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.’
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.
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.’