Villa de Rome apartment building, Boulevard de Suisse, Monte Carlo, Monaco 18th March—5.23 p.m.
It was earlier than usual, but then Ronan D’Arcy figured he’d earned it. After a bloodbath in the first few months of the year, some of his shorts were finally beginning to pay off and the latest round of Middle Eastern sabre rattling had pushed his oil futures back to historic highs. If that didn’t warrant a drink, what did?
A helicopter droned overhead, circling low over the palace up on the hill, and then swooping back around to perch gracefully on the deck of one of the larger yachts lying at anchor in the harbour, the sea glittering like gold in the sinking sunlight. D’Arcy gave a rueful smile. It didn’t matter how good the market was or how well you thought you were doing, someone else, somewhere, was always doing better. It was a lesson that this place
seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in beating into him at every opportunity. Still, he wasn’t going to let it spoil his little celebration.
He stepped off the balcony back into his office and quickly scanned the six trading screens that formed a low, incandescent wall on his desk to check that some random market sneeze hadn’t wiped out a good month’s work. Reassured, he picked up the phone and dialled the internal extension to the kitchen. If it had been a beer he could have fixed it himself, of course—he wasn’t that lazy. But celebrations called for cocktails, and cocktails called for mojitos, and Determination was the mojito-master.
Determination. He’d never get used to that name. It was from Botswana, or some other spearchucking African country that he’d never been able to find on a map. He’d heard of names such as Hope and Faith and Temperance. Even a Chastity, if you could believe that. But Determination…?
Maybe it wasn’t the name but the irony of it that jarred, D’Arcy reflected, his tanned forehead creasing in annoyance as the phone rang unanswered. Indolence. That would have been a more appropriate name. Lethargy. Torpidity. Yes, that was a good one. Where was the shiftless bastard now?
He slammed the phone down and clicked his mouse to bring up the apartment’s internal closed circuit TV system. The kitchen, laundry room, gym
and billiard room were all empty. So too were the sitting rooms and the dining room. Which only left the…
D’Arcy paused, having suddenly noticed that, according to the camera in the entrance hall, the front door was wide open.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ he swore. What was the point of flying in a specialist security company from Israel to fit armoured doors if the stupid fucker was going to leave them wide open?
Muttering angrily under his breath, he turned to leave, and then paused. The lights were on in the corridor outside, the travertine marble floor reflecting a narrow strip of light under his office door. But the pale band was broken by several dark shapes. Someone was standing outside, listening.
He punched the emergency shut-down button on his trading system and then sprang across to the bookcase. In the same instant the door burst open and two men came tumbling through the gap, guns raised. D’Arcy hit the panic-room release button. A section of the bookcase slid back and he leapt inside. The men started firing, the silenced shots searing the air with a fup-fupping noise. He slammed his hand against the ‘close’ switch, the door crashing shut with a hydraulic thump, leaving him in a strange deadened silence that echoed with the rasping gasps of his adrenaline-charged breathing.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck…’ Frantically he scrabbled in the sickly light for the phone. It was dead, his clammy fingers sliding on the moulded plastic as he stabbed at the hook switch. There was no dial tone, the line presumably cut at the junction box downstairs.
‘Mobile,’ he breathed, patting his jacket and trouser pockets excitedly until, his heart sinking, his eyes flicked to the monitor which showed a picture of his office. His phone was still where he’d left it on his desk.
He quickly reassessed his situation. Without a phone, there was no way of letting anyone know he was in here. That meant he’d have to wait until someone came looking for him. The chances were that his brokers in London would raise the alarm when he missed their usual morning call. That would be in—he checked his watch—less than sixteen hours’ time. In the meantime he was quite safe. After all, he’d had this place installed by a Brazilian firm who specialised in kidnap prevention. It had five-inch-thick steel walls, fortyeight hours of battery life if they cut the power, access to the CCTV system and a month’s worth of supplies. He might as well make himself comfortable and enjoy the show.
He sat back, his pulse slowing, and watched the men with an amused expression. They were arguing, he noticed with a smile. Probably trying to figure out which of them would carry the can
for him having got away. At least he only planned to fire Determination, he thought to himself. Judging by their brutal methods, he doubted whether whoever had sent these two would be as forgiving when they learnt of his escape.
Suddenly he sat forward, his face drawn into a puzzled frown. The arguing had stopped, the men now intent on emptying the bookcase on to the floor and arranging its contents into a large uneven mound that pressed up against the panic room’s concealed entrance. Seemingly satisfied, they turned their attention to the walls, ripping the paintings down and tossing them on to the pile. They reserved special treatment for his Picasso, one of the men punching his fist through the
Portrait of Jacqueline
that had found its way to D’Arcy after being stolen a few years before from Picasso’s granddaughter’s apartment in Paris. Then he sent it spinning through the air to join the others.
D’Arcy shook his head, swearing angrily. Did they think he would come charging out to save a few old books and a painting? He valued his life far more dearly than that. Their petty vandalism was as pointless as it was…
He lost his train of thought, noticing with a frown that one of the men seemed to be spraying some sort of liquid over the jumble of books and canvases and wooden frames, while the other had lit a match. Glancing up at the camera with a
smile, as if to make sure D’Arcy had seen them, the man with the match stepped forward and dropped it on to the pile. The screen flared white, momentarily blinded by a whoosh of fire.
D’Arcy was gripped by a chilling realisation. His eyes rose slowly from the screen to the small metal grille positioned in the right-hand corner of the panic room. To the thin tendrils of acrid smoke that were even now snaking through its narrow openings. To the acid taste at the back of his throat as he felt his lungs begin to clench.
Vicolo de Panieri, Travestere, Rome 19th March—7.03 a.m.
Tom had booked himself on to the afternoon flight out of DC, taking the obvious precaution of using another name. He never travelled without at least two changes of identity stitched into his bag’s lining and luckily the FBI had not thought to check whether he had left anything with the concierge at the hotel he’d been staying in the previous night.
There had been a relatively low-key police presence at Reagan International. Understandable, given that the FBI would probably be focusing all their efforts on the Vegas area if they were serious about catching him. After all, he’d dropped a pretty strong hint to Stokes that that was where he’d head in the first instance to pick up the killer’s trail.
He’d managed to snatch a few hours’ sleep, recouping a little of what he’d lost over the past
two days, and then spent the rest of the flight reading through Jennifer’s file in a bit more detail. Most of it was by now familiar to him, although he had paused over the witness statements, bank records and various other documents that the FBI had seized in their raid on the art dealer’s warehouse in Queen’s which he hadn’t seen before. One, in particular, stood out and had triggered the call he was making now as his taxi swept into the city along the A91, accompanied by the dawn traffic and the chirping tones of the driver’s satnav system.
‘Archie?’ he said, as soon as he picked up.
‘Tom?’ Archie rasped, jet lag and what Tom guessed had probably been a heavy night at the hotel bar combining to give his voice a ragged croak. ‘What time is it? Where the hell are you?’
‘Rome,’ Tom answered.
‘Rome?’ he repeated sleepily, the muffled noise of something being knocked to the floor suggesting that he was groping for his watch or the alarm clock with one hand while digging the sleep out of his eyes with the other. ‘What the fuck are you doing in Rome? You’re meant to be in Zurich. What number is this?’
‘Jennifer’s dead,’ Tom said sharply. ‘It was a setup. The Caravaggio. The exchange. They were waiting for us.’
‘Shit.’ Any hint of tiredness had immediately evaporated from Archie’s voice. ‘You all right?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘What the fuck happened?’
‘Sniper,’ Tom said, trying not to think about what he’d seen or heard or felt, concentrating on just sticking to the facts. ‘Professional job.’
‘You’re sure she was the target?’
‘Pretty sure. Have you ever heard of an antiquities-smuggling operation called the Delian League?’
‘No. Why? Is that who you think did it?’
‘That’s what I’m in Rome to find out. That’s why I need you in Geneva.’
‘Of course,’ Archie replied instantly. ‘Whatever you need, mate.’
‘There’s a sale at Sotheby’s this afternoon,’ Tom said, glancing down at the circled entry in the Geneva auction catalogue that had been included in the file. ‘One of the lots is a statue of Artemis. It looks like Jennifer thought it was important. I want to know why.’
‘No worries,’ Archie reassured him. ‘What about you? What’s in Rome?’
‘A name. Luca Cavalli. He was fingered by someone Jennifer arrested in New York. I thought I’d start with him and work my way back up the ladder.’
A pause.
‘Tom…’ Archie spoke haltingly, for once lost for words. ‘Listen, mate, I’m sorry. I know you two were…I’m really sorry.’
Tom had thought that sharing the news of Jennifer’s murder with Archie might help unburden him in some way. But his hesitant awkwardness was so unusual that it was actually having the opposite effect, forcing Tom to reflect yet again on the events that had brought him here, rather than focus on the immediate task at hand.
‘Are you going to be all right?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Tom said. ‘Just call me on this number when you get there.’
About fifteen minutes later the taxi pulled up. Tom stepped out.
It was a wide, cobbled street largely populated by neat four-storey buildings with symmetrical balconies and brightly coloured plaster walls. Cavalli’s house, by contrast, was a feral, hulking shape. Long and only two storeys high, its stonework was grey and wizened by age, the roof sagging under a red blister of sun-cracked tiles, the flaking green shutters at its upstairs windows betraying years of neglect. An old horse block stood to the right of the front door, while to the left, a large dilapidated arched gate suggested that the building had once served as some sort of workshop or garage.
For a moment, Tom wondered if he’d been misled by the sat-nav’s confident tone and been dropped off in the wrong place. But the seals on the door and the laminated notice declaring the
premises a court-protected crime scene removed any lingering doubts. He was definitely in the right place. It just looked as though he was too late.
Hitching his bag across his shoulders and checking that the street was empty, Tom clambered quickly up the drainpipe, glad that he had changed out of his suit. Reaching across to the window, he could see that although it had been closed shut, the frame was warped and the latch old and loose. Pushing a knife into a narrow gap, he levered the blade back and forth, shaking the window so that the latch slowly worked itself free, until it popped open and he was able to clamber inside.
He found himself in what he assumed was a bedroom, although it was hard to be sure, the contents of the wardrobe having been swept on to the floor, the bed propped against the wall and the chest flipped on to its back, its emptied drawers lying prostrate at its side. It struck Tom that there was a deliberate violence in the way that the room had been upended. The police, for all their clumsiness, usually searched with a little more restraint. The people who had done this, however, hadn’t just been looking for something. They’d been trying to make a point.
He exited the bedroom on to a glass and stainless steel walkway that ran the length of the building and looked down on to a wide, double
height living space. Here the décor was as modern as the outside had been neglected, the back wall made of folding glass panels and looking out on to a small walled garden, the floor a dull mirror of polished concrete, the galley kitchen a mass of stainless steel that looked like it might double as an operating theatre.
Tom stepped along the walkway past a bathroom and another bedroom that had been similarly turned upside down. Then he made his way down a glass staircase to the ground floor, its icicle-like glass treads protruding unsupported from the wall. Down here, the brutality of the assault was, if anything, even more marked—the large plasma screen lifted off its brackets and broken almost in two across a chair; the seats and backs of the leather furniture slashed open, their innards ripped out in handfuls through the deep gashes; the coffee table overturned and its metal legs stamped on so that they were bent into strange, deviant shapes; the bookcase forced on to its front, crushing its contents underneath. There was a distinctive and unpleasant aroma too, and it was a few moments before Tom was able to guess at its meaning—not content with defeating these inanimate foes, the assailants had, it seemed, chosen to mark their victory by urinating on them.
A sudden noise from the front door made Tom look up. Someone was coming in, the bottom lock
clunking open, the key now slipping into the top one. He knew immediately he wouldn’t have enough time to make it back upstairs.
That only left him one option.
19th March—7.22 a.m.
The seal ripped as the door opened. Someone stepped inside and then quickly eased it shut behind them. They paused. Then, with careful, hesitant footsteps, they walked down the small entrance hallway towards him.
Tom, his back pressed to the wall, waited until the intruder was almost level with him and then leapt out, sending their gun spinning across the floor with a chop to the wrist. Rather than press his advantage, however, Tom paused, surprised by the sudden realisation as he caught sight of their dark hair, that it was a woman. But this momentary hesitation was all the invitation she needed to turn and crash her right fist into his jaw, the force of the blow sending him staggering back with a grunt. Spinning round, she stretched towards the gun, but Tom stuck out a leg and tripped her, sending her sprawling headlong into an upturned
chair. In a flash he was on top of her, digging his knee into the small of her back, trying to pin her arms to her sides. But with surprising force, she reached behind and, grabbing his arm, flipped him over her head and on to the floor, winding him.
Again she turned and scrambled towards the gun, but Tom, still coughing and trying to get his breath just managed to grab one of her ankles and drag her back, her leg thrashing wildly until she was able to kick herself free. Struggling to her feet, she reached down and grabbed one of the dislocated struts from the coffee table and then lunged at him with it, her face contorted with rage. Tom sidestepped the first downward swipe aimed at his head, but the second wild swing struck him with a painful thump at the top of his right arm, momentarily numbing it. Her attack provided him with an opening, however, because with his other hand he reached out and grabbed the end of the metal rod, and then yanked it sideways. The woman went with it, tripping over a small pile of books and collapsing on to her knees. By the time she was on her feet, the gun was in Tom’s hands and aimed at her stomach.
‘Trovisi giù,’
he wheezed. Her chest heaving, she gave him a long, hateful look and then lay face down on the floor as he’d ordered. Tom quickly patted her down, finding her wallet in her jeans pocket.
‘
Siedasi là
,’ he ordered as he opened it, waving
the gun at a chair. Her eyes burning, she pulled herself to her feet, righted the chair he had indicated, and then sat in it.
‘
Siete un poliziotto
?’ he asked in surprise, the sight of her ID made him feel a little less embarrassed about his sore chin and throbbing arm. Tall and obviously strong, she was wearing jeans, a tight brown leather jacket and red ballet-style pumps. She was also very striking, with olive skin, a jet-black bob that was cut in a square fringe around her face and mismatched blue and brown eyes embedded within a smoky grey eye shadow. There was something odd about her appearance, though. Something that Tom couldn’t quite put his finger on yet, that didn’t quite fit.
‘Congratulations,’ she replied. ‘You’ve managed to assault a police officer and trespass on a crime scene before most people have got out of bed.’
‘Where did you learn English?’ Tom’s Italian was good, but her English, while slightly accented, was almost faultless.
She ignored him. ‘Put the gun down.’
‘You tell me what you’re doing here and I’ll think about it,’ he offered unsmilingly.
‘Who are you working for? Gallo?’ she shot back, ignoring his question.
‘Who’s Gallo?’
‘He didn’t send you?’ There was a hint of hope as well as disbelief in her voice.
‘Nobody
sent
me,’ he said. ‘I work for myself. I’m looking for Cavalli.’
A pause.
‘Cavalli’s dead.’
‘Shit,’ Tom swore, pinching the top of his nose and shutting his eyes as he gave a long, weary sigh. Cavalli had been his main hope of working his way back up the Delian League to whoever had ordered the hit. ‘How?’
She shook her head, eyeing him blankly, refusing to be drawn.
‘What does it matter, if he’s dead?’ Tom insisted.
Another pause as she considered this, before answering with a shrug.
‘He was murdered. Four days ago. Why?’
‘I wanted to talk to him.’
‘About what?’
‘This for a start—’ Tom held up the photocopied page showing the sketch of the symbol of the two snakes wrapped around a clenched fist. ‘I hoped he might…’
‘Where did you get that?’ she gasped.
‘You’ve seen it before?’
‘C-Cavalli,’ she stammered. ‘They found a lead disc in his pocket, that was engraved on it!’
‘Do you know what it means?’ Tom pressed, hoping that her obvious surprise might cause her to momentarily lower her guard to his advantage. But she quickly regained her composure, again glaring at him defiantly.
‘It means that you’ve got about five minutes to get out of here before someone comes looking for me.’
Tom studied her face for a few moments. She was bluffing.
‘Why wait?’ he said, offering her his phone. ‘Call it in.’
She gazed at the handset for a few moments, then lifted her eyes to his.
‘What are you doing?’
Tom smiled.
‘No one even knows you’re here, do they?’
She ignored his question, although the momentary flicker of indecision across her otherwise resolute face effectively answered it for him.
‘Just let me go,’ she repeated. ‘You’re in enough shit as it is.’
Tom went to reply and then paused, having suddenly realised what it was about her appearance that had been troubling him earlier. It was her hair, or rather the ragged way it had been cut, especially around the back, which seemed at odds with the rest of her. She’d clearly cut it herself. Recently. Probably dyed it too, given its unnaturally deep lustre.
‘Where did you put the bottles?’ he asked.
‘What?’ She shook her head, as if she wasn’t sure she’d heard him properly.
‘The empty dye bottles and the hair you cut off. Did you lose them somewhere safe? Because
if you didn’t and whoever’s looking for you finds them, it won’t take them much to figure out what you look like now.’
Allegra gave him a long, curious look.
‘Who are you?’
‘Someone who can help,’ Tom said with a tight smile. ‘Because right now, I’m guessing you’re in a lot more shit than me.’
Leaning forward, he offered the gun to her, handle first.