by James Becker
‘No, no, please don’t. I’ll tell you.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘I don’t know his name. He called me a few days ago.’
‘Oh,’ Bronson said, ‘you advertise your services, do you? In the Yellow Pages, are you, under “Killers for hire”? Something like that?’
The man shook his head.
‘People know how and where to find me. Anyway, he called. Cash job. Five grand, two up front, two on completion, with an extra grand as a bonus. He gave me all the details – work address, home address and stuff – but he didn’t tell me why he wanted her dead. They never do. I was supposed to do it in her flat, make it look like a burglary, an accidental death, if I could manage it, but yesterday he called me again, said he’d changed his mind and it had to be done immediately. That was the reason for the bonus.’
Bronson nodded, even more grateful than before that Angela had decided to spend the previous night in his house instead of at Ealing.
‘That’s all I know. Now get me a bloody doctor.’
‘A deal’s a deal,’ Bronson replied, standing up as the next Northern Line train pulled into the station. ‘I’ll make the call as soon I get out of here.’
52
Angela was waiting for Bronson in the open area of Charing Cross mainline station opposite platforms 5 and 6, from which trains down into the heart of Kent, to Orpington, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells, normally departed.
‘What the hell was all that about?’ she demanded, as she walked up to him.
‘That,’ Bronson replied, making sure nobody else could hear what he was saying, ‘was the long arm of whoever organized the killings in Cairo reaching out to you. He grabbed hold of you and was going to push you under the train. I could see what he intended to do, and so I stopped him.’
Angela’s face changed, her complexion turning paler as she absorbed this unwelcome news.
‘I know he got hold of me, but I didn’t know why. At first I thought it was you, just messing about. Are you sure?’
Bronson nodded.
‘I had a chat with him after you’d gone. He told me he’d been offered five thousand pounds to make sure you didn’t see tomorrow.’
From somewhere, Angela summoned a weak smile.
‘Only five thousand? So I’m not exactly in the big league, then.’ She paused for a moment, then asked: ‘Do you think he was the only one after me?’
‘Probably. These people normally work alone. For the moment I think you’re quite safe. And in any case, tomorrow we’ll be in Spain.’
He pulled out the mobile phone he’d taken from the man at the station and checked the log. As he’d expected, neither received nor called numbers were listed, the mark of a man who’s either very careful or very paranoid. Or both. Bronson supposed that the techies might be able to find out more about where the phone had been and which numbers it had been in contact with, but they were all likely to be untraceable pay-as-you-go numbers – and in any case, they didn’t have the time to find out.
He dialled triple nine and, when the operator asked him which service he required, he said ‘ambulance’. When he was connected, he reported that he had seen a man collapse at the Tottenham Court Road Underground station. He thought he might be drunk.
53
‘You can call our man in Cairo and tell him that the target’s in Madrid,’ the Englishman said the moment Morini answered his call, ‘so they can stop looking for him anywhere in Egypt.’
‘How did you find out?’ the Italian asked.
‘He used a credit card to make a purchase at a shop in the city, and we traced him from that.’
‘That sounds as if it might have been a big mistake,’ Morini suggested.
‘I’m not so sure. What he did might have been deliberate, or perhaps he decided that staying hidden didn’t matter any longer. We think he could be intending to go public with the relic quite soon, in which case the whole world will know where he is. And what he’s trying to sell.’
‘Then I hope you can locate him before that happens.’
54
The Englishman had not been a popular choice within the ranks of P2 when he was selected as its new head, not least because he wasn’t Italian and didn’t speak the language. But he’d taken the reins just over three years earlier when an internal revolt, a battle for control, had almost wrecked the lodge, a revolt that he had resolved in one short afternoon. He’d travelled out to Milan unannounced and personally executed the five ringleaders with his bare hands, using a baseball bat on four of the men and a knife on the last one, the man who’d started it. He had taken a long time to die and it had been very messy.
After that, nobody had ever questioned his competence or fitness for the job, and certainly not his ruthlessness.
Having completed the call to the cleric in Rome, the Englishman opened his small briefcase on the café table in front of him and took out the list of names and numbers, the annex to the document he had been instrumental in compiling. He needed to decide who would be the most appropriate person for him to activate in Spain’s capital city.
What he required now was not just some hired thug who would be able to kill Anum Husani – that would be easy enough – but somebody who could first track down the man and recover the relic, and then eliminate Husani. And that, the Englishman knew, wouldn’t be easy; not in a city of well over three million people, with more than double that number in the entire metropolitan area, and especially not when the only clues he had to go on were two credit card transactions that had taken place the previous day. Not to mention that Husani could have taken a flight out of Madrid by now, or possibly even out of Spain.
But, actually, he doubted that was the case. He believed that Husani had chosen Madrid deliberately. It was the third largest city in Western Europe, after London and Berlin, and had the largest metropolitan area after London and Paris. And because of Spain’s Moorish heritage, people bearing an Arabic appearance were not an unusual sight there.
And there were probably other reasons as well. If he was trying to sell the parchment – and that was the only scenario that made any sense – then the most likely potential buyers would be the museums and well-heeled collectors of Western Europe.
What the Englishman was expecting, at almost any moment, was some kind of a news item or press release on the Internet that would alert potential purchasers to the existence of the relic. Tracing the origin of such a posting probably wouldn’t help to track down Husani, because if he had any sense he would travel somewhere in the city that was well away from the hotel where he was staying and use a cyber café there. And so far Husani had proved that he certainly wasn’t stupid.
But if he were to sell the relic, his press release, or whatever medium he decided he was going to use to describe the parchment, would have to include some means of communicating with him – an email address, a mobile phone number, or even a physical location, probably in a public place – and once that information was available, it would only be a matter of time before they found him.
55
The heat hit them as they stepped out of the terminal building in Madrid, a solid wall of warm and muggy air that seemed to suck sweat straight out of every pore on their bodies.
‘God,’ Angela muttered. ‘Please tell me you got a car with air conditioning.’
‘You’re damn right I did. I’ve driven in Spain before, and you need air con here even in the winter.
‘There it is,’ Bronson added, as the lights on a light-blue León began to flash in response to him pressing the button on the car key.
They walked over to the car and placed their bags and laptops in the boot, before setting off through the Madrid streets.
The Spanish city looked very much like any other major city in Europe, a mixture of wide avenues and narrow streets, large and imposing public buildings and rundown apartment blocks. The worldwide economic recession had had a major effect upon the economy of Spain, and they were not surprised t
o see that quite a number of shops and other businesses were boarded up. But there were still a lot of cars on the road, most of them fairly new and many of them quite expensive makes. Clearly there were still some people in the country who were making money.
‘Of course,’ Angela pointed out as they drove through the streets, ‘Spain has always had a very prosperous black economy. I think the Spanish regard income tax, and most other taxes, in fact, as an optional expense, and if there’s any practical way of hiding funds from business transactions from the Hacienda – that’s the Spanish taxman – then they would do it. They call it mattress money, because under the mattress is the one reasonably safe place where they can hide it.’
‘Then it’s not too surprising that the Spanish economy is in such a deep hole at the moment, is it? I read one report that said about five million new homes had been built in Spain that nobody wanted, because the Spanish population is falling, not increasing, and it now probably stands at less than forty-five million. It’s a bloody shambles!’
The hotel was located in a narrow side street close to a small square. It had its own dedicated parking area on the two underground levels beneath the building. Bronson drove down the ramp and easily found a vacant space, then he and Angela took the lift to the reception on the ground floor.
Their room was on the third floor, overlooking the street. It didn’t take them long to put away the few clothes they’d brought with them, and as soon as they’d done that, Bronson suggested going downstairs for a drink.
‘Bring your laptop,’ he said. ‘We can probably log in to the hotel Wi-Fi system in the bar, and then you can check your emails and see if that guy has come back to you. Here,’ he added, taking hold of her computer bag. ‘I’ll carry it for you.’
Angela looked at him suspiciously.
‘You’re being particularly nice to me at the moment. What do you want?’
‘Only your body, much later, if you’re willing to share it.’
Angela looked at the large double bed which dominated the room.
‘Well, we’ll obviously be sleeping together because there’s only one bed, but I haven’t yet decided whether or not we’ll be sleeping together. It all depends on how well you treat me and where we go out to eat tonight. And I don’t want bloody paella.’
56
Bronson ordered ‘Dos cafés con leche’ from the slim, dark-haired young man standing behind the bar. He immediately replied in fluent English: ‘Two white coffees coming right up.’
Bronson guessed he must look very English. Either that or the accent of his rudimentary Spanish had given him away.
‘You’ve got Wi-Fi here?’ Bronson asked the barman, abandoning all attempts at conversing in Spanish, as he placed two large cups on a machine.
The young man nodded, reached into a drawer and took out a piece of paper. He passed it over to Bronson and pointed at the letters and numbers printed on it.
Bronson passed the paper to Angela, then returned to the bar, where the barista was putting a couple of paper wraps of sugar on each saucer.
‘Your English is very good,’ he said.
‘It should be. My father’s English but my mother is Spanish, so I grew up speaking both languages. Don’t pay for this,’ he went on as Bronson pulled out his wallet. ‘I’ll just stick it on your room bill. Much easier for all of us.’
‘Do you work here full time?’ he asked, then gave him the room number.
The young man shook his head.
‘Not really. I’m trying to decide what to do with my life, and while I’m making up my mind my father thought working here would be a good idea. He owns the hotel, you see, so I’m just cheap labour, I suppose. Enjoy your coffee.’
Bronson carried the cups over to the table where Angela was sitting, the laptop open in front of her.
‘Anything from our mystery seller?’ he asked.
‘Nothing yet,’ she said, sounding downcast.
‘I hope this doesn’t mean we’ve wasted our time flying out here,’ Bronson said. ‘Or that your anonymous correspondent has met with some kind of an accident, like walking into the path of a bullet.’
‘Don’t remind me,’ Angela said, with a slight shudder. ‘What did you do with that man’s gun, by the way? Will you hand it in when we get back to Britain?’
‘Probably not. I’ve never understood why New Labour thought it was such a brilliant plan to disarm all sections of the British population apart from the criminals. In my opinion, having the odd unlicensed weapon about the place is actually quite a good idea.’
Angela looked worried. ‘But if you get caught with it you’ll be in a lot of trouble.’
‘You’re quite right there, so I’ll just have to make sure I don’t get caught.’
Before Angela could reply, her computer emitted a musical tone and she turned back to look at the screen.
‘It’s him,’ she said excitedly, and clicked the touchpad to open the message.
‘What’s he said?’
‘He hasn’t said anything, actually. The only thing that’s in this email is an address of a website.’
She moved the mouse pointer over the underlined address and clicked the button. Her browser opened almost immediately, and a couple of seconds after that she and Bronson were both staring at the contents of the website.
Bronson was the first to speak.
‘Well,’ he murmured, with a glance at Angela, ‘that’s a bit of a bugger, isn’t it?’
57
Bronson and Angela sat side by side and stared at the screen, their coffees forgotten beside them. What they were looking at wasn’t, to be honest, much of a website. The homepage had a simple title – ‘Ancient parchment for sale’ – and contained a single colour photograph of the relic itself. The second page contained slightly more in the way of illustrations, pictures which had clearly been cropped from those taken by Ali Mohammed. Each picture showed just a small section of the text which had been revealed by his sophisticated techniques.
The third page contained no pictures, and simply gave an email address – the same address that Angela had already used in communicating with the hitherto unidentified owner of the parchment – and a name. The mysterious owner was at last revealed to be a man called Anum Husani.
‘I don’t understand,’ Angela said. ‘The only thing this tells us that we didn’t know before is his name. I’ve already got copies of all these pictures, so why is he bothering to load them onto a website and then suggesting I view them?’
‘Let’s take another look at the email.’
Angela called it up again.
‘That’s what I thought he might have done,’ Bronson said, pointing at the top of the screen. ‘He didn’t just send this email to you. It looks as if he’s sent it to every museum in America and Western Europe. He created the website just to show people what he’s got for sale. He’s obviously trying to generate a kind of auction for the relic. Is that likely to happen?’
Angela shook her head.
‘That’s difficult to say, because there are two things he hasn’t mentioned. The first is what the text on the parchment actually says, so perhaps he doesn’t know. I certainly don’t, not fully. I doubt if any museum or collector would stump up much money without a full translation.’
‘And the other thing?’ Bronson asked.
‘In a word, provenance. A lot of museums won’t touch any object if they can’t establish full details of its history, because in the world of antiques and antiquities there are an awful lot of very accomplished counterfeiters. Some of them have managed to fool acknowledged experts in their fields, time and time again, like Tom Keating. He fooled almost everybody. He painted Old Masters, including Gainsborough, Renoir and Degas, as well as Samuel Palmer watercolours, and almost all of them were certified as genuine by art experts of the day.’
‘And nobody twigged?’
‘No. Or, at least, not for a long time, and they really should have been picked up right from the st
art, because Keating always left a clue in his forgeries, something so blatant that any competent art examiner should have detected it immediately.’
‘What sort of clues?’ Bronson asked.
‘Oh, he was quite fond of writing a vulgar remark in white lead on the canvas before he started painting. Obviously it would be invisible once the work was finished, but it would show up immediately with an X-ray. Or he would use a type of material in the painting that would simply have been unavailable to the genuine artist.’
‘I remember him now,’ Bronson said. ‘I think I saw something about him on television.’
Angela grinned at him.
‘You certainly did. Once he confessed to what he’d done, he had his own television series teaching people – believe it or not – how to paint like the Old Masters. He was a likeable old rogue.’
‘OK, this is all very interesting, but it doesn’t get us anywhere.’ Bronson knew that Angela could go on forever about one of her favourite topics. ‘Did the guy from the Cairo Museum know the provenance – where the parchment came from?’
‘If he did know, he didn’t tell me.’
‘So it’s possible that this relic was just found somewhere and has basically popped into existence now, and nobody has any idea where it’s been for the last two thousand years, or however old it is.’
‘That’s possible,’ Angela replied, ‘but I think – in fact, I’m certain – that somebody must have known exactly what the parchment is and where it’s been. The website we’re looking at is the only place where pictures of the relic have been posted, yet the first killing in Cairo happened almost a week ago.’
‘So somebody, somewhere, knew that the parchment had reappeared, and also how important it was,’ Bronson finished for her.
Angela nodded. ‘Exactly. And it looks to me as if this man Husani has realized that the best thing he can do to ensure his safety is to go public with details and photographs of the relic.’