The Lost Relic

Chapter Fifty

Torréjon military base

24 kilometres northeast of Madrid

The airfield’s floodlights gleamed off the sleek fuselage of the SOCA Cessna Citation jet as it waited on standby a hundred metres from the giant hangar where Darcey had set up her temporary command centre. The huge space was alive with heavily-armed police and soldiers, technical personnel and government agents, and filled with vehicles and military trestle tables and flight-cased racks of radio and computer equipment. At the rear of the hangar, silhouetted in shadow, stood the official planes of the King of Spain and the country’s President.

Darcey was deep in a meeting with Comisario Miguel Garrido, one of Madrid’s most senior-ranking police chiefs, when, just after midnight, Paolo Buitoni came sprinting across the hangar and broke in on their conversation. He was out of breath and clutching a card file, full of apologies for the interruption but bursting with news.

‘I just had a call from Rome,’ he said excitedly. ‘Your idea to bring Ornella De Crescenzo into custody and put some pressure on her? We’ll probably get our balls – that is to say, we’ll probably get disciplined, but it worked. She remembered. She got it.’

‘Don’t beat about the bush, Paolo,’ Darcey said. ‘Tell me.’

‘The name of the man her husband rushed off to meet is Segura. That was all she could remember, but I ran a search using “Segura Spain fine art”. I came up with this guy.’ He plucked a glossy printout from the file. Darcey took it. It showed a serious-looking man in his fifties, with swept-back silver hair and broad shoulders, pictured at some kind of arts event, shaking hands with another man in front of a huge canvas.

‘Juan Calixto Segura,’ Buitoni said. ‘A well-respected art collector based in Salamanca.’ He snatched a sheet from his file. ‘I have the address right here. Million to one, Ben Hope followed Pietro De Crescenzo there tonight. And there’s more. Our men just discovered that Ornella’s car is missing. She says her husband left for Spain in his own Volvo.’

‘Ben Hope took it,’ Darcey said. ‘We’re looking for a bronze Maserati GranTurismo. Not too many of those around.’

Darcey turned to Garrido. ‘Comisario, we need your tactical teams and every available patrol officer in there, hard and fast.’

Garrido was already summoning his aides and issuing commands.

‘Darcey, Salamanca is just a hundred and fifty kilometres from here,’ Buitoni said. ‘The jet can get us there in less than fifteen minutes and I’ll have a police chopper waiting for us at the military base outside the city.’

‘Nice work, Paolo.’ Darcey flashed a brief smile at him, and then her jaw tightened and the fierce glint came into her eye. She grabbed her Beretta from a nearby steel table.

As she strode towards the mouth of the hangar she jacked a round into the breech, flipped on the safety and shoved the weapon into her hip holster. ‘Ben Hope isn’t getting away this time.’

‘She has that look again,’ Buitoni muttered under his breath as he ran after her. ‘God, I love that look.’