The Geneva Deception

by James Twining

  ‘I wouldn’t say you were rude, sir.’ The words were out of her mouth before she even knew she was saying them.

  His smile faded. Salvatore looked faint.

  ‘What can you tell me about this place?’ he snapped, motioning at her to follow him over to the altar.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The Pantheon. Is there anything I should know about it? Anything that might tie it to where we found Ricci’s body last night?’

  She ran her hand through her hair, desperately trying to dredge up the highlights of some longforgotten lecture or text book.

  ‘It was built by Hadrian in about 125 AD, so there’s no obvious connection to Caesar, if that’s what you mean?’ she began with a shrug. ‘Then again, although it’s been a church since the seventh century, the Pantheon did used to be a pagan temple, just like the ones in the Area Sacra.’

  ‘Hardly conclusive,’ Gallo sniffed, patting his jacket down as if he was looking for cigarettes and eventually finding a packet of boiled sweets. ‘I’m trying to give up,’ he admitted as he popped one into his mouth. She noticed that he didn’t offer her one.

  ‘No,’ she agreed with a firm shake of her head.

  ‘Then what do you make of this?’

  At a flick of his wrist, two forensic officers rolled away the screens. A body was lying on the altar, naked from the waist up. His bearded face was turned towards them, eyes gaping open with shock. Two gleaming white shop mannequins were standing at his head – one small and hunched, the other taller – staring down at the corpse with cold, vacant expressions. Both were unclothed, with moulded blank features and no hair, although the smooth hump of their breasts marked them out as female.

  The taller mannequin had been carefully arranged so that her left hand was gripping the man’s hair and the right holding a short sword. The sword itself was embedded in a deep gash in the victim’s neck that had almost decapitated him. The blood had gushed from his wound, covering the altar and cascading to the floor where it had pooled and solidified into a brackish lake.

  It was a carefully arranged, almost ritualistic scene. And one that, for a reason Allegra couldn’t quite put her finger on, seemed strangely familiar to her.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Don’t you recognise him?’ Salvatore, looking surprised, had ventured forward to her side. ‘His brother’s always on TV. He looks just like him.’

  ‘Why, who’s his brother?’ she asked, wanting to look away and study the man’s tortured features at the same time.

  ‘Annibale Argento,’ Salvatore explained. ‘The Sicilian deputy. The stiff is his twin brother Gio, otherwise known as Giulio.’

  ‘Hannibal and Julius,’ Gallo nodded. ‘There’s your damn Caesar connection.’

  ‘What’s any of this got to do with me?’ she interrupted, wondering if she still had time to untangle herself from this mess before the media got wind of it.

  ‘We found this in his mouth -’

  Gallo held up a clear plastic evidence bag. She knew, almost without looking, what it contained.

  ELEVEN

  Amalfi Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas

  17th March – 11.02 p.m.

  Kezman’s private elevator opened on to a tennis court-sized room, rainbows cloaking the lush tropical gardens that could be glimpsed through the open windows where the floodlights shimmered through a permanent cooling mist.

  Glancing up, Tom could see that the soaring ceilings had been draped in what looked like black satin, three huge chandeliers flowering from within their luxuriant folds as if they were leaking glass. The only furniture, if you could call it that, was a 1926 Hispano-Suiza H6. Parked about twothirds of the way down, it was a mass of gleaming chrome and polished black metal, the wheel arches soaring up over the front wheels and then swooping gracefully down towards the running boards, two dinner plate-sized headlights perched at the end of a massive bonnet like dragon’s eyes.

  ‘You’re here. Good.’

  A man had come in off the balcony, a radio in one hand, a mobile phone in the other. Short and wiry, his olive skin was pockmarked by acne scars, his black hair shaved almost to his skull. Rather than blink, he seemed to grimace every few seconds, his face scrunching into a pained squint as if he had something in his eye.

  ‘Tom, this is Special Agent Carlos Ortiz.’ They shook hands as she introduced them. ‘I’ve borrowed him from my other case for a few days to help out.’

  ‘Welcome.’

  Ortiz’s expression was impenetrable, although Tom thought he glimpsed a tattoo just under his collar – the number fourteen in Roman numerals. Tom recognised it as a reference to the letter ‘N’, the fourteenth letter of the alphabet, and by repute to the Norteños, a coalition of Latino gangs from Northern California. Ortiz had clearly taken a difficult and rarely trodden path from the violent street corners of his youth to the FBI’s stiff-collared embrace.

  ‘I hope you’re half as good as she says you are,’ Ortiz sniffed. Tom glanced questioningly at Jennifer, who gave him an awkward shrug. ‘Did you get the envelope from the State Department?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She nodded. ‘Let’s talk about that later. How long have we got?’

  ‘It’s set for midnight so…just under an hour,’ he replied, checking his watch – a fake Rolex Oyster, Tom noted, its second hand advancing with a tell-tale staccato twitch rather than sweeping smoothly around the dial as a real one would.

  ‘Everyone’s already in place,’ Stokes added. ‘I got six agents on the floor at the tables and playing the slots, and another four on the front and rear doors. Metro and SWAT are holding back two blocks south.’

  ‘What about the money?’ Tom asked.

  ‘In the vault in two suitcases,’ Stokes reassured him. ‘Unmarked, non-sequential notes, just like they asked. They’ll bring it out when we’re ready.’

  ‘Let’s get you mike’d up.’

  Ortiz led Tom over to the car, which Tom suddenly realised had been turned into a desk, the seats ripped out and the roof and one side cut away and replaced with a black marble slab.

  ‘I guess rich people are always looking for new ways to spend their money, right?’ Ortiz winked.

  ‘Some just have more imagination than others,’ Tom agreed.

  Ortiz removed a small transmitter unit from the briefcase and, as Jennifer turned away with a smile, helped Tom fix it to his inner thigh, hiding the microphone under his shirt.

  ‘If anyone finds that, they’re looking for a date not a wire,’ Ortiz joked once he was happy that it was secure and working. He checked his watch again. ‘Let’s go. Kezman asked to see you downstairs before we hit the floor.’

  ‘Any reason we didn’t just meet down there in the first place?’ Jennifer asked with a frown.

  ‘He thought you might like the view.’

  They stepped back inside the elevator and again it headed down automatically, stopping at the mezzanine level, close to the entrance to the Amalfi’s private art gallery.

  ‘He suggested we wait for him inside,’ Ortiz said, nodding at the two security guards posted either side of the entrance as he walked past.

  The gallery consisted of a series of interlinked rooms containing maybe twenty or so paintings, as well as a number of small abstract sculptures on glass plinths. It was an impressive and expensively assembled collection, bringing to mind the recent newspaper headlines when Kezman had broken his own auction record for the highest amount ever paid for a painting. Tom’s eyes sought out the Picasso he’d bought on that occasion in amongst the works by Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Manet and Matisse.

  ‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Jennifer said in a low voice, echoing his own thoughts. ‘Although, I don’t know, it feels a bit…’

  ‘Soulless?’ Tom suggested.

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded slowly. ‘Soulless. Perhaps that’s it.’

  Tom’s sense was that Kezman had been less concerned with the paintings themselves than by who had painted them. To him these were trophi
es, specimens of famous names that he’d only bought so that he could tick them off his list, much as a big-game hunter might set out on safari intent on adding a zebra’s head to the mounted antelope horns and elephant tusks that already adorned his dining-room walls.

  ‘What do you know about him?’

  ‘He’s rich and he’s smart. In thirty years he’s gone from running a diner in Jersey to being the biggest player on the Strip.’

  ‘He buys a place that’s losing money, turns it around or knocks it down, and starts over,’ Stokes added, having been listening in. ‘As well as the Amalfi, he owns three other places in Vegas, two in Atlantic City and one in Macau.’

  ‘And he’s clean?’ Tom asked.

  ‘As anyone can be in this town,’ Stokes replied with a smile. ‘He mixes with a pretty colourful crowd, which always gets people talking, but so far he seems to check out.’

  ‘He used to collect cars, but art is his new passion now,’ Jennifer added. ‘He’s become a major donor to both the Met and the Getty.’

  ‘Which is your favourite?’

  Kezman had breezed into the room wearing sunglasses, a gleaming white smile and a tuxedo. He was closely flanked by an unsmiling male assistant clutching a briefcase in one hand and two gold-plated mobile phones in the other. From the way his jacket was hanging off his thin frame, Tom guessed that he was armed.

  Kezman was in his mid-fifties or thereabouts, and shorter than Tom had expected. Although he was still recognisably the same person, the photo on his jet had clearly been taken several years before, his brown hair now receding and greying at the temples, the firm lines of his once angular face now soft and surviving only in the sharp cliff of his chin. The energy in his voice and movements, however, was undimmed, his weight constantly shifting from foot to foot like a boxer, his head jerking erratically as he looked around the room, as if it pained him to focus on any one thing for longer than a few seconds. He answered his own question before anyone else had a chance to respond.

  ‘Mine’s the Picasso, and not just because I paid a hundred and thirty-nine million dollars for it. That man was a genius. A self-made man. A true visionary.’

  Tom smiled, the machine-gun rattle of Kezman’s voice making it hard to know whether he was talking about himself or Picasso.

  ‘Mr Kezman, this is…’

  ‘Tom Kirk, I know.’ He grinned. ‘Luckily the FBI doesn’t have a monopoly on information. At least not yet. I like to know who’s on my plane.’

  Tom stepped forward to shake his hand, but Kezman waved him back.

  ‘Stay where I can see you, goddammit,’ he barked.

  Tom suddenly understood why Kezman was wearing sunglasses and moving his head so erratically – he was clearly blind, or very nearly so, his aide presumably there to help steer him in the right direction as he navigated through the hotel.

  ‘Retinitis pigmentosa,’ Kezman confirmed. ‘The closer I get to things, the less I can see. And one day even that…’

  His voice tailed off and Tom couldn’t stop himself wondering if this explained Kezman’s insistence that they should go up to his private apartment first, before meeting him down here. It was almost as if he’d wanted to give them some small insight into his shrinking world. A world where there was little point in furnishing a room he could barely see, but where a view was still there to be enjoyed. At least for now.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said. He didn’t know Kezman, but he meant it all the same.

  ‘Why? It’s not your fault,’ Kezman shrugged. ‘Besides, in a way, it’s a gift. After all, would I have started my collection if I hadn’t known I was going blind? Sometimes, it’s only when you are about to lose something that you really begin to understand what it’s worth.’

  There was a long silence, which Ortiz eventually broke with a forced cough.

  ‘As I have discussed with your head of security, the plan is for Mr Kirk to take the money down on to the casino floor and wait there for them to make contact.’

  ‘It’s unlikely they’ll bring the painting with them,’ Jennifer added. ‘So we expect them to either provide us with a location, which we will then check out before handing over the money, or lead us to it so that we can make the exchange there.’

  ‘Either way, we’ll follow them to make sure we grab them, the painting and the money,’ Stokes said confidently.

  ‘Once again, Mr Kezman, the federal government is very grateful for your co-operation in this matter. We’ll do what we can to ensure that your staff and customers…’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ Kezman waved Jennifer’s thanks away with a sweep of his hand. ‘You just make sure no one gets hurt.’

  TWELVE

  Amalfi Casino and Hotel Resort, Las Vegas

  17th March – 11.22 p.m.

  It was funny how people conditioned themselves to only ever see what they wanted to, Foster mused. Ask anyone who wears a watch with Roman numerals how the number four is written on it and they’ll say IV. All those years that they’ve been looking at it, checking the time, the numbers only a few inches from their stupid dumb-ass faces, and they’ve never actually noticed that it’s IIII. That it’s always IIII on a watch, because IV would be too easily confused with VI. That their brains have tricked them into seeing what they expect to, or rather not seeing what they should. It was pathetic really.

  Like tonight. The security detail at the staff entrance had barely glanced at his badly fitting uniform and tampered badge before waving him through. He looked the part, so why see something that you’ve convinced yourself isn’t there? That’s why the beard had had to go in the end; that might have been the one thing that could have triggered a response.

  He, on the other hand, had immediately picked out the FBI agents, uncomfortable in their civilian clothes as they loitered near the entrance, or perched unconvincingly in front of the slot machines. It was the half-hearted way they were feeding the money into the machine that was the killer tell – either you played the slots, or they played you.

  He stopped next to an anonymous-looking red door. How many people had walked past it, he wondered, without ever asking themselves why, out of all the doors that lined this service corridor, this was the only one that warranted two locks. Without ever asking themselves what might possibly lie behind it that demanded the extra security. But then, that’s what he’d noticed in civilians: a lack of basic human curiosity, a slavish, unquestioning acceptance of a life dropped into their lap like a TV dinner.

  Quickly picking the locks, he opened the door on to a dimly lit stairwell that he slipped into, wedging a fire extinguisher between the base of the door and the bottom step of the metal staircase to stop anyone coming in after him. The staircase led up several flights to the observation deck – a series of cramped, interconnecting gantries hidden in the ceiling void that stretched over the entire casino floor.

  Although in theory these were to allow maintenance staff to invisibly service the casino’s complex lighting grid and vast network of A/C ducts, the careful positioning of two-way mirrors and air vents also allowed casino security to spy on people without being seen. Dealers watching the gamblers, boxmen watching the dealers, supervisors watching the boxmen, pit bosses watching the supervisors, shift managers watching the pit bosses…the entire set-up functioned on the assumption that everyone was on the make and on the take.

  Not that the deck was used as often as it used to be – video cameras and advances in biometric technology that could flag-up suspicious changes in body heat and pupil dilation had seen to that. But Kezman was famously old-school and had insisted on having it there anyway, both as a low-tech back-up, and because he knew that sometimes you needed to get up there and sniff the floor to get a feeling for where the trouble was brewing.

  As Foster had expected, the gantries were empty. He took up his position, removed the towel from his back-pack, and unrolled it. Piece by piece he began to reassemble his rifle, the parts sliding into place with a satisfying click echoed by the
sound of the roulette ball skipping on the wheel below. With the infrared sight fitted he hesitated momentarily, toying with the suppressor before slipping it into his top pocket like a good cigar he was saving for the right moment.

  No suppressor. Not tonight. He wanted everyone to hear the shot, to be paralysed by its angry roar, and then to run. To run screaming.

  THIRTEEN

  The Pantheon, Rome

  18th March – 7.41 a.m.

  Allegra was sheltering in the portico, grateful for the coffee Salvatore had conjured up for her and for the fresh air – there had been a strange, curdled atmosphere inside that she had been glad to escape.

  The storm had now tethered itself directly overhead, rain lashing the square, lightning cleaving the stygian sky only for the clouds to crash thunderously back together. But it was the more powerful storm brewing on the other side of the barricades that worried her now. Rising out of the warm waters of political scandal and feeding on the lurid details of these murders, it would quickly spin out of control, blowing them violently towards the rocks until either the media lost interest or they had all been dashed into pieces, whichever came sooner. She wondered if Gallo’s men all knew this, and whether what she could sense inside, what she could almost taste, was their fearful anticipation of the hurricane that lay ahead.

  ‘So it’s the same coin?’ Gallo had materialised at her side, lighting a cigarette.

  ‘I thought you’d given up?’

  ‘So did I.’

  She was reassured that she wasn’t the only one feeling the pressure.

  ‘It’s the same.’ She nodded, not bothering to repeat that it wasn’t a coin but a lead disc.

  ‘So it’s the same killer?’

  ‘Are you asking me or telling me?’

  ‘I’m asking.’ As earlier, the hint of a smile was playing around his lips, as if she somehow amused him.

  ‘There are some obvious similarities,’ she began hesitantly, surprised that Gallo even cared what she thought. ‘The lead discs. The proximity of the two murder scenes. The pagan temples. The connection to Caesar. But…’