‘Sounds all right to me,’ said Giora while the other two shook their heads. ‘But what I could do with now is another pitcher of wine.’
‘Take my advice and don’t,’ said Josephus. ‘If you drink too much and fall asleep during Nero’s performance this evening he’ll have you killed on the spot. He does it to Roman citizens so he wouldn’t think twice about doing it to any of us.’
‘From what I’ve heard, after an hour of his wailing, death would be a merciful release,’ said Giora.
Chapter Sixteen
‘Nervous?’ Hayek asked Flora as they waited in the arrivals area of terminal five at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. It was her first outing as Lavinia Crump and although there was no risk involved, she still felt a frisson of excitement.
‘A little I suppose. Is it that obvious?’
‘It is to me,’ he replied.
‘And I thought I was doing a good job of hiding it,’ she said with a look of disappointment on her face.
‘You are, but you’re acting just a little over-excited and that’s what gives you away.’ Seeing her expression he continued. ‘But if I didn’t know you and hadn’t been working with you, then I’d never know.’
‘That’s a relief,’ she said, allowing herself a brief smile. Lavinia Crump was hard, cynical and calculating she kept telling herself, so no outward displays of emotion. Try to remember your training
The status for the United Airlines flight changed to “Arrivato” on the screen above them. ‘OK, I’m going outside for a smoke and then you’ll find me over there.’ He pointed towards an area round the exit from customs where a group of drivers were clustered, each holding a sign with the name of the people they were waiting for. ‘Just remember the brief and you’ll be fine.’
‘But what if I don’t recognise him?’ asked Flora.
He put his hand on her shoulder. It was the first time he’d touched her but it felt reassuring rather than over-familiar. ‘You’ve picked him out of every picture we’ve shown you and don’t worry, he knows what Lavinia looks like too. You’re both pros, so just relax.’ As he walked away, Flora allowed herself a little flush of pride. She knew he was only saying it to boost her confidence, but being called a pro by someone like Hayek felt good – it was just like old times with The Firm. For now the grown-up game of charades was still fun and the bad memories were banished from her mind.
As the first passengers started to file through, Flora scrutinised each male face in detail, looking for Cohen in the crowd. The first man she identified as a possible candidate glared back at her with a look that said “who are you staring at?” Relax, she told herself, or you’ll look like a stalker: you’re Lavinia meeting her client – just relax.
When he did arrive, there was no doubt: mid-thirties, well-cut blue wool suit, tall, athletic build and close-cropped dark hair that didn’t really suit him she thought. He spotted her too, gave an almost imperceptible nod and approached, his well-defined features lighting up into a broad grin. ‘Lavinia,’ he shouted, hurrying towards her with one arm outstretched, the other towing his carry-on bag.
Flora’s stage fright vanished and her old training kicked in as she assumed the mantle of the frosty Miss Crump. She gave what she hoped was a suitably icy smile and replied, ‘Good morning, Mr Grossman. I trust you had a pleasant flight.’
‘Yeah, not too bad thanks,’ he replied: New York overlaid with an Israeli accent. ‘Hey, it’s great to see you again, come here.’ He tried to give her a kiss on each cheek but she kept him firmly at arm’s length.
‘Please, Mr Grossman, I’ve told you before, let’s be businesslike,’ she said, making sure other bystanders heard and holding out a hand to shake his. ‘Now if you’ll kindly follow me, your car is here.’ She led him towards the scrum of drivers where they found Hayek, standing under a “no smoking sign” with a cigarette in his mouth, wearing a battered peaked cap and holding up a sign saying “Sig Grozemann”. Flora permitted Lavinia her second smile of the morning.
As Hayek drove down the exit ramp. Cohen loosened his tie and sat back in the seat with a contented sigh. ‘Damn, you’ve no idea how much I hate wearing those things,’ he said to Flora. ‘Sorry, didn’t really introduce myself back there. Ben Cohen, FBI Art Crime Team.’
‘And I’m Flora Kemble,’ she said, returning his smile.
Cohen nodded approvingly. ‘Mike said you were good – he wasn’t kidding. Lavinia’s a ball-breaker, isn’t she? Please, no offence,’ he added hastily.
Flora laughed. ‘None taken, Mr Cohen.’
‘Ben, please,’ he said.
‘Of course, Ben. Just give me time to get out of character.’ She felt at ease in his company and her fears of being teamed up with an over-aggressive, TV stereotype bad cop disappeared as they chatted in the back of the car.
Hayek headed through the traffic towards the US Embassy – a collection of four-storey buildings painted in a shade of pink that reminded Flora of artificial food colouring on an over-sweet cake – before pulling up in front of the first set of sliding metal gates which protected the entrance to the compound. At the car’s approach, the orange lights on top of the centre post began to flash and the gates slid noiselessly aside, allowing the car to approach the picket post, closing behind it as they advanced. Four CCTV cameras tracked their progress as the US Marine Security Guard corporal, invisible behind a pane of reinforced smoked glass, cleared them through the final series of protection. The second set of gates opened and two retractable metal barriers folded down flush with the roadway.
Once inside the compound Hayek led the way, swiping his identity card against the readers to open the doors as they went. Soon, Flora, was completely lost. Taking the elevator to the third floor, he showed them through a heavy sliding door into a small entrance hall. They stopped. Hayek picked up a tray and pointed to a sign on the wall. It read: “No recording devices, electronic apparatus, cameras, cell-phones, pagers or similar allowed beyond this point.” Leaving their mobile phones in the tray, they continued into a lecture theatre, with tiered rows of tip-up seats and at the front, a low stage with a lectern bearing the seal of the United States. Flora noticed the room had no windows and that their voices sounded strangely muffled. Hayek spotted the puzzled expression on her face. ‘Don’t worry, it’s the sound-proofing and anti-vibration dampers – they stop the structure of the building transmitting anything we say to the outside walls. Thirty years ago, both we and the Soviets could pick up speech from the vibrations of window glass, but the technology has moved on a bit from there, so best to be careful.’
He showed Flora to a seat in the front row. What have I got myself into? she wondered for about the thousandth time in the last few days. Hayek’s voice called her back to reality ‘Special Agent Cohen’s going to give us an update,’ he said, leaving him to plug his laptop into the audio-visual system which after the customary false starts and head-scratching, finally responded to a reboot and sprang into life, displaying the FBI Art Crime Team’s logo on the screen.
‘First of all,’ said Cohen, ‘I’d like to add my thanks, Flora, for agreeing to help us. The people we’re up against are pros and we’re only going to get one chance to make them think we’re fellow collectors. They’re going to be skittish as hell and if they see or hear anything that doesn’t ring right, we’ll never see them again. That’s where you come in.’ To Flora, his pale grey eyes seemed to exude an infectious confidence.
‘I do?’ she said, playing the innocent.
‘Sure you do. You’ve obviously got grade-A pain in the ass Lavinia Crump nailed down and it’s her presence that’s going to convince these guys that I’m the real deal, because if they start quizzing me on the stuff I’m supposed to be collecting then maybe I’d be able to snow them for five minutes, certainly no more, so we’re relying on you to make us look like the real deal and to stop Grossman making a schmuck of himself in public. Plus, from what Mike tells me and from what I’ve seen already, I can tell you’re a natural.
’
I only wish I felt as sure about that as you two do, thought Flora, looking up at him with what she hoped was an expression of steely determination.
Cohen continued. Next on the screen was a mug-shot of the SUV driver who’d been arrested in Alabama. ‘We’ve got a name for this character but he’s not co-operating. Luckily for us, he was carrying a credit card which led in a roundabout way to this guy here.’ He flicked to the next screen which showed a intense looking man, aged forty three and called Giovanni Luzzo according to the information board in front of his chest. ‘We have another name: a black guy who’s called Raymond but who doesn’t seem to match any known offender profile.’
‘Any form on Luzzo?’ asked Hayek.
‘Sure. The usual lowlife CV. String of felonies long as your arm: handling stolen goods, robbery with violence, possession with intent to supply – we’re pretty sure he’s got links to the mob – and it’s not the first time his name has come up in connection with stolen archaeological finds.’
‘Anything involving works of art or first-century documents?’
Cohen checked down the printed sheet on the lectern in front of him. ‘Arrested in possession of stolen goods – whole bunch of twenty-sixth dynasty Egyptian stuff that went missing from the Royal Ontario Museum a couple of years back – but released for lack of evidence. Said he’d found it under a hedge and was about to hand it in. As if.’
‘What was he carrying?’
‘Oh, funerary items from a pharaoh called…hell, how do you pronounce this guy? P-sam something –’
‘Psamtik probably,’ said Flora, happy to be back on home turf. ‘There were two pharaohs of that name in the twenty sixth dynasty and according to Herodotus the first one did the first ever recorded experiments in linguistics,’
Cohen shot a worried glance at Hayek as if to say “what the hell have we got here?” Flora spotted the unspoken exchange, and, nervous that she’d said too much, sunk down in her seat and stared up at the screen, hoping she wasn’t about to make a fool of herself and that her former training would see her through.
‘So if the driver is taking the fifth how’ve you managed to link these guys to events in Pompeii?’ asked Hayek.
Cohen moved on to the next photograph. ‘Just coming to that,’ he said, as a picture of a Ford SUV filled the screen. ‘The vehicle was rented from Hertz using a cloned credit card which was found on the driver. We managed to trace it back to this guy here.’ The screen now showed a much younger man with long unwashed hair and a straggly goatee beard. ‘Now the good thing about him is that as soon as we threatened him with a grand jury he started singing his dear little heart out.’
‘What are you holding him on?’ asked Hayek.
‘Plenty. He was their IT guy and a specialist in internet fraud as well as being a one-man credit card and driver’s licence factory. He’s already given us three other names but they’ve gone to ground. The good news is he’s also given us an insight to what’s going on with the haul from Pompeii.’
‘Which is?’
‘That it’s all in the US of A as we speak,’ said Cohen. ‘Every last scrap of it.’
Hayek frowned. ‘That’s one big haystack to find a needle in. Any idea where?’
‘Not yet, but what we do know is that there was a screw-up. The guys in Italy had specific instructions about what to steal but they exceeded their remit. Now here’s where we got lucky. The Italian team were paid off but when it came to the US end of the chain, there was a bust-up with the client. Luzzo’s people wanted paying for everything but the client only wanted to pay for the stuff he asked for and there was a row. That’s all we know because the geek wasn’t party to the full details.’
‘Can you be sure of that?’ asked Hayek, looking up from his notes.
‘Pretty sure. He’s had no dealings with the law before and now he’s got the FBI all over him. We’ve also told him what’ll happen to his pretty young ass if he goes to prison – he’s in Arthur Kill Correctional Facility on Staten Island right now.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘The usual,’ said Cohen with a casual shrug. ‘Medium security joint which in English means rough as hell. Right now we got ourselves one scared young white man – our biggest problem has been trying to get him to shut up.’
Hayek winced. ‘You gonna leave him there?’
‘Nah. They’re moving him to someplace upstate within the Incarcerated Witness Scheme until we need him to testify. He says Raymond and Luzzo have been trying to sell the stuff the client didn’t want in order to cover their losses.’
‘But we still don’t know who the end client is?’
‘We’ve got a name, sure to be an alias, and a hotmail address that was set up from behind a proxy server anyway, so we’re none the wiser.’
‘How’d you get the driver?’ Hayek asked.
Cohen laughed and shook his head. ‘The handover was supposed to go down in a church of all places but like I said, there was a screw-up. We got good footage of the driver from a security camera at a gas station where he used the same cloned credit card to pay on two days running. The same evening the county police got a call from a pastor reporting vandalism at his church – told them he’s been keeping an eye on the place at nights to deter kids and Klan crazies from tagging the place. State Troopers pulled the SUV over for a random check, didn’t like what the driver had to say and because of the call they held on to him.’
‘And when they got to the church they found the page from the Antiquities?’
‘Correct,’ said Cohen. ‘Along with a can that had been used to spray “KKK” on the church wall. We’ve got good prints and DNA from it too.’
Hayek frowned. ‘I still don’t see how this hooks up.’
‘I’m not sure I do yet and if the collector from Chicago hadn’t told us that someone was out there trying to sell document fragments, we’d never have connected Luzzo with the case.
Trouble is, the only hard evidence we’ve got is the cloned credit card: we can’t hold him on that, and we still can’t prove he was involved with what was found at the church, let alone the body –’
‘Hold on a minute,’ said Hayek. ‘You never mentioned a body.’
‘I was coming to that. The following morning a farmer in his pickup saw what he thought was a pile of clothes on the roadside, about a couple of miles from the church, stopped to take a look and it turned out to be a dead body.’
‘Anyone we should be interested in?’ asked Hayek.
‘Not sure. Police surgeon puts the time of death at around midnight – about the same time the driver was arrested so he’s in the clear. But here’s where it gets weird; the deceased was a local college kid from William Sunday University who’d collected a nine millimetre round, probably from a Glock.’
‘Not your typical profile, I’ll admit. Any ideas?’
‘None. Autopsy showed he’d been shot in the leg from behind. The round severed his femoral artery and he bled to death. Folks at the college are as puzzled as we are – straight-A student, devout, no known enemies, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke. Like you said, he doesn’t fit the profile for a murder victim.’
‘Couple of miles away you say? Could be a coincidence.’
Cohen shrugged. ‘Could be but gut says something went wrong with the handover and the kid was involved. Local cops think maybe he walked into it by accident.’
Hayek’s eyebrows rose into a sceptical arch. ‘Walked into it by accident? At a rural church in the middle of the night? I know William Sunday’s a Bible college, but hey, there are limits. Even God deserves a night off.’
‘Trouble is, we’re screwed,’ said Cohen. ‘We can’t tie Luzzo or this Raymond guy to the shooting, nor to the handover. The vehicle was a rental so the interior’s going to be contaminated with the DNA of every John Doe who’s sat in it. There’s powder residue too, but nothing that can be linked to the college kid’s shooting. We can throw a credit card misdemeanour at the driver,
but that’s it and for now he’s not saying anything.’
Hayek chewed the end of his pen as he mulled over what he’d just heard. ‘So how do you propose to flush the buyer out if he’s got everything he wants?’
‘That’s the good news. He hasn’t – least we don’t think so. According to the kid, Luzzo’s boys are holding on to a bunch of the finds as a bargaining chip. I reckon negotiations are probably still going on.’
‘Interesting,’ said Hayek. ‘So all we need to do is find Mr Luzzo and see who he’s talking to these days.’
‘Yeah, that’s what we thought. The IT punk wasn’t sure but he seems to think they kept at least one Josephus codex section and all the copper sheets.’
Flora looked up from her notes again. ‘Ben, can I ask a question?’
‘Sure, Flora, go right ahead.’
‘Did this kid, the IT geek or whatever his name is, seem to have any idea of what the copper sheets were for?’
He shrugged. ‘Dunno to be honest. We never asked him.’
‘Well far be it from me to tell you how to do your job,’ she replied. ‘And please tell me to shut up if you’ve already thought of this, but I think the grids could be your best way of smoking the buyer out of hiding.’
Another rapid glance flashed between the two men before Cohen answered. ‘You’re going to have to help us here, Flora. We know they’re in the form of Polybius squares – an early form of Vigenère cipher – and that you’ve proved they can be used to decipher some of The Devil’s Codex, but that’s all.’
‘That’s really all there is to know,’ she replied. ‘The big problem for whoever’s buying, is that without the copper sheets, they can’t decipher the texts. If they can’t decipher them they can’t validate them and the market’s knee-deep in forgeries. Now some of the fragments from the dig have plain text on one side of the page and the exact equivalent, word-for-word, in encrypted format on the other. However, at least forty percent of what Moretti’s people found is encrypted and there’s no equivalent plain text. So no copper sheets, no way of telling whether the codices are the ones the buyer wants.’
The Seven Stars Page 17