by Craig Smith
'I just need to get back to Zürich. I should have a suitcase waiting for me there.'
'Let's get you there safely.' She started from the room.
'I like the paintings.'
The contessa stopped and turned back to look at them with the affection of a collector. 'They're supposed to be Egyptian mummy portraits from the second and third century, but I like to think of them as my children.'
'What are they really?'
'A window into the past.'
She stepped back into the room now and pointed out one of the paintings. Malloy had trouble following her hand because her fragrance stirred him. 'You see the similarity in style to your painting?'
'It's encaustic, isn't it?'
'Very good. The only one in the group that is actually.'
The tempera paintings hadn't the sheen of encaustic. 'So what are mummy portraits?' he asked.
'Sometime in the second century, Egyptians began having their portraits painted on panels of wood and occasionally on canvas. At the person's death, the relatives would then have the portrait slipped into the bandages of the mummy directly over the face instead of the traditional mask. The idea sounds strange, but the effect is wonderful. If the painting is skillfully done, it's as if you can see the actual person staring out from the bandages. Anyway, in the nineteenth century an archaeologist named Flinders Petrie began digging at an enormous necropolis in Fayum, Egypt, about forty miles from Cairo. Most of the paintings he recovered were in terrible condition, of course, but a few looked as if they had just been created. Naturally, once people saw them in Europe and America, there was an incredible demand for them. Economic realities being what they are, some enterprising Egyptians passed off quite a few forgeries for the real thing.
'Over the years our ability to date material has become quite sophisticated and a number of museums have been forced to remove what they had once thought was a second or third century masterpiece. It's virtually impossible these days to own the real thing. There are only about a thousand in existence. But, for a price, the forgeries are available, if you are enterprising about it. I don't really care when they were painted. I just love looking at the faces.'
She pointed at another painting, a woman staring out from eternity. 'This one went to the Petrie Museum in London but it became suspect when one of the curators realized there was no gypsum undercoat. The genuine paintings all had a base of gypsum. If you look closely, you can see why.'
'The wood grain shows through?'
She nodded like an approving schoolmarm. 'Otherwise
perfect. This one,' she pointed at a man's face, 'they found in the bandages of a woman's mummified corpse. It was at the Louvre for a number of years with the mummy before someone noticed the discrepancy and tested the age of the panel.'
Malloy pointed at the painting she had first indicated. It depicted a robust young man of some thirty years with dark eyes and a thick beard. He was beginning to go bald, but he was a handsome man all the same. 'The edges of the painting aren't rounded off like the others,' he remarked.
'In a mummy portrait they would trim the corners of the panel so that it would fit inside the bandages without making a bulge - but not on this one.'
'So it's a forgery?'
'It looks like a mummy portrait otherwise, though, doesn't it?'
'Is it genuine?'
'I haven't tested it.'
'But if it's encaustic—'
'Let me show you something I think you'll like. If you rub the encaustic with a cloth, the wax heats up so that the flesh seems almost to glow. Try it.'
Malloy took the sleeve of his sweatshirt and rubbed it, seeing the effect after a few seconds.
'Feel it,' she said.
He touched the paint and felt the warmth of it and smiled. 'That's amazing!'
'Almost like a living being, isn't it? Come on, let's find a shirt and get you on your way. Rene is not very happy at the moment and I think it might be a good idea not to push our luck with him.'
'Are you sure—'
'I owe you this for your help with the bankers, Thomas.'
'I made a telephone call. Not exactly high risk.'
'It was a lot more than that and you know it. You trusted me - and that made all the difference.'
As he was leaving, Malloy told the contessa, 'If something happens to me—'
She touched his lips with the tips of her fingers, a gesture that was too intimate for friends, but she did not pull back or seem flustered by her sudden show of affection. Instead, she held him with her gaze - as a lover might. 'Your eyes are open now, Thomas. You'll be fine.'
Zürich
Ethan found a cell phone in the glove compartment and tried to call Kate but got no answer. For several minutes, he focused on getting out of Zürich and planning his drive south. Sobrio was a mountain village perched over the Levantine Valley. The autobahn cut through it. Otherwise, it was a perfect wilderness dotted with tiny, ancient villages. It was two to two and a half hours from Zürich, depending on the traffic in the tunnels. The problem was that Ethan wasn't even sure if he should drive down there. He wasn't sure what he should do. He tried her number again, then Roland's cell phone. When neither answered, Ethan decided that Corbeau had moved against all three of them at the same moment. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became. There was no point in driving south. Kate was gone, escaped into the mountains ... or dead.
That thought was unbearable and, almost reflexively, he tried her number again. The phone rang several times before her message service answered. She could have run, he thought with a thrill of hope, even knowing he was deluding himself. But it was possible! She could have dropped her phone getting away. He didn't have his phone, and he wasn't dead. Not yet, anyway.
He had to take the chance, had to drive to Sobrio. He found the autobahn at the edge of the city and started south. He checked his watch. He could be at Kate's cabin before sunset. And then? For the first time in their lives they had no backup plan. He tried Roland's cell phone, but Roland wasn't answering either. Ethan checked Lutz's cell phone directory. There were no names, only three cell phone numbers, all of them inside Switzerland. He tried the first two and got a phone out of service message. The next produced a pleasant chirp that was followed by someone speaking High German.
'And?' The speaker's tone, more than the word itself, suggested that he either didn't want to be interrupted or he expected a report without the usual pleasantries.
Ethan answered in High German with the same grimness. 'Brand is dead.'
'Problem?' The voice seemed to have a degree of curiosity. Phone contact was probably only necessary if something had gone wrong.
'He killed Zimmer and Kemp. I need to know what you want me to do.'
'You know what to do!'
'Did we get Kenyon?'
'They're flying her back now.'
Ethan muttered a satisfied, 'Good!' and disconnected. Pulling to the side of the road, he began to shake. Corbeau had Kate. Now what? He stared vacantly at the road signs, then at the cold grey sky. 'You know what to do,' he whispered.
Corbeau owned an office building in the industrial town of Zug. He also had a vacation house outside St. Moritz. The first was not isolated enough for his purposes. The second was not large enough. If he was 'flying her back' from Kate's cabin, Corbeau would be taking her in a helicopter to his villa on Lake Lucerne.
Ethan was an hour away.
Zürich
Malloy caught a bus down Ax Alp to Brienz. From there he took a train back to Lucerne and another to the Enge station in the suburbs of Zürich. He kept his hat and coat on and managed to read his Züricher Zeitung with pretended interest. He called Marcus Steiner from a tram.
'Change of plans.'
'Tell me about it. I have been at it all day cleaning up the mess.'
'I need a safe house.'
'Let me see what I can do. Where are you?'
'I'll be at the lake across from the Congress House in
a couple of minutes.'
'Max can be there in twenty. He's driving a black Mercedes.'
'Don't forget my computer and suitcase.'
Stepping off the tram at the Congress House, Malloy settled on a park bench amid some shrubbery and tried one more time to work out just what had gone wrong. Marcus, he knew, was not involved. Had his friend wanted the painting Malloy would be dead. Jane was a different matter. With Jane the mission was always more important than the personnel involved in it. That was understood from the opening gambit and it was something every field operative faced at some point. Sometimes it meant she didn't tell you everything. In this instance it was possible she was playing a game he did not understand. Possible, but not likely.
Charlie Winger made even less sense. Like Jane, if he wanted the painting, he probably would have worked things differently. Certainly his long-standing friendship with Bob Whitefield argued his innocence, even if he did not get along with Malloy. Whitefield was extraneous to the mission, an insurance policy against the long odds of Swiss Customs discovering the painting as it was being smuggled out of the country. Unless Whitefield was the reason for the attack.
A lot had changed since Malloy had worked inside Langley. Whitefield, for one thing, was more independent than when he first moved to Paris. But independent bureau chiefs, like freewheeling operatives, tended to be reassigned or forced into early retirement. As his superior, Charlie had no reason to want Bob Whitefield dead, not when a transfer was easy enough. Besides, this was about the painting. It had value. To people like North, Richland, and Starr it was priceless. The painting was at the centre of this. The people moving it were irrelevant.
Stateside a handful of people knew about J. W. Richland's favour. Of those no one at all knew when Malloy had intended to arrive at the Zürich airport. Whitefield had irritated Malloy as his supervisor, but nothing about the station chief of the Paris bureau had ever indicated Whitefield's lack of experience. He would have kept information concerning the rendezvous with Malloy to himself. That meant the only way someone else could have known about it was by an audio surveillance of Malloy's room when Malloy and Whitehead met and arranged the exchange. That was only possible if someone knew Malloy and Whitefield were involved. How had anyone anticipated Malloy would run the operation?
There were, as far as he could see, only two possibilities. Someone inside the agency had leaked the information to a third party or one of the buyers had said something. Agency personnel might sell information for the right price, but that kind of betrayal took time. Turning hard-core intelligence officers with the temptation of a quick buck just wasn't possible. In such a situation the approach was everything. A good approach took months, even years. There had to be a level of trust - like that which he had established with Claudia de Medici or Marcus Steiner. Given the nature of this job that wasn't really plausible. Mentioning Malloy's name to someone, on the other hand, was an amateur's mistake, what Malloy would expect from the ebullient J. W. Richland.
A black Mercedes appeared in the distance, its turn signal flashing, and Malloy walked to the sidewalk. 'Thanks for the help this morning,' he said in English as he slipped into the car.
Max shrugged his shoulders indifferently. 'That is what I was there for.'
'How did you avoid the cops, anyway?'
Max pulled out a detective's shield from his shirt pocket, 'Not too hard.'
Malloy laughed quietly.
'The story,' Max explained, 'is that terrorists assassinated a US diplomat. Swiss police responded with deadly force: five terrorists dead, one Zürich detective up for commendation. There is another Glock in the glove compartment, by the way. Why don't you take it, and I'll take yours. Marcus can substitute it this afternoon for the one I turned over to him as evidence. If we don't, my report isn't going to convince anyone.'
Malloy exchanged weapons, careful to clean his prints away on the gun he gave Max. 'What about the witnesses? They going to create any problems?'
'Both people who got a look at you thought you were one of the bad guys.'
'Have you talked with the Americans?'
'Somebody has. They turned up maybe thirty-to-forty minutes after the shooting.'
'Anybody looking for me?'
Max smiled, kicking up his shoulder. 'The friends of the dead guys, I expect.'
Approaching Bellevue Plaza, traffic came to a standstill. 'Fire,' he remarked miserably. 'Some bookstore got lit-up at lunchtime and traffic is backed up around the lake.'
Malloy studied the source of the black smoke for a minute. 'Brand Books?'
'You know it?'
'Best shop in town for English books.'
'Not anymore.'
A meeting with Starr and North Sunday evening and his shop burning to the ground two days later: that wasn't a coincidence. That was a chain of evidence. Brand was involved somehow. He just didn't know how.
'Did Marcus have any trouble finding me a safe house?'
'He said you didn't give him much time.'
'That doesn't sound good.'
Max's dark, stolid features broke into a crooked smile. 'It depends on your point of view, I suppose. In my opinion, a whorehouse has some real advantages.'
CHAPTER SEVEN
Zürich
October 10, 2006.
There are two districts in the old town of Zürich. Some would say two Zürichs. One offers an elegant mix of fashion and finance. At the centre is Zürich's Bahnhofstrasse, a promenade of cafes and sumptuous shops where window displays routinely offer fifty thousand dollar watches and necklaces so richly encrusted in jewels it would seem only royalty could wear them without blushing. The people who crowd this street are all business. They work here, and though they dress fashionably, they hardly seem to notice the golden temptations virtually within their reach. One finds of course the occasional tourist, dressed badly and wandering along the broad walkways with as little purpose as the pigeons, but mostly the crowd is young, urban, and upscale: the local elite, a pleasant mix of nationalities and languages and even colour.
Across the Limmat under the Gross Munster lies a bohemian Zürich. The buildings here are often three or four hundred years old. Gargoyles are standard fare. The alleys are paved with cobblestone and twist about in medieval whimsy. This is the part of town where one finds rare books, old paintings, antique glass and porcelain. Here, perfectly polished tables are frequently as old as the French Revolution and shopkeepers look more like Oxford dons than merchants in a hurry to move their property.
There is a degree of prosperity in this second Zürich that is astonishing, especially as the quarter makes an open display of strip clubs, blue movies, and an active population of prostitutes and addicts. It is an interesting place by day, hardly dangerous and not really so racy that you would notice the decadence if you kept your gaze straight ahead. But as the sun begins to set it becomes a different world.
Max dropped Malloy off in the heart of this district with instructions for where he was to go and what he should say. Malloy walked only a few blocks before he slipped into a small, ugly little tavern with no name. His jacket had the flavor of a working-class east European, so he should have fit in, but his suitcase and computer gave him away. The moment he stepped through the door everyone in the room stopped talking and stared at him.
'I hope you're in the right place,' a prostitute murmured in High German.
Malloy pushed through the crowd without answering and ordered a bottle of beer from a sullen bartender. Dropping twenty francs on the bar when his beer arrived, he said in Swiss German, 'Alexa working this afternoon?'
The bartender's eyes focused on Malloy briefly and then shifted toward the stairway at the back of the room. 'Alexa' was in.
The doors to three of the four rooms at the top of the stairs were closed. Hasan Barzani waited inside the fourth room. An AK-47 lay across the bed. Barzani was a tall man with a large square head and deep-set black eyes. He dressed like a workman in ill-fitting jeans, scarred b
oots, and a cheap leather jacket, even though he was worth over eighty million dollars. His method for earning his fortune was time-honoured and ugly: he sold the bodies of women, he stole the property of the middle-class and he murdered anyone foolish enough to stand in his way. Like every wealthy man Malloy had ever known, Barzani made no apologies for the way he had earned his money. Given the chance he would even indulge himself in justifications. He took care of people. He paid salaries to the families whose husbands and sons had once been free men and now sat quietly in prison. He had wealth, yes, but he had responsibilities as well!
All of which was true. What Barzani did not have was risk. Not for many years now. He was insulated from the crime he committed. He ran managers who ran networks. He owned corporations. He consulted lawyers. He even saw his own personal banker once a week. Barzani had started life the hard way, but he was not a criminal anymore. No, straight-faced he would tell you he was a businessman. And when people died, as people sometimes did, well, it was a tough business.
But he was nothing if not loyal and, for Malloy, Hasan Barzani came back to the streets. Malloy after all had not only financed him when he was nothing more than a petty crook with dubious connections to the major criminal organizations behind the Iron Curtain, he had also taught the giant how to avoid what had become an embarrassingly long and intimate involvement with the police of Zürich. In return for this, in the beginning at least, Barzani really hadn't very much to give. Most of what he heard was outdated or simply incorrect. Malloy hadn't complained. He took what Barzani gave him and spent lavishly for it.
In time his patience had paid off. Barzani became an important man in Zürich with connections that reached all the way to Moscow. Weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Barzani reported that things were changing, travel restrictions being lifted. The ubiquitous stream of East Germans trying to break out through the Austrian border had turned into an exodus. When he talked about Russia, he described the growing decadence, crumbling social institutions, and the kind of political awareness and concern that in any other country would have spelled revolution. Some of what he told Malloy Langley had flatly rejected as bad intelligence, either wishful thinking or an agent passing along what he thought his handler wanted to hear. For a time, even Malloy had begun to wonder, but once the wall broke, it became clear that Barzani was extremely well connected. In the early nineties while other field operatives were sending disturbing reports about what was becoming known as the Russian mafia, Malloy was providing names and job descriptions.