddenly dry. No wonder Aurelio had turned pale.

‘Who else?’ He nodded excitedly. ‘Don’t you see, Allegra? It’s a miracle.’

‘Let’s go,’ Tom repeated, grabbing Allegra’s arm, the door now shaking violently. But she wrestled herself free, determined to ask the one question that she most wanted answered.

‘Why did you do it, Aurelio?’ she snapped. ‘Has Gallo got something on you?’

‘Gallo? I’d never even heard of him until yesterday,’ he protested.

‘Then who were you on the phone to?’

There was a long pause, Aurelio’s lips quivering as though the words were trapped in his mouth.

‘The League.’

‘The Delian League?’ she breathed, not sure which was worse-Aurelio working with Gallo, as she’d first assumed, or this?

‘They said they wouldn’t hurt you. That they just wanted to see what you knew,’ he pleaded. ‘I wanted to tell you everything. Have done for a long time. When you told me about the lead discs and the killings…I tried to point you in the right direction. But I was afraid.’

Abruptly, the noise outside stopped.

‘They’ll be back with a key,’ urged Tom. ‘Come on!’

‘You could have trusted me,’ she insisted, ignoring Tom. ‘I could have helped you.’

‘It was too late for that. It’s been twenty, thirty years. They’d kept records of everything I’d ever done for them. The false attributions, the inflated valuations, the invented provenances. I needed the money. You see that, don’t you? I needed the money to finance my work. Who else was going to pay? The university? The government? Pah!’

‘Who are they?’ she pressed. ‘Give me a name.’

‘Th-there was a dealer who I met a few times,’ he muttered. ‘An American called Faulks who used to fly in from Geneva. He was with them, I’m sure of it. But everyone else was just a voice on the phone. Believe me, Allegra, I tried to get out so many times. Tried to give it up. But the older I got, the harder it became to throw everything away.’

‘Throw what away?’

‘Oh, you don’t understand. You’re too young.’ He gave an exasperated sigh, throwing his hands up as if she had somehow let him down. ‘You don’t know what it means to be old, to be out of breath from tying your shoelaces, to not be able to take a piss without it hurting.’

‘What’s that got to do…?’

‘My books, my research-everything I’d ever worked for…my whole life. It would all have been for nothing if they’d leaked my involvement.’

‘Your books?’ she repeated with an empty laugh. ‘Your books!’

‘Don’t you see?’ he pleaded, a desperate edge to his voice now. ‘I had no choice. My reputation was all I had left.’

‘No,’ she said, with a broken smile. ‘You had me.’

FORTY-FIVE

Quai du Mont Blanc, Geneva 19th March-11.16 a.m.

There was a definite spring in Earl Faulks’s step that morning, despite the slightly bitter taste left by Deena Carroll’s sermonising earlier. After everything he’d done for them over the years…the ungrateful bitch. The truth was that, having thought about it, he was rather glad she’d turned him down. With Klein as good as dead, he was no use to him any more anyway, so why do her any favours? Better to give someone else a sniff of the action.

Besides, he could afford to take a small risk. Things were going well. Much better, in fact than he had anticipated. His courier had cleared the border at Lake Lugano that morning and was due down at the Free Port any time now. In Rome, meanwhile, events were unfolding far more quickly and dramatically than he had ever dreamt would be possible. That was the beauty of the Italians, he mused. They were an amaretto paper of a race -ready to ignite at the faintest spark.

There had been that unhelpful little episode with the kouros at the Getty, of course, although for the moment at least, tempers seemed to have cooled. Having seen the ivory mask, Verity had understood that there was a far greater prize at stake here than a dry academic debate over a statue’s marble type and muscle tone. Barring any last-minute disaster, she was due in from Madrid around lunchtime the following day.

Until then he had an auction to prepare for, lots to examine, commission bids to place…On cue, his car drew up outside Sotheby’s. He sat back, waiting for his chauffer to jog round and open his door, but then waved him away when his phone began to ring. An American number that he didn’t recognise. A call he wanted to take.

‘Faulks.’

‘This is Kezman,’ the voice replied.

‘Mr Kezman…’ Faulks checked his watch in surprise-a classic fluted steel Boucheron. ‘Thank you for returning my call. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you so late.’

‘I’m in the casino business. This is early,’ he growled.

‘Mr Kezman, I don’t know if you know…’

‘Yeah, I know who you are,’ he shot back. ‘Avner Klein’s a personal friend. He told me about you.’

‘And he told me about you,’ purred Faulks. ‘Said you were a shrewd collector.’

‘Don’t blow smoke up my ass. I pay people for that and I guarantee they’ve all got bigger tits than you. If you’ve got something to sell, sell it.’

‘Fair enough. Here’s the pitch: seven and a half million and your name in lights.’

‘My name’s in ten foot neon out on the Strip already.’ Kezman gave an impatient laugh. ‘Tell me about the money.’

‘Seven and a half million dollars,’ Faulks repeated slowly. ‘Risk free.’

‘Why don’t you leave the odds to the experts?’ Kezman snapped.

‘How would you price a federal government guarantee?’

There was a pause.

‘Go on.’

Faulks smiled. He had his attention now.

‘An…item has come into my possession. An item of immense historical and cultural significance. I want you to buy it off me for ten million dollars.’

‘Sure. Why not make it twenty?’ Kezman gave a hollow laugh. ‘The global economy’s on its knees, but let’s not let small details like that get in the way.’

‘Then, you’re going to donate it to Verity Bruce at the Getty,’ he continued, ignoring the interruption. ‘She will value it at fifty million, its true price. This will lead the IRS…’

‘To give me a seventeen and a half million tax credit for having made a fifty-million-dollar charitable donation,’ Kezman breathed, his flippant tone vanishing.

‘Which, subtracting the ten you will have paid me, nets out at a seven and a half million profit, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Not to mention the PR value of the coverage that will be triggered by your generosity,’ Faulks added. ‘Hell, they’d probably name a wing after you, if you asked.’

‘How firm is the valuation?’

‘Do you know Verity Bruce?’ Faulks asked.

‘I had breakfast with her two weeks ago.’

‘She’s due here tomorrow to authenticate the piece. Something this rare isn’t affected by shortterm economic factors. The value will hold.’

Kezman was silent for a few moments. Faulks waited, knowing that his next question would reveal how well he’d played his hand.

‘When would you need the money?’

Blackjack.

‘A few days. A week at most.’

‘If Verity okays it, I’m in,’ Kezman confirmed. ‘You have my private number now. Just get her to call me when she’s seen it.’

‘Wait! Don’t you even want to know what it is?’ Faulks asked with a frown.

A pause.

‘Will I make any more if I do?’

‘No,’ Faulks conceded.

‘Then why should I care?’

FORTY-SIX

Via del Governo Vecchio, Rome 19th March-11.32 a.m.

The streets were dark and narrow here, the buildings seeming to arch together over Tom and Allegra’s heads like trees kissing over a country lane. It was busy too; people carefully picking their way along the narrow pavements, dodging around the occasional dog turds and an elderly woman who was furiously scrubbing her marble doorstep. The traffic, meanwhile, was backed up behind a florist’s van which had stopped to make a delivery. Alerted by the relentless sounding of impatient car horns, a few people were leaning curiously over their balconies, some observing events with a detached familiarity, others hurling insults at the van driver for his selfishness. Glancing up, he made an obscene gesture, and pulled away.

Allegra was silent, her eyes rarely lifting from her shoes. She was hurting, Tom knew, probably even blaming herself for Aurelio’s betrayal, as if his selfishness and pride was somehow her fault. He tried to think of something to say that might comfort her and relieve her imagined guilt. But he couldn’t. Not without lying. The truth was that in time the floodwaters of her anger and confusion would recede, leaving behind them the tidemark of their lost friendship. And whatever he said, that would never fade. He, of all people, bore the fears of betrayal.

‘What other Phidias pieces are there?’ he asked, stepping to one side to let a woman past holding on to five yapping dogs, the leashes stretching from her hands like tentacles.

‘There’s a torso of Athena in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris that’s been attributed to him,’ she replied without looking up. ‘And they found a cup inscribed with his name in the ruins of the workshop at Olympia where he assembled the statue of Zeus.’

‘But nothing like the mask?’

‘Not even close.’ She shook her head. ‘If Aurelio’s right, it’s priceless.’

‘Everything has a price,’ Tom smiled. ‘The trick is finding someone willing to pay it.’

‘Maybe that’s what Cavalli was doing the night he was killed,’ she said, grimacing as an ancient Vespa laboured past, its wheezing engine making the windows around them rattle under the strain. ‘Meeting a buyer. Or at least someone he thought was a buyer.’

‘It would explain why he had the Polaroid on him,’ Tom agreed. ‘And why he hid it when he realised what they really wanted.’

‘But not where he got the mask from in the first place.’ She paused, frowning, as the road brought them out on to the Piazza Ponte Sant’Angelo. ‘What are we doing here?’

‘Isn’t this where you said Cavalli was killed?’ Tom asked.

‘Yes, but…’

‘I thought we should take a look.’

A steady two-way traffic of pedestrians was streaming over the bridge’s polished cobbles, the hands and faces of the statues lining the parapet seeming strangely animated under the sun’s flickering caress, as if they were waving them forward. For Tom, at least, the wide-open vista was a welcome relief from the narrow street’s dark embrace.

‘Where did they find him?’ he asked, hands shoved deep into his coat pockets.

‘In the river. Hanging from one of the statues.’

‘Killed on the anniversary of Caesar’s murder, only for Ricci to be murdered on the site of Caesar’s assassination,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘With both Ricci’s and Argento’s deaths staged as a re-enactment of a Caravaggio painting.’ She nodded impatiently. ‘We’ve been through all this.’

‘I know.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s just that everything about these murders has been so deliberate. The dates, the locations, the arrangement of the bodies, the careful echoing of some element of the one that had preceded it. It’s almost as if…they weren’t just killings.’

‘Then what were they?’

Tom paused before answering. In the distance the glorious dome of St Peter’s rose into the sky, massive and immutable. Around it swarmed a flock of pigeons, their solid mass wheeling and circling like a shroud caught in the wind.

‘Messages,’ he said eventually. ‘Maybe someone was trying to have a conversation.’

‘If you’re right it started with Cavalli,’ she said slowly, her eyes narrowing in understanding.

‘Exactly. So why kill him here? Why this bridge? They must have chosen it for a reason.’

Allegra paused a few moments before answering, her face creased in thought.

‘It was originally built to connect the city to Hadrian’s mausoleum. Before becoming a toll road for pilgrims who wanted to reach St Peter’s. And in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, famously of course, they used to display the bodies of executed prisoners along it as a warning.’

‘A warning to who?’ Tom frowned, then nodded at the weathered shapes looming over them. ‘What about the statues? Do they mean anything?’

‘Commissioned from Bernini by Pope Clement IX. Each angel is holding an object from the Passion. Cavalli’s rope was tied to the one holding a cross.’

‘Which was then echoed by Ricci’s inverted crucifixion and Argento being found in a church.’ Tom clicked his fingers as two more small pieces of the puzzle fell into place.

‘That’s not the only thing,’ Allegra added excitedly, a thought having just occurred to her. ‘Cavalli’s not the first person to have been killed here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘A noblewoman called Beatrice Cenci was tortured and put to death on the Piazza Ponte Sant’Angelo in 1599,’ she explained. ‘It was one of Rome’s most notorious public executions.’

‘What had she done?’

‘Murdered her father.’

Tom nodded slowly, remembering the deliberate violence with which Cavalli’s house had been ransacked.

‘Patricide. Treason. Maybe that’s it. Maybe Cavalli had betrayed the League and this was his punishment?’ He gave a deep sigh, then turned to her with a shrug. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Come on, let’s try and call Archie. He should have landed by now.’

They turned and walked to the end of the bridge, Tom reaching for his phone as they waited for a break in the traffic. But before they could cross, a large armoured truck gunned down the road towards them. Two men jumped down holding what Tom recognized as what the Sicilian mafia called a Lupara-a traditional break-open design shotgun, sawn off a few inches beyond the stock to make it more effective at close range and easier to manoeuvre and hide. The weapon of choice in old-school vendettas.

A woman behind screamed and Tom could hear the fumbling scramble of panicked feet behind him as people scattered.

‘Get in,’ one of the men barked.

FORTY-SEVEN

Lungotevere Vaticano, Rome 19th March-11.53 a.m.

Looking around him, Tom could see that the truck’s interior had been furnished like an expensive office, the floor laid with thick carpet, the sides lined with a cream wallpaper decorated with tropical birds. To his left a red leather sofa abutted what he assumed was a toilet cubicle, its door latched shut. In the far right-hand corner, meanwhile, stood an elegant cherrywood desk on which a brass banker’s lamp illuminated a laptop and a police scanner spitting static. Overhead were four flat-panel screens, each tuned to a different news or business channel. Most telling, perhaps, was the gun rack opposite the sofa, which contained four MP5s, half a dozen Glock 17s and a pair of Remington 1100s. Neatly stacked on the shelves below were two dozen grenades and several boxes of ammunition. Enough to start and win a small war.

The gears crunched and the truck swayed forward with a determined snarl. The gunman who had followed them inside waved at them to sit down and then instructed them to handcuff themselves to the hoop bolted to the wall above them so that their arms were held above their heads. Stepping forward, he made sure that the ratchets were tight against their wrists and then emptied their pockets and Tom’s bag, pausing over the FBI file and the Polaroid of the ivory mask. In the background, Tom could make out the opening aria of the Cavalleria Rusticana.

There was the muffled sound of the toilet flushing. The latch clicked open and a man walked out, placing a folded newspaper down on the desk as he turned to face them. Tall and square faced, he had a thinning head of hair that rose in white waves at the front and then foundered into a black expanse at the rear. He was smartly dressed in a grey Armani suit and gaudy Versace tie with matching pocket handkerchief. The collar of his white shirt, however, appeared to be several sizes too small, as if he had gambled on not buying a new one in the belief that he would lose some weight. If so, it was a bet that he appeared destined to lose, his once sharp cheekbones sinking into his face like smudged lines on a charcoal drawing, a fleshy crevice forming in the cleft of his chin.

The guard handed him the file and the Polaroid. He glanced at each of them, then sat down. Swivelling to face them, he adjusted his cuffs, carefully covering his watch.

‘Welcome to Rome, Signor Kirk.’ He spoke in a thick accent, his eyes fixing them with a cold, mortuary gaze.

‘You know him?’ Allegra’s voice was both angry and disbelieving.

Tom frowned as he tried to place the face, then gave a small shake of his head.

‘Should I?’

‘Should he?’ the man asked Allegra, his face creased into a question.

‘He’s Giovanni De Luca,’ Allegra replied unsmilingly. ‘The head of the Banda della Magliana.’

Tom’s eyes flickered in recognition. So much for tracking the Delian League down and the element of surprise. Instead, one half of it had come looking for them and sprung its own trap.

‘Felix doesn’t know me,’ De Luca said, his flickering smile suggesting he was pleased that she had recognised him. ‘But I had the pleasure of meeting his mother once.’

‘My mother?’ Tom breathed, not knowing whether to sound angry or astonished.

‘A fundraising dinner many years ago. A beautiful woman, if I may say so. A terrible loss. Of course, it was only many years later that I heard of you.’

‘Heard what, exactly?’ Allegra asked, eyeing Tom with the same suspicious look she’d had back in Cavalli’s house when she’d first met him.

‘It’s hard to be good at what Felix does without word getting out. He has a special talent.’

‘Had,’ Tom corrected him. ‘I got out a few years ago.’

‘And yet, from what I hear, you’re still running.’ He nodded towards the scanner.

‘Is that what this is about?’ Tom asked impatiently. His arms were beginning to ache and every gear change and bump in the road was making the cuffs saw a little deeper into his wrists.

‘What’s this?’ De Luca waved the photo at him.

‘We found it in Cavalli’s car,’ Tom explained. ‘We think he was trying to sell it.’

‘What do you know about Cavalli?’ De Luca shot back, spitting the name out in a way that revealed more than he had probably intended.

Tom nodded slowly, immediately guessing at the truth.

‘Why did you kill him?’

De Luca paused, then inclined his head in a small bow, as if acknowledging applause.

‘Strictly speaking, the river killed him.’

‘Did he work for you?’

‘Pfff! He was one of Moretti’s.’

Moretti. Tom recognized the name as the person Allegra had identified as supposedly heading up the other half of the Delian League. De Luca’s supposed business partner.

‘What had he done?’ Allegra asked.

‘I only kill for two reasons. Theft and disloyalty.’ De Luca counted them off on his fingers as if he were listing the ingredients for a recipe. ‘In Cavalli’s case, he was guilty of both.’

‘You mean he’d betrayed the League?’ Tom asked.

‘It seemed fitting to mark his treachery on the spot of an earlier treason,’ De Luca nodded, confirming what they’d already guessed on the bridge.

The van turned sharply left. Allegra slid across the seat, pressing up against Tom.

‘And Ricci?’ Allegra asked.

‘I took care of Cavalli to protect the League. But Moretti, the old fool, got it into his head that I was about to make a move on the whole operation.’ De Luca’s tone hardened, his jaw clenching. ‘He had Ricci killed to warn me off. Argento was me evening the score.’

Tom nodded as the realisation dawned that far from being a conversation the careful echoing and symbolism of the various deaths had in fact been the opening shots of a very public, very acrimonious divorce.

‘And now it seems my accountant in Monaco has disappeared,’ he continued angrily. ‘Well, if Moretti wants a war, I’m ready for him.’ He struck his chest with his fist, the dull thud revealing that he was wearing a bullet-proof vest under his shirt.

‘What did Jennifer Browne have to do with your war?’ Tom demanded angrily.

‘Who?’ De Luca frowned.

‘The FBI agent you had killed in Vegas.’

‘What FBI agent?’

‘Don’t lie to me,’ Tom shouted, his wrists straining against the handcuffs.

‘Cavalli was going to sing, so I clipped his wings,’ De Luca said in a low, controlled voice. ‘Ricci and Argento-that’s just business between Moretti and me. But I had nothing to do with killing any FBI agent. I’ve never even heard of her.’

‘She was closing in on the Delian League, so you had her taken out,’ Tom insisted.

‘Is that what this is about? Is that why you’re here?’ De Luca picked up the FBI file and glanced at its monogrammed cover with a puzzled shrug. ‘Well, then maybe somebody did us a favour. Either way, I never ordered the hit.’

‘Well, somebody in the League did,’ Tom insisted. ‘And I’ll take you all down to find them, if I have to.’

There was a pause. De Luca blew out the sides of his cheeks, clearly mulling something over. Then, with a shrug, he nodded.

‘Yes. I expect you probably would.’

Tom felt the needle before he saw it, a sharp stab of pain in his neck where the guard had stepped forward and pulled the trigger on an injection gun. Allegra was next, her head slumping forward as he felt the room begin to spin and darken. The last thing he was aware of was De Luca’s voice, deepening and slowing as if being played back at half speed.

‘Do give my best to your mother.’

FORTY-EIGHT

Sotheby’s auction rooms, Quai du Mont Blanc, Geneva 19th March -1.32 p.m.

Short, perhaps only four feet high, she had braided hair that fell across her forehead and down her neck. Dressed in a simple tunic that hung from her body in smooth folds, a hunting strap ran down from her shoulder and across her breasts, pulling the material tight against their firm slope. Gazing straight ahead, she wore a slight smile, lips parted as if she was about to speak. Her arms were cut off at the elbows.

‘Statue of the goddess Artemis; fourth century BC,’ Archie murmured to himself as he looked down from the marble sculpture to the auction catalogue and scanned through the entry again. ‘Believed to be from a settlement near Foggi. Private Syrian collection.’

This last detail made Archie smile. Even if Tom hadn’t asked him to investigate this lot, the fact that it had supposedly come from a Syrian family would have made him suspicious anyway. The simple truth was that, while the contents of most major European and American collections were well documented, little, if anything, was known about the majority of Middle Eastern and Asian private collections. Anyone trying to disguise the fact that an artefact was looted, therefore, was far more likely to tie it back to some obscure family collection where they could convincingly claim it had been languishing for the last eighty years, than to risk the awkward questions that a European provenance might trigger.

He stepped back and pretended to study some of the other lots, ignoring the call on his phone which he guessed, from the New York prefix, was the lawyer they’d met at Senator Duval’s funeral still trying to arrange a meeting with Tom. Next time, he’d know better than to hand out his card so readily, he thought to himself with a pained sigh.

Looking up, he caught sight of Dominique de Lecourt standing near the entrance. Seeing her now, blonde hair cascading on to her delicate shoulders, it struck him that her pale, oval face mirrored something of the goddess Artemis’s cold, sculpted and remote beauty. There was a parallel too, between the statue’s simple tunic and her tailored linen dress, and perhaps even an echo of the carved hunting strap in the rearing stallion that he knew Dominique had had tattooed on her shoulder when younger. But any resemblance was only a fleeting one, the illusion shattered by her Ducati biker jacket and the way her blue eyes glittered with a wild freedom that the marble sculpture would never taste.

She was too young for him, although that hadn’t stopped him thinking about what might have been from time to time. Still only twenty-five, in fact. Not that her age had prevented her from successfully running Tom’s antiques business, having helped him transfer it from Geneva to London after his father died. This was her first time back here since then, and he could tell she was finding it difficult, however much she was trying to hide it.

She had been close to Tom’s father-far closer, in fact, than Tom. The way she told the story, he had saved her from herself, offering her a job rather than calling the cops when he’d caught her trying to steal his wallet. With it had come a chance to break free from the spiralling cycle of casual drugs and petty crime that a childhood spent being tossed between foster homes had been steering her towards; a chance she’d grabbed with both hands. All of which made what they were about to do that much more ironic.

He nodded at her as Earl Faulks turned to leave the room, leaning heavily on his umbrella. Even if the auctioneer hadn’t accepted the carefully folded five-hundred-euro note to finger him as the lot’s seller, Archie would have guessed it was him. It wasn’t just that he had returned four times during the viewing period that had marked him out, but the questioning look he had given anyone who had strayed too close to the statue. It rather reminded Archie of a father weighing up a potential boyfriend’s suitability to take their teenage daughter out on a date.

Seeing Archie’s signal, Dominique set off, bumping into Faulks heavily as they crossed.

‘Pardon,’ she apologised.

‘That’s quite all right,’ Faulks snapped, a cold smile flickering across his face before, with a curt nod, he limped on.

‘Go,’ she whispered as she walked past Archie, their hands briefly touching as she handed him Faulks’s PDA.

Turning to face the wall, Archie deftly popped off the rear cover, removed the battery and then slipped out the SIM card. Sliding it into a reader connected to an Asus micro laptop, he scanned its contents, the software quickly identifying the IMSI number, before girding itself to decrypt its Ki code.

Archie glanced up at Dominique, who had moved back towards the entrance and was signalling at him to hurry. Archie gave a grim nod, his heart racing, but the programme was still churning as it tried to break the 128-bit encryption, numbers scrolling frantically across the screen.

He looked up again, and cursed when he saw that she was now mouthing that Faulks was leaving. Damn! He’d counted on him staying for the auction itself, although he knew that some dealers preferred not to attend their own sales in case they jinxed them. He looked back down at the computer. Still nothing. Dominique was looking desperate now. Back to the screen again.

Done.

Snatching the SIM card out of the reader, he hurried to the door, fumbling as he slid it back into Faulks’s phone and fitted the battery and then the cover. He crossed Dominique, their hands briefly touching again as slipped her the micro-computer, leaving her the final task of programming a new card.

‘He’s outside,’ she breathed.

Archie sprinted into the hall, down the stairs and through the main entrance. Faulks was settling back in the rear seat of a silver Bentley, his chauffeur already at the wheel and turning the ignition key.

‘Excuse me, mate,’ Archie panted, rapping sharply on the window.

The window sank and Faulks, sitting forward on his seat, fixed him with a suspicious look.

‘Can I help you?’

‘You dropped this.’

Faulks looked at the phone, patted his breast pockets, then glanced up at Archie.

‘Thank you,’ he said, his wary look fading into a grateful smile. Taking it with a nod, he sat back, the window smoothly sealing itself shut.

As Faulks’s car accelerated away, Dominique appeared at Archie’s shoulder.

‘All sorted?’ he puffed.

‘We’ve got him.’ She nodded, handing him the newly cloned phone.

FORTY-NINE

Nr Anguillara Sabazia, northwest of Rome 19th March – 8.34 p.m.

Tom’s eyes flickered open. The room slowly came into focus. Allegra was lying on the tiled floor next to him. Still breathing.

Gingerly pulling himself upright, he sat with his back against the wall, trying not to vomit. The drugs had left him dizzy and with a bitter taste at the back of his throat. Worse still was the headache centred behind his right eye, the daggered pain ebbing and flowing with the hammer beat of his pulse. Within seconds he’d fainted back to sleep, vaguely aware of a dancing blue light licking the walls, of the whisper of running water, of the deadened echo of his own breathing, and of De Luca’s warm breath on his neck. Do give my best to your mother.

‘Tom?’

Allegra had rolled over on to her side to face him, her dark hair tumbling forward over her face. She looked worried and he wondered how long she had been calling his name.

He groaned as he sat up, his neck stiff where his head had fallen forward on to his chest.

‘What time is it?’ she asked.

He checked his watch, then remembered with a rueful grimace that it was still wrapped around Johnny Li’s tattooed wrist.

‘No idea.’

‘Merda.’ She rubbed her hands wearily across her face, then sat up next to him. ‘Where do you think they’ve taken us?’

Tom looked around with a frown. They were at one end of a windowless room that had been almost entirely swallowed by what appeared to be a large swimming pool. Five feet deep, sixty feet long and thirty feet across, it was lined with white tiles, the water spilling with a gurgling noise over the edges into an overflow trench and washing through skimmers. The underwater lights cast a shimmering flicker on to the white-washed concrete walls.

Standing up, Tom walked unsteadily to the edge. His eyes adjusting, it took him a few moments to realise that the dark shapes lurking under the water’s silvered surface were rows of antique vases and jars, each carefully spaced one from the other along the pool floor like vines anchored to a steep slope. Stiff and still, they reminded him of a Roman cohort arranged in a testudo formation, their shields held over their heads like a tortoise’s shell, bracing themselves for an attack.

‘It’s a chemical bath,’ he said, pointing at the blue drums that explained the slight burning sensation in his eyes.

‘I’ve seen something like this before,’ Allegra nodded, joining him. ‘But not this big. Not even close.’

‘Over there,’ Tom pointed hopefully at a door on the far side of the pool.

They passed through into a large room, its tiled walls lined with glass-fronted cabinets that contained a rainbow array of paints and chemicals in differently sized and shaped tins and jars. Beneath these, running along each wall, were polished stainless steel counters loaded with microscopes, centrifuges, test-tube racks, scales, shakers and other pieces of laboratory equipment.

The centre of the room, meanwhile, was taken up by two large stainless steel benches and deep sinks. A trolley laden with knives, saws, picks, tweezers, drills and other implements had been drawn up next to them, as if in preparation for an imminent procedure. In the corner was a coiled hosepipe, the white tiled floor sloping towards a central drain as if to carry away blood.

‘Cleaning, touching up, repairs, open-heart surgery…’ Tom pursed his lips. ‘This is a tombaroli restoration outfit.’

‘On an industrial scale,’ she agreed, Tom detecting the same instinctive anger in her voice as when she’d found the orphan vase fragment in Cavalli’s car.

There was another unlocked door which gave, in turn, on to a third room, lit by a single naked bulb whose weak glare didn’t quite reach to the corners. Here there was a more rustic feel, the ceiling supported by parallel lines of closely spaced wooden beams, semicircular iron-framed windows set into the stone walls at above head height and welded shut. A flight of stone steps led upstairs to another door. Predictably, this one was locked.

Shrugging dejectedly, Tom made his way back down. Allegra was waiting for him, silently pointing, her outstretched arm quivering with rage.

Looking around, he could see that the paved floor was covered in a foaming sea of dirty newspapers, wooden crates and old fruit and shoe boxes, some stacked into neat piles, others split open or listing dangerously where the cardboard had collapsed under their combined weight. He only had to open a few to guess at the contents of all the others – antique vases still covered in dirt, loose jumbles of glass and Etruscan jewellery, envelopes bulging with Roman coins, gold rings strewn on the floor. In the corner was what had once been an entire fresco, now hacked away from the wall and chain-sawed into laptop-sized chunks. Presumably to make them easier to move and sell.

‘How could they do this?’ Allegra breathed, her anger tinged by a horrified sadness.

‘Because none of this has any value to them other than what they can sell it for. Because they don’t care. Look.’

He nodded with disgust towards one of the open shoeboxes. It was stuffed with rings and human bones, the tombaroli having simply snapped off the fingers of the dead to save time.

‘You think this is where Cavalli got the ivory mask?’ she asked, looking away with a shudder.

‘I doubt it,’ Tom sighed, sitting down heavily on the bottom step. ‘Whoever owns this place must work for De Luca, and he certainly didn’t look like he’d ever seen the mask before.’

‘He may not have seen it, but he might have found out that Cavalli was ripping him off,’ she suggested, sitting down next to him. ‘Theft and disloyalty, remember? According to De Luca, Cavalli was guilty of both. Maybe Cavalli was trying to sell the mask behind the League’s back.’

‘So De Luca killed Cavalli, Moretti evened the score by murdering Ricci, and then De Luca struck back by executing Argento. He was right. We’ve stumbled into a war.’

‘That must be why they both put the lead discs on the bodies.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Remember I told you that the original Delian League was to have lasted as long as the lead its members had thrown into the sea didn’t rise to the surface? The discs were to signal that this new alliance was fracturing.’

‘None of which explains who ordered the hit on Jennifer or why.’ He sighed impatiently.

‘You don’t think De Luca had anything to do with it?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe…No. I think he would have told me if he had.’

‘Then who?’

Tom shook his head, still no closer to the truth. There was a long pause.

‘She must have meant a lot to you,’ Allegra said gently. ‘For you to have come all this way. For you to be risking so much.’

‘She trusted me to do the right thing,’ Tom answered with a half smile. ‘That’s more than most have ever done.’

There was another, long silence, Tom staring at the floor.

‘How did you two meet?’

He was glad that Allegra hadn’t picked up on the obvious cue and said that she trusted him too. He wouldn’t have believed her if she had. Not yet at least.

‘In London,’ he began hesitantly. ‘She thought I’d broken into Fort Knox.’ He smiled at the memory of their first bad-tempered exchange in the Piccadilly Arcade.

‘Fort Knox!’ She whistled. ‘What did she think you’d…’

She broke off as the door above them was unbolted and thrown open. A man stood silhouetted in the doorway, his long shadow stretching down the stairs towards them. He was holding a hip flask.

‘Let’s go for a drive.’

FIFTY

Banco Rosalia head office, Via Boncompagni, Rome 19th March – 9.24 p.m.

‘So? How much are we down?’ Santos sniffed, helping himself to a half tumbler of Limoncella from the drinks trolley.

Alfredo Geri looked up from his laptop, frowning slightly as he worked through the math. Five feet ten, he was wearing a grey suit, his tie yanked down, jacket trapped under the wheel of his chair where it had fallen on to the floor and he’d run over it. His thin black hair was slicked down against his marbled scalp, his face gaunt and bleached a cadaverous shade of white by lack of sleep and sunlight. To his right, balancing precariously on a slumping battlement of stacked files, was a pizza box that he’d not yet had time to open.

‘Now I’ve had a chance to look properly…eight…maybe nine?’

‘Eight or nine what?’ Santos snapped. He sat down heavily at the head of the table, a blanket of scattered paper stretching along its polished surface like an avalanche over a valley floor. ‘It’s a big number. Show it some respect.’

‘Eight or nine hundred million. Euro.’

‘Eight or nine hundred million euro.’ Santos closed his eyes and sighed heavily, then gave a rueful smile as he kicked back. ‘You know, the strange thing is that a few months ago losing just fifty million would have felt like the end of the world. Now, it feels like a rounding error.’

He reached for his tin of liquorice, shook it, then popped the lid.

‘It’s the CDOs that have killed us,’ Geri continued, putting his half-moon glasses back on and hunching over his screen. ‘The entire portfolio’s been wiped out. The rest is from currency swings and counterparty losses.’

‘I thought we were hedged?’

‘You can’t hedge against this sort of market.’

‘And the League’s deposits and investments?’ Santos asked hopefully.

‘Antonio, the bank’s entire capital base is gone,’ Geri spoke slowly as if trying to spell out complicated directions to a tourist. ‘It’s all gone. Everything.’

Santos sniffed, then knocked the Limoncella back with a jerk of his wrist.

‘Good. It makes things easier. This way I only need to worry about myself. Where did I come out in the end?’

‘I’ve liquidated what I can,’ Geri sounded almost apologetic. ‘Most of it at a loss, like I told you when we spoke. But the bulk of your portfolio would take weeks if not months to sell.’

‘How much?’ Santos snapped.

‘Three, maybe four million.’

‘That barely gets me a chalet,’ Santos said with a hollow laugh. ‘What about the money market positions?’

‘Already included, minus what you had to sell to fund your fun and games in Las Vegas last week,’ Geri reminded him in a reproachful tone.

A long pause.

‘Fine,’ Santos stood up. ‘It is what it is and what it is…is not enough. I need the painting.’

‘You’ve found a buyer?’

‘The Serbs are lined up to take it off my hands for twenty million,’ Santos said with a smile. ‘I’m flying out to meet them later tonight.’

‘And the watches?’

‘I’ve got one already and another on its way. I’ll get the third on the night from De Luca or Moretti. They always wear theirs.’

‘They won’t let you get away with it,’ Geri pointed out, closing his file.

‘They won’t be able to stop me if they’re dead.’ Santos shrugged, moving round to stand behind him.

‘For every person you kill, the League will send two more. You can’t kill them all. Eventually they’ll find you.’

‘How?’ Santos shrugged, stepping even closer until he could see the liver spots and tiny veins nestling under Geri’s thin thatch. ‘The world’s a large place. And you’re the only other person who knows where I’m going.’

‘Well, you know I’ll never tell them,’ Geri reassured him, shoulders stiff, staring straight in front of him.

‘Oh, I know.’ Santos smiled.

In an instant, he had locked his left arm around Geri’s throat and pulled him clear of the table. Geri lashed out with his legs, catching the edge of his file and sending it cartwheeling to the floor, paper scattering like feathers. Then with his right hand, Santos reached round and grabbed Geri’s chin.

With a sharp jerk, he snapped his neck.

FIFTY-ONE

Nr Anguillara Sabazia, northwest of Rome 19th March – 9.56 p.m.

‘Drink?’

Fabio Contarelli had turned in the passenger seat to face them, battered hip flask in hand. In his mid forties, short and pot-bellied, he had the warm, jovial manner of someone who prided himself on being on first-name terms with everyone in his village, and who the local butcher had come to favour with the best cuts. Shabbily dressed, his weather-worn face was brown and cracked like a dried river bed, although his fern green eyes shone, as if he was permanently on the verge of playing a practical joke. There was certainly little there to suggest that he had been responsible for the horrors Allegra and Tom had witnessed in the basement of his house.

‘No,’ she refused, then watched as Tom did the same. Contarelli shrugged and took a swig himself, turning back to face the road as the mudflecked Land Cruiser danced over the pot holes.

‘How long have you been a tombarolo?’ Tom asked.

‘Since I was a boy,’ Contarelli said proudly. He spoke fast and mainly in Italian, with a booming voice that was too big for his body. ‘It’s in the blood, you see. I used to come out to these fields with my father. In those days the earth would be littered with fragments of pottery and broken statues surfaced by the farmers’ ploughs. That’s when I realised there was another world under there.’ He gestured longingly out of the window towards the earthquake-scarred landscape now shrouded by night. ‘I sold what I found in the market, used the money to buy some books, got smarter about what pieces were and how much they were worth, climbed through the ranks. Now I’m a Capo di Zona and it’s the only life I know.’

‘And you always go out at night?’

‘It depends on the site.’ He shrugged, lighting a cigarette from the smouldering stub of the one which had preceded it, his fingernails broken and dirty. He seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘For some of the larger ones, we offer the landowner a share in the profits. Then my boys turn up in the day with a bulldozer and some hard hats. If anyone asks, we tell them we’re working on a construction project. If they ask again, we pay them off. Or shut them up.’

Allegra felt her anger rising, its delirious scent momentarily blinding her to the danger they were in and to the armed man seated in the back with her and Tom. She’d seen enough already to know that this wasn’t just tomb robbing. It was cultural vandalism, Contarelli’s brutal methods probably destroying as much as he found. The fact that he was now happily boasting about it only made it worse.

‘So you’ve never been caught?’ Tom asked quickly, his worried glance suggesting that he could tell she was about to snap.

‘The Carabinieri need to find us before they can catch us,’ he explained with a grin. ‘They do their best, but there are thousands of tombs and villas buried out here and they can’t be everywhere at once. Especially now the politicians are tablethumping about immigration, drugs and terrorism. You know, a few years ago, I even cleared out three graves in a field next to the police station in Viterbo. If they can’t stop us there, right under their snouts, what are their chances against us out here?’

He laughed, slapping the knee of the driver next to him in merriment.

‘Why do you still do it?’ Allegra snapped. ‘Haven’t you made enough money?’

‘I don’t do it for the money, my dear. Not for a long time now. Archaeology is my sickness, my addiction,’ he explained, his eyes shining, his hands conducting an unheard symphony. ‘The thrill of finding a tomb, the smell of a freshly opened chamber, the adrenaline rush as you crawl inside, the fear of being caught…’

‘What you do is not archaeology,’ Allegra snapped. ‘It’s rape. You take innocence and corrupt it, turning beauty into a bauble for the rich to decorate their mantelpieces with.’

‘I bring history back from the dead,’ he shot back, his face hardening. ‘I restore artefacts from thousands of years of neglect. I provide them with a home. A home where they will go on display and be appreciated, rather than languish in some museum’s basement storeroom. Now tell me, is that rape?’

The same tired old excuses, the same selfserving justifications.

‘What about your basement and the fresco we saw there, hacked into pieces?’ she retorted. ‘Or the fingers ripped from the dead, or the remains of tombs that have been gouged clean like a backstreet abortionist scraping out a womb. Is that archaeology?’

Contarelli, face now like thunder, eyed her coldly, then turned to face the front.

‘Stop the car,’ he ordered the driver tonelessly. ‘We’ll walk from here.’

FIFTY-TWO

19th March – 10.31 p.m.

They had parked at the end of a rutted track and then set out across the fields on foot, Contarelli leading the way, his two men at the rear. One of them had a pair of infra-red binoculars that he held to his face every few minutes to scan the horizon, presumably on the lookout for a possible Carabinieri patrol. Tom and Allegra, meanwhile, had been roped together by their wrists; Tom’s tied behind his back, Allegra’s fixed in front of her so that she could follow behind.

Contarelli was grasping a spilloni, a long metal spike that he had explained was used to identify a site’s size and entrance. He was still smoking, Tom noted, although he had turned the cigarette around so that the lit end was inside his mouth, to mask its glow when he inhaled. For the same reason no one was using a flashlight, relying instead on the low moon to light their path.

‘The most important thing is to be able to read the land,’ Contarelli expounded, having decided, it seemed, to focus all his attention on Tom after Allegra’s outburst. ‘You see how the grass is drier there?’ He pointed out a patch of ground that, as far as Tom could see, didn’t look any different from the rest of the field. ‘The earth above a hollow space has less moisture. And those brambles there -’ he gestured to his right – ‘when they grow tall and yellowish like that, it means that their roots are leaning on a buried wall.’

Tom nodded, struggling to keep up – Contarelli was proving to be surprisingly nimble over the rough terrain, although unlike Tom he didn’t have to cope with his arms being forced up behind his back every time he stumbled.

‘Wild fig trees are a give-away too,’ he continued. ‘And fox and badger tracks can often lead you straight to the entrance.’

‘Where are you taking us?’ Tom demanded, the hopelessness of their situation growing with every step. Over this rough ground, roped together, they had no chance of escaping.

‘Don De Luca told me you were interested in understanding what we do.’ Contarelli shrugged, turning to face him.

‘I think I’ve got the general idea, thanks.’ Tom gave a tight smile. ‘We can make our own way back from here.’

Contarelli gave one of his booming laughs and strode on, leaving one of his men to prod Tom forward.

‘It takes us two nights to break into a tomb normally. On the first night we clear away the entrance and let whatever’s inside oxidise and harden. Then on the second night we come back and take what we can before dawn. Usually I never come back a third time. It’s too risky. But I’ve made an exception for you.’

He stopped and signalled at someone standing beneath a low hillock covered in trees. The man was leaning wearily on a shovel and had clearly been waiting for them. As they approached him and the dark passage he had uncovered, he waved back, jumping down to greet them.

‘It’s an Etruscan burial chamber,’ Allegra breathed.

Contarelli turned, smiling.

‘You see,’ he said with a pained sigh, as if he was wearily scolding a small child. ‘That’s the type of cleverness that’s got you both killed.’

Before Tom could move, a plastic hood was placed over his head by one of the men standing behind him and he was forced to his knees. Working quickly, they deftly passed a length of duct tape several times around his neck, sealing the bag against his skin.

He felt himself being lifted and then dragged along the tomb’s short corridor into the Stygian darkness of the burial chamber. Moments later, Allegra was thrown down on to the damp earth next to him, struggling furiously.

‘Compliments of Don De Luca,’ Contarelli intoned from somewhere above them, his disembodied voice echoing off the tomb’s domed roof.

For a few moments Tom could hear nothing apart from the rattle of his own breathing and Allegra’s muffled shouts as her heels scrabbled in the dirt. But then came the muted sound of steel against stone.

They were filling the entrance in.

FIFTY-THREE

19th March – 11.06 p.m.

They didn’t have long, Tom knew. Each breath used a little more of the oxygen sealed within the bag. He could already feel the plastic rubbing against his face, warm and moist; hear it crinkling every time he inhaled, growing and shrinking like a jellyfish’s pulsing head. In a few minutes the air would all be gone and then the CO₂ levels in his blood would rise, shutting down first his brain’s cerebral cortex and then the medulla.

It was a cruel death – light-headedness, followed by nausea, then unconsciousness. And finally oblivion. But then that was hardly a surprise, given that they were here at the orders of the same man who had, by his own admission, ordered Cavalli to be slowly choked by the Tiber’s strong current and Argento to be partially decapitated and left to bleed out like a slaughtered lamb.

Lying next to him, Allegra had stopped struggling but was still shouting, using up her air far more quickly than she should. He’d have to get to her first. He shuffled back towards her, feeling for her with his hands, which were still tied behind his back. Touching her arm, he bent forward and pulled himself round with his feet until he made contact with the hood’s slippery surface. She seemed to guess what he was doing, because she went quiet and bent towards him until he was able to feel the outline of her mouth.

Digging his finger hard into the shallow depression formed between the hard edges of her teeth, he gouged the thick plastic with his nail, weakening its surface until it suddenly gave way. There was a loud whistling noise as Allegra sucked air greedily through the small hole.

But the effort had cost Tom more than he’d expected. He felt light-headed, almost as if he was floating outside of himself. He didn’t have long before he went under. Thirty seconds at most. He shuffled down, bending his head towards where he guessed Allegra’s hands had been retied behind her back so that she could feel for his mouth. With her longer nails, it took far less time for her to rupture the plastic, the chamber’s stale air tasting sweet to Tom’s starving lungs.

‘You okay?’ Tom called through the darkness when his head had cleared, the plastic hood both muffling and amplifying his voice.

‘Not really,’ she answered, coughing.

‘Where are your hands?’

Feeling for her wrists, he carefully picked away at the knot, the rope resisting at first, until little by little he was able to loosen it and then undo it completely. Sitting up, Allegra returned the favour. As soon as he was free they felt for each other in the darkness and hugged with relief – relative strangers brought unexpectedly close by the intimacy of fear.

‘Which way’s the entrance?’ Tom asked as he broke away and ripped the remainder of the plastic hood from his neck.

‘We should be able to find it if we feel our way along the walls,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps if we…what’s this?’

A light clicked on, forcing Tom to shield his eyes as it was pointed at him. Allegra snatched it away with an apology. Unless it had fallen from Contarelli’s pocket, it appeared that he had left them a torch. Perhaps he had anticipated that they might free themselves? Perhaps he was trying to help them escape? The thought filled Tom with hope.

He glanced around excitedly, noting the low domed roof above them and the earthen floor littered with pottery fragments. Lying discarded in the corner was a bundle of rags that Tom suspected marked what was left of the tomb’s original occupant.

‘That way -’ Allegra pointed towards the low tunnel that led to the entrance.

He crawled hopefully down it, but soon found his path blocked. As the shovelling sound earlier had suggested, the entrance had been filled in. And not just with earth, but with a massive stone plug that they must have brought there with this single purpose in mind.

‘We should have left the bags on,’ Allegra said in a shaky voice. ‘I’d rather suffocate quickly than starve down here.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about starving,’ Tom said with a grim smile. ‘I’d say we have six hours of air, eight max.’

‘That’s reassuring.’ She gave a short laugh, then frowned as her torch picked out a dull metal object lying near the entrance.

It was a Glock 17. Tom picked it up and checked the magazine. It contained two bullets.

Contarelli, it seemed, was offering them a way out after all.

FIFTY-FOUR

Avenue Krieg, Geneva, Switzerland 20th March – 12.02 a.m.

‘This can’t be it,’ Dominique whispered.

Normally Archie would have agreed with her – a half-empty building with a broken lift, shabbycommunal areas, half the light bulbs blown and the name plate hanging loose, certainly didn’t seem to fit with what he’d seen of Faulks. But the porter he’d bribed in the Sotheby’s loading bay had been adamant that this was the right address, floor and suite number for the company who’d sold the Artemis. In fact, he’d proved it.

‘He showed me the bloody receipt,’ Archie grunted as he tried to force the final locking pin out of the way. ‘Galleries Dassin is registered here.’

‘It just doesn’t feel right,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘We should have spoken to Tom first.’

‘I’ve been trying to get him on the blower all day,’ Archie reminded her sharply, his tone reflecting both his irritation at being secondguessed and his concern. It wasn’t like Tom to be out of touch this long. Not deliberately. ‘Besides…’ With a final effort, the pin fell into place and the lock clicked open. ‘…We’re in now. We might as well have a butcher’s.’

Pulling their masks down over their faces, they slipped inside and gently closed the door behind them. The suite consisted of a large open-plan space with perhaps four desks in it, a small kitchen, a meeting room, and what Archie guessed was the owner or manager’s personal office.

‘Still sure this is the right place?’ Dominique whispered as her torch picked out bookcases overflowing with legal and tax reference books, stacks of paperwork secured by treasury tags, filing cabinets, printers and shredders, and a series of insipid paintings of a yacht sailing across the lake. Archie sighed. He hated to admit it, but it looked as though she might be right after all.

‘I’ll have a quick shifty in there,’ Archie suggested, nodding towards the manager’s office. ‘You have a look through this lot.’

The office was dominated by a vast, monolithic desk whose primary purpose could only have been to intimidate anyone standing on the other side of it. Behind this ran thick-set, mahogany shelves loaded with books, photo frames and various stress-busting executive toys. Archie couldn’t help himself but set off the Newton’s Cradle, his eyes dancing to the metronomic click-click-click of the balls as they swung back and forth. Glancing up with a smile, he absent-mindedly picked up one of the photo frames, then frowned. Rather than be confronted by Faulks’s patrician scowl as he had expected, he instead found himself staring at a heavily overweight man in swimming trunks trying to pour himself into a wetsuit.

Replacing it with a shudder, Archie turned his attention to the two filing cabinets lurking in the corner. Opening the drawers in turn, he walked his fingers along the tabs until he found one marked Galleries Dassin.

‘I’ve got something,’ he called in a low voice, carrying it to the entrance. Dominique looked up from where she had been leafing through the papers arranged on one of the desks. ‘Galleries Dassin,’ he read, flicking through a few of the pages. ‘Registered address, 13 Avenue Krieg. That’s here. Fiduciary owner, Jérome Carvel.’ He glanced up at the door and saw the same name picked out on it in black letters. ‘That’s him.’

‘What’s a fiduciary owner?’ Dominique asked.

‘Someone who deals with all the administrative bollocks, as opposed to the beneficial owner, who calls the shots and makes the serious wonga and who in this particular instance is…’ He’d found a shareholder contract and flipped to the signature page, then looked up with a grim smile. ‘Earl Faulks. Carvel’s a front.’

‘Why bother?’

‘Fuck knows. But if I had to guess, to hide…’ Archie paused, struck by a thought. ‘Who bought the Artemis again?’

Dominique had approached the auctioneer after the sale and expressed an interest in buying the statue from its new owner. Sensing the opportunity to make another fee, the auctioneer had volunteered their name and offered to broker the deal.

‘It was a commission bid for Xenephon Trading.’

Archie vanished back inside the office, returning a few moments later clutching another file.

‘Xenephon Trading,’ he read. ‘Fiduciary owner, Jérome Carvel. Beneficial owner…Earl Faulks.’ He looked up at her triumphantly.

‘He bought it from himself?’ Dominique exclaimed. ‘That makes no sense. Even if he’d negotiated special rates, he’d still be paying six to ten per cent commission on both sides of the deal.’

‘Are those the invoices?’ Archie nodded at the sheaf of papers she’d been sorting through.

‘Last month’s auction.’ She nodded.

‘Any where Xenephon is the buyer?’ Archie went to stand next to her.

Gripping her torch in one hand and flipping the pages over quickly with the other, she quickly counted them up. ‘There’s one here. Two…three…four…five. And look who’s on the other side of the deal here and here: Galleries Dassin.’

‘Who’s Melfi Export?’ Archie tapped his finger on the page with a frown. ‘They show up a lot too.’

Without waiting for an answer, he disappeared back into the office, returning a few moments later with a third file and a solemn expression.

‘Melfi Export. Fiduciary owner, Jérome Carvel. Beneficial owner…Earl Faulks. It’s the same story – he’s selling with one company and buying with another. It makes no sense.’

‘He must be getting something out it,’ she pointed out.

‘Well, I don’t see what, apart from a shit-load of paperwork.’ He slapped the pile of invoices with a shrug. Dominique turned to him with a smile.

‘That’s it.’

‘What?’

‘The paperwork. He’s doing it for the paperwork.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘It’s a laundering scam,’ she said excitedly. ‘First he puts an item up for auction. Then he buys it back under another name. Finally he sells it on to a real buyer, only this time with a manufactured provenance, courtesy of an official auction house invoice and valuation certificate.’

‘Maybe not just about provenance,’ Archie said with a slow nod. ‘Arms dealers get around embargoes by selling weapons down a network of shell companies and middlemen, so that by the time the shipment gets to the intended customer, no one can tie the final transaction back to the original seller. It’s called triangulation. Faulks could be pulling the same stunt here to cover his tracks.’

FIFTY-FIVE

Nr Anguillara Sabazia, northwest of Rome 20th March – 1.13 a.m.

They had both run out of conversation a while ago. Now they were sitting in silence, locked into their own thoughts, hugging their knees for warmth. The torch nestled on the ground between them in a puddle of light, their bodies huddled around it as if to shield it from the wind. Tom had the ominous feeling that once its fragile flame finally expired, they wouldn’t long survive it.

He’d faced death before, of course. But never with the resigned acceptance and powerlessness he felt now. The walls were rock solid, the floor packed firm, the domed roof unyielding, the entrance sealed. They had no tools, no way of communicating with the outside world, no answers. Nothing except for the two bullets that lay side by side in the torch’s pale wash, like bodies awaiting burial.

‘How did you know?’ Allegra’s voice broke the cloying silence.

‘Know what?’

‘When we first met at Cavalli’s and you handed me the gun,’ she reminded him. ‘How did you know I wouldn’t just shoot you?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Then why did you trust me?’

‘I didn’t.’ He shrugged.

‘Then what…?’

‘I took the clip out before I gave you the gun.’ Tom grinned. ‘You couldn’t have shot me if you’d wanted to.’

‘Why you…’ Allegra’s face broke into a wide smile as she reached across to punch Tom’s shoulder.

‘Ow.’ He winced, his arm still bruised from where she’d hit him that morning.

‘Still sore from being beaten up by a girl?’ she said, the clear bell of her laughter both unexpected and strangely uplifting in the darkness.

‘You landed a couple of lucky shots.’ Tom gave a dismissive shake of his head. ‘Another few seconds and I…’

He paused. Allegra was holding up her hand for him to be quiet, her chin raised like a foxhound who has caught a scent.

‘What’s that?’

Tom listened, at first not hearing anything, but then making out what seemed to be the faint rattle of an engine.

‘They’re coming back,’ Allegra exclaimed, turning excitedly towards the entrance tunnel.

‘Maybe to finish the job,’ Tom said grimly, hauling her back and loading the gun.

They sat there, the ground now shaking with a dull throb, the occasional sound of a muffled voice reaching them. Readying himself, Tom took aim at the stone plug that was blocking the entrance, determined to take Contarelli, or whichever of his men he sent ahead of him, down with them.

Ten or so minutes later the massive stone began to move, dirt and moonlight trickling through the crack. The sound of voices was clearer now, someone swearing in Italian, another one groaning under the strain. Then, with a final effort, the stone was rolled free. It fell on to its side with a leaden thump.

A harsh, lightning strike of light flooded down the entrance corridor, washing over them and making them blink. On its heels came the thunder of what Tom realised now was a helicopter, the hammer chop of its rotors echoing off the walls.

For a few moments nothing happened. Then a figure appeared at the tunnel entrance, a black silhouette against the floodlit backdrop.

‘Tom Kirk? Allegra Damico? Andiamo,’ he said, reaching towards them.

They swapped a look, Tom slowly lowered the gun.

‘What’s going on?’ Allegra shouted through the noise.

‘I don’t know,’ Tom called back. ‘But it is, it beats being in here.’

Crawling forward, they emerged gratefully into the night, brushing the earth from their clothes and hands as they stood up. But whatever relief they felt at escaping was soon tempered by the realisation that their three liberators were all dressed in black paramilitary clothing – ski masks, fatigues, bullet-proof vests, field boots, guns strapped to their thighs. Two of the men were also equipped with night-vision goggles which they kept trained on the horizon, their Beretta PS12-SDs held across their chests, safety’s off.

‘Go,’ the man who had helped them to their feet ushered them towards the black Augusta Bell 412EP which had landed about thirty feet away, its spotlight trained on the tomb’s entrance, the wash of its rotors back-combing the grass. A fourth man was waiting for them in the cockpit.

‘Get in,’ the first man shouted over the roar of the engine, handing them each a set of headphones. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll put everything back here so they won’t know you’ve gone.’

Slamming the door, he stepped back and gave the pilot the thumbs-up. Throttling up, the helicopter lurched unsteadily off the ground, dipped its rotors, and then climbed at a steep angle into the sky. In a few minutes, the tomb had faded from view, swallowed by the night.

‘Military?’ Allegra’s voice hummed in Tom’s ear, worried but with a curious edge.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied, glancing round. ‘Their equipment’s standard Italian army issue. Could be special forces or some sort of private militia?’ He nodded at the back of the pilot’s head. ‘You could try asking him, but I don’t think he’ll tell us.’

‘Right now, I’m not sure I even care,’ she said with a relieved shrug. ‘The further we can get…’ Her voice tailed off into a puzzled frown as she noticed the envelope that had been left on the bench opposite. It was addressed to both of them. Swapping a look with Tom, she ripped it open and glanced inside, then emptied the contents into her lap: about twenty thousand euro secured in a neat bundle, a set of car keys, and five black-and-white photographs of a fire-ravaged apartment attached to an official press release from the Monégasque Police.

‘What does it say?’ Allegra frowned, handing it to him.

‘They’re looking for two missing people,’ Tom quickly translated. ‘An Irish banker, called Ronan D’Arcy and his housekeeper, Determination Smith. It says no one’s seen them since D’Arcy’s apartment caught fire two days ago. Looks like somebody wants us to take a closer look.’ His eyes narrowed as he studied the third photograph again, a small object having caught his eye. Had the police noticed that yet, he wondered?

‘De Luca?’ she suggested. ‘Remember he told us that his accountant in Monaco had disappeared?’

‘Why have Contarelli bury us, only to dig us up a few hours later?’ Tom asked with a shake of his head.

‘But who else would have known where to find us?’

Tom shrugged. She had a point, although right now he was less concerned with who had rescued them than why, and what they wanted.

The pilot’s voice broke into their conversation with a crackle.

‘What’s our heading?’

‘What?’

‘My orders are to take you anywhere within operational range,’ the pilot explained.

‘Anywhere?’ Tom asked in surprise. He’d assumed that whoever had set them free was planning to have them brought to him.

‘Anywhere,’ the pilot confirmed. ‘As soon as we land, you’re free to go.’ He reached back and handed them two Swiss passports made out in false names. ‘What’s the heading?’

Tom paused before answering, flicking through the forged documents. He reckoned a full tank would last them 600 kilometres. More than enough to leave De Luca, Gallo and the murderous madness they seemed to have stumbled into far behind. Allegra seemed to be having the same thought, because she pulled her headset off and yelled into his ear so she couldn’t be overheard.

‘What do you want to do?’

‘If we want out, then this is it,’ he called back. ‘A chance to walk away while we still can.’

‘Walk away to what? Until I can prove what Gallo’s up to, I’ve nothing to walk away to.’

Tom slipped his headset back on.

‘Can we make it to Monte Carlo?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ the pilot confirmed. ‘What do you need?’

Tom paused before answering.

‘A suit for me. Three buttons and a double vent. A dress for the lady. Black. Size 8.’