The Geneva Deception

FIFTY-SIX

Over the Ligurian Sea, fifty kilometres southeast of Monaco 20th March – 2.21 a.m.

Rigged for black, they had headed west, hitting the coast just north of Civitavecchia and then hugging it as far as Livorno, sawing in and out of the jagged shoreline to stay under the radar. Once there, they had struck out across the sea, the city’s bright lights fading behind them to a gossamer twinkle, until there was nothing but them and the water’s empty shadow and the echo of the rotors as they skimmed low across the waves.

Occasionally the moon would emerge from behind a cloud, and for a few moments Allegra could see their spectral reflection in the swell, a ghost ship carried on neon whitecaps. Then, just as quickly, it vanished again and the darkness would open beneath them once more, an endless abyss into which they seemed to be falling without moving.

Allegra glanced over at Tom, but like her he seemed to be enjoying the flight’s noisy stillness, his dirt-smudged face pressed to the window, alone with his thoughts. She wondered if, like her, he could still feel the plastic against his skin, moist and warm, still feel his fingernails lifting as he scrabbled at the chamber’s earthen walls.

She hated to admit it, but she had been scared back there. Not danger scared, where adrenaline kicks in and instinct takes over before you even have a chance to think. Dying scared, where there is time for the mind to wander long and lonely corridors of fear and uncertainty. The sort of fear that she imagined lingered in the portentous shadows of a surgeon’s forced cheerfulness or a radiologist’s brave smile.

Perhaps this explained why she found something strangely comforting about the engine’s noise now, its animal roar having settled into a contented purr that was a welcome contrast to the ticking contemplation of death that she had endured in that tomb. A reminder that she was alive. That she had escaped.

Not that she was sure what they had escaped to, exactly, or who had helped them. Clearly somebody had their reasons for wanting them alive and continuing their investigation. Less clear was who that might be. De Luca, perhaps; if she was right about D’Arcy working for him. But then, as Tom had suggested, it seemed unlikely that he would order Contarelli to kill them, only to dispatch a search-and-rescue team a few hours later. But if not him, who? The FBI? Tom had told her that he had worked with them before. Was this them protecting their best chance of finding Jennifer’s killer? She shook her head ruefully. The truth was, there was no way of telling.

More certain was her growing trust in Tom. He would never stop, she knew, never rest until he had brought the Delian League down and punished whoever had killed his friend. Part of her almost felt jealous of this fierce loyalty. Did she have anyone who would have done the same for her? Probably not. The realisation strengthened her resolve. If she didn’t follow this through to the end, wherever it led her, no one else would. And then Gallo would have won.

Tom suddenly tapped the window.

‘Monte Carlo.’

The city had appeared out of the night, a stepped pyramid of lights that clung to the steep mountainside with concrete claws, its jaws open to the sea. The helicopter banked to the left and climbed over the yachts anchored in the harbour before swooping back towards the heliport, a narrow cantilevered shelf that hung over the water. It landed with a bump and then dusted off as soon as their feet had hit the tarmac, climbing steeply until the clatter of its blades was nothing but a warm whisper on the wind.

The heliport was shut for the night, but someone had seen to it that the gate set into the hurricane fence had been left unlocked. The keys left for them in the envelope opened an X5 parked on the street outside the deserted terminal building. Inside, Allegra found a bag of casual clothes and two suit carriers – one containing Tom’s shirt and suit, the other a knee-length black dress that they had clearly managed to lay their hands on in the hour or so it had taken them to fly here. Shoes, underwear, cufflinks, comb, make-up – they’d thought of everything, and she knew without even looking that it would all fit. These people, whoever they were, knew what they were doing.

‘Ladies first?’ Tom offered, closing the door after her and then turning his back.

It was only when she had undressed that she realised how filthy she was; her face, arms and clothes were covered in stains, dirt and small cuts and grazes that she had unconsciously picked up somewhere between Li’s oily workshop, Cavalli’s foam-filled car, Contarelli’s gruesome basement and the empty tomb. Grabbing some wipes, she quickly cleaned herself up as best she could, applied some make-up, and then wriggled into the dress. She checked herself in the mirror before she got out. Not bad, apart from her hair, which would need six months and several very expensive haircuts to get it looking even half decent. But it had served its purpose.

She got out and swapped places with Tom, hoping that his raised eyebrows were a sign of silent appreciation. Five minutes later and he too was ready to go.

‘Want to drive?’ Tom offered, holding out the keys. ‘Only this time you have to promise not to crash into anything.’

She refused with a smile.

‘What’s the fun in that?’

The casino was only a short drive from the heliport, although, in a country of only 485 acres, everything was, almost by definition, close to everything else. It was still busy, a succession of Ferraris and Lamborghinis processing slowly across the Place du Casino to give the tourists enough time to gawp. Turning in by the central fountain, its bubbling waters glowing like molten glass in the floodlights, they waited in line behind a Bentley Continental for the valet to take their car.

The casino itself was an elaborate, baroque building, its façade dominated by two flamboyant towers either side of the main entrance and encrusted with statues and ornate architectural reliefs. The floodlights had given it a rather gaudy appearance, clothing it in amber in some places and gold in others, while a lush green copper roof was just about visible through the gaps between the towers. A central clock, supported by two bronze angels, indicated it had just gone three.

‘You still haven’t told me why we’re here,’ Allegra complained as Tom led her into the marble entrance hall to the ticket office.

He glanced across with an indulgent smile as he paid their entrance fee, as if this was a somehow rather foolish question.

‘To play blackjack, of course.’

FIFTY-SEVEN

Casino de Monte Carlo, Monaco 20th March – 3.02 a.m.

There was a compelling logic to the casino’s layout: the further inside you ventured, the more money you stood to lose. Although a simple conceit, it had, over the years, led to the evolution of a complex and intuitive ecosystem whereby those at the bottom of the food chain rarely strayed into the territory of the higher, predatory mammals.

This could be easily observed in the way that the outer rooms were mainly inhabited by sunburnt British and German tourists, their clothes creased from having been kept at the bottom of a suitcase for the best part of a week in anticipation of a ‘posh’ night out, their modest losses borne with thinly disguised resentment. The middle rooms, meanwhile, were populated by immaculately dressed Italian and French couples – ‘locals’ who had driven up on a whim and who seemed to play the tables with an almost effortless familiarity. The inner rooms, finally, had been overrun by Russians; for the most part overweight men dressed in black and clutching cigars as they would a bayonet, accompanied by daggerthin blonde women half their age wearing white to better show off their tans. Here they bet with an indifference that verged on boredom, the roulette table lavished with chips, each spin of the wheel a desperate plea to feel something, anything, in a life blunted by having forgotten what it means to want something but not be able to buy it.

As they walked through from the Salle Europe, Tom found his thoughts wandering. He had tried to resist it as long as he could, but it was hard not to be drawn back to the Amalfi, not to let the fairground flash of the slot machines and the piano play of the roulette ball grab him by the throat and catapult him back through time, as if he had stumbled into some strange parallel world.

It was as if he was watching a film. The echo of the shot being fired, Jennifer crumpling to the floor, the smell of blood and cordite, that first, disbelieving scream. A film that he could play, pause, forward and rewind at any time, although it would never allow him to go further back than the crack of the gunshot. That’s when everything had started.

‘Tom?’ The mirrored room slowly came back into focus and he saw Allegra’s hand laid in concern on his shoulder. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine.’ He nodded, the scream still silently ringing in his ears even though now, on closer inspection what struck him most about this place on reflection was less its similarity to the Amalfi than its differences.

Here, they played Chemin de Fer not Punto Banco, for example. The poker tables were marked in French not English. The roulette wheel had one zero, not two. And the air was seared with the bittersweet tang of a century and a half of fortunes being lost and made. Small differences on their own, perhaps, but pieced together and set amidst the jewelled chandeliers, stained-glass windows and ornate sculptures that adorned the casino’s soaring rococo interior, they breathed a soul into this place that Kezman could never hope to buy, and revealed the Amalfi in all its silicone-enhanced artifice.

‘Deal me in.’ Tom sat at an empty blackjack table and placed a five-thousand-euro chip on the box in front of him.

The croupier looked up and smiled. In his early forties, he was a tall precise man, gaunt and with a pianist’s long, cantilevered fingers.

‘Monsieur Kirk. Very good to see you again.’

He dealt him a king and a five.

‘You too, Nico.’

‘I was sorry to hear about your loss.’ For a moment Tom thought he meant Jennifer, before realising he must be referring to his father. That was almost three years ago now. It showed how long it had been since he was last here.

‘Thank you. Carte.’

‘You don’t twist on fifteen,’ Allegra whispered next to him. ‘Even I know that.’

‘Seven,’ the croupier intoned. ‘Twenty-two.’ He scooped the cards and Tom’s chip off the baize.

‘See?’ Allegra exclaimed.

‘I’ve come for my gear,’ Tom said in a low voice, placing another five-thousand-euro chip down. ‘Is it still here?’

‘Of course.’ Nico nodded, dealing him an ace and a seven.

‘Eighteen. You need to stick again,’ Allegra urged. Tom ignored her.

‘Carte.’

The croupier deftly flicked an eight over to him.

‘Twenty-six.’

Allegra tutted angrily.

‘You don’t like losing, do you?’ Tom said, amused by the expression on her face.

‘I don’t like losing stupidly,’ she corrected him.

‘Perhaps madame is right,’ the croupier ventured. ‘Have you tried the Roulette Anglaise?’

‘Actually, I was hoping to bump into an old friend here. Ronan D’Arcy. Know him?’

The croupier paused, then nodded.

‘He’s been in a few times. Good tipper.’ A pause. ‘Ugly business.’

‘Very ugly,’ Tom agreed. ‘Any idea where I can find him?’

Nico shrugged, then shook his head.

‘No one’s seen him since the fire.’

‘Where did he live?’

‘Up on the Boulevard de Suisse. You can’t miss it.’

‘Can you get me in?’

The croupier checked again that no one was listening, then nodded.

‘Meet me in the Café de Paris in ten minutes.’

‘I’ll need a couple of phones too,’ Tom added. ‘Here -’ He threw another five-thousand-euro chip down. ‘For your trouble.’

‘Merci, monsieur, but four should cover everything.’ He slid a one-thousand-euro chip back, then signalled at the floor manager that he needed to be relieved.

‘You lost both those hands on purpose, didn’t you?’ Allegra muttered as they made their way back towards the entrance.

‘He charges a ten-thousand-euro fee.’

‘Fee for what?’

‘For looking after this -’ He held up the chip that the croupier had returned to him in change. Two numbers had been scratched on to its reverse. ‘Come on.’

Reaching the main entrance lobby, Tom led her over to the far side of the galleried space, where a mirrored door on the right-hand side of the room gave on to a marble staircase edged by an elaborate cast-iron balustrade. They headed down it, the temperature fading, until they eventually found themselves in a narrow corridor that led to the men’s toilets on one side and the women’s on the other.

Checking that they hadn’t been followed, Tom opened the small cupboard under the stairs and removed two brass stands joined by a velvet rope and an Hors Service sign. Pinning the sign to the door, he cordoned the toilet entrance off and then disappeared inside, reappearing a few moments later with a smile.

‘It’s empty.’

‘Is that good?’ she asked, an impatient edge to her voice as she followed him inside.

The room was as he remembered it: four wooden stalls painted a pale yellow to his right, six porcelain urinals separated by frosted-glass screens to his left. Unusually, the centre of the room was dominated by a large white marble counter with two sinks set on each set of a double-sided arched mirror. The walls were covered in grey marble tiles.

‘Six across, three down.’

He showed her the numbers scratched on to the chip and then turned to face the urinals and began to count, starting in the far left corner and moving six tiles across, then dropping three tiles down.

‘I make it this one,’ he said, stepping forward and pointing at a tile over the third urinal.

‘Me too,’ Allegra agreed with a curious frown.

Snatching up the silver fire extinguisher hanging just inside the door, he swung it hard against the tile they had picked out. There was a dull clunk as it caved in.

‘It’s hollow,’ Allegra breathed.

Tom swung the extinguisher against the wall again, the hole widening as the tiles around the opening cracked and fell away until he had revealed a rectangular space. Throwing the extinguisher to the floor, he reached into the space and hauled out a large black holdall.

‘How long’s that been here?’

‘Three or four years?’ he guessed. ‘Nico paid off the builder the casino hired to re-tile this room. It was Archie’s idea. A precaution. Enough to get us operational again if we ever had to cut and run. He chose here and a few other places around the world where we had people we could trust.’

Allegra leaned forward as he unzipped the bag.

‘What’s inside?’

‘Batteries, tools, drill, borescope, magnetic rig, backpack,’ he said quickly, sorting through its contents. ‘Money, guns,’ he continued, taking one of the two Glocks out, checking the magazine was full and placing it in his pocket.

‘And this?’ Allegra asked, frowning as she took out a small object the size of a cigarette packet.

‘Location transmitter. Three-mile radius,’ He pulled out the receiver, slotted a fresh battery in place and then turned it on to show her. ‘Stick it on, if you like. At least that way I won’t lose you.’

‘Don’t worry, you won’t get rid of me that easily.’ She smiled, tossing it back.

‘Good. Then you can give me a hand with this up the stairs. Nico will be waiting by now.’

FIFTY-EIGHT

Boulevard de Suisse, Monaco 20th March – 3.35 a.m.

Barely ten minutes later, they pulled in a little way beyond D’Arcy’s building. Nico had been right – you couldn’t miss it. Not only was a police car parked outside on the narrow one-way street, but the upper stories of the otherwise cream apartment block were scorched and coated with ash, like a half-smoked cigarette that had been stood on its filter and then left to burn down to its tip.

Tom gave her a few minutes to struggle out of her dress and heels and into the casual clothes that had been left for them in the car, and then rapped impatiently on her window. She lowered it and he thrust the second Glock and a couple of spare clips through the gap.

‘Ready?’

‘Are there actually any bullets in this one?’ she asked, eyebrows raised sceptically.

It wasn’t that she minded carrying a gun. In fact, she quite liked its firm and familiar presence on her hip, like a dance partner’s hand leading her through a rehearsed set of steps. It was just that she preferred to know what she was dealing with.

‘Let’s not find out.’ He winked.

The building was called the Villa de Rome, an appropriate and perhaps not entirely coincidental name if they were right about D’Arcy’s involvement with De Luca and the Delian League. Although old, it betrayed all the signs of a recent and rather ill-judged refurbishment, the entrance now resembling that of a two-star hotel with ideas above its station – all rose marble, smoked glass and gold leaf.

‘Bonsoir,’ a junior officer from Monaco’s small police force rose from behind the reception desk and greeted them warmly, relieved, it seemed, at the prospect of a break in his vigil’s lonely monotony.

‘Thierry Landry. Caroline Morel,’ Tom snapped in French, each of them flashing the special passes that Nico had produced for them. ‘From the palace.’

‘Yes, sir, madam,’ the officer stuttered, his back straightening and heels sliding almost imperceptibly closer together.

‘We’d like to see D’Arcy’s apartment.’

‘Of course.’ He nodded eagerly. ‘The elevator’s still out, but I can escort you up the stairs to the penthouse.’

‘No need,’ Tom insisted, stepping deliberately closer. ‘We were never here. You never saw us.’

‘Saw what, sir?’ The officer winked, then froze, as if realising that this was probably against some sort of royal protocol. To his visible relief, Tom smiled back.

‘Exactly.’

Leaving the officer saluting to their backs, they climbed the stairs in silence, the fire’s charred scent growing stronger and the floor getting wetter as water dripped through from the ceiling like rainwater percolating into an aquifer. There was a certain irony, Allegra reflected, in how the fire brigade had probably caused more damage to the flats below D’Arcy’s than the blaze they were meant to be protecting them from. She couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t a warning there for them both: were they causing more harm by trying to fix things than if they had just let matters run their natural course?

On the third floor, Tom stopped and swung his backpack off his shoulder. Reaching inside, he took out a small device that he stuck on to the wall at about knee height, then turned on.

‘Motion sensor,’ he explained, holding out a small receiver that she guessed would sound if anyone broke the transmitter’s infrared beam.

They continued on, emerging half a minute later on the top landing, the fire’s pungent incense now so heavy that she could almost taste the ash sticking to the back of her throat. Tom flicked his torch on, the beam immediately settling on the door to D’Arcy’s apartment that had been unscrewed from its hinges and placed against the wall.

‘Quarter-inch steel and a four-bar locking mechanism,’ Tom observed slowly. ‘Either he knew his attackers or someone let them in.’

They stepped inside the apartment on to a sodden carpet of ash and charred debris, weightless black flecks fluttering through their torch beams like flies over a carcass. The walls had been licked black by the cruel flames and the ceiling almost entirely consumed, so that she could see through it to the roof’s steel ribs and, beyond them, the sky. The furniture, too, had been skeletonised into dark shapes that were both entirely alien and strangely familiar, although the fire, ever capricious, had inexplicably spared a single chair and a large section of one wall, as if to deliberately emphasise the otherwise overwhelming scale of its devastation.

It was an uncomfortable, dislocating experience, and Allegra had the strange impression of having stepped on to a film set – an imagined vision, rendered with frightening detail, of some future, post-apocalyptic world where the few remaining survivors had been reduced to taking shelter where they could and eking out an existence amidst the ashes.

‘This looks like where it started.’ She picked her way over the charred wreckage to a room that looked out over the harbour. The fire here seemed to have been particularly intense, the steel beams overhead twisted and tortured, opaque pools of molten glass having formed under the windows, the stonework still radiating a baked-in heat that took the edge off the chilled sea breeze. There was also some evidence of the beginnings of a forensic examination of the scene: equipment set up on a low trestle table, mobile lighting arranged in the room’s corners.

‘Probably here,’ Tom agreed, pointing his torch at a dark mound that was pressed up against what was left of a bookcase. ‘As you’d expect.’

‘What do you mean?’

Tom reached into his backpack and pulled out one of the photographs that had been left for them in the helicopter.

‘What do you see?’

She studied it carefully, then ran her torch over the burnt bookcase with a frown. As far as she could tell they looked the same. There certainly didn’t seem…She paused, having just noticed a rectangular shape on the photo that the torchlight revealed to be a small metal grille set into the wall at about head height.

‘What’s that?’ she asked with a frown.

‘That’s what I wondered too,’ Tom muttered. ‘Probably nothing. But then again…’ He stepped closer and rubbed gently against a section of the wall. Through the damp layer of soot, a narrow groove slowly revealed itself.

‘A hidden door,’ Allegra breathed.

‘A panic room.’ Tom nodded. ‘The grille must be for an air intake that would have been concealed by the bookcase. D’Arcy hasn’t disappeared. He never even left his apartment.’

‘Can you open it?’

‘Half-inch steel, at a guess.’ Tom rapped his knuckles against the door with a defeated shrug. ‘Electro-magnetic locking system. Assuming they’ve cut the mains power, the locking mechanism will release itself as soon as the batteries run out.’

‘Which is when?’

‘Typically about forty-eight hours after they kick in.’

‘Which is still at least twelve hours away,’ she calculated, thinking back to the time of the fire given in the missing persons report. ‘We can’t hang around here until then.’

‘We won’t have to,’ Tom reassured her. ‘Here, give me a hand clearing this away.’

Reaching up, they ripped what was left of the bookcase to the floor, the charred wood crisping as they grabbed it, the dust making them both cough.

‘There would have been an external keypad, but that must have melted in the fire,’ Tom explained as the panic room’s steel shell emerged through the soot. ‘But there’s usually a failsafe too. A secondary pad that they conceal inside the room’s walls in case of an emergency. That should have been insulated from the heat.’

Stepping forward, he carefully ran his hands across the filthy steel walls at about waist height.

‘Here.’

He spat into his hand and wiped the dirt away in a series of tarred smears to reveal a rectangular access panel that he quickly unscrewed.

‘It’s still working,’ Allegra said with relief as she shone her torch into the recess and made out the keypad’s illuminated buttons and the cursor’s inviting blink.

Tom reached into his bag and pulled out a small device that looked like a calculator. Levering the fascia off the panic room’s keypad to reveal the circuit board, he knelt down next to it and connected his device. Immediately the screen lit up, numbers scrolling across it in seemingly random patterns until, one by one, it began to lock them down. These then flashed up on the keypad’s display, hesitantly at first, and then with increasing speed and confidence, until the full combination flashed up green: 180373.

With a hydraulic sigh, the panic room’s door rolled back.

FIFTY-NINE

20th March – 3.44 a.m.

Allegra approached the open doorway, then staggered back.

‘Cazzo!’ She swore, her hand over her mouth. Peering through the opening, Tom understood why.

The emergency lighting was on, the room soaked in its blood-red glaze. D’Arcy was lying slumped in the corner and had already begun to bloat in the heat, the sickly sweet stench of rotting meat washing over them. Head lolling against his chest, his eyes were bulging as if someone had tried to pop them out on to his cheek, his stomach ballooning under his white shirt, the marbled skin mottled blue-green through the gaps between the buttons.

Breathing through his mouth, and trying to ignore the way D’Arcy’s black and swollen tongue had forced his jaws into a wide, gagging smile, Tom stepped inside the cramped space. Allegra followed close behind.

‘The smoke would have killed him,’ Tom guessed, pointing out some plastic sheeting hanging loose from the air vent which it looked as though D’Arcy had tried to seal shut with bandages and plasters raided from a first-aid kit. ‘Then he must have started to cook in the heat.’

‘Cazzo,’ she breathed to herself again.

Glancing round, it seemed pretty clear that D’Arcy had taken to using the room for storage rather than survival, with filing boxes stacked to the ceiling against the far wall, and a large server array providing some sort of data backup facility to whatever computers he guessed must have once stood on the desk outside. Clearly, like most people who had these types of rooms installed, D’Arcy had drawn comfort from knowing it was there should he want to use it, without ever really expecting that he would ever need to.

‘Help me lift one of these down.’

Mindful of not tripping over D’Arcy’s outstretched legs, he lifted down a box and opened it up. Inside were four or five lever-arch files, neatly arranged by year, containing hundreds of invoices.

‘Renewal fees for a burial plot in the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome,’ Allegra read, opening the most recent file and then turning the pages. ‘Private jet hire. Hotel suites. Yacht charter agreements. It’s expensive being rich.’

‘Anything linking him to De Luca?’ Tom asked, hauling a second box down.

‘Nothing obvious. Trade confirmations, derivatives contracts, settlement details, account statements…’ She flicked through a couple of the folders.

‘This one’s the same,’ Tom agreed, having heaved a third box to the floor.

‘Look at this, though,’ Allegra said slowly, having come across a thick wedge of bank statements. ‘Every time his trading account went over ten million, the surplus was transferred back to an account at the Banco Rosalia.’

‘The Banco Rosalia?’ Tom frowned. ‘Wasn’t that where Argento worked?’

‘Exactly. Which ties D’Arcy back to the other killings.’

‘Except there’s nothing here that links his death to either Caesar or Caravaggio,’ Tom pointed out. ‘Why would Moretti have broken the pattern?’

‘Maybe he didn’t. Maybe D’Arcy locked himself in here before Moretti could get to him,’ she suggested.

Tom nodded, although he wasn’t entirely convinced. Compared to what he’d heard about the other murders, this one seemed rushed and unplanned. Different.

‘What do you know about the Banco Rosalia?’ he asked.

‘Nothing really.’ She shrugged. ‘Small bank, majority owned by the Vatican. I met the guy who runs it at the morgue, ID-ing Argento’s body.’

‘We should take the disks.’ Tom pointed at a stack of DVDs that he guessed were server backups. ‘If the bank’s involved, the money trail might show us how.’

‘What about him?’ She motioned towards D’Arcy’s distended corpse.

‘We’ll re-seal the door and leave him for the cops to find when it opens tomorrow,’ he said with a shrug. ‘There’s nothing he can tell them that we -’ He broke off, having just caught sight of D’Arcy’s wrist.

‘What’s up?’

Tom knelt down and gingerly lifted D’Arcy’s arm.

‘His watch,’ he breathed as he tried to get at the fastening. The cold flesh had risen like dough around the black crocodile-skin strap, his blackened fingers leaving dark bruise-like marks on D’Arcy’s pale skin.

‘What about it?’

‘It’s a Ziff.’

‘A Ziff?’

‘Max Ziff. A watch-maker. A genius. He only makes three, maybe four pieces a year. They sell for hundreds of thousands. Sometimes millions.’

‘How can you tell it’s one of his?’ She crouched down next to him.

‘The orange second hand,’ he explained, the catch coming free and the strap peeling away, leaving a deep welt in the skin. ‘That’s his signature.’

‘I’ve seen one of these before,’ she frowned, reaching for it.

‘Are you sure it was a Ziff?’ he asked with a sceptical look. Not only were there so few of them around, but they were so unobtrusive that most people never noticed them when they saw them. In fact that was half the point.

‘It wasn’t a Ziff. It was the same Ziff,’ she insisted. ‘It was in Cavalli’s evidence box. White face with no make on it, steel case, roman numerals, orange second hand and…’ she flipped it over ‘…Yes. Engraved Greek letter on the back. Only this is delta. Cavalli’s was gamma.’

‘Are you sure it…?’ he asked again.

‘I’m telling you, it was identical.’

Tom shook his head in surprise.

‘It must have been a special commission. He normally only makes one of anything.’

‘Then we should talk to him,’ Allegra suggested. ‘If it’s unusual, he might remember who ordered it and where we can find them?’

‘We’d have to go and see him. He doesn’t have a phone.’

‘Where?’

‘Geneva. We could drive there in a few hours and Archie could -’ A sharp electronic tone broke into the conversation. Tom’s eyes snapped to the door. ‘Someone’s coming.’

They leapt towards the exit, Allegra pausing only to hit the close button and snatch her hand out of the way as the door slammed shut. Working quickly, Tom stuffed the keypad back into the recess and screwed the access panel on, rubbing soot over it so that the area blended in with the rest of the wall.

‘Outside,’ Allegra mouthed, dragging him on to the balcony, the air cool and fresh after the panic room’s putrid warmth. Moments later, his back pressed against the stone, he heard the unmistakeable sound of someone crunching through the ash and debris, entering the room and then stopping. Reaching into his backpack for his gun, Tom flicked the safety off. Allegra, standing on the other side of the doorway, did the same.

‘It’s Orlando,’ a voice rasped in Italian. Tom frowned. He sounded strangely familiar. ‘No, it’s still shut…’ A pause as he listened to whatever was being said at the other end, Tom barely daring to breathe in the silence. ‘They’ve cleared away what was left of the bookcase, so they must know it’s there…’ Another pause, Tom still trying to place a voice that he was now convinced he’d heard only recently. If only he could remember when and where. ‘I’ll make sure we have someone here when it opens. It’s the least they can do for us. Otherwise there’s someone in the morgue…we’ve got an agreement…As soon as they bring the body in…Don’t worry, everything’s already set up. I’ll be back before they land.’

The call ended and the footsteps retreated across the room towards the stairs. A few minutes later, the motion sensor beeped again and Allegra let out a relieved sigh. Tom, however, was already halfway across the room, heart thumping.

‘Where are you going?’ she called after him in a low voice. ‘Tom!’ She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back. ‘He’ll hear you.’

Tom spun round, his eyes blazing, a tremor in his voice that he barely recognised as his own.

‘It’s him,’ he spat angrily. ‘I recognised his voice.’

‘Who?’

‘The priest,’ Tom said through gritted teeth, all thoughts of Cavalli and the League and following up on the Ziff watch having suddenly left him. ‘The priest from the Amalfi. The one sent to handle the Caravaggio exchange.’

SIXTY

20th March – 3.52 a.m.

Barrelling through the doorway, Tom took the stairs as quickly as he dared, Allegra on his heels. Nothing made sense any more. Nothing, except that he couldn’t let him get away. He connected whatever had happened here to both the killings in Rome and Jennifer’s death. He could lead Tom to whoever had ordered the hit.

A few minutes later, they emerged breathlessly into the ground-floor lobby.

‘Which way did he go?’ Tom barked at the officer, whose smile had quickly faded as he caught sight of the expression on Tom’s soot-smudged face.

‘Who?’ he stuttered.

‘The man who just came down ahead of us,’ Tom snapped impatiently.

‘No one else has been in since you went up,’ the officer replied in an apologetic voice, as if he was somehow at fault.

‘He must have come in another way,’ Allegra immediately guessed. ‘Probably jumped across from a balcony next door.’

They stepped through the sliding glass doors just as the garage entrance on the adjacent building rattled open. A blood-red Alfa Romeo MiTo chased the echo of its own engine up the slope from the underground car park, Tom glimpsing the driver as he quickly checked for traffic before accelerating down the street.

‘Is everything okay?’ the officer called after them with a worried cry as they sprinted to their car.

‘Are you sure it’s him?’ Allegra asked as she buckled herself in, bracing an arm against the dash as the car leapt away.

‘I remember every voice, every glance, every face from that night,’ Tom insisted in a cold voice. ‘He was as close to me as you are now. It was him. And if he’s here, whoever sent him might be too.’

They caught up with the Alfa near the casino, the priest being careful, it seemed, to stay well within the speed limit. Dropping back to a safe distance, Tom followed him down the hill and through the underpass back towards the port, where workmen were busy disassembling a temporary dressage arena and stables under floodlights. Pulling in, they watched as he parked up and made his way down to the water, where a launch was waiting for him between two topheavy motor cruisers.

‘Drive down to the end,’ Allegra suggested. ‘We’ll be able to see where he’s going.’

With a nod Tom headed for the harbour wall and then got out, pausing to grab a set of nightvision goggles out of his bag. Putting them on, he tracked the small craft as it cut across the waves to an enormous yacht moored in the middle of the bay.

‘Il Sogno Blu,’ Tom read the name painted across its bows. ‘The Blue Dream. Out of Georgetown.’ A pause. ‘We need to get out to it.’

Allegra eyed him carefully, as if debating whether she should try and talk him out of it. Then, with a shrug she pointed back over his shoulder.

‘What about one of those?’

They ran down the ramp on to a pontoon where three small tenders had been tied up. The keys to the second one were attached to a champagne cork in a watertight storage compartment under the instrument panel. A few minutes later and they were slapping across the waves towards the yacht.

‘This will do,’ Tom called over the noise of the outboard as they approached. ‘If we get any closer they’ll hear us. I’ll swim the rest.’

She killed the engine, then went and stood over him as he took his soot-stained tie off and loosened his collar.

‘You don’t know who’s onboard or how many of them there are,’ she pointed out, the wind whipping her hair.

‘I know that someone on that ship helped kill Jennifer.’ He kicked his shoes off and stood up, looping the night-vision goggles over one arm. ‘That’s enough.’

‘Then I’m coming with you,’ she insisted.

‘You need to stay with the boat,’ he pointed out, handing her both the phones the croupier had given him and D’Arcy’s watch. ‘Otherwise it’ll drift and neither of us will make it back.’

She eyed him angrily.

‘I thought we were in this together.’

‘We are. But this is something I have to do alone.’

‘I could stop you,’ she reminded him in a defiant tone, standing in front of him so that he couldn’t get past.

A pause, then a nod.

‘You probably could.’ A longer pause. ‘But I don’t think you will. You know I have to do this.’

There was a long silence. Then Allegra stepped unsmilingly to one side. With a nod, Tom squeezed past her to the stern and lowered himself into the water.

‘Look, I’m not stupid,’ he said, with what he hoped was a reassuring smile. ‘I’ll be careful. Just give me twenty minutes, thirty max. Enough time to see who’s on board and what they’re doing here.’

Lips pursed, she gave a grudging nod.

Turning, Tom kicked out for the yacht with a powerful stroke, the waves rolling gently underneath him. He was lucky, he knew. On a rougher day, they might well have tossed him from crest to crest like a dolphin playing with a seal. Even so, it took him five, maybe even ten minutes to cover the hundred and fifty yards he’d left himself, his clothes dragging him back, a slight current throwing him off his bearing.

Up close, the yacht was even larger than it had appeared from the shore – perhaps 400 feet long, with sheer white sides that rose above him like an ice shelf, the sea lapping tentatively around it, as if afraid of being crushed. Even though it was anchored, the yacht’s shape made it look as if it was powering through the waves at eighteen knots, its arrowed bow lunging aggressively over the water, its rear chopped off on a steep rake, as if it had been pulled out of shape. Tom counted five decks in all, their square portholes looking as if they must have been dynamited out of the ship’s monolithic hull, capped by a mushrooming radar and comms array that wouldn’t have been out of place on an aircraft carrier.

The launch had been moored to a landing platform that folded down out of the stern. Swimming round to it, Tom hauled himself on board and then carefully climbed across on to the ship itself. The landing platform was deserted, although he could see now that when lowered it revealed a huge garage and electric hoist, with room to store the launch itself, together with a small flotilla of jet-skis, inflatables and other craft.

Quickly drying himself on one of the neatly folded towels monogrammed with the yacht’s name, he buttoned his jacket and turned the collar up to conceal as much of his white shirt as he could. Then he slipped his NV goggles over his head and turned them on. With a low hum, night became day, albeit one with a stark green tint. The outline of the deck’s darkest recesses now revealed themselves as if caught in the burst of a permanent firework.

Treading stealthily, Tom made his way up a succession of steep teak-lined staircases to the main deck, which he had noticed on the swim across was the only one with any lights on. Finding the port gangway empty, he made his way forward along it, keeping below the windows and checking over his shoulder that no one was coming up behind him. Two doors had been left open about halfway along, the glow spilling out on to the polished hardwood decking and making his goggles flare. Switching them off, he edged his head round the first opening. It gave on to a walnut-panelled dining room, the table already set with china and crystal for the following morning’s breakfast. In the middle of the main wall he recognised Picasso’s Head of a Woman, taken from a yacht in Antibes a few years ago.

The second open doorway revealed the main sitting room. Hanging over the mantelpiece was a painting that Tom recognised as the View of the Sea at Scheveningen, stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. This room, too, had been set up, although in readiness for what looked like cocktails rather than breakfast: champagne cooling in an ice bucket, an empty bottle of ‘78 Chûteau Margaux standing next to a full decanter, glasses laid out on a crisp linen cloth.

Turning the goggles back on, he continued along the gangway, wondering if he had chanced his luck long enough up here and whether he should head down below instead. But before he could do anything, a door ahead of him opened. Tom froze in the shadow of a bulkhead. A man stepped out, talking on his phone. Tom’s heart jumped. It was the priest, his mouth twisted into a cruel laugh, but recognisably the same man he’d faced in the casino – medium build, white, wavy hair, ruddy cheeks.

Even as Jennifer’s image filled his mind, he felt the anger flood through him, sensed his chest tightening and his jaw clenching. Before he knew it, he was clutching his gun, her name on his lips, and death in his heart.

SIXTY-ONE

Il Sogno Blu, Monaco 20th March – 4.21 a.m.

It hadn’t taken Allegra long to decide to ignore Tom’s instructions and follow him on board. There’d been something dead in his eyes, something in the way he’d deliberately patted his pocket to check that his gun was still there, that had suggested he would need her help – not to deal with whoever was on board, but to protect him from himself.

Having approached from behind so that the wind would carry the engine’s breathless echo away from the yacht, Allegra had pulled alongside the launch and lashed the tender to it. Then she had paused for a few moments, waiting for an angry shout and for an armed welcoming party to materialise. But none came.

Climbing across the launch and on to the landing platform, she made her way up to the main deck, pressing herself flat against one of the aluminium staircases when a sentry walked whistling past above her. Unlike Tom, she had no night-vision equipment, so had to feel her way through the darkness, the distant flicker of the steeply banked shore providing only the faintest light by which to navigate. Even so, Tom was proving relatively easy to track, the deck still damp wherever he had paused for more than a few seconds.

Moving as quickly as she dared, she edged forward, ducking under windows and darting across the open doorways until she had almost reached the sundeck area which took up the entire front third of this level. At its centre was a helipad that she realised parted to reveal a swimming pool.

In the same instant she saw Tom ahead of her, crouched in the shadows of the side rail, his gun in his hand. She followed his aim and saw a man standing at the bow, looking out to sea, talking into his phone. Leaping forward, she placed her hand on Tom’s shoulder. He spun round to face her, a strange, empty expression on his face as if in some sort of trance.

‘Not now,’ she whispered. ‘Not here.’

For a few moments it was almost as if he didn’t recognise her, before his face broke with surprise, and then a flash of anger.

‘What…?’

She held her finger to her lips, then pointed above them towards the top deck. An armed guard was leaning back casually against the railings above them blowing smoke rings. Tom blinked and then glanced across at her, his eyes betraying a flicker of understanding.

She motioned for him to follow her, the second door she tried opening into a small gymnasium.

‘Are you trying to get yourself killed?’ she hissed as soon as the door had shut. Their shadows danced off the mirrored walls, the exercise equipment’s skeletal frames looming menacingly around them as if they were limbering up for a fight.

‘I…’ he faltered, staring at the gun in his hand as if he wasn’t quite sure how it had got there. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘You’re right, I don’t understand…’ She broke off at the sound of someone approaching with a squeak of rubber soles, the noise growing and then slowly fading away. ‘You said you were just going to see who was here. Not get yourself killed.’

‘It’s him,’ Tom said in a low voice, almost as if he was trying to convince himself. ‘He set her up!’

‘He doesn’t matter. What’s important is finding out who sent him.’

‘I saw him and I…’ Another long pause, until he finally looked up, his lips pressed together as if he was trying to hold something in. ‘You’re right. I wasn’t…’

With a curt nod, she accepted what she assumed was as close as she was going to get to an apology. ‘Let’s just get off this thing before they find us.’

Checking that the gangway was still empty, Allegra led him back towards the stern. But they were only about halfway along it when the echo of a barked order and the sound of running feet forced them to dive through the open sitting-room door and crouch behind the sofa, guns drawn. Three men tore past the doorway, the approaching thump of rotor blades explaining the sudden commotion.

‘Someone’s landing,’ Allegra breathed.

‘Which must be what all this is for,’ Tom said, pointing at the carefully prepared drinks and glasses. ‘We need to…What the hell are you doing?’

‘Inviting us to the party,’ she said with a wink. Having taken out both the phones Tom had handed her earlier, she used one to dial the other and then slid it out of sight under the coffee table. ‘At least until the battery runs out.’

With the phone hidden and still transmitting, they made their way back along the gangway, then down the staircase to the landing platform, the helicopter’s low rumble now a fast-closing thunder. As it landed, they cast off, using the engine noise as cover to throttle up and spin away towards the harbour and the relative sanctuary of their waiting car.

SIXTY-TWO

Il Sogno Blu, Monaco 20th March – 4.56 a.m.

Santos uncorked the decanter and poured the Margaux into four large glasses. It pained him to share a bottle as good as this at the best of times, but to split it at this time of the night with two former members of the Serbian special forces, whose palates had no doubt been irretrievably blunted by eating too much cabbage and drinking their own piss while out on exercise, seemed positively criminal. Then again, they would recognise the Margaux for what it cost, even if they couldn’t taste why it was worth it. And that was half the point in serving it.

‘Nice boat,’ Asim whistled. ‘Yours?’

He was the older of the two and clearly in charge, squat and square headed, with a five-mil buzz-cut and a bayonet scar across one cheek.

‘Borrowed from one of my investors,’ Santos replied, sitting down opposite them. ‘How was your flight?’

‘No problem,’ Dejan, the second Serb, replied.

Compared to Asim, he was tall and gaunt, with curly black hair that he had slicked back against his head with some sort of oil. One of his ears was higher than the other, which caused his glasses to rest at a slight angle across his face.

‘Good,’ Santos replied. ‘You’re welcome to stay the night, of course.’

‘Thank you, but no,’ Dejan declined, Santos noting with dismay that he had already knocked back half his glass as if it was tequila. ‘Our orders are to agree deal and return.’

‘We do have a deal then?’

‘Fifteen million dollars,’ Asim confirmed.

‘You said twenty on the phone,’ Santos retorted angrily. ‘It’s worth at least twenty. I wouldn’t have invited you here if I’d known it was only for fifteen.’

‘Fifteen is new price,’ Asim said stonily. ‘Or you find someone else with money so quick.’

There was a pause as Santos stared angrily at each of the Serbs in turn. With Ancelotti’s team of forensic accountants due to start on his books any day, he was out of options. And from their obvious confidence, they knew it. He glanced across at Orlando, who shrugged helplessly.

‘Fine. Fifteen,’ Santos spat. ‘In cash.’

‘You understand the consequences if you are not able to deliver…’

‘We’ll deliver,’ Santos said firmly, standing up.

‘Then we look forward to your call,’ Dejan shrugged, draining his glass. ‘Tomorrow, as agreed.’

Shaking their hands, Santos showed them to the door, waited until their footsteps had melted into towards the engine whine of the waiting helicopter, then swore.

‘We could find another buyer,’ Orlando suggested.

‘Not at this short notice, and the bastards know it,’ Santos said angrily. ‘It’s tomorrow night or never.’

‘De Luca and Moretti agreed to the meet?’

‘I told them that things had got out of hand,’ Santos nodded. ‘That business was suffering. Then offered to broker a settlement. They didn’t take much convincing. Usual place. No weapons, no men. It’ll be our only chance to get the watches and the painting in the same room.’

‘As long as we can get to D’Arcy’s.’

‘We only need three,’ Santos reminded him. ‘We’ve got Cavalli’s already and Moretti and De Luca should both be wearing theirs. D’Arcy’s is back-up.’

‘They’ll come after you. They’ll come after us both.’

‘They’ll have to find me first.’ Santos shrugged. ‘Besides, life’s too short to waste it worrying about being dead.’

‘Amen,’ Orlando nodded, topping up their glasses.

SIXTY-THREE

Main harbour, Monte Carlo 20th March – 5.03 a.m.

‘Are you sure that was him?’

‘I’m telling you, it’s Antonio Santos,’ she breathed, certain she was right but still not quite able to believe it. ‘The Chairman of the Banco Rosalia. He said exactly the same thing about life being too short when he was identifying Argento’s body.’

‘It wouldn’t exactly be the first time a Vaticanfunded bank has been a front for the mafia,’ Tom conceded with a shrug.

‘Do you think he ordered the hit on Jennifer?’

‘The priest clearly works for him and, by the sound of it, he had access to the Caravaggio too,’ Tom nodded darkly.

‘But why would he have done it?’

‘My guess is that she found something during that raid on the dealer in New York. A bank statement or an invoice or a receipt. Something that implicated the Banco Rosalia or that tied him back to the League. Something worth killing her for.’

‘Even if we could prove that, he’s got a Vatican passport,’ she reminded him with a shake of her head. ‘He can’t be prosecuted.’

‘Maybe if we can get to the painting before him, he won’t have to be.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean the Serbs will take care of him for us if he doesn’t deliver,’ Tom explained in a grim voice.

There was a pause as she let the implications of this sink in.

‘At least now we know why D’Arcy’s murder didn’t match any of the other killings,’ she said. ‘It had nothing to do with the League’s vendetta. Santos killed him for his watch.’

‘They link everything,’ Tom agreed.

‘Moretti, De Luca, D’Arcy…’ She counted the watches off on her fingers.

‘Cavalli,’ Tom finished the list for her.

‘That must have been what Gallo was looking for when he killed Gambetta,’ Allegra said with an angry shake of her head. ‘He’s been working for Santos all along.’

‘But why? How can a watch help get to a painting?’

‘Even if we knew, we still don’t know where the painting is.’

‘Ziff’s our best hope,’ Tom said slowly. ‘He’ll know why Santos needs them.’

‘Will he see us?’ Allegra asked.

‘Oh, he’ll see us,’ Tom nodded. ‘But that doesn’t mean he’ll tell us anything.’

SIXTY-FOUR

Near Aosta, Italy 20th March – 8.33 a.m.

It was a six-hour drive to Geneva, the road snaking up into the hills behind Monte Carlo and then along the motorway into Italy, before turning north and plunging into the Alps. They’d had no trouble at the border, their Swiss passports earning little more than a cursory once-over from the duty officer and then a dismissive flick of his hand as he waved them through. Even so, Tom was certain that he’d caught him giving them the finger as they’d accelerated away. So much for European harmony.

Allegra had soon drifted off, leaving Tom to take the first shift, although she had at least managed to share what she remembered about Santos’s immaculate dress sense, compulsive liquorice habit and cold-eyed charisma before her tiredness had finally caught up with her. Eventually, about three hours in, Tom had turned off at a service station near Aosta on the A5, hungry and needing to stretch his legs before swapping over.

‘I need a coffee,’ Allegra groaned as he shook her awake.

‘We both do.’

‘Where are we?’

‘Not far from the Mont Blanc tunnel.’

The service station was bright and warm, something indistinct but resolutely cheerful playing in the background. A busload of school children on a ski trip had turned up just before them and they were besieging the small shop. Desperately rooting through their pockets for change, they were noisily pooling funds to finance a hearty breakfast of crisps, coke and chocolate. As soon as the onslaught had cleared, the teachers swooped in behind them to pick over the bones of whatever they hadn’t stripped from the shelves and apologise to the staff.

While Allegra queued for the toilet, Tom got them both a coffee from the machine and managed to locate a couple of pastries that had somehow survived the raid. Then he called Archie.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ Archie greeted him angrily. ‘I’ve been trying to call since lunchtime yesterday.’

‘I had to swap phones. It’s a long story.’

‘Then make it a good one. Dom was worried. We both were.’

‘We think Jennifer was killed because she was investigating a mafia-controlled antiquities smuggling ring called the Delian League,’ Tom explained, mouthing Archie’s name to Allegra as she returned.

‘We? Who the bloody hell is “we”?’

Tom sighed. He could see this was going to be a long conversation. But there was no avoiding it. Step by step, he ran through the events of the last day or so – his encounter with Allegra at Cavalli’s house, their trip to see Johnny Li, the abortive attempt to steal a car, their interrogation of Aurelio, their capture by De Luca and subsequent escape from the tomb, their trip to the casino and their discovery of D’Arcy’s panic room. And finally, the conversation they had just overheard between Santos and the Serbs. Archie was an impatient listener, interrupting every so often with questions or a muttered curse until Tom had finished. Then it was his turn to explain how it seemed that the Artemis Tom had asked them to look into had in fact been bought by a company controlled by the same person who had sold it in the first place.

‘Our guess is that it’s part of an elaborate laundering scam to manufacture provenance,’ Archie added. ‘You ever heard of an antiquities dealer called Faulks?’

‘Faulks,’ Tom exclaimed, recognising the name that Aurelio had mentioned. ‘Earl Faulks?’

‘You know him?’ Archie sounded vaguely disappointed.

‘Aurelio mentioned his name,’ Tom explained. ‘Where he is now?’

‘His car had Geneva plates, so I’m guessing he’s based here.’

‘See if you can find him. When we’ve finished with Ziff, I’ll call you. We can pay him a visit together.’

‘Everything okay?’ Allegra asked as he ended the call. From her expression, Tom guessed that she’d overhead the tinny echo of Archie’s strident tone.

‘Don’t worry. That’s standard Archie,’ Tom reassured her with a wink. ‘He’s only happy when he’s got something or someone to complain about.’ He held out the car keys. ‘Here – it’s your turn to drive.’

SIXTY-FIVE

Lake Geneva, Switzerland 20th March – 10.59 a.m.

A couple of hours later, they drew up at the lake’s edge. A yacht was skating across the water’s glassy surface, its sail snapping in the breeze. In the distance loomed the jagged, snow-covered teeth of the surrounding mountains, their reflection caught so perfectly by the water’s blinding mirror that it was hard to know which way was up. It was a strangely disorientating illusion. And one that was broken only when the yacht suddenly tacked left, its trailing wake corrugating the water.

Getting out, they walked up to the gates of a large three-storey red-brick building with steep gabled roofs. Set high up and back from the road behind iron railings, it appeared to be empty; grey shutters drawn across the mullioned windows, walls choking with ivy, the gardens wild and overgrown. Even so, there were faint signs of life – tyre tracks in the gravel suggesting a recent visit,roving security cameras patrolling the property’s perimeter, steam rising from an outlet.

‘The Georges d’Ammon Asylum for the Insane?’ Allegra read the polished brass nameplate and then shot Tom a questioning, almost disbelieving look.

‘Used to be,’ Tom affirmed, rolling his shoulders to try and ease the stiffness in his back and neck. ‘That’s why Ziff bought it. He thought it was funny.’

‘What’s the joke?’

‘That anyone who spends their life watching the seconds tick away is bound to go mad eventually. He thought that at least this way, he wouldn’t have far to move.’ A pause. ‘Swiss humour. It takes some getting used to.’

Tom pressed the buzzer. No answer. He tried again, holding it down longer this time. Still nothing.

‘Maybe he’s out,’ Allegra ventured.

‘He never goes out,’ Tom said with a shake of his head. ‘Doesn’t even have a phone. He’s just being difficult. Show him the watch.’

With a shrug, she held D’Arcy’s watch up to the camera. A few seconds past, and then the gate buzzed open.

They made their way up the steep drive, the gravel crunching like fresh snow underfoot, the building’s institutional blandness further revealing itself as it slowly came into view.

‘How long has he been here?’

‘As long as I’ve known him,’ Tom replied. ‘The authorities shut it down after some of the staff were accused of abusing the inmates. They found two bodies under the basement floor, more bricked up inside a chimney.’

Even as he said this, Allegra noticed that the spiked railings girdling the property were angled back inside the garden – to keep people in, not out. She shivered, the sun’s warmth momentarily eclipsed by the shadow of a large plane tree.

‘How many watches does he make a year?’ she asked, changing the subject.

‘New? Not many. Maybe three or four.’ Tom shrugged. ‘His main business is upgrades.’

‘What sort of upgrades?’

‘It depends. Retrofitting manufactured components with handmade titanium or even ceramic ones, improving the balance wheel and mainspring design, engraving certain parts of the movement, adding new features, modifying the face…The only way you’d know it was one of his is from the orange second hand that he fits to everything he touches.’

‘So you buy a watch that tells the time perfectly well and then pay him more money to take it apart and rebuild it to do exactly the same thing?’ she asked incredulously.

‘Pretty much.’ Tom grinned. ‘People do it with sports cars.’

‘But that’s to make them go faster. A watch either tells the time or it doesn’t. It can’t do it better.’

‘That’s not the point. It’s not what it does but the way it does it. The ingenuity of the design. The quality of the materials. The skill with which it’s been assembled. It’s like people. It’s what you can’t see that really counts.’

‘Some people, maybe.’

The front door was sheltered under an ornate cast-iron canopy at the top of several shallow steps. It was open and they stepped inside, finding themselves in a large entrance hall lit by a flickering emergency exit sign.

Her eyes adjusting to the gloom, Allegra could see that the room rose to the full height of the building, an oak staircase zig-zagging its way up to each floor capped off by a glass cupola far overhead. To their right was what had clearly once been the reception desk, the yellowing visitors’ book still open at the last entry, a gnarled claw of desiccated flowers drooping over it as if poised to sign in. Up on the wall was a large carved panel lauding the generosity and wisdom of the asylum’s founder and marking its opening in 1896. Next to this, another panel commemorated those who had served as directors over the years, the final name on the list either incomplete or deliberately defaced, it was hard to tell. To the left, a straitjacket had been left slung over the back of a wheelchair at the foot of the staircase, its leather straps cracked, the buckles rusting. Behind it was a grandfather clock, its face shrouded by a white sheet.

Allegra had the strange feeling that she was intruding, that the building was holding its breath, and that as soon as they left the straitjacket would deftly fasten itself, the doors would swing wildly in their frames, the clock chime and silent screams rise once again from the basement’s dank shadows.

‘Up here,’ a voice called, breaking the spell.

She looked up through the darkness and saw a man peering down at them over the secondfloor banisters. Swapping a look, they made their way up to him, the wooden staircase groaning under their unexpected weight, their footsteps echoing off the flaking green walls.

‘So you’ve come to visit at last, Felix?’ Ziff grinned manically, thrusting his hand towards them as they stepped on to a landing lit by sunshine knifing through the gaps and cracks in the shuttered windows. He spoke quickly and with a thick German accent, his words eliding into each other.

‘A promise is a promise.’ Tom smiled, shaking his hand. ‘Max, this is Allegra Damico.’

‘Friend of yours?’ Ziff asked without looking at her.

‘I wouldn’t have brought her here otherwise,’ Tom reassured him.

Ziff considered this for a few seconds, then gave a high-pitched, almost nervous laugh, that flitted up and down a scale.

‘No, of course not. Wilkommen.’

Ziff stepped forward into the light. He was tall, perhaps six foot three, but slight, his reedy frame looking as though it would bend in a strong wind, dyed black hair thinning and cropped short. His features were equally delicate, almost feminine, his face dominated by a neatly trimmed moustache that exactly followed the contours of his top lip and had been dyed to match his hair. He was wearing a white apron over green tweed trousers, gleaming brown brogues and an open-necked check shirt worn with a yellow cravat. His sleeves were rolled up so she could see his thin wrists, the slender fingers of his right hand tapping against his leg as if playing an unheard piece of music, the left gripping an Evian atomiser. Strangely, given his occupation, he wasn’t wearing a watch.

She shook his hand, his skin feeling unnaturally slick, until she realised that he was wearing latex gloves.

‘I was so sorry to hear about your father.’ Ziff turned back to Tom, gripping him firmly by the elbow and leaning in close. ‘How have you been?’

‘Fine,’ Tom nodded his thanks. ‘It’s been a while now. Almost three years.’

‘That long?’ Ziff let him go, his head springing from side to side in bemusement. ‘You know me: I try not to keep track. I find it too depressing,’ He licked the corner of his mouth absent-mindedly, then repeated his shrill laugh.

The sight of a round mark on the wall behind him where the clock that had once hung there had been removed made Allegra wonder if perhaps Ziff hadn’t been joking when he had told Tom his reasons for buying this place. Maybe he really did believe that a life spent watching time leak irresistibly away would condemn him to insanity, and that by removing a clock here and covering another there, he might in some way avoid or at least delay his fate.

Ziff seemed to guess what she was thinking, because he glanced up at the ghostly imprint of the missing clock behind him.

‘Time is an accident of accidents, signorina.’ He gave her a sad nod.

‘Epicurus,’ she replied, recognising the quote.

‘Exactly!’ His face broke into a smile. ‘Now tell me, Felix. What accident of accidents brings you here?’

SIXTY-SIX

20th March – 11.14 a.m.

Ziff led them through a set of double doors into a sombre corridor, its grey linoleum unfurling towards a fire escape at its far end. Several gurneys were parked along one wall, while on the other wall patients’ clipboards were still neatly arranged in a rack with the staff attendance record chalked up on a blackboard – further confirmation that the building’s former occupants had left in a hurry and that Ziff had made little effort to clean up after them.

He stopped at the first door on the left, sprayed its handle with the atomiser, then opened it to reveal one of the asylum’s former wards. Here, too, it seemed that nothing had been touched, until Ziff flicked a power switch and Allegra suddenly realised that all the beds were missing and that in their place, lined up between the floral curtains dangling listlessly from aluminium tracks, were pinball machines. Sixteen of them in all, eight running down each side of the room, backboards flashing, lanes pulsing, drop targets blinking and bumpers sparking as they happily flickered into life. Allegra read the names of a few as she walked past – ‘Flash Gordon’, ‘Playboy’, ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, ‘The Twilight Zone’ – their titles evocative of a distant, almost forgottenchildhood. Every so often one of them would call out a catchphrase or play a theme song, and this seemed to set the other machines off, their sympathetic chorus building to a discordant crescendo before dying away again.

‘They’re all vintage,’ Ziff explained proudly, stepping slowly past them like a doctor doing his rounds. ‘Each one is for a private commission I’ve completed. A tombstone, if you like. So I don’t forget.’

‘How many have you got?’ Allegra asked, pausing by ‘The Addams Family’, and then jumping as it blasted out a loud clickety-click noise.

‘About eighty,’ he said after a few seconds’ thought. ‘I’ve almost run out of bed space.’

‘Which one’s your favourite?’

‘Favourite?’ He looked horrified. ‘Each one is unique, each different. If you were to try and choose one over the others…’ He tailed off, as if afraid the machines might overhear him.

He stopped by a battered wooden desk marooned in the middle of the ward. Its top was covered in red felt, worn and stained in places with oil. A large magnifying lamp was clamped to one edge and it was on casters, prompting Allegra to wonder if Ziff wheeled it from room to room, moving around the different wards as the mood took him.

He sat down, a steel tray in front of him containing the disembodied guts of a Breguet, a 20x loupe and several jeweller’s screwdrivers. Other tools had been carefully laid out in the different drawers of a small wheeled cabinet to his right, as if in preparation for surgery – case openers, tweezers, screwdrivers, watch hammers, pliers, brushes, knives – each sorted by type and then arranged by size.

‘Show me,’ Ziff said, pushing the tray out of the way and putting on an almost comically large pair of black square-framed glasses that he secured to his head with an elastic strap.

Allegra handed him the watch and he angled the magnifying lamp down over it, peering through the glass.

‘Oh yes.’ His face broke into a smile. ‘Hello, old friend.’

‘You recognise it?’

‘Wouldn’t you recognise one of your own children?’ Ziff asked impatiently. ‘Especially one as special as this.’

‘What do you mean?’ Tom shot back eagerly.

‘Each of my watches is normally unique,’ Ziff explained. ‘A one-off. But in this case, the client ordered six identical pieces. And paid handsomely for the privilege, from what I remember.’

‘Six?’ Allegra repeated excitedly. They knew of four already. That left two others still unaccounted for.

‘They’re numbered,’ Ziff continued, pointing at the delta symbol delicately engraved on the back of the case. ‘Platinum bezel, stainless-steel case, ivory face, self-winding, water resistant to thirty metres, screw-down crown…’ He balanced it in his hand as if weighing it. ‘A good watch.’

‘Who was the client?’ Tom asked.

Ziff looked at him with an indulgent smile, slipping his glasses up on to his forehead where they perched like headlights.

‘Felix, you know better than that.’

‘It’s important,’ Tom insisted.

‘My clients pay for their confidentiality, the same as yours,’ Ziff insisted with a shrug.

‘Please, Max,’ Tom pleaded. ‘I have to know. Give me something.’

Ziff paused before answering, his eyes blinking, then slipped his glasses back on to his nose and stood up.

‘Do you like pinball?’

‘We’re not here to play pinball,’ Tom said sharply, although Ziff didn’t seem to pick up on his tone. ‘We’re here to…’

‘“Straight Flush” is a classic,’ he interrupted, crossing over to the door. ‘Why don’t you have a game while you’re waiting?’

‘Waiting for what?’ Tom called after him, but Ziff was already out of the room, the sprung door easing itself shut behind him.

Allegra turned towards the machine he had pointed out. It appeared to be one of the oldest and most basic in the room, the salmon-coloured back-board illustrated with face-card caricatures, the sloping yellow surface decorated with playing cards that Allegra guessed you had to try and illuminate to create a high-scoring poker hand. She frowned. It wasn’t an obvious recommendation, compared to some of the more modern, more exciting games in the room, but then again she had detected an insistent tone in his voice. A tone that had made her wonder if there was something there he wanted them to see. Something other than the machine itself.

‘Can you open it?’ she asked, pointing at the metal panel on the front of the machine that contained the coin slot.

‘Of course,’ Tom squatted down next to her with a puzzled frown, reaching into his coat for a small pouch of lock-picking tools.

‘He said that each machine was for a job he’d completed. A tombstone so he wouldn’t forget,’ she reminded him as he deftly released the lock and opened the door, allowing her to reach into the void under the playing surface. ‘I just wondered…’

Her voice broke off as her fingers closed on an envelope of some sort. Pulling it out, she opened it, the flap coming away easily where the glue had dried over the years. It contained several sheets of paper.

‘It’s the original invoice,’ she exclaimed with an excited smile. ‘Six watches. Three hundred thousand dollars,’ she read from the fading type. ‘A lot of money, thirty years ago.’

‘A lot of money today.’ Tom smiled. ‘Who was the client?’

‘See for yourself.’

Allegra handed him the sheet, her eyes blazing with excitement.

‘E. Faulks & Co,’ Tom read, his face set with a grim smile. ‘And there’s a billing address down at the Freeport. Good. I’ll ask Archie to meet us there. Even if Faulks has moved we should be able to find -’

‘That’s strange,’ Allegra interrupted him, having quickly leafed through the rest of the contents of the envelope. ‘There’s another invoice here. Same address, only twelve years later.’

‘But that would make seven watches.’ Tom frowned. ‘Ziff only mentioned six.’

Before she could even attempt an explanation, she heard the whistled strains of the overture from Carmen echoing along the corridor outside. Snatching the invoice from Tom’s hand, she slipped it back in the envelope, shoved it inside the machine and shut the door.

“Magnets,’ Ziff announced as he sauntered in, excitedly waving several sheets of paper over his head. ‘I knew they were down there somewhere.’

‘What?’

‘Magnets,’ Ziff repeated with a high-pitched giggle, his glasses hanging around his neck like a swimmer’s goggles. ‘See.’

Picking D’Arcy’s watch up, he held it over the tray containing the watch he was working on. Two small screws leapt through the air and glued themselves to the bezel.

‘Each watch has a small electro magnet built into it powered by the self-winding mechanism,’ he explained, opening the file and pointing at a set of technical drawings as if they might mean something to either of them. ‘They were all set at slightly different resistances.’

‘What for?’

‘Some sort of a locking mechanism, I think. They never said exactly what.’

Allegra swapped a meaningful glance with Tom. So this was why Santos needed the watches. Together, they formed a key that opened wherever the Caravaggio was being stored.

‘Normally I destroy the drawings once a job is completed, but this was the first time I had used silicon-based parts and I thought they might be useful. Turns out it was just as well.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The client lost one of the watches and asked for a replacement. The epsilon watch, I think. Without these I might have struggled to replicate it.’

Allegra took a deep breath. That explained the second invoice. More importantly, it meant that there were seven numbered watches out there somewhere. Each the same and yet subtly different. Each presumably entrusted to a different key member of the Delian League.

‘By the way, what was your score?’ Ziff jerked his head towards the ‘Straight Flush’ pinball machine he had pointed out earlier.

‘Ask us tomorrow,’ Tom answered with a smile.

SIXTY-SEVEN

Free Port Compound, Geneva 20th March – 12.02 p.m.

The Free Port was a sprawling agglomeration of low-slung warehouses lurking in the shadow of the airport’s perimeter fence. Built up over the years, it offered a vivid snapshot of changing architectural fashions, the older buildings cinder grey and forbidding in their monolithic functionality, the newer ones iPod white and airy.

For the most part, its business was entirely legitimate, the facilities providing importers and exporters with a tax-free holding area through which goods could be shipped in transit or stored, with duty only being paid when items officially ‘entered’ the country.

The problem, as Tom was explaining to Allegra on the drive down there, lay in the Free Port’s insistence on operating under a similar code of secrecy to the Swiss banking sector. This allowed cargo to be shipped into Switzerland, sold on, and then exported again with only the most cursory official records kept of what was actually being sold or who it was being sold to. Compounding this was Switzerland’s repeated refusal to sign up to the 1970 Unesco Convention on the illicit trade in cultural property. Not to mention the fact that, under Swiss law, stolen goods acquired in good faith became the legal property of the new owner after five years on Swiss soil.

Taken together these three factors had, over the years, established Switzerland’s free ports as a smuggler’s paradise, with disreputable dealers exploiting the system by secretly importing stolen art or looted antiquities, holding them in storage for five years, and then claiming legal ownership.

To their credit, the Swiss government had recently bowed to international pressure and both ratified the Unesco Convention and changed its antiquated ownership laws. But so far the Free Port’s entrenched position at the crossroads of the trade in illicit art and antiques seemed to be holding surprisingly firm. As Faulks’s continuing presence served to prove.

They turned on to La Voie des Traz, the road choked with lorries and vans making deliveries and collections at the different warehouses, fork lifts shuttling between them as they loaded and unloaded with a high-pitched whine. For a moment, Tom was reminded of his drive into Vegas a few nights before, the vast buildings lining both sides of the street like the casinos studding the Strip.

‘There’s Archie and Dom -’ Tom pointed at the two figures waiting in the car park of the warehouse mentioned on the invoice.

‘Everything all right?’ Archie bellowed as they got out.

‘Tom!’ A tearful Dominique tore past him and wrapped her arms around Tom’s neck. ‘I’m so sorry about what happened to…I’m so sorry.’

‘Yeah,’ Archie coughed awkwardly, lowering his eyes.

Even now, no one could bring themselves to say Jennifer’s name, he noticed. Afraid of upsetting him. Afraid of what he might do or say.

‘This is Allegra Damico,’ Tom said, turning to introduce her.

She nodded hello, Tom realising from their forced handshakes and awkward greetings that they were all probably feeling a bit uncomfortable. Dom and Archie at Allegra stepping inside their tight little circle, Allegra at being so quickly outnumbered, with only Tom providing the delicate thread that bound them all together.

‘How was Max?’ Archie asked. ‘Still bonkers?’

‘Getting worse,’ Tom sighed. ‘Although we did manage to find out why Santos needs the watches.’

‘They contain small electro-magnets that open some sort of lock,’ Allegra jumped in. ‘Presumably to wherever the painting’s being kept.’

‘Faulks commissioned seven of them,’ Tom continued. ‘So as well as the four we know about, there are three more out there somewhere, which might give us a chance to get to the painting before Santos.’ He glanced sceptically at the squat, square building behind them, its exterior clad in rusting metal sheeting. ‘So, this is it?’

‘It’s scheduled for demolition later in the year,’ Archie nodded. ‘Faulks and a few other tenants who are due to move out at the end of the month are the only people left inside.’

‘He’s got a suite of rooms on the third floor,’ Dominique added. ‘He’s due back at around four for a meeting with Verity Bruce.’

‘The curator of antiquities at the Getty?’ Allegra frowned in surprise. ‘What’s she doing here?’

‘Having lunch at the Perle du Lac any time now and then doing the usual rounds of the major dealers.’

‘How do you…’ Allegra’s question faded away as she saw the phone in Dominique’s hand.

‘We cloned his SIM. I’ve got it set up to mirror his calendar entries and record every call he makes.’

‘Does that mean you know where they’re meeting tonight?’ Tom asked hopefully.

‘The time’s blocked out but there’s no details.’

‘Well, if they’re due back here at four that gives us…just under four hours to get inside, have a look around and get out.’

‘I’ve rented some space on the same floor as Faulks.’ Archie held out a key. ‘Bloke on the desk thought I was loopy, given they’re shutting down, but it’s ours for the next two weeks.’

They signed in, the register suggesting that they were the only people there. The guard was all smiles, the momentary flurry of activity clearly a welcome respite from the silent contemplation of empty CCTV screens. To Archie’s obvious amusement he seemed to take a particular shine to Dominique.

‘You’re well in,’ he grinned as they made their way to the lift.

‘Lucky me.’

‘Archie’s got a point,’ Tom said. ‘Why don’t you stay down here and keep him busy.’

She gave Tom an injured look.

‘Please tell me you’re joking.’

‘Just until we can get inside.’

She glared at Archie, who was trying not to laugh, then turned wearily back towards the reception as they got into the lift.

‘Great,’ she sighed as the doors shut.

A few moments later and they stepped out on to a wide cinder-block corridor that led off left and right. The floor had been painted grey, the evenly spaced neon tubes overhead reflecting in its dull surface every fifteen or so feet. A yellow line ran down its centre, presumably to help the fork-lifts navigate safely along it, although the gouges and marks along the greenwashed walls suggested that it had not been that effective. Steel doors were set into the walls at irregular intervals, the relative distance between them giving some indication as to the size of the room behind each one. As was usual in the Free Port, they were identified only by numbers, not company names.

They followed the signs to corridor twelve and then stopped outside room seventeen.

‘This is it,’ Archie confirmed.

‘You know seventeen is an unlucky number in Italy,’ Allegra observed thoughtfully.

‘Why?’

‘In Roman numerals it’s XVII, which is an anagram of VIXI – I lived. I’m now dead.’

‘She’s a right barrel of laughs, isn’t she?’ Archie gave a flat sigh. ‘Do you do bar mitzvahs too?’

‘Give her a break, Archie,’ Tom warned him sharply. ‘She’s part of this now.’

The offices were secured by three locks – a central one, common to every door, and two heavyduty padlocks that Faulks must have fitted himself at the top and bottom. Working quickly, Tom placed a tension wrench in the lower half of the key hole and placed some light clockwise pressure on it. Then he slipped his pick into the top of the lock and, feeling for each pin, pushed them up out of the way one by one, careful to maintain the torque on the tension wrench so that they wouldn’t drop back down. In little over a minute, all three locks had been released.

Grabbing the handle, Tom fractionally eased the door open and looked along its frame, then shut it again.

‘Alarmed?’ Archie guessed.

‘Contact switch,’ Tom said, glancing up at the camera at the end of the corridor and hoping that Dominique was working her magic.

‘Can’t you get round it?’ Allegra asked.

‘The contact at the top of the door is held shut by a magnet,’ Tom explained. ‘If we open the door, the magnet moves out of range and the switch opens and breaks the circuit. We need another magnet to hold the switch in place while we open the door.’

‘I’ll go and get your gear out the car,’ Archie volunteered.

‘Can’t we just use this?’ Allegra held up D’Arcy’s watch, her eyebrows raised into a question. ‘It’s magnetised, isn’t it?’

Tom turned to Archie with a questioning smile.

‘Yeah well, I can’t think of everything, can I?’ Archie sniffed grudgingly.

Taking the watch from her, Tom again eased the door open and then held the back of the watch as close as he could to the small surface-mounted white box he had noticed previously. Then, exchanging a quick, hopeful look with both Archie and Allegra, he pushed the door fully open. For a few moments they stood there, each halfexpecting to hear warning tones from the alarm’s control panel. But the sound never came.

They were in.

SIXTY-EIGHT

Restaurant Perle du Lac, Geneva 20th March – 12.30 p.m.

‘You found it!’

Faulks leant on his umbrella to stand up as the maitre d’ escorted Verity along the terrace to the table. She was wearing a black dress and a denim jacket and clutching a red Birkin to match her shoes. Half her face was masked by a pair of dark Chanel sunglasses, a thick knot of semiprecious stones swaying around her neck.

‘Earl, darling,’ she gushed. They air-kissed noisily. ‘Sorry I’m late. Spanish air traffic control was on strike again. Quelle surprise! I just got in.’

‘Allow me.’ He stepped forward and pushed her chair in for her, then handed her a napkin with a flourish. The maitre d’, looking put out at having been so publicly supplanted, retreated in stony silence.

‘What are we celebrating?’ She clapped her hands excitedly as the waiter stepped forward and poured them both a glass of the Pol Roger Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill that Faulks had specially pre-ordered.

‘I always drink champagne for lunch.’ He shrugged casually. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Oh, Earl, you’re such a tease.’ She took a sip. ‘You know this is my favourite. And as for the view -’ she gestured beyond the terrace towards the lake, its jewelled surface glittering in the sun – ‘you must have sold your soul to get such a perfect day.’

‘You’re half right.’ He winked.

She turned back to him with a suspicious smile, pushing her sunglasses up and shielding her eyes from the sun with a hand.

‘Are you trying to soften me up?’

‘As if I’d dare!’ He grinned. The waiter materialised expectantly at their table. ‘I recommend the pigeon breast.’

Their order taken, the waiter backed away. There was a lull, the delicate chime of Verity’s long painted nails striking her glass echoing the clink of cutlery from the neighbouring tables, until she fixed him with a casual look.

‘Do you have it?’

There. The question he’d been waiting for. Faulks was impressed. It had taken her a full three minutes longer to ask this than he’d thought it would. She’d obviously come here determined to play it cool.

‘I have it,’ he confirmed. ‘It arrived yesterday. I unpacked it myself.’

‘Is it…?’ Her voiced tailed off, as if she didn’t trust herself to put what she felt into words, her carefully planned strategy of feigned indifference falling at the first hurdle, it seemed.

‘It’s everything you dreamt it would be,’ he promised her.

‘And you have a buyer?’ she asked, her voice now betraying a hint of concern. ‘Because after the kouros, the trustees have asked for a review of our acquisitions policy. They’re even talking about establishing some sort of unofficial blacklist. It’s madness. The lunatics are taking over the asylum.’

‘I have a buyer,’ he reassured her. ‘And provided you value the mask at the agreed figure, he will happily donate it to the Getty as we discussed.’

‘Of course, of course,’ she said, seeming relieved.

‘What about Director Bury?’ It was Faulks’s turn to sound concerned. ‘Have you spoken to him?’

‘That man is a disgrace,’ Verity snorted. ‘How he ever came to…’ She broke off, and took a deep breath, trying to compose herself. ‘Well, maybe I shouldn’t complain. Better a riding school pony on a lead rope than an unbroken Arab who won’t take the bit.’

She drained her glass, the waiter swooping in to refill it before Faulks had time to even reach for the bottle.

‘So he said yes?’

‘If it’s in the condition you say it is and I confirm that it’s by Phidias, he’ll submit the acquisition papers to the trustees himself. Bury may be incompetent, but he’s not stupid. He realises that this could make his own reputation as much as mine. And he knows that if we don’t take it, someone else will.’

‘My buyer has promised me the money by the end of the week if you green-light it. It could be in California by the end of the month.’

‘I just wish we hadn’t arranged all these meetings today,’ she sighed. ‘Four o’clock seems like a long way away.’

‘Then I’ve got some good news for you,’ Faulks smiled. ‘I bumped into Julian Simmons from the Gallerie Orientale on the way in and he wants to cancel. We should be able to head over there by around three.’

‘Two and a half hours.’ She checked her watch with a smile. ‘I suppose that’s not too long to wait after two and a half thousand years.’

SIXTY-NINE

Free Port Compound, Geneva 20th March – 12.32 p.m.

‘What a shithole,’ Archie moaned.

Tom had to agree. Withered carpet, wilting curtains, weathered windows, a stern row of steelfronted cupboards lining the right-hand wall. There was something irredeemably depressing about the room’s utilitarian ugliness that even the unusual table at the centre of the room – a circular slab of glass supported by a massive Corinthian capital – couldn’t alleviate. Sighing, he opened one of the cupboards and then stepped back, openmouthed.

‘Look at this.’

The shelves were overflowing with antiquities. Overwhelmed by them. Vases, statues, bronzes, frescoes, mosaics, glassware, faience animals, jewellery…packed so tightly that in places the objects seemed to be climbing over each other like horses trying to escape a stable fire. The strange thing was that, while there was nothing here of the casual brutality with which Contarelli had treated the objects in his care, Tom couldn’t help but wonder if the sheer number and variety of what had been hoarded here, and what it said about the likely scale and sophistication of the Delian League’s operation, wasn’t actually far more horrific.

‘This one’s the same,’ Allegra said, her voice brimming with anger.

‘Here too,’ Archie called, opening the one next to her.

There was a gentle knock at the door. Using D’Arcy’s watch again, Tom let Dominique in.

‘You escaped?’ Archie grinned.

‘No thanks to you,’ she huffed angrily. ‘I don’t know what you said to him to convince him to rent us some space, but he’s been giving me some very strange looks. Luckily he had to go and do his rounds or I’d still be…’ She broke off, having just caught sight of the open cupboards. ‘I guess we’re in the right place.’

‘You’re just in time,’ Tom said. ‘We were about to have a look next door.’

They stepped through into the adjacent room, the lights flickering on to reveal another Aladdin’s cave of antiquities, although here stored with rather less care – a wooden Egyptian sarcophagus sawn into pieces, straw-packed chests with Sotheby’s and Christie’s labels still tied to them with string, vases covered in dirt, cylinder seals from Iraq wrapped in newspaper, bronze statues from India propped up against the wall, Peruvian ceramics…In the middle of the room, raised off the floor, a quarter-ton Guatemalan jaguar’s head glowered at them through the slats of its wooden crate.

‘He’s got shit here from all over,’ Archie noted, taking care to look where he was treading. ‘And fakes too.’ He pointed at two identical Cycladic statues of a harp player. ‘The original’s in Athens.’

But Tom wasn’t listening, having seen the large safe at the far end of the room. He tried the handle, more in hope than expectation. It was locked.

‘Over here.’

Allegra was standing at the threshold of a third room, much smaller than the others, but no less surprising. For where they had been flooded with antiquities, this was drowning in documentation – Polaroids, invoices, valuation certificates, consignment notes, shipping manifests, certificates of authenticity, remittance notes. All carefully filed away by year in archive boxes.

The photographs, in particular, told their own grim story. One set picked at random showed an Attic kylix covered in dirt and in pieces in the boot of a car, then the same object cleaned and partially restored, then fully restored with all the cracks painted and polished, and finally on display in some unnamed museum, Faulks standing next to the display case like a proud father showing off a new-born child.

‘Like Lazarus raised from the dead,’ Allegra murmured, peering over Tom’s shoulder.

‘Only this time with the evidence to prove it,’ Dominique added. She’d found several long rectangular boxes crammed with five-by-eight-inch index cards. Written on each one in Faulks’s looping hand was a meticulous record of a particular sale he’d made – the date of the transaction, the object sold, the price paid, the name of the customer. ‘The Getty, the Met, the Gill brothers, the Avner Klein and Deena Carroll collection…’ she said, flicking through the first few cards. ‘This goes back fifteen, twenty years…’

‘Insurance,’ Archie guessed. ‘In case anyone tried to screw him.’

‘Or pride,’ Tom suggested. ‘So he could remind himself how clever he was. He just never counted on anyone finding it.’

‘Does it matter?’ Dominique snapped her fingers impatiently. ‘It’s quarter to one. That means we’ve only got just over three hours until Faulks gets back.’

‘Just about enough time to get his safe open,’ Tom said with a smile.

SEVENTY

20th March – 12.46 p.m.

Five feet tall and three feet across, the safe had a brutish, hulking presence, its dense mass of hardened steel and poured concrete exerting a strange gravitational pull that almost threatened to fold the room in on itself. A five-spoke gold-plated handle jutted out of its belly, the Cyclops eye of a combination lock glowering above it, the whole crowned with an elaborate gilded copperplate script that proudly spelt out its manufacturer’s name. Under the flickering lights its smooth flanks pulsed with a dull grey glow, like a meteorite that had just fallen to earth.

With Dom having gone to fetch Tom’s equipment, Tom, Allegra and Archie stood in a line in front of it, like art critics at an unveiling.

‘How do you know the watches are inside?’ Allegra asked.

‘I don’t. But I don’t see where else he would keep them.’

‘He certainly wasn’t wearing one,’ Archie agreed.

‘Can you open it?’ She was trying to sound positive, but she couldn’t quite disguise the sceptical edge to her question.

‘It’s a Champion Crown,’ Tom said, rubbing his chin wearily.

‘Is that bad?’

‘Two-and-one-eighth-inch thick composite concrete walls with ten-gauge steel on the outside and sixteen-gauge on the inside. A five-inch-thick composite concrete door secured by twenty one-and-a-half-inch active bolts. Internal ball-bearing hinges. Sargent & Greenleaf combination dial with a hundred million potential combinations…’ Tom sighed. ‘It’s about as bad as it gets.’

‘Don’t forget the sodding re-lockers,’ Archie added with a mournful sigh.

‘Re-lockers?’ Allegra looked back to Tom with a frown.

‘The easiest way to crack a safe is to drill through the door,’ Tom explained. ‘That way you can use a borescope, a sort of fibre-optic viewer, to watch the lock wheels spin into position while you turn the dial, or even manually retract the main bolt.’

‘Only the manufacturers have got smart,’ Archie continued. ‘Now they fit a cobalt alloy hardplate around the lock mechanisms and sprinkle it with tungsten carbide chips to shatter the drill bits. Sometimes the bastards even add a layer of steel washers or ball bearings too. Not particularly hard, but they spin round when the drill bit touches them, making them a bugger to cut through.’

‘The answer used to be to go in at an angle,’ Tom picked up again. ‘Drill in above or to the side of the hardplate and get at the lock pack that way. So the high-end safes now have a re-locker mechanism. A plate of tempered glass that shatters if you try to drill through it, releasing a set of randomly located bolts which lock the safe out completely. Some of them are even thermal, so that they trigger if you try and use a torch or plasma cutter.’

‘So you can’t open it?’ Given what she’d just heard, it seemed like a fair, if depressing conclusion.

‘Everything can be opened, given the right equipment and enough time,’ Archie reassured her. ‘You just need to know where to drill.’

‘Manufacturers build in a drill point to most types of safes,’ Tom explained, running his hand across the safe’s metal surface as if trying to divine its location. ‘A specific place where locksmiths can more easily drill through the door and, for a safe like this, a hole in the glass plate to get at the lock. They vary by make and model, and if you get it wrong…’

‘You trigger the re-lockers.’ Allegra nodded in understanding.

‘Drill-point diagrams are the most closely guarded secret in the locksmithing world,’ Archie sighed, before turning to face Tom. ‘We’ll have to get them off Raj.’

‘Who’s Raj?’ She asked.

‘Raj Dhutta. A locksmith we know. One of the best.’

‘It’s too late for that.’ Tom shook his head. ‘Even if he could get it to us in time, it would still take hours to drill through the hardplate with the kit I’ve got.’

‘Then your only option is a side entry.’ Archie dragged three crates out of the way to give them access to the safe’s flanks.

‘And then in through the change-key hole,’ Tom said.

‘You what?’ Archie gave a disbelieving, almost nervous laugh.

‘It’ll take too long to drill back through into the lock pack. It’s the only way in the time we’ve got.’

‘What’s a change-key hole?’ Allegra asked with a frown. Hardplate. Re-locker. Change-key. Part of her wondered if they were deliberately tossing in these terms to confuse her.

Dominique interrupted before Tom could answer, breathing heavily as she hauled Tom’s equipment bag behind her.

‘Did you get lost?’ Tom asked, surprised it had taken her so long.

‘I got out at two by mistake,’ she panted. ‘I was banging on the door like an idiot until I realised that I was on the wrong floor. They all look the same.’

‘And there was me thinking your new boyfriend was showing you his torch,’ said Archie, grinning.

‘I’ll bet it’s bigger than yours,’ she retorted, screwing her face into an exaggerated smile.

‘Stop it you two,’ Tom said as he knelt down and unzipped the bag, and then carefully lifted out the magnetic drill rig.

‘What about all that?’ Allegra asked, nodding towards the paperwork in the third room.

‘What about it?’ Archie frowned.

‘It’s evidence. Proof of every deal the Delian League has ever done. We can’t just leave it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because this isn’t just about Santos and Faulks. There’s enough in there to bring the whole organisation down and implicate everyone who has ever dealt with them.’

‘Have you seen how much of that shit there is?’ Archie snorted.

‘We could photograph some it,’ she suggested. ‘We’ve got three hours. That’s more than enough…’

‘Two hours,’ Dominique corrected her.

‘What?’ Tom’s head snapped round. ‘You said…’

‘According to his calendar, Faulks just cancelled his last meeting,’ she explained, holding up her phone. ‘That means he could be here any time after three.’

‘Shit,’ Archie swore, then shot Tom a questioning glance. ‘Can you do it?’

‘No way.’ Tom shook his head emphatically, running his fingers distractedly through his hair. ‘It’s a three-hour job. Two and a half if we’re lucky.’

‘Then we need to buy you some more time,’ Archie said. ‘Find a way to keep Faulks away from here until we’ve finished.’

There was a long, painful silence, Tom glaring at the safe door as if it was somehow to blame for the change in Faulks’s schedule, Dominique flexing her fingers where they’d gone stiff from dragging the bag.

‘Come on,’ Archie snorted eventually. ‘Nothing? Anyone?’

‘Can you get to the surveillance cameras?’ Allegra asked.

‘The patch panel’s probably next to the server room downstairs,’ Dominique said with a nod. ‘Why?’

‘It’s just…I might have an idea. Well, it was your idea really.’

‘My idea?’ Dominique looked surprised, the brusque tone she’d reserved for Allegra up until now softening just a fraction.

‘Only it’ll never work.’

‘Perfect!’ Archie grinned. ‘The best ideas never do.’

SEVENTY-ONE

Free Port, Geneva 20th March – 3.22 p.m.

‘What did you think?’ Verity asked, fixing her lipstick in the mirror.

‘Which one?’

The Bentley tacked into the warehouse car park, the chassis leaning gracefully into the bend.

‘Sekhmet. The Egyptian lion goddess.’

‘Oh, that one,’ Faulks sniffed, looking disinterestedly out of the window.

‘Don’t go all shy on me.’ Verity glanced across, wiping the corner of her mouth where she had smudged it slightly. ‘What did you think?’

‘I don’t like to bad-mouth the competition,’ Faulks gave a small shake of his head as the car glided to a halt.

‘Liar!’ Verity laughed. ‘You thought it was a fake, didn’t you?’

‘Well, didn’t you?’ He threw his hands up in exasperation. ‘And not even a very good one. The base was far too short.’

‘Are we here?’ Verity glanced up at the ware-house’s rusted façade with a dubious expression.

‘Don’t sound so disappointed,’ Faulks laughed. ‘Most people don’t even know I have this place, let alone get to come inside.’

‘In that case I’m honoured.’ She smiled.

‘Anyway, I’m moving. They’re knocking it down. It’s a shame, really. I’ve been here almost since I started. Grown quite attached to it over the years.’

‘I never took you for a romantic, Earl,’ she teased.

‘Oh, I’m an incurable romantic,’ he protested. ‘Just as long as there are no people involved.’

Logan stepped round and opened her door. But as Verity went to get out, Faulks placed his hand on her arm.

‘Can you give me five minutes? I just want to make sure everything’s set up.’

‘Of course.’ She sat back with an indulgent smile although there was no disguising the impatience in her voice. ‘There are a few calls I need to make anyway.’

Nodding his thanks, he led Logan inside where they both signed in.

‘New tenants, Stefan?’ Faulks asked, surprised to see four names above his.

The guard checked that no one else was listening then leaned forward with a grin.

‘Just until the end of the month,’ he whispered excitedly. ‘They’re making a porno and wanted somewhere…discreet. You should see the two girls they’ve got! The director said I could go and watch them shoot a couple of scenes later this week.’

Faulks mustered a thin smile.

‘How nice for you.’

They rode the lift to the third floor and traced a familiar path round to corridor thirteen, stopping outside Faulk’s suite. Unlocking the door, he stepped inside and then stopped.

‘That’s funny,’ he muttered.

‘What?’ Logan followed him inside, immediately alert.

‘The alarm’s off. I was sure I’d…’

Logan drew his gun and stepped protectively in front of him.

‘Wait here.’

Treading carefully, he stepped over to the door to the middle room, eased it open and then peered inside. His gun dropped.

‘Boss, you’d better come’n see.’

Faulks stepped past him with a frown, the tip of his umbrella striking the floor every second step, then froze.

It was empty. Gutted. Stripped clean. The crates, the boxes, the vases, the statues, the safe-everything had gone.

He felt suddenly faint, the room spinning around him, his heart pounding, the blood roaring in his ears. Turning on his heels, he limped back into the first room and threw one of the cupboards open with a crash. Empty. The next one was the same. And the one after that, the metal doors now clanging noisily against each other like shutters in a storm as he jumped from one cupboard to the next. They were all empty.

‘You’ve been fuckin’ turned over,’ Logan growled.

Faulks couldn’t speak, could barely breathe, felt sick. He staggered to the table, his legs threatening to give away under him at any minute, the open cupboard doors still swaying around him as if they were waving goodbye.

What about the files?

Somehow he found the strength to limp through to the third room, Logan following behind, his warning to be careful echoing unheard off the bare walls. Faulks stopped on the threshold, supporting himself against the door frame, not needing to go inside to see that this room too had also been stripped bare.

He had the strange sensation of drowning, of the air being squeezed from his lungs, the pressure clawing at his eardrums, pressing his eyes back into his head. And then he was falling, legs tumbling away from underneath him, back sliding down the wall as the floor rose up to grab him, umbrella toppling on to his lap. Gone. Gone. Everything gone.

‘Earl?’ He heard Verity’s voice echoing towards him. ‘You said five minutes, so I thought I’d come up. Is everything okay?’

SEVENTY-TWO

Free Port, Geneva

20th April-3.36 p.m.

‘He’s gone inside.’ Archie let himself back into the room with a relieved smile. ‘I’ve left Dom watching the stairs. How are you getting on?’

‘Any minute now,’ Tom replied, the air thick with the smell of oil, burnt steel and hot machine parts.

Allegra had been right. Her idea had had no reason to work. And yet, like all good ideas, there had been an elegance and simplicity to it that had at least given it a fighting chance of success.

‘Dominique said all the floors look the same,’ Allegra had reminded them. ‘If she’s right, then maybe we could try and trick Faulks into getting off on the second floor.’

‘It could work,’ Tom had said, immediately catching on. ‘We could rig the lift, swap over the wall signs and door numbers, and then use the forklift to move all his furniture downstairs so that when he goes inside his first thought will be that he’s been robbed.’

‘I’ll reroute the camera feed so the guard can’t see us,’ Dominique had suggested. ‘And we could fix the alarm cover panel to the wall so it at least looks the same.’

‘What about the cupboards?’ Archie had reminded them. ‘We haven’t got time to unload them all.’

‘Check out some of the other empty offices,’ Tom had suggested. ‘There’s bound to be a couple of spares lying around. As long as they look vaguely similar, he’ll be too shocked to notice. And by the time he does, we’ll be long gone with whatever’s inside.’

Tom’s safe-cracking kit was surprisingly simple. A 36-volt Bosch power drill, like you would buy at any normal hardware store. A tungsten-carbide-tipped drill bit shaped for steel cutting. A twenty-millimetre diamond-core drill bit, routinely used in the construction industry. And finally a Fein electro-magnetic drill rig to hold the power drill in place and control the pressure.

The method was relatively straightforward too. First fix the rig on to the side of the safe over the chosen breach point with the magnets. Then clamp the power drill into the rig. Then equip the tungsten carbide drill bit, and lower the drill to bore a centring hole in the steel. Finally swap it for the diamond-core drill bit and punch through.

The tricky part was applying the correct combination of drill speed and pressure at the right time. Puncturing the safe’s steel casing, for example, required drilling at about 2000 rpm with only medium to low pressure applied by the rig. Getting through the composite material underneath, however, demanded high pressure and low revs, maybe 300 rpm. Even then Tom had to go easy, the diamonds clogging in the angled mild steel plates that had been embedded in the concrete. With only one power drill, that meant he had to be careful not to blow the motor, and he was forced to stop at regular intervals and allow it to cool.

‘How are you getting on with the photos?’ Tom called, adding some lubricant.

‘I’ve got a system going-’ Allegra poked her head into the room -‘I won’t get them all, but I’ll get enough.’

‘Anything that might tell us where the League are meeting tonight?’

‘No, but I’ll keep looking.’

At last the drill punched through, the motor racing wildly.

‘That’s it,’ Tom called, fumbling for the off switch and then heaving the rig out of the way.

‘Here-’ Archie handed him a small monitor that he taped to the side of the safe and then connected to the borescope. The screen flickered with light, indicating it was working.

‘Ready?’ Tom looked up with a hopeful smile at Allegra, who had run across to join them. She nodded silently as he blew against the hole to cool the scorched metal and then slipped the cable inside.

‘Look,’ she gasped almost immediately. The outline of a white face was framed on the small screen like a human skull, the grainy image looking like it was being broadcast up through the depths from a long-lost shipwreck. ‘It’s the ivory mask. Cavalli must have sent it here before he was killed.’

‘They must have been working together,’ agreed Tom. ‘Cavalli supplying the antiquities and Faulks providing the buyers. That way, they didn’t have to split the profits with the Delian League.’

‘Faulks doesn’t have to split anything with anyone now that Cavalli’s dead,’ Allegra observed wryly.

‘Pretty convenient,’ Tom agreed. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if…’ He broke off, a sudden thought occurring to him. Of course. It had been so simple. So easy. And once Faulks had realised how much the mask was worth, so necessary.

‘Oi, you two,’ Archie interrupted. ‘Holmes and bloody Watson. Do you mind if we get a move on?’

Tom winked at Allegra, then nodded. He was right.

Looking back to the screen to get his bearings, he bent the cable towards the left and found the back of the safe door. Then he slowly moved it along until he was roughly behind the combination dial.

‘There it is,’ Archie said sharply.

‘There what is?’ Allegra leant closer with a frown.

‘The key-change hole,’ Archie explained. ‘Every combination safe comes with a special key that you insert in that hole when the safe’s open to change the code.’

‘How big is the hole?’

‘Not very,’ Tom said, jaw clenched in concentration.

‘Not big enough,’ Archie muttered under his breath. ‘That’s the problem.’

They watched the image silently, the camera’s proximity making the tiny hole look surprisingly large on the screen, the cable catching on its edge as Tom tried to nudge it inside.

‘Shit,’ he hissed, the cable slipping past yet again. ‘It keeps sliding off.’

‘Try from the other side,’ Archie suggested.

‘I’ve done that,’ Tom snapped, smearing oil across his forehead as he wiped the sweat away.

Dominique came in, out of breath from having run up the stairs.

‘How much time have we got?’ Tom barked without looking up.

‘About as much time as it takes them to look out the window and realise they’re only two floors up. How are we doing?’

‘Shit,’ Tom swore as the camera skated past the hole again.

‘That well.’ She pulled a face.

‘Why don’t you try coming in from underneath?’ Archie suggested. ‘You might catch against the upper lip.’

‘I don’t see why that will…’ Tom glanced up at Archie with a sheepish smile. It had worked first time.

The screen now showed a fuzzy image of the lock mechanism-four wheels, each with a notch that had to be aligned so that the locking gate could fall into them.

‘Someone’s going to have to turn the dial for me,’ Tom said, carefully holding the cable in place so that it didn’t pop out. Allegra immediately stepped forward and crouched down to next to him.

‘Which way?’

‘Clockwise. You need to pick up all the wheels first.’

Allegra turned the lock, the picture showing the drive cam turning and then gathering up each of the four wheels one by one until they were all going round.

‘Slowly,’ Tom said, as he saw the notch on the first wheel at the bottom right of the screen moving upwards.

‘Stop!’ Archie called as the notch reached the twelve o’clock position. Fifteen. ‘Now back the other way.’

Allegra turned the dial back, again slowing as the notch appeared on the second wheel and then stopping when Archie called to her. Seventy-one. Then came sixteen.

‘The last number’s ten,’ Tom guessed.

‘How do you know?’ Dominique asked with a frown.

‘Fifteen seventy-one to sixteen ten,’ Tom explained with a smile. ‘Caravaggio’s dates.’

As Tom pulled the borescope out of the hole, Allegra turned the dial to the final number and then tried the gold-plated wheel in the middle of the door. It turned easily, the handle vibrating with a dull clunk as the bolts slid back. Standing up, she tugged on the door, the airtight seal at first resisting her until, with a swooshing noise, it swept open.

The safe had a red velour interior and four shelves containing an eclectic assortment of items that Faulks had presumably felt deserved the extra security-twenty or so antique dinner plates, a set of red figure vases, notebooks, some files, a few maps. And of course, the ivory mask.

Tom’s attention, however, was drawn to a rectangular black velvet box, monogrammed with a by now familiar symbol: the clenched fist and entwined snakes of the Delian League. It opened to reveal a cream silk interior moulded to house six watches. Two of the spaces were occupied.

‘Epsilon and zeta,’ Allegra said, taking them out and turning them over so that they could see the Greek letters engraved into their backs.

‘Which gives us the three we need,’ Tom said, sliding D’Arcy’s watch into place and then snapping the case shut. ‘Let’s just see if there’s anything in here that tells us where they’re meeting tonight.’

‘What about this?’ Archie asked, carefully sliding out the small packing crate containing the ivory mask, its delicate face cushioned by the straw that poked through its eyes and parted lips in a way that reminded Tom of the Napoleonic death mask he and Archie had discovered the previous year.

‘Leave it,’ Tom said with a shake of his head, glancing up from the handful of notes and maps he had pulled from the safe and was now leafing through.

‘Leave it? Are you joking? This thing’s worth a bloody fortune.’

‘Not to us, it isn’t. Besides, the less we take, the more chance that Faulks won’t even realise we’ve been here.’

SEVENTY-THREE

Free Port, Geneva

20th March-3.46 p.m.

Faulks’s initial shock had given way to a bewildered incredulity. It was impossible. The stock. His best stock. The documentation. The safe. Everything gone. Spirited away. Everything. Thousands of items. Tens of millions of dollars. How had they got in? How had they got away without being seen?

‘Earl, I don’t understand. What’s going on? What is this place?’ Verity sounded nervous, like someone who’d witnessed a gangland killing and was now worried about being dragged into testifying.

‘Did you tell anyone you were coming here?’ Faulks spun round to face her, jabbing his umbrella at her accusingly.

‘Of course not,’ she insisted hotly. ‘How could I? I’ve never been here before.’

He glared at her, his disbelief having slipped into anger, although not with her in particular. With everyone. With everything. She gave a sharp intake of breath, her eyes widening in understanding.

‘Oh my God, Earl, have you been robbed?’

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, exhaled and then opened them again, part of him almost expecting to find that everything was still there after all and that this had just been a terrible dream. Logan reappeared and jerked his head to indicate that they needed to talk. Alone.

‘Give me a minute, Verity,’ Faulks said, following Logan back out into the first room and closing the door behind him.

‘Well?’

‘The guard downstairs hasn’a seen nothing,’ Logan said in a low voice. ‘Nor had th’ one on the night shift when we called him.’

‘Not unless they’re both in on it together,’ Faulks pointed out.

‘Aye well, I’d know if he was.’ Logan gave him a tight smile.

Looking down, Faulks noticed that the Scotsman’s knuckles were grazed and that there was a faint spray of blood on his collar. He felt a little better.

‘What about the surveillance footage?’

‘Backed up remotely. I’ve asked for a copy. It’ll be here in an hour.’

‘Anyone else in the building?’

‘Just the people who moved in today.’

Faulks snorted.

‘Well, there you go then.’

‘There’s only four o’ them and they signed in at twelve thirty,’ Logan pointed out with a firm shake of his head. ‘Shiftin’ all tha’ would have tak’n them days.’

‘And he didn’t hear the alarm go off?’

‘No.’

‘Bastards must have disabled it,’ Faulks hissed, striding over to the control panel next to the main entrance and smacking it angrily, taking some pleasure in the sharp stab of pain as it spread across his palm. ‘What’s the point in paying for…’

He broke off as the keypad fell away from the wall and crashed on to the floor. Frowning, he bent down to pick it up, then noticed the two pieces of black tape that had been securing it to the wall.

‘Jesus,’ he swore, tossing the panel to Logan. ‘It’s a dummy. We’re in the wrong goddamned room.’

Turning, he limped back out on to the corridor. Ignoring the lift, he made his way to the fire escape and leaned over the banisters, following the staircase as it snaked its way down to the floor below and then…to the ground floor.

With Logan at his shoulder, Faulks climbed the staircase as fast as he could, then stepped out on to the empty corridor and turned towards his offices. Here the nature of the deception became abundantly clear -all the signs and door numbers were missing, having presumably been removed and re-attached on the floor below to confuse him.

He flung the door to his offices open. Apart from the cupboards down the right-hand wall, the room was empty and almost unrecognisable without its furniture, carpet or curtains.

And standing at its centre was a woman.

SEVENTY-FOUR

Free Port, Geneva

20th March-3.50 p.m.

‘Where’s Archie?’ Tom asked as he threw his bag into the boot and slammed it shut.

‘With Allegra,’ Dominique panted, sliding into the passenger seat next to him.

There was a brief lull as they waited, Tom tapping his fingers nervously on the window sill.

‘Did you sweep the safe clean?’

‘He won’t know we’ve been in there,’ she reassured him. ‘Not unless he moves the crates and sees where I’ve taped over the drill hole in the side.’

‘Good.’

‘So what now?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Tom admitted. ‘We still don’t know where they’re meeting.’

‘What was that piece of paper you took out of the safe, then?’

‘Something else that I thought might come in useful.’ He craned his neck for a view of the entrance. ‘What’s taking them so long?’

‘Do you want me to go back inside?’

‘Let’s just give them another-’

‘Look, here he comes!’ Dominique pointed with relief as Archie exited the building and jogged over to the car.

‘Yeah, but why’s he on his own?’ Tom frowned, his eyes still fixed on the building’s entrance.

Archie threw the door open and climbed in.

‘Close one.’ He sighed with relief. ‘Nearly bumped into Faulks coming up the stairs. I think he’s finally twigged.’

‘Where’s Allegra?’ Tom asked in an urgent voice.

‘Allegra?’ Archie looked around, only now, it seemed, noticing that she was not in the car. ‘I thought she was with you?’

‘Well, she’s not,’ Tom shot back.

‘When did you last see her?’

‘Upstairs. She was helping me pack up my kit. I handed her the…’

He paused, a sudden thought occurring to him. Flinging the door open, he raced round to the back of the car and popped the boot.

‘What are you looking for?’ Archie asked as he rooted through his bag.

‘This,’ Tom said, holding up the receiver for the location beacon.

He turned it on. A faint pulse of light confirmed what he had already guessed. The transmitter was about fifty yards directly in front of him.

‘She’s still inside.’

‘What the hell’s she doing?’ Archie’s voice was caught somewhere surprise and admiration.

‘Playing the only card we have left.’

SEVENTY-FIVE

Free Port, Geneva

20th March-3.50 p.m.

‘Who the hell are you?’ Faulks paused on the threshold, wary of another trick.

‘Everything’s here,’ she reassured him. ‘I just wanted to make sure I got your attention.’

‘Congratulations. You’ve got it,’ he snarled, motioning at Logan to grab her, while he checked the cupboards and stuck his head into the next room.

Unbelievably, everything did indeed seem to be there, the empty desolation of a few minutes ago quickly replaced by a warm wave of relief. And a cold current of anger.

‘Who are you?’ he repeated.

‘Lieutenant Allegra Damico. An officer with the TPA.’

A pause, Faulks giving a thin smile at her laboured breathing as Logan tightened his grip on her arm which he had bent behind her back.

‘What do you want?’

‘I have some information for the Delian League.’

‘Who?’

‘I think we’re a little beyond that,’ she said, nodding in the direction of the documentation in the small room.

‘Earl, are you in here?’

Faulks’s head snapped round at the sound of Verity’s approaching voice.

‘Damn,’ he swore, then turned back to Allegra with an impatient shrug. He didn’t have time for this. Not today of all days. Not now. But after the lengths she’d gone to…there was no telling what she knew or who she’d told. He had to be sure. The League had to be sure. ‘You’re right. We’re way beyond that.’

Stepping forward, he grabbed the end of his umbrella and swung its handle hard against her temple. Groaning, she went limp in Logan’s arms.

‘Take her to the back and keep her quiet,’ he hissed. ‘When we’re finished here, load her up with the rest of the shipment.’

Turning on his heel, he walked back out on to the corridor. Verity was marching towards him, her face drawn into a thunderous scowl, hands clenched like an eagle swooping to snatch a rabbit out of long grass.

‘Earl, I don’t know what you’re playing at, but…’

‘Verity, I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am,’ he apologised, arms outstretched, palms upturned, his brain working hard. ‘There’s been a terrible mistake. Terrible. And it’s entirely my fault.’

‘The only mistake was me agreeing to come here,’ she retorted angrily. ‘Abused, accused, abandoned…’

‘We were on the wrong floor!’ He laughed lustily, hoping that it didn’t sound too forced. ‘Can you believe it? It’s old age. It must be. I’m losing it.’

‘The wrong floor?’ she repeated unsmilingly.

‘The landlord needed access to my old offices to begin the demolition planning, so they’ve moved me up here,’ he explained, with what he hoped was a convincingly earnest wide-eyed look. ‘I’m so used to going to the second floor after all these years, that I didn’t even think about it. I’m so sorry.’

‘So everything’s here?’ She glanced past him with a sceptical frown.

‘Absolutely.’ He gave an emphatic nod. ‘Thank God, because for a terrible moment I thought…’

‘I know. Me too.’ She let out a nervous, hesitant laugh. He forced himself to join in.

‘Can you ever forgive me?’

‘That depends on what’s inside.’ She flashed him a smile.

Ushering her in, he led her through to the middle room, Verity murmuring with appreciation at some of the items she could see stacked there.

‘Good God, Earl, this is wonderful.’

‘Even better, it’s all for sale,’ he reminded her with a smile as he crouched next to the safe, flicked the dial and heaved it open.

‘Is that it?’ Verity breathed over his shoulder, pulling on a pair of white cotton gloves.

‘That’s it.’ Sliding the shallow box out, he carefully placed it on top of one of the neighbouring packing crates. Removing his jacket, he lay it over another crate so that its scarlet lining covered it. Then he gingerly removed the mask and set it on top of the lining, the pale ivory leaping off the red material. Finally he stepped back and ushered her forward.

‘Please.’

Approaching slowly as if she was afraid of waking it, Verity pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves and carefully picked the mask up. She raised it level with her face, eyes unblinking, the colour flushing her throat and cheeks, her breathing quickening, hands trembling. For a moment, it seemed she might kiss it. But instead, she gave a long sigh of pleasure and lowered it unsteadily back into its straw bed, her shoulders shaking.

‘So? What do you think?’ Faulks asked, after giving her a few moments to compose herself.

Verity made to speak, but no sound came out, her lips trembling, tears welling in her eyes. She looked up at him, her hand waving in front of her mouth as if she was trying to summon the words out of herself.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ she breathed eventually. ‘It’s like…it’s like gazing into the eyes of God.’

‘Attribution?’

‘Assuming the dating is right…’

‘Oh, it’s right.’

‘Then Phidias. Phidias, Phidias, Phidias!’ Her voice built to an ecstatic crescendo. ‘We would have heard of any other sculptor from that period of this quality.’

‘Then I hope you won’t mind confirming that to my buyer?’ Faulks pulled out his phone and searched for a number. ‘Or the valuation you’ll put on it once he donates it to you?’

‘Of course,’ she enthused, snatching the phone from him as soon as it started ringing. ‘What’s his name?’

SEVENTY-SIX

Over Milan, Italy

20th March-6.27 p.m.

Darkness. The smell of straw. A dog barking.

Coming round, Allegra lifted her head and then sank back with a pained cry. There was something above her preventing her from sitting up. Something smooth and flat and…wooden. She moved her hands gingerly across it, sensing first its corners and then the constrictive press of the walls at her side. It was a box. She was lying in a wooden box.

The last thing she remembered was Faulks, wildeyed, raising his umbrella above her like an executioner’s axe and then…darkness. Darkness, the smell of straw, a dog barking, something hard and uneven underneath her, her head throbbing where he’d struck her. And in the background a low, incessant drone, a rushing whistle of air, a bass shudder.

A plane. She was on a plane. Lying in a wooden box in the hold of a plane.

She nervously patted her inner thigh, and then sighed with relief. The location transmitter was still there-taped to her skin at the top of her leg where they only would have found it if they had stripped her down.

She’d taken a big risk, she knew. A risk that Tom would never have agreed to. But as soon as it had become clear that there was nothing in either Faulks’s papers or the safe that was going to give them even the slightest hint as to where the League was meeting that night, she’d known what she had to do. Grab the transmitter and some tape out of the bag. Hold back amid the confusion of their hurried retreat as Faulks pounded along the corridors towards them. And then try to talk or shock him into delivering her to the League himself. It was that or give up on getting to the painting before Santos could hand it over to the Serbs. It was that, or admit that they couldn’t stop him.

‘Stop’ was a euphemism, she knew, for what the Serbs would do to him if he failed to deliver the Caravaggio. The strange thing was that, after the horrors she’d witnessed and endured over the past few days, she felt remarkably sanguine about his likely fate. Especially when the alternative was that, armed with his diplomatic immunity and the proceeds of the Caravaggio’s sale, Santos would escape any more conventional form of justice.

Tom had said that the radius of the transmitter was three miles. No use at thirty thousand feet, but if he’d realised what she was doing when she hadn’t come back down, and then followed her signal to the airport, he should have been able to work out where she was heading and take another flight to the same destination where he would hopefully be able to pick up her signal again when she landed. At least, that was had been her rough, ill-conceived plan.

For now, all she had was darkness and the sound of her own breathing. Its dull echo, in fact, that seemed to be getting louder and louder as the box’s walls closed in, pressed down on her chest, her lungs fighting for air.

Suddenly she was back in the tomb. The entrance blocked, the earth cold and clammy underneath. She called out, her fists pounding against the sides, her feet drumming against the end, twisting her body so that she could lever her back up against the lid.

There. Above her head. Two small, perfectly round holes in the wood that she hadn’t been able to see before. She inched forward on her stomach, pressed her face to them, drinking in the narrow rivulets of air and light with relief, her heart rate slowing.

She looked down, struck by a sensation of being watched.

In the dim light, a pair of lifeless eyes stared back up at her, cold lips parted in a hard smile, nose sliced off.

She was lying on top of a statue. A marble statue. But to Allegra the statue might as well have been a corpse, and the box a coffin, and the rumble of the engines the echo of loose earth being shovelled back into her grave.

SEVENTY-SEVEN

Cimitero Acattolico, Rome

20th March-10.22 p.m.

‘I’ve lost her,’ Tom barked.

‘What do you mean, you’ve lost her?’ Archie grabbed the receiver from him and shook it. ‘She was just there.’

‘Well, she isn’t now,’ Tom shot back, his anger betraying his concern.

Until now, Allegra had proved surprisingly easy to track, her signal leading them from the Freeport to the cargo terminal at Geneva airport, where they had observed Faulks’s driver overseeing several large crates being loaded on to a plane bound for Rome. It hadn’t taken much imagination to deduce that she had been placed inside one of them. They had therefore immediately booked themselves on to an earlier flight to ensure that they would already be in position to pick up the signal again by the time her plane landed.

Watching through his binoculars from the airport perimeter fence, Tom had been able to tell that this was a well-established smuggling route for Faulks, the Customs officers welcoming him off the plane on to a remote part of the airfield with a broad smile as a black briefcase had swapped hands.

The cargo had then been split, some heading for the warm glow of the main terminal, the rest to a dark maintenance hangar into which Faulks had driven, the doors quickly rolling shut behind him. Then for two, maybe three hours nothing. Nothing but the steady pulse of her location transmitter on the small screen cradled in his lap. A pulse that had served as a taunting reminder of the fading beat of Jennifer’s heart-rate monitor in the helicopter over the desert. A pulse which they had carefully followed here, only to see it flatline.

Sheltered by regimented lines of mourning cypresses and Mediterranean pines, the Cimitero Acattolico nestled on the slope of the Aventine Hill, in the time-worn shadow of the Pyramid of Caius Cestius and the adjacent Aurelian walls. Even by moonlight, Tom had been able to see that it was populated by an eclectic tangle of stone monuments, graves and family vaults, separated by long grass woven with wild flowers. These elaborate constructions were in stark contrast to the trees’ dark symmetry: pale urns, broken columns, ornate scrollwork and devotional statuary bursting in pale flashes through the gaps in their evenly spaced trunks, as if deliberately planted there in an attempt to prove the superiority of human creativity over natural design.

If so, it was increasingly obvious to Tom that this was an argument that nature was winning, decades of neglect having left monuments eroded by pollution and tombs cracked open by weeds and the cruel ebb and flow of the seasons. In one place, a pine tree had shed a branch, the diseased limb collapsing on to a grave and smashing its delicately engraved headstone into pieces. In another, the ground had risen up, snapping the spine of the vault that had dared to surmount it. And now it seemed to have swallowed Allegra’s signal too.

‘Where was the last reading from?’ Dominique asked, ever practical.

‘Over there-’ Tom immediately broke into a loping run, vaulting the smaller graves and navigating his way around the larger tombs. Then, just as he was about to emerge into one of the wide avenues that cut across the cemetery, he felt Archie’s hand grab his shoulder and force him to the ground.

‘Get down,’ he hissed.

Three men had emerged from the trees ahead of them, their machine guns glinting black in the moonlight, torch beams slicing the darkness. Moving quickly, they glided over to a large family vault, their boots lost in the long grass so that they almost appeared to be floating over the ground. As Tom watched, they ghosted up its steps and vanished inside.

‘She must be in there,’ Tom guessed, standing up.

The vault was a small rectangular building designed to echo a Roman temple, a few shallow steps leading up to the entrance, a Doric frieze carved under the portico, white Travertine walls decorated with columns that gave the illusion of supporting the tiled roof. The entrance was secured by a handsome bronze door that the elements had varnished a mottled green. A single name had been carved over it: Merisi. Tom pointed at it with a smile as they crept towards it.

‘What?’ Dominique whispered.

‘Merisi was Caravaggio’s real name.’

They paused, straining to hear a voice or a sound from inside. But nothing came apart from the silent echo of darkness.

With a determined nod at the others, Tom carefully eased the door open with one hand, his gun in the other. This and three other ‘clean’ weapons had been sourced by Archie from Johnny Li while they had been watching the hangar at Rome airport. The price had been steep-the money he claimed Tom still owed him, plus another ten for his trouble. Archie had only just stopped cursing about it, although Johnny had at least held his half of their earlier bargain and returned Tom’s watch.

Inside, a thin carpet of dirt and leaves covered the black-and-white mosaic floor and lay pooled in the room’s dark corners. At the far end stood a black marble altar with the name Merisi again picked out in bronze letters above a date-1696. In front of this were two high-backed prayer stools, once painted black and upholstered in a rich velvet, but now peeling and rotted by the cold and the damp. Above the altar, suspended from the wall, was a crucifix, one arm of which had broken off so that it hung at an odd angle.

The room was empty.

‘Where the hell have they gone?’ Archie exclaimed, rapping the walls to make sure they were solid.

Tom examined the floor with a frown.

‘How did they expect to bury anyone in here?’

‘What do you mean?’ Dominique frowned.

‘It’s a family vault. There should be a slab or something that can be lifted up.’

‘No inscriptions either,’ Archie chimed in. ‘Not even a full set of dates.’

‘And the one that’s here doesn’t fit,’ Dominique pointed out. ‘This graveyard wasn’t used until the 1730s. No one would have been buried here in 1696.’

‘It could be a birth year,’ Tom suggested, crouching down in front of the altar. ‘Maybe the second date has come away and…’

The words caught in his throat. As he’d rubbed the marble, his fingers had brushed against the final number, causing it to move slightly. He glanced up at the others to check that they had seen this too, then reached forward to turn it, the number spinning clockwise and then clicking into place once it was upside down so that it now read as a nine.

Archie frowned. ‘1699? That doesn’t make no sense either?’

‘Not 1699-1969,’ Tom guessed, turning each of the previous three numbers so that they also clicked into place upside down. ‘The year the Caravaggio was stolen.’

There was the dull thud of what sounded like a restraining bolt being drawn back from somewhere in front of them. Then, with the suppressed hiss of a hydraulic ram, the massive altar began to lift up and out, pivoting high above their heads, stopping a few inches below the coffered ceiling.

They jumped back, swapping a surprised look. Ahead of them, a flight of steps disappeared into the ground.

SEVENTY-EIGHT

20th March-10.37 p.m.

The steps led down to a brick-lined corridor set on a shallow incline. It was dimly lit, the sodium lighting suspended from the vaulted ceiling at irregular intervals forming pallid pools of orange light that barely penetrated the cloying darkness. In places the water had forced its way in, the ceiling flowering with calcite rings that dripped on to the glistening concrete floor.

Treading carefully, their guns aiming towards the darkness into which the three armed men who had preceded them down here had presumably disappeared, they crept down the tunnel. Tom had the vague sense that they were following the contour of the Aventine as it rose steeply to their right, although it was hard to be sure, the passage tracing a bewildering course as it zigzagged violently between the graveyard’s scattered crypts and burial chambers. Eventually, after about two hundred yards, it ended, opening up into a subterranean network of interlinking rooms supported by steel props.

‘It’s Roman,’ Dominique whispered, stooping to look at a small section of the frescoed wall which hadn’t crumbled away. ‘Probably a private villa. Someone rich, because this looks like it might have been part of a bath complex.’ She pointed at a small section of the tessellated floor which had given way, revealing a four-foot cavity underneath, supported by columns of terracotta tiles. ‘They used to circulate hot air through the hypercaust to heat the floors and walls of the caldarium,’ she explained.

They tiptoed through into the next room, their path now lit by spotlights strung along a black flex and angled up at the ceiling, the amber glow suffusing the stone walls. Dominique identified this as the balneum, a semicircular sunken bath dominating the space.

Picking their way through the thicket of metal supports propping the roof up, they arrived at the main part of the buried villa, the tiled floor giving way to intricate mosaics featuring animals, plants, laurel-crowned gods and a dizzying array of boldly coloured geometric patterns. Here, some restoration work appeared to have been done: the delicate frescoes of robed Roman figures and carefully rendered animals showed signs of having been pieced back together from surviving fragments, the missing sections filled in and then plastered white so that the fissures between the pieces resembled cracks in the varnish on an old painting.

An angry shout echoed towards them through the empty rooms.

‘You think Santos is already here?’ Dominique whispered.

‘Allegra first,’ Tom insisted. ‘We worry about Santos and the painting when she’s safe.’

They tiptoed carefully to the doorway of a small vaulted chamber. The walls here had been painted to mimic blood-red and ochre marble panels, while the ceiling had been covered in geometric shapes filled with delicately rendered birds and mischievous-looking satyrs. And crouching on the floor with their backs to them, checking their weapons and speaking in low, urgent voices, were the three men they’d seen earlier.

Tom locked eyes with Archie and Dominique; both of them nodded back. On a silent count of three, they leapt inside and caught the three men completely cold.

‘Tu?’ one of the men hissed as, one by one, Archie taped their hands behind their backs and then gagged them.

It was Orlando-the priest from the Amalfi. Tom returned his hateful glare unblinkingly. Strangely, the murderous rage that had enveloped him in Monte Carlo had vanished; he felt almost nothing for him now. Not compared to Santos. Not with Allegra’s life at stake.

‘I’ll watch them,’ Dominique reassured him, waving the men back into the corner of the room with her gun.

‘You sure?’

‘Go.’

With a nod, Tom and Archie continued on, a bright light and the low rumble of voices drawing them across an adjacent chamber decorated with yellow columns, to the next room where they crouched on either side of the doorway.

Edging his head inside, Tom could see that they were on the threshold of the most richly decorated space of all, the floor covered in an elaborate series of interlocking mosaic medallions, each one decorated with a different mythological creature. The frescoes, meanwhile, looked almost entirely intact and mimicked the interior of a theatre, the left-hand wall painted to look like a stage complete with narrow side doors that stood ajar as if opening on to the wings. To either side, comic and tragic masks peered through small windows that revealed a painted garden vista.

‘Look,’ Archie whispered excitedly. Tom followed his gaze and saw that a large recess, perhaps nine feet high, six across and three deep, had been hacked out of the far wall. And, hanging within this, behind three inches of blast-proof glass, was the Caravaggio. It was unframed, although its lack of adornment seemed only to confirm its raw, natural power.

‘That’s Faulks,’ Archie whispered.

At the centre of the room, over a large mosaic of a serpent-headed Medusa, was a circular table inlaid with small squares of multicoloured marble. The man Archie had pointed out was clutching an umbrella and standing in front of three other men who were seated around the table as if they were interviewing him.

‘The guy on the left is De Luca,’ Tom breathed, recognising the badger streak running through his hair and the garish slash of a Versace tie. ‘And the one in the middle who’s speaking now…’ He broke off, his chest tightening as he realised that this was the face of the man he’d overheard on the yacht in Monaco. The same man who’d ordered Jennifer’s death. ‘That’s Santos.’

‘Which must make the other bloke Moretti,’ Archie guessed, nodding towards a short man wearing glasses who was seated on the other side of Santos. Completely bald across the top, his scalp gleaming under the lights, he had a bristling wirewool moustache that matched the hair clinging stubbornly to the back and sides of his head. He was wearing a grey cardigan and brown corduroy trousers, looking more like someone’s grandfather than the head of one of the mafia’s most powerful families.

Tom nodded but looked past him, distracted by the gagged and bound figure he could see slumped in a chair to Faulks’s left. It was Allegra. Still alive, thank God, although there was no telling what they might have done to her. Or what they might still be planning.

‘She wants to speak to us,’ Faulks protested. ‘She said she had a message.’

‘Of course she does,’ Santos shot back in English, his tone at once angry and mocking. ‘She’s working on the Ricci and Argento cases.’ He glanced across at De Luca. ‘I thought you said you’d taken care of her?’

De Luca shrugged, gazing at Allegra with a slightly dazed look.

‘I thought I had.’

‘She managed to locate and break into my warehouse,’ Faulks retorted. ‘Who knows what else she’s found out.’

‘She broke in and, from what you’ve told us, took nothing apart from your pride,’ Santos reminded him. ‘You should have taken care of her in Geneva. You have no business here.’

‘In case you’ve forgotten, I have two seats on this council.’ Faulks spoke in a cold, deliberate tone. ‘I have as much right to be here as anyone. If not more.’

‘An accident of history that you delight in reminding us of,’ De Luca said dryly.

Santos took a deep breath, attempting what Tom assumed was intended to be a more conciliatory tone.

‘This meeting was called by the Moretti and De Luca families-’ he nodded at the two men either side of him in turn-‘as representatives of the founding members of the Delian League, to resolve their recent…disagreements. Disagreements that, as we all know, have led to two former members of this council not being here with us tonight.’

‘We had nothing to do with D’Arcy’s death,’ Moretti insisted angrily.

‘Cavalli was a traitor who deserved what he got,’ De Luca retorted, both men standing up and squaring off.

‘Enough!’ Santos called out. Muttering, they both sat down. Santos turned back to face Faulks. ‘They asked me here to help mediate a settlement. I let you know we were meeting as a courtesy. But, as I told you when we spoke, there was no need for you to come.’

Faulks looked at them, then nodded sullenly towards Allegra.

‘Then what am I meant to do with her?’

‘What you should have done already.’

‘I dig bodies up, not bury them,’ Faulks said through gritted teeth.

‘Then I’ll finish what you are too weak to begin,’ Santos snapped, taking his gun out from under his jacket and aiming it at Allegra’s head.

SEVENTY-NINE

20th March-10.54 p.m.

A shot rang out. Santos fell back with a cry, clutching his arm.

‘Sit the fuck down. Don’t nobody move,’ Archie bellowed.

Tom pushed past him to Allegra, pulling the gag out of her mouth, then slicing her wrists free.

‘Are you okay?’ he breathed as she fell gratefully into his arms.

She nodded, gave him a weak smile. Turning, Tom scooped Santos’s weapon off the floor and quickly searched the others.

‘I’m bleeding,’ Santos shrieked.

‘It’s a graze. You’ll live,’ Tom snapped.

‘Pity,’ Archie intoned behind him. Looking up, Faulks’s eyes widened in shocked recognition, although the others didn’t seem to notice his expression.

‘You have no idea what you’ve done,’ Santos hissed though clenched teeth, holding his arm to his chest. ‘You’re both dead men.’ He snatched a glance towards the entrance.

‘Who are you?’ Moretti demanded.

‘He’s Tom Kirk,’ De Luca said slowly, greeting Tom with a half-smile. ‘Also risen from the dead, it seems.’

‘Kirk?’ Moretti gasped.

‘Tom Kirk?’ Faulks gave a disbelieving smile, his face turning grey.

Tom frowned, confused. Some people, criminals especially, knew who he was, or at least who he had been. But that didn’t usually warrant this sort of reaction.

‘What do you want?’ Santos demanded.

‘The same as you,’ Tom said simply. ‘The Caravaggio.’

‘You’re robbing us?’ De Luca seemed to find this almost amusing.

‘I’m borrowing it,’ Tom corrected him.

‘You’ll never get it out of there,’ Faulks scoffed. ‘Not without destroying it.’

‘Even with these?’ Tom asked, holding up the monogrammed case he’d taken from Faulks’s safe. The dealer went pale, his eyes bulging. ‘Here, you might as well collect them all up,’ said Tom, tossing Allegra the box. ‘Although it is only the three watches I need, isn’t it?’

Moretti and De Luca swapped a dumbfounded look.

‘How did you know?’ De Luca asked as Allegra loosened his watch and then Moretti’s, before finding the sixth in Santos’s top pocket. ‘Did your…’

‘Santos has struck a deal to sell your painting,’ Tom explained. ‘We overheard him negotiating the terms yesterday in Monte Carlo. He let slip about the watches.’

Santos rose from his seat.

‘Stronzata,’ he spat, his face stiff with anger.

‘Bullshit. Really?’ Tom smiled. ‘Dom?’ he called out.

A few moments later Dominique appeared, ushering Santos’s three sullen-faced men ahead of her. Eyes narrowing, Santos slumped back into his seat as she forced them on to the ground and made them sit with their hands on their heads.

‘These men work for Santos. We found them next door. You were the only people standing between him and the fifteen million dollars his Serbian buyers have promised him for the painting.’

‘He’s lying,’ Santos seethed, his eyes fixed on Tom. ‘It’s a trick. We all know to come to this place alone. I would never break our laws.’

‘Can you open it?’ Tom called across to Allegra, who was crouching in front of the case.

‘There are six plates,’ she said, pointing at the brass roundels set into the wall under the painting. ‘Each one’s engraved with a different Greek letter.’

Opening the box, she took out the first watch and carefully matched it to the corresponding plate, the case sinking into the crafted recess with a click. Then she repeated the exercise with another two watches and stood back, glancing across at Tom with a hopeful shrug. For a moment nothing happened. But then, with a low hum, the thick glass slid three feet to the right, leaving an opening that she could step through.

‘I’ll give her a hand,’ Archie volunteered, handing Tom his gun. He followed her through the gap into the narrow space behind the glass, and then helped her lift the unframed painting down. Carrying it back through with small, shuffling steps, they leaned it gently against the wall.

Tom stepped closer. He recognised the scene. It was exactly as he remembered it from the Polaroid Jennifer had shown him in her car. But there was no comparing that flat, lifeless image to the dramatic energy and dynamism of the original. The angel swooping down from heaven like an avenging harpy, the boy’s taunting face creased with a cruel laughter, Mary’s exhaustion and exultation, the fear and anticipation of the onlooking saints. Light and darkness. Divine perfection and human fallibility. Life and death. It was all there.

‘Let’s take it off the stretchers so we can roll it up,’ Archie suggested.

‘Be careful with it,’ Moretti warned him.

Tom fixed him with a questioning look, detecting a proprietary tone.

‘Is it yours?’

‘Not any more,’ he admitted. ‘We donated it as a gesture of good faith when the League was founded. The De Luca family contributed this villa.’

‘I’ll return it,’ Tom reassured him. ‘You have my word.’

‘Then why take it?’ De Luca demanded.

Tom paused before answering, not wanting to give Santos the pleasure of hearing him stumble over his words.

‘You know the FBI officer I asked you about, the one who was shot in Vegas three nights ago?’ De Luca nodded with a puzzled frown. ‘A few weeks back she got a tip-off about one of your US-based distributors. An antiquities dealer based in New York. Under questioning, he volunteered Luca Cavalli’s name.’

‘I knew Luca,’ Moretti frowned. ‘He was careful. He would never have revealed his name to someone that far down the organisation.’

‘He didn’t,’ Tom agreed. ‘Faulks did.’

‘What?’ Faulks gave a disbelieving laugh.

‘Remember that photo of the ivory mask we came across in Cavalli’s car?’ Allegra glanced up at De Luca from where she was helping free the painting from the wooden stretchers. ‘We found it in Faulks’s safe. It’s worth millions. Tens of millions.’

‘My guess is that Cavalli had been secretly bringing you pieces for years,’ Tom said, turning to stand in front of Faulks, whom he noticed had slid his chair a little way back from the others. ‘Pieces his men had dug up and that he had deliberately not declared to the League, so that you could sell them on and share the profits between you. But then one day he unearthed something really valuable, didn’t he? Something unique. And you just couldn’t help yourself. You got greedy.’

‘Cavalli sent me the mask, it’s true,’ Faulks blustered, looking anxiously at De Luca and Moretti. ‘A wonderful piece. But my intention was to split the proceeds with the League in the usual way after the sale. And not just the mask. I have the map showing the location of the site where he found it. Who knows what else might be down there?’

‘Can you prove any of this?’ De Luca challenged Allegra, fixing her with an unblinking, stony-faced stare.

‘Who told you that Cavalli had betrayed you?’ Tom shot back.

De Luca paused, then pointed a wavering finger towards Faulks. ‘He did.’

‘I had no choice,’ Faulks protested. ‘It’s true that Cavalli wanted me to deal with him direct. But when I refused he threatened to go public with everything he knew. What I told you was the truth. He was planning to betray you. He was planning to sell us all out. You know yourself that your informants backed me up.’

‘The FBI had Cavalli’s name,’ De Luca acknowledged, turning his gaze back to Tom. ‘They wanted the authorities here to arrest him.’

‘Cavalli was ripping you off, but I doubt he was going to go public with anything,’ Tom said with a shrug, thinking back to the moment in front of Faulks’s open safe when this had all clicked into place. ‘The simple truth is that Faulks wanted him out of the way so he could have the mask for himself. So he came up with a plan. First feed Cavalli’s name to the New York dealer. Then sell the dealer out to the FBI to make sure he would talk. Finally accuse Cavalli of betraying you, knowing your police informants would confirm that the FBI was investigating him and that you would think he was collaborating.’

‘This is crazy,’ Faulks spluttered. ‘I’ve never…’

‘The clever thing was the way he set both sides of the League against each other,’ Allegra mused, rising to her feet. ‘He knew that Don Moretti would retaliate once you’d killed Cavalli, leaving him free to sell it for himself, while you were busy fighting each other.’

‘That was never my intention,’ Faulks pleaded angrily. ‘Cavalli was a threat. I was simply acting in the best interests of the League. As I have always done.’

‘Of course, while all this was going on, Santos was busy taking out a contract on my friend,’ Tom continued, turning to face him. ‘My guess is…’

‘How much more of this do we have to listen to?’ Santos interrupted, his palms raised disbelievingly to the ceiling. ‘I’ve never-’

‘Basta,’ De Luca cut him off angrily. ‘You’ll have your chance.’

Santos sat back with a scowl, muttering to himself.

‘My guess is that, when she searched the dealer’s warehouse, she found something implicating the Banco Rosalia and started kicking the tyres,’ Tom continued. ‘When Santos realised that she was on to him, he had her taken out, using the prospect of recovering your Caravaggio to lure her to Las Vegas where he had a gunman waiting.’

‘She was a threat to us all,’ Santos blurted out defiantly.

‘You mean this is true? You killed an FBI agent without our permission?’ De Luca jumped to his feet, violence in his voice now.

‘I did what I had to do to protect the League,’ Santos protested. ‘I’d do the same again.’

‘At first we thought everything was connected,’ Allegra admitted. ‘It was only later that we realised that the Rome murders and the ivory mask had nothing to do with Jennifer’s assassination, or with D’Arcy, who was killed for his watch.’

‘The irony is that it was Faulks’s tip-off about the dealer in New York that unknowingly led to the FBI looking into the Banco Rosalia in the first place,’ Tom said with a rueful smile. ‘Without that, Jennifer would probably still be alive, and Santos wouldn’t be preparing to explain to his Serbian friends why he hasn’t been able to deliver the painting.’

‘No, Kirk,’ Santos said with a cruel smile. ‘The biggest irony is that-’

A single gunshot cut him off. Tom’s head snapped towards the doorway. A uniformed policeman in a bullet-proof vest was standing there, gun pointed towards the roof, five, maybe eight armed police filtering into the room either side of him, machine guns braced against their shoulders.

Tom snatched a look at Allegra. Ashen faced, she mouthed one word.

Gallo.

EIGHTY

20th March-11.13 p.m.

‘Colonel Gallo, thank God you’re here!’ Santos rose gratefully from his seat and stepped towards him, switching back to Italian.

‘Sit down,’ Gallo ordered him back.

‘I’ve been kidnapped. Held against my will. Shot!’ He held out his bloodied arm, his voice rising hysterically.

‘Sit down, Santos, or I’ll shoot you again myself,’ Gallo warned him in an icy tone.

‘This is an outrage,’ Santos insisted. ‘In case it’s slipped your mind, Gallo, I have diplomatic immunity. You have no legal right to detain me here. I demand to be released immediately.’

‘No one is going anywhere,’ Gallo fired back. ‘Get their weapons.’ Two of his men shouldered their machine guns and quickly patted everyone down, tossing whatever they found into the far corner of the room. Santos sank into his chair. Gallo turned to Allegra. ‘Lieutenant Damico, are you hurt?’

‘N-n-no,’ Allegra stammered, bewildered. This was the man she’d been running from; the man she’d seen execute Gambetta and then pin the crime on her; the man who had supposedly supplied Santos with Cavalli’s watch. And yet, this same man was now holding Santos at gunpoint and asking if she was okay.

‘Good.’ Gallo twitched a smile. ‘Then maybe you can tell me what the hell is going on down here?’

Again she looked for signs of the person who had been haunting her thoughts for the past few days. But it was almost as if she’d imagined the whole thing.

‘There’s a secret organisation called the Delian League,’ she began haltingly. ‘An alliance between the different mafia families to co-ordinate their antiquities smuggling operations and split the profits. Don De Luca and Don Moretti head it up. This man-’ she pointed at Faulks-‘was responsible for selling whatever was smuggled out of the country to dealers and collectors around the world. Santos provided the financial backing and laundered the profits for them through the Banco Rosalia.’

‘And this?’ Gallo kicked the rolled up painting.

‘The missing Caravaggio Nativity.’

‘You’re joking!’ Placing his gun down next to him, Gallo knelt and unrolled the first few feet of the canvas before glancing up, shaking his head in wonder. ‘My God, you’re not.’

Without warning, Santos flew forward off his chair, snatched Gallo’s gun up and before anyone had time to move, aimed it at his forehead.

‘Back off,’ he snarled as the armed police belatedly aimed their weapons at him. ‘Put your guns on the floor or I’ll kill him right here.’

The police ignored him, a few even taking a step closer. Santos immediately took shelter behind Gallo, pressing the gun to his temple.

‘You know I’ll do it,’ he hissed, his lips hovering over Gallo’s ear. ‘Tell them to back the fuck off.’ From the wild look in his eyes, Allegra could tell that he meant it.

‘Stand down,’ Gallo ordered in a strangled voice, clearly sensing this too. ‘Stand down, that’s an order.’

One by one, the officers lowered their guns, placing them at their feet, and then backed away. Santos’s three men immediately re-armed themselves, Orlando leaping to Santos’s side, the other two covering off the rest of the room.

‘Now get them out of here.’

Gallo said nothing.

‘Now!’ Santos roared, striking him on the back of his head with the heel of his gun.

‘Fall back the way you came in,’ Gallo ordered grudgingly, clutching his skull. ‘Tell them what’s happening.’

‘Yes, tell them everything,’ Santos called after them. ‘And tell them that if anyone else comes down here, I’ll kill everyone in this room, starting with the colonel.’

There was a pause as Santos waited for the room to empty, a few of the retreating officers glancing nervously behind them in anticipation of perhaps being shot from behind. But the attack never came, and the sound of their leaden footsteps soon faded away. Allegra glanced at Tom, who gave her a grim smile. They were on their own.

‘Get the painting,’ Santos barked. ‘Time to go.’

With Orlando standing guard, the two other men heaved the rolled-up canvas on to their shoulders and staggered towards the entrance. Still holding Gallo’s neck in the crook of his arm, the gun pressed to his head, Santos backed across the room.

‘I’ll be seeing you soon, Antonio,’ Moretti called after him. ‘Sooner than you think.’.

Santos paused, then shoved Gallo into Orlando’s arms and grabbed two grenades from the bag looped around Orlando’s neck.

‘I doubt it,’ he said, smiling as he pulled the pins out and lobbed one, then the other, into the middle of the room.

EIGHTY-ONE

20th March-11.16 p.m.

The first grenade landed at Tom’s feet. Without thinking, he snatched it up, and with a deft snap of his wrist, flicked it through the gap in the glassfronted display case where the painting had been hanging. Hitting the wall, it bounced a short way along the bottom and then exploded.

The room jumped around them, smoke and dust avalanching through the opening, bits of plaster peeling off the walls like the bark on a cork tree, a terrible, angry roar lifting them off their feet and knocking the wind out of them. But, as some primitive, instinctive part of Tom’s brain had no doubt intended, the two-inch-thick armoured glass absorbed the brunt of the blast, its surface cracking but holding firm.

There was to be no such reprieve from the second grenade, however. Having struck the marble table it bounced into Moretti’s lap. He looked up, his eyes beseeching, mouth gaping as De Luca dived out of the way. Then it went off, cutting Moretti in half and sending a meteor shower of shrapnel across the room.

Tom looked up from where he had thrown himself to the floor, barely able to see through the thick smoke that seemed to have blown in like a sea fog. Ears ringing, he staggered to his feet and made his way unsteadily towards where he had last seen Allegra and the others, tripping over De Luca, who had lost a shoe and whose arm was hanging limply at his side, blood leaking from a deep gash to his head. The two halves of Moretti’s body were lying next to him, although the way they had landed made it look as if his legs were growing out of his head. It was a gruesome sight.

Coughing, he knelt by Allegra’s side. She seemed okay if a little disorientated, Moretti having clearly absorbed the worst of the explosion. But both Archie and Dominique were injured-Archie clutching the side of his face, the blood soaking through his fingers, while a shard of hot metal had embedded itself in Dominique’s thigh.

‘Are you okay?’ Tom called, knowing that he was shouting but still barely able to hear himself.

‘We’ll be fine,’ Archie said through gritted teeth. ‘Just go and shoot the bastard.’

With a nod, Tom jumped across to the pile of guns discarded by Gallo’s men, grabbing one for himself and tossing another to Allegra, who was now back on her feet.

‘Let’s go,’ she said, her eyes filled with the same diamond-tipped determination he’d seen when she’d engineered their escape from the car park.

They sprinted back through the various decorated rooms towards the bath complex and the vaulted tunnel that led outside.

‘Wait!’ Allegra called as he turned towards the entrance. ‘Can you feel that?’

He paused, and then realised what she meant. A fresh breeze was tickling his cheek, the air sweet and rich compared to the otherwise brackish atmosphere. Santos must have found another way out.

Turning to her right, she led him down a narrow tunnel that rose in total darkness up a steep incline. Feeling his way along the brick walls, Tom followed closely behind, the breeze getting stronger, until they found themselves in a square chamber. Above them, an iron ladder climbed towards a patch of star-flecked sky. At the foot of the ladder, a body was lying on a bed of rubble. It was Gallo.

‘He’s alive,’ Allegra said, kneeling next to him and pressing her fingers against his neck. Tom wasn’t sure if she sounded relieved or disappointed. ‘Santos must have thrown him back down the hole.’ She pointed at the colonel’s arm, which was bent up at an unnatural angle where he had dislocated his shoulder in the fall.

Tom flew up the ladder, emerging under the disapproving glare of an angel that had escaped damage when Santos had smashed through the gravestone she had been guarding. Hauling himself clear, he reached down to help Allegra climb out, the flickering blue lights on the other side of the cemetery indicating where Gallo’s man had congregated around the entrance to the Merisi tomb.

‘Which way?’

Allegra’s question was almost immediately answered by the sound of an engine being started. They ran to the cemetery wall, Allegra giving Tom a leg up, Tom then reaching down and hauling her up behind him. As he jumped down on to the pavement, an ambulance surged out of the darkness, headlights blazing, Santos hunched over the wheel.

Stepping into the road and taking careful aim, Tom unloaded a full clip into the ambulance’s onrushing windscreen. Allegra, still perched on the wall, did the same. But they both missed, forcing Tom to leap out of the way at the last minute as the ambulance veered past, followed the road round and then disappeared into the night.

‘Merda,’ Allegra swore.

‘I had him,’ Tom panted as he clambered back up alongside her. ‘I was aiming right at him.’

‘Well, you missed. We both did.’

‘That’s impossible.’ Tom shook his head, popping out the magazine and checking it. ‘He was coming straight towards me. He could only have been thirty feet away. Less.’

A sudden thought came to him. An impossible thought. And yet… it was the only explanation. Ignoring Allegra’s calls, he jumped down and raced back to the stern angel guarding the shattered gravestone. Peering through the opening to check that no one was coming up behind him, he lowered himself inside and then slid down the ladder.

‘Don’t move!’

Hearing the voice, Tom turned and saw that Gallo was conscious now, propped up against the wall and being attended by a medic. Four armed policemen were eyeing Tom suspiciously, their machine guns raised.

‘It’s okay,’ Gallo rasped. ‘He’s with us. Her too.’

Tom looked up and saw that Allegra was climbing down towards them. The policemen relaxed, allowing their weapons to swing down across their stomachs.

‘What the hell is going on?’ Tom demanded angrily.

‘What do you mean?’ said Gallo, wincing as the medic prodded his shoulder.

‘I mean this-’ Stepping forward, Tom smashed his forearm into the bridge of a policeman’s nose and wrenched the machine gun from the man’s grasp as he staggered back, howling in pain.

‘Tom, what are you doing?’ Allegra gasped as he swung the weapon towards Gallo and flicked the safety off.

‘Ask him,’ he replied tonelessly, before pulling the trigger.

The gun jerked in his hand, the muzzle flash lighting the narrow tunnel like a strobe light, hot shell casings pinging off the walls, the noise crashing around them with a deafening echo that seemed to feed off itself and last long after the final shot had been fired.

Gallo returned Tom’s accusing glare through the smoke. Unharmed.

‘Blanks?’ Allegra’s face turned from horror to understanding, to confusion as she looked from Tom to Gallo.

Pushing the medic roughly out of the way, Gallo heaved himself to his feet.

‘We need to talk,’ he growled.

‘You need to talk,’ Tom corrected him.

‘Fine, but not here.’

EIGHTY-TWO

Ponte Sant’ Angelo, Rome

20th March-11.55 p.m.

With his men forming a cordon at either end of the bridge, Gallo led them out to the middle, then turned to face them, his arm strapped across his chest where the medic had popped his shoulder back into its socket.

‘This will do.’

‘Where have you taken Archie and Dom?’ Tom asked angrily.

‘To hospital,’ Gallo reassured him. ‘My men will take you to them when we’ve finished.’

‘The same men who attempted a rescue armed with blanks?’ Allegra snorted. She didn’t believe a word he said any more.

He gave a heavy sigh.

‘It’s complicated.’

‘Is that your idea of an apology?’ she shot back.

‘There are forces at work here. Powerful forces.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Tom’s tone was caught between irritation and impatience. ‘I want an explanation, not a palm reading.’

Gallo paused, turning to face down the river so that his back was to them.

‘Santos is connected. Very well connected,’ he began. ‘It seems that, over the years, the Banco Rosalia has done a lot of favours for a lot of people.’

‘What sort of people?’ Allegra pressed.

‘People he helped to evade tax and launder money. People who had relied on him to help fund their political campaigns. People who had profited from the sale of tens of millions of dollars in looted antiquities. Important people. People who couldn’t risk Santos going down and taking them with him.’

‘So these…people-they’re why you helped him get away?’ Allegra’s voice was heavy with an air of resigned disgust. ‘They’re why you watched him try to kill us.’

‘He wanted it to look as though he’d had to shoot his way out,’ said Gallo. ‘I didn’t know he was going to throw…that was…wrong.’

‘Wrong?’ Tom repeated with a hollow laugh.

‘How long has he had you on a leash?’ Allegra asked. ‘Since Cavalli was killed? Before?’

‘I didn’t even know who Cavalli was until I was put on to the Ricci case,’ Gallo turned to face them again, pressing his back against the parapet. ‘I don’t think Santos did either. But when Argento was killed, Santos grew worried that I might somehow connect the murders back to him or the Delian League. So he made some calls.’

‘Who to?’ Tom asked.

‘I’ve already told you’-Gallo shrugged-‘People. All I know is that, when my orders came, they came from the top. The very top. Protect Santos. Keep a lid on things. Stop the case spiralling out of control.’

‘What about Gambetta?’ Allegra said sharply. ‘Did they tell you to kill him too?’

‘I did what I had to do,’ Gallo said defiantly. ‘Santos had offered us a deal. Cavalli’s watch in return for keeping a lid on everything he knew and a promise to leave the country by the end of the week. Gambetta was an old fool who was never going to keep quiet about evidence going missing or how clever he’d been in linking all the murders together. He was a necessary sacrifice.’ A pause. ‘He’s not the first person to have died for his country.’

‘A necessary sacrifice?’ Allegra shook her head in disgust, a fist of anger clenching her stomach. ‘This has nothing to do with patriotism. This is about rich, powerful people doing whatever it takes to protect themselves. This is about murder. You killed Gambetta for doing his job.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Gallo shot back. ‘I had my orders. The things Santos knows…this was a matter of national security. He was to be protected at all costs. I had no choice.’

‘You had a choice,’ Allegra insisted. ‘You just chose not to make it. You killed a man and framed me for it.’

‘I was trying to protect you.’

‘From what?’

‘Santos found out you were asking questions about the Delian League. He wanted you dealt with. Why else do you think De Luca picked you up? I thought that if I blamed you for the killing and got your face in the papers, I might find you before he did. I was never planning to… Look, maybe it was wrong of me. But you’ll get a full retraction, an apology, your choice of assignments-’

‘You disgust me. You and whoever it is that can decide that an old man should die to stop someone like Santos being caught.’

‘I love my country,’ Gallo insisted. ‘I did what I had to do to protect it, and I’d do the same again. Anyway, I tried to put things right.’

‘How? With that little show you and Santos put on tonight?’

‘By saving you.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Tom challenged him. ‘Saving us from what?’

‘Who do you think dug you out of that tomb?’

‘That was you?’ Allegra swapped a glance with Tom, almost not wanting to believe him. Anything to avoid feeling that she might in some way owe him something.

‘How did you find us?’

‘I had a back-up team watching Eco. They picked you up coming out of the gallery and followed you to where De Luca snatched you up and then out to Contarelli’s farmhouse. I sent my men in as soon as I could. Luckily, they weren’t too late.’

‘Luckily,’ Allegra repeated in a sarcastic tone, the thought of the plastic bag slick and tight against her lips still making her stomach turn.

‘So it was you that fed us the information about D’Arcy?’

‘I knew that he worked for De Luca,’ Gallo nodded. ‘So when I heard about the fire and that he’d gone missing, I realised it was probably connected. The problem was that I didn’t have the jurisdiction to investigate. Luckily for me, I’d seen enough of Allegra to know that, if I gave her the option, she’d follow up the lead herself rather than walk away.’

There was a long silence, Gallo glancing at each of them in turn with a look that threatened to veer into an apology, although Allegra knew that he’d never allow himself to actually say anything.

‘So what happens to Santos now?’ she asked eventually.

‘He sells the painting and leaves the country. As long as he never comes back, we forget about him and move on. Let him become someone else’s problem.’

‘And the Banco Rosalia?’

Gallo laughed.

‘The Banco Rosalia is bankrupt. That’s why he had to make a move for the painting. It was his last chance to get out with something before the news broke. Not that it ever will. The government and the Vatican have already agreed to jointly underwrite the losses and quietly wind the business down to avoid any bad press. No one will ever know a thing.’

Allegra shook her head angrily, her jaw clenching and throat tightening. The hypocrisy and injustice of a world where a murderer like Santos was allowed to go free to protect a cabal of corrupt politicians and God-knows who else, while Gambetta was…it made her feel dirty.

‘What about De Luca and Faulks? Aren’t you going to charge them?’ Tom asked hopefully.

‘What with?’ Gallo shrugged. ‘We know what Faulks does, but we’ve never had any proof that he’s broken an Italian law on Italian soil. And as for De Luca…’

‘Colonel!’ He was interrupted by an officer signalling urgently from the end of the bridge. ‘We’ve found them.’

EIGHTY-THREE

Via Appia Antica, Rome

21 March-12.29 a.m.

Sirens blaring, they swept through the city, outriders clearing their path, people pointing and staring. Twenty minutes later they reached the Via Appia Antica where curious faces were replaced by the sombre countenance of the Roman funerary monuments that, like foxes pinned down by their headlights, momentarily reared out of the darkness, only to slink away as soon as they had raced past.

‘A local patrol unit ran their plates as they came past,’ Gallo explained over the noise of the engine as soon as he had finished his call. ‘They came up registered to a vehicle stolen last week in Milan. When they tried to stop them, the driver lost control and rolled it into a tree.’

Peering through the seats in front of her, Allegra could see a faint glow on the horizon, a red hue with a blue-edged tint. She looked across to Tom, who gave her an encouraging smile and then reached for her hand. She understood what he was trying to tell her. That this was nearly all over. That they’d almost won.

There were two fire crews on the scene but they were holding back, their flaccid hoses lying uncoiled at their feet.

‘The fuel tank could go at any moment and there’s no danger of it spreading,’ one of the crew explained to Gallo. ‘We’re just going to let it die down a bit.’

Allegra led Tom to the edge of the semi-circle of policemen and passers-by that had formed around the burning ambulance like kids at a bonfire, the heat from the flames searing her cheeks. Deep ruts in the verge showed where the vehicle had careered off the road and into a ditch, a partially uprooted tree explaining why it hadn’t continued on into the field that lay on the other side of the hedge. One of the wheels was on fire and still slowly turning.

Abruptly, the fuel tank exploded, the ambulance jerking spasmodically, the noise of breaking glass and the tortured shriek of expanding metal coming from somewhere inside it. Sparks flitted though the air around them like fireflies.

Allegra glanced at Tom and followed his impassive gaze to the body that must have been thrown clear before the fire had broken out. It was the priest, Orlando. From the way he was lying it didn’t look like he would be getting up again. She turned back to the ambulance, straining to see through the swirling flames and smoke, and caught the charred outline of a body in the driver’s seat, head slumped forward, hands still gripping the wheel.

‘Santos?’ she asked Tom.

Tom shrugged and then turned away.

‘If you want it to be.’

EIGHTY-FOUR

The Getty Villa, Malibu, California

1st May-11.58 a.m.

One thing was certain-they had all been asked here to witness something special. The clue, as always, had been in the expense lavished on the engraved invitations, the quality of the champagne served at the welcoming reception and the bulging gift bags positioned next to the exit.

When it came to what was going to be announced, however, opinions were more divided. Opinions that, as the minutes passed, grew ever more outlandish and unlikely, until some were confidently predicting that the entire collection of the British Museum was even now being loaded into containers to be shipped to California, and others that it was the Getty itself that was relocating to Beijing. As guesswork was layered on to conjecture, so the noise grew, until what had started as a gentle breeze of curious voices had grown into a deafening storm over which people were struggling to make themselves heard.

Then, without warning, the lights dimmed and three people stepped out on to the stage, one of them wearing sunglasses. The noise dropped as abruptly as if they had passed into the eye of a hurricane, leaving an eerie, pregnant silence.

The shortest person, a man, approached the lectern and gripped its sides, seemingly comforted by its varnished solidity. A large screen behind him showed a close-up of his face-pink, fleshy and sweating.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Director Bury began nervously, licking the corners of his mouth. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome you here today. As many of you know, our founder had a simple vision. It was that art has a civilising influence in society, and should therefore be made available to the public for their education and enjoyment.’ He paused, his voice growing in confidence as a polite round of applause rippled through the crowd. ‘It is a vision that continues to inspire us today as we seek to collect, preserve, exhibit and interpret art of the highest quality. More importantly, it is a vision that continues to inspire others into the most extraordinary acts of generosity. Acts of generosity that have led us today to what I believe is the single most important acquisition in the museum’s history. Dr Bruce, please.’

He retreated a few steps, glistening and exultant, and led the clapping as Verity stepped forward. Saying nothing, she waited for the applause to die down, and then nodded. The stage was immediately plunged into darkness. For a few moments nothing happened, people craning their necks to see over or between the rows in front of them, hardly daring to breathe. Then a single spotlight came on, illuminating the jagged outline of a carved face. An ivory face. Behind them the screen was filled with its ghostly, sightless eyes.

Still Verity said nothing, the silence of anticipation giving way to an excited murmur, a few people standing up to get a closer look, one man at the front clapping spontaneously, others turning to each other and muttering words of confusion or shocked understanding. Little by little the noise grew, until the room was once again gripped by a violent, incoherent storm that was only partially muted by the sound of Verity’s voice and a second spotlight revealing her face.

‘Thanks to the incredible generosity of Myron Kezman, a man of singular vision and exquisite taste whose philanthropy shines through these dark economic times,’ she called over the clamour, waving at a beaming Kezman to step forward, ‘the Getty is proud to announce the acquisition of the Phidias Apollo, the only surviving work of possibly the greatest sculptor of the classical age.’ She paused as the applause came again, unrestrained and exultant. ‘As you can see, it is a uniquely well-preserved fragment of a chryselephantine sculpture of the Greek god Apollo. Dated to around 450 BC, it shows-’

‘Verity Bruce?’ A man in the front row had interrupted her. Standing up, he moved to the stage.

‘If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll take questions at the end,’ she said through a forced smile, eyeing him contemptuously.

‘My name is Special Agent Carlos Ortiz, FBI,’ the man announced, holding out his badge. ‘And if you and Mr Kezman don’t mind, you’ll be taking my questions downtown.’

The audience turned in their seats as the doors at the back of the auditorium flew open. Four darksuited men entered the room and fanned out.

‘What is this?’ she called out over the crowd’s low, confused muttering, her expression caught somewhere between incredulity and indignation.

‘I have a warrant for your arrest, along with Mr Myron Kezman and Earl Faulks,’ Ortiz announced, the sight of the piece of paper in his hand raising the audience’s muttering to a curious rumble. Kezman said nothing, his indulgent smile having faded behind the blank mask of his sunglasses as two further agents had taken up positions either side of the stage.

‘On what charges?’ Director Bury challenged him, advancing to Verity’s side.

‘Federal tax fraud, conspiracy to traffic in illegal antiquities and illegal possession of antiquities,’ Ortiz fired back. ‘But we’re just getting started.’

‘This is outrageous,’ Verity erupted, shielding her face from the machine-gun flash of press cameras. ‘I have done nothing-’

She was interrupted by a commotion at the back of the room as a man tried to make a run for the exit, only to be brought down heavily by the outstretched leg of another member of the audience.

‘It seems Mr Faulks is not as confident in his innocence as you appear to be in yours,’ Ortiz observed wryly as two of his men pounced on Faulks’s prone figure and hauled him to his feet. ‘Cuff them.’

Verity and Kezman’s shouted protests were drowned out by the hyena howl of the crowd as they leapt from their seats and surged forward to feast.

Amidst the commotion, a man and a woman slipped out, unobserved.

EIGHTY-FIVE

1st May-12.09 p.m.

‘How’s your foot?’ Allegra laughed as they made their way out into the Outer Peristyle’s shaded cloister. A light salt breeze was blowing in from the Pacific and tugging at her hair, which was now its original colour once again.

‘He was meant to trip over it, not step on it,’ Tom grinned, pretending to limp over the marble floor.

‘Do you think they’ll let him cut a deal?’

‘Unlikely, given what you copied in his warehouse and the tape.’

‘What tape?’ Allegra asked with a frown.

‘Dominique recorded the three of them discussing the mechanics of the whole deal on the phone she and Archie cloned.’

They stepped between two of the fluted columns and made their way down a shallow ramp into a large rectangular courtyard. Running almost its entire length was a shallow reflection pool, its rectangular white stone basin curving at both ends like a Venetian mirror.

‘What do you think they’ll do with the mask?’ Allegra asked as they navigated their way along a labyrinthine arrangement of box hedge-lined gravel paths to the pool’s edge.

‘Ortiz told me that the Italian government has drawn up a catalogue of forty artefacts acquired by or donated to the Getty over the past twenty years that they want returned. The mask is at the top of the list.’

‘That’s a start,’ she said, sitting down next to him.

‘The Greek and Turkish governments are talking about doing the same. And that’s just the Getty. There are other museums, galleries, private collections…the fall-out from this will take years to clear.’

‘But nothing will change,’ she sighed. ‘When the Delian League finally falls, others will just see it as an opportunity to step in and fill the vacuum.’

‘You can’t stop the supply,’ Tom nodded. ‘Contarelli was right about that. The tomb robbers are fighting a guerrilla campaign and the police are still lining up in squares and using muskets. But if the publicity makes museums, collectors and auction houses clean up their act, it might choke the demand. And with less buyers, there’ll be less money and less incentive to dig. In time, things might just change.’

There was a silence, Allegra playing with the water and letting it slide through her fingers like mercury.

‘They buried Aurelio yesterday,’ she said, without looking up.

‘I didn’t know that…?’

‘Some kids found his body washed up on the Isola Tiberina.’

‘Murdered?’

‘They don’t think so.’

Tom placed his hand on her shoulder. She glanced up and then quickly looked down again, her eyes glistening.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I think he was too.’ She shook the water from her fingers and then wiped them on her skirt.

‘What’s happened to Gallo?’

‘Promoted, I expect.’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘To be honest, I don’t care. Him, the people he was protecting…they all disgust me.’

‘But he kept his part of the deal?’ Tom checked.

She nodded. ‘All charges dropped. A formal apology. My pick of assignments. He even had my parking tickets cancelled.’

‘So you’ll stay?’

‘I’ll think about it,’ she said. ‘Not everyone’s like him. Besides, I want to see Contarelli’s face when I raid his place.’ Tom grinned. ‘What about you?’

‘Me?’ He gave a deep sigh. ‘Archie’s meeting me in New York for Jennifer’s funeral. The FBI only released her body last week, After that…Who knows? I never like to plan too far ahead. Which way’s the sea?’

They stood up and walked through to the other side of the colonnade, following some steps down to a path.

‘By the way, did you hear about the Caravaggio?’ Allegra asked as they headed up a slope to their right.

‘Destroyed?’ A hint of surprise in Tom’s voice.

She shook her head.

‘There wasn’t any trace of it in the ambulance.’

‘And Santos?’

‘The DNA from the body at the wheel matched the sample the Vatican provided for him,’ she said with a shrug. ‘So that’s case closed, I guess.’

‘Except you think he’s still alive,’ Tom guessed.

‘I think if he’s got any sense, he’ll stay dead,’ she said, the muscles in her jaw flexing with anger. ‘Moretti’s people are looking for him and the word is that De Luca’s put a five-million-dollar ticket on his head.’

They reached a large lawned area and walked to its far wall where there was a view out over the treetops to the sea, white caps rolling in neat parallel lines towards the beach.

‘There’s one thing I still can’t figure out,’ Allegra said, hitching herself on to it to face Tom, who was shielding his eyes from the sun. ‘Why did Faulks have two watches?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘De Luca, D’Arcy, Moretti and Cavalli only had one watch each. Why did Faulks have two in his safe?’

‘He said he had two seats on the council,’ Tom reminded her. ‘Presumably to act as a counterweight between D’Arcy and De Luca on one hand and Cavalli and Moretti on the other. The watches went with the seats, I guess.’

‘Except the League was formed by putting De Luca’s and Moretti’s two organisations together,’ she said slowly. ‘That must have meant that they would each have had their own dealer at one stage.’

‘So what are you saying? That one of the watches used to belong to someone else?’ Tom frowned as he considered this.

‘De Luca did say that Faulks’s two seats were an accident of history,’ she said. ‘What if the other dealer left? Faulks would have taken over his seat and his watch.’

‘Unless the other dealer never handed the watch back. That might explain why Faulks had to go and get a replacement made.’ Tom suggested. ‘You could be right. Maybe when you see him you can ask him. Which reminds me…’

He took a piece of paper from his pocket and deliberately ripped it in half and then half again.

‘What’s that?’ she asked, as he continued to rip it into ever smaller pieces.

‘You remember when we went through the papers in Faulks’s safe? Well, I found a map. The one showing where Cavalli found the mask.’

‘Wait!’

She reached out to grab his hand, but he threw the pieces up into the air before she could get to him.

‘Tom!’ she shouted angrily. ‘Have you any idea what else could be down there?’

He gave her a rueful smile.

‘Not everything’s ready to be found, Allegra.’

Above him, the scraps of paper fluttered like butterflies in the sunlight, before a gust of wind lifted them soaring into the sky and carried them out to sea, like a flock of birds at the start of a long migration south.

EIGHTY-SIX

Central Square, Casco Viejo, Panama

1st May-6.36 p.m.

Antonio Santos, his arm in a sling, stood to one side and pressed the muzzle of his gun against the door at about head height.

‘Who is it?’

‘DHL,’ a muffled voice called back. ‘Package for Mr Stefano Romano?’

‘Leave it outside.’

‘I need a signature,’ the voice called back.

Santos paused. He was expecting a couple of deliveries this week under that name, and it would be a shame if they got returned. On the other hand, he needed to be careful until he was certain that he had shaken everyone off the trail.

‘Who is it from?’ he asked, slowly sliding his face across to the peep hole.

A bored-looking man was standing on the landing dressed in a brown uniform. He appeared to be trying to grow a beard and was chewing gum. Santos’s last question had prompted him to roll his eyes and blow a bubble that he popped with his finger.

‘It’s from Italy,’ he replied, glancing at the stamps and then turning it over so that he could read the label on its back. ‘Someone called Amarelli?’

Grinning, Santos tucked his gun into the back of his trousers, unbolted the door and threw it open.

‘Amarelli liquorice from Calabria,’ he explained, signing the form and eagerly ripping the box open. ‘The best there is.’ He flicked open a tin of Spezzata and crammed two pieces into his mouth, chewing them noisily. ‘Want to try some?’ he mumbled, thrusting the tin at the courier, who waved them away with a muttered word of thanks. ‘I’ve looked everywhere, but no one seems to stock it here. Lucky for me they do mail order.’

‘Lucky for me too, Antonio,’ the courier replied. ‘Or I’d never have found you.’

His eyes widening as he realised his mistake, Santos immediately kicked the door shut and reached for his gun. But the man was too quick, stamping his foot in the jamb and then shouldering the door open, sending Santos reeling backwards. Swinging his gun out from behind him, Santos lined up a shot, but before he could pull the trigger a painful punch to the soft inside of his arm sent it rattling across the tiled floor, while a forearm smash to his neck sent him crashing to his knees. He made a choking noise, his hands wrapped around his throat, his breathing coming in short, animal gasps.

Quickly checking that no one had heard them, the man eased the front door shut and then dragged Santos by his feet towards the kitchen. Once there he cuffed him, and then attached his wrists to a steel cable that he looped over the security bars covering the window.

‘Wait. What’s your name?’ Santos croaked as he was forced to his feet.

‘Foster,’ the man replied as he tugged down hard on the cable, the metal fizzing noisily as it passed over the bars until Santos’s hands were stretched high above his head, forcing him to stand on the balls of his feet to stop the cuffs biting into his wrists, his injured arm burning.

‘Please, Foster, I’ll pay you,’ he wheezed. ‘Whatever they’re paying you, I’ll double it.’

‘You know how this works.’ The man eyed him dispassionately. ‘Once I’ve taken a job, there’s no backing out. It’s why people hire me. It’s why you hired me.’

‘I don’t even know you.’

‘Sure you do.’ Foster tied the cable to a radiator, twanging it to check that it was under tension. ‘Las Vegas? The Amalfi? That was you, wasn’t it?’

‘The Amalfi?’ Santos breathed, whatever colour he had left in his face draining away. ‘Please,’ he whispered. ‘There must be another way. Let me go. I’ll disappear. They’ll never know.’

‘I’ll know,’ the man replied. ‘And I can’t have your life on my conscience. Now, open wide.’

‘What?’

Santos gave a muffled shout as a grenade was forced into his mouth. The ribbed metal casing smashed two of his teeth as Foster wedged it between his jaws, making sure that the safety handle was at the back so that its sharp edges cut into the corners of Santos’s mouth like a horse bit. Santos began to gag on the oily metal, his eyes wide and terrified.

‘The person who sent me wanted you to know that he is a reasonable man. A civilised man. So, if you were to feel able to apologise…?’

Santos nodded furiously, the pain in his arms now making him feel faint.

‘Good!’ Foster reached forward, pulled the pin out and placed it on the counter. Then he took out a mobile phone, dialled a number and positioned it next to the pin. ‘He’s listening now-’ Foster nodded at the phone. ‘So when you’re ready, just spit the grenade out and say your piece. Just remember-you’ll need to speak quickly.’