She crossed over to the desk, noticing the closely typed notes for a lecture that according to the cover page Aurelio was giving at the Galleria Doria Pamphilj the following day. Crouching down next to it, she tried each of the overflowing drawers in turn, her fingers eventually closing around the weapon at the back of the third drawer, behind some cassette tapes and a fistful of receipts.
She slid out the eight-round magazine. It was full and she tapped it sharply against the desk in case the spring was stiff and the bullets had slipped away from the front of the casing. The gun itself was well maintained and looked like it had recently been oiled, the slide pulling back easily, the hammer firing with a satisfyingly solid click. It wasn’t much, she knew, but it was certainly better than nothing. Satisfied, she slapped the magazine home.
Deriving a renewed confidence from her find, she sat down again in Aurelio’s chair and tried to clear her head. But she soon found her thoughts wandering again. To Gambetta and what he’d told her; to Gallo and her escape; to Salvatore and how close she’d come to falling into his grasp; to Aurelio and the sanctuary he was providing. And annoyingly, to the riddle that she had ignored earlier, but which had now popped back into her head.
‘I am the beginning of the world and the end of ages, but I am not God.’ She repeated the line to herself with a frown.
The beginning of the world-Genesis, dawn, a baby? But then how were any of these the end, she asked herself. And who else but God could claim to be at the beginning and end of time? Maybe she needed to be more literal, she mused-the Latin for world was mundi and for ages was sæculorum, so the beginning of mundi was…her eyes snapped open.
‘It’s the letter M,’ she called out triumphantly. ‘The beginning of mundi and the end of sæculorum is the letter M.’
Grinning, she walked into the kitchen. To her surprise it was empty, the kettle boiling unattended on the stove. Frowning, she turned the hob off and then stepped back into the hall.
‘Aurelio?’ she called, reaching warily for the gun.
There was no answer, although she thought she heard the faint echo of his voice coming from his bedroom. She stepped over to it, a narrow slit of light bisecting the worn floorboards where the door hadn’t quite been pulled to. Not wanting to interrupt, she pressed her ear against the crack and then froze. He was talking about her.
‘Yes, she’s here now,’ she heard him say in an urgent voice. ‘Of course I can keep her here. Why, what do you need her for?’
She backed away, the gun raised towards the door, her face pale, heart pounding, the blood screaming in her ears. First Gallo. Now Aurelio too?
Her eyes stinging, she turned and stumbled out of the apartment, down the stairs and on to the street, not knowing if she was crying from sadness or anger. Not sure if she even cared.
Not sure if she cared about anything any more.
TWENTY-NINE
Villa de Rome apartment building, Boulevard de Suisse, Monte Carlo, Monaco 18th March-5.23 p.m.
It was earlier than usual, but then Ronan D’Arcy figured he’d earned it. After a bloodbath in the first few months of the year, some of his shorts were finally beginning to pay off and the latest round of Middle Eastern sabre rattling had pushed his oil futures back to historic highs. If that didn’t warrant a drink, what did?
A helicopter droned overhead, circling low over the palace up on the hill, and then swooping back around to perch gracefully on the deck of one of the larger yachts lying at anchor in the harbour, the sea glittering like gold in the sinking sunlight. D’Arcy gave a rueful smile. It didn’t matter how good the market was or how well you thought you were doing, someone else, somewhere, was always doing better. It was a lesson that this place seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in beating into him at every opportunity. Still, he wasn’t going to let it spoil his little celebration.
He stepped off the balcony back into his office and quickly scanned the six trading screens that formed a low, incandescent wall on his desk to check that some random market sneeze hadn’t wiped out a good month’s work. Reassured, he picked up the phone and dialled the internal extension to the kitchen. If it had been a beer he could have fixed it himself, of course-he wasn’t that lazy. But celebrations called for cocktails, and cocktails called for mojitos, and Determination was the mojito-master.
Determination. He’d never get used to that name. It was from Botswana, or some other spearchucking African country that he’d never been able to find on a map. He’d heard of names such as Hope and Faith and Temperance. Even a Chastity, if you could believe that. But Determination…?
Maybe it wasn’t the name but the irony of it that jarred, D’Arcy reflected, his tanned forehead creasing in annoyance as the phone rang unanswered. Indolence. That would have been a more appropriate name. Lethargy. Torpidity. Yes, that was a good one. Where was the shiftless bastard now?
He slammed the phone down and clicked his mouse to bring up the apartment’s internal closed circuit TV system. The kitchen, laundry room, gym and billiard room were all empty. So too were the sitting rooms and the dining room. Which only left the…
D’Arcy paused, having suddenly noticed that, according to the camera in the entrance hall, the front door was wide open.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ he swore. What was the point of flying in a specialist security company from Israel to fit armoured doors if the stupid fucker was going to leave them wide open?
Muttering angrily under his breath, he turned to leave, and then paused. The lights were on in the corridor outside, the travertine marble floor reflecting a narrow strip of light under his office door. But the pale band was broken by several dark shapes. Someone was standing outside, listening.
He punched the emergency shut-down button on his trading system and then sprang across to the bookcase. In the same instant the door burst open and two men came tumbling through the gap, guns raised. D’Arcy hit the panic-room release button. A section of the bookcase slid back and he leapt inside. The men started firing, the silenced shots searing the air with a fup-fupping noise. He slammed his hand against the ‘close’ switch, the door crashing shut with a hydraulic thump, leaving him in a strange deadened silence that echoed with the rasping gasps of his adrenaline-charged breathing.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck…’ Frantically he scrabbled in the sickly light for the phone. It was dead, his clammy fingers sliding on the moulded plastic as he stabbed at the hook switch. There was no dial tone, the line presumably cut at the junction box downstairs.
‘Mobile,’ he breathed, patting his jacket and trouser pockets excitedly until, his heart sinking, his eyes flicked to the monitor which showed a picture of his office. His phone was still where he’d left it on his desk.
He quickly reassessed his situation. Without a phone, there was no way of letting anyone know he was in here. That meant he’d have to wait until someone came looking for him. The chances were that his brokers in London would raise the alarm when he missed their usual morning call. That would be in-he checked his watch-less than sixteen hours’ time. In the meantime he was quite safe. After all, he’d had this place installed by a Brazilian firm who specialised in kidnap prevention. It had five-inch-thick steel walls, fortyeight hours of battery life if they cut the power, access to the CCTV system and a month’s worth of supplies. He might as well make himself comfortable and enjoy the show.
He sat back, his pulse slowing, and watched the men with an amused expression. They were arguing, he noticed with a smile. Probably trying to figure out which of them would carry the can for him having got away. At least he only planned to fire Determination, he thought to himself. Judging by their brutal methods, he doubted whether whoever had sent these two would be as forgiving when they learnt of his escape.
Suddenly he sat forward, his face drawn into a puzzled frown. The arguing had stopped, the men now intent on emptying the bookcase on to the floor and arranging its contents into a large uneven mound that pressed up against the panic room’s concealed entrance.
Seemingly satisfied, they turned their attention to the walls, ripping the paintings down and tossing them on to the pile. They reserved special treatment for his Picasso, one of the men punching his fist through the Portrait of Jacqueline that had found its way to D’Arcy after being stolen a few years before from Picasso’s granddaughter’s apartment in Paris. Then he sent it spinning through the air to join the others.
D’Arcy shook his head, swearing angrily. Did they think he would come charging out to save a few old books and a painting? He valued his life far more dearly than that. Their petty vandalism was as pointless as it was…
He lost his train of thought, noticing with a frown that one of the men seemed to be spraying some sort of liquid over the jumble of books and canvases and wooden frames, while the other had lit a match. Glancing up at the camera with a smile, as if to make sure D’Arcy had seen them, the man with the match stepped forward and dropped it on to the pile. The screen flared white, momentarily blinded by a whoosh of fire.
D’Arcy was gripped by a chilling realisation. His eyes rose slowly from the screen to the small metal grille positioned in the right-hand corner of the panic room. To the thin tendrils of acrid smoke that were even now snaking through its narrow openings. To the acid taste at the back of his throat as he felt his lungs begin to clench.
THIRTY
Vicolo de Panieri, Travestere, Rome 19th March-7.03 a.m.
Tom had booked himself on to the afternoon flight out of DC, taking the obvious precaution of using another name. He never travelled without at least two changes of identity stitched into his bag’s lining and luckily the FBI had not thought to check whether he had left anything with the concierge at the hotel he’d been staying in the previous night.
There had been a relatively low-key police presence at Reagan International. Understandable, given that the FBI would probably be focusing all their efforts on the Vegas area if they were serious about catching him. After all, he’d dropped a pretty strong hint to Stokes that that was where he’d head in the first instance to pick up the killer’s trail.
He’d managed to snatch a few hours’ sleep, recouping a little of what he’d lost over the past two days, and then spent the rest of the flight reading through Jennifer’s file in a bit more detail. Most of it was by now familiar to him, although he had paused over the witness statements, bank records and various other documents that the FBI had seized in their raid on the art dealer’s warehouse in Queen’s which he hadn’t seen before. One, in particular, stood out and had triggered the call he was making now as his taxi swept into the city along the A91, accompanied by the dawn traffic and the chirping tones of the driver’s satnav system.
‘Archie?’ he said, as soon as he picked up.
‘Tom?’ Archie rasped, jet lag and what Tom guessed had probably been a heavy night at the hotel bar combining to give his voice a ragged croak. ‘What time is it? Where the hell are you?’
‘Rome,’ Tom answered.
‘Rome?’ he repeated sleepily, the muffled noise of something being knocked to the floor suggesting that he was groping for his watch or the alarm clock with one hand while digging the sleep out of his eyes with the other. ‘What the fuck are you doing in Rome? You’re meant to be in Zurich. What number is this?’
‘Jennifer’s dead,’ Tom said sharply. ‘It was a setup. The Caravaggio. The exchange. They were waiting for us.’
‘Shit.’ Any hint of tiredness had immediately evaporated from Archie’s voice. ‘You all right?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘What the fuck happened?’
‘Sniper,’ Tom said, trying not to think about what he’d seen or heard or felt, concentrating on just sticking to the facts. ‘Professional job.’
‘You’re sure she was the target?’
‘Pretty sure. Have you ever heard of an antiquities-smuggling operation called the Delian League?’
‘No. Why? Is that who you think did it?’
‘That’s what I’m in Rome to find out. That’s why I need you in Geneva.’
‘Of course,’ Archie replied instantly. ‘Whatever you need, mate.’
‘There’s a sale at Sotheby’s this afternoon,’ Tom said, glancing down at the circled entry in the Geneva auction catalogue that had been included in the file. ‘One of the lots is a statue of Artemis. It looks like Jennifer thought it was important. I want to know why.’
‘No worries,’ Archie reassured him. ‘What about you? What’s in Rome?’
‘A name. Luca Cavalli. He was fingered by someone Jennifer arrested in New York. I thought I’d start with him and work my way back up the ladder.’
A pause.
‘Tom…’ Archie spoke haltingly, for once lost for words. ‘Listen, mate, I’m sorry. I know you two were…I’m really sorry.’
Tom had thought that sharing the news of Jennifer’s murder with Archie might help unburden him in some way. But his hesitant awkwardness was so unusual that it was actually having the opposite effect, forcing Tom to reflect yet again on the events that had brought him here, rather than focus on the immediate task at hand.
‘Are you going to be all right?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Tom said. ‘Just call me on this number when you get there.’
About fifteen minutes later the taxi pulled up. Tom stepped out.
It was a wide, cobbled street largely populated by neat four-storey buildings with symmetrical balconies and brightly coloured plaster walls. Cavalli’s house, by contrast, was a feral, hulking shape. Long and only two storeys high, its stonework was grey and wizened by age, the roof sagging under a red blister of sun-cracked tiles, the flaking green shutters at its upstairs windows betraying years of neglect. An old horse block stood to the right of the front door, while to the left, a large dilapidated arched gate suggested that the building had once served as some sort of workshop or garage.
For a moment, Tom wondered if he’d been misled by the sat-nav’s confident tone and been dropped off in the wrong place. But the seals on the door and the laminated notice declaring the premises a court-protected crime scene removed any lingering doubts. He was definitely in the right place. It just looked as though he was too late.
Hitching his bag across his shoulders and checking that the street was empty, Tom clambered quickly up the drainpipe, glad that he had changed out of his suit. Reaching across to the window, he could see that although it had been closed shut, the frame was warped and the latch old and loose. Pushing a knife into a narrow gap, he levered the blade back and forth, shaking the window so that the latch slowly worked itself free, until it popped open and he was able to clamber inside.
He found himself in what he assumed was a bedroom, although it was hard to be sure, the contents of the wardrobe having been swept on to the floor, the bed propped against the wall and the chest flipped on to its back, its emptied drawers lying prostrate at its side. It struck Tom that there was a deliberate violence in the way that the room had been upended. The police, for all their clumsiness, usually searched with a little more restraint. The people who had done this, however, hadn’t just been looking for something. They’d been trying to make a point.
He exited the bedroom on to a glass and stainless steel walkway that ran the length of the building and looked down on to a wide, doubleheight living space. Here the décor was as modern as the outside had been neglected, the back wall made of folding glass panels and looking out on to a small walled garden, the floor a dull mirror of polished concrete, the galley kitchen a mass of stainless steel that looked like it might double as an operating theatre.
Tom stepped along the walkway past a bathroom and another bedroom that had been similarly turned upside down. Then he made his way down a glass staircase to the ground floor, its icicle-like glass treads protruding unsupported from the wall. Down here, the brutality of the assault was, if anything, even more marked-the large plasma screen lifted off its brackets and broken almost in two across a chair; the seats and backs of the leather furniture s
lashed open, their innards ripped out in handfuls through the deep gashes; the coffee table overturned and its metal legs stamped on so that they were bent into strange, deviant shapes; the bookcase forced on to its front, crushing its contents underneath. There was a distinctive and unpleasant aroma too, and it was a few moments before Tom was able to guess at its meaning-not content with defeating these inanimate foes, the assailants had, it seemed, chosen to mark their victory by urinating on them.
A sudden noise from the front door made Tom look up. Someone was coming in, the bottom lock clunking open, the key now slipping into the top one. He knew immediately he wouldn’t have enough time to make it back upstairs.
That only left him one option.
THIRTY-ONE
19th March-7.22 a.m.
The seal ripped as the door opened. Someone stepped inside and then quickly eased it shut behind them. They paused. Then, with careful, hesitant footsteps, they walked down the small entrance hallway towards him.
Tom, his back pressed to the wall, waited until the intruder was almost level with him and then leapt out, sending their gun spinning across the floor with a chop to the wrist. Rather than press his advantage, however, Tom paused, surprised by the sudden realisation as he caught sight of their dark hair, that it was a woman. But this momentary hesitation was all the invitation she needed to turn and crash her right fist into his jaw, the force of the blow sending him staggering back with a grunt. Spinning round, she stretched towards the gun, but Tom stuck out a leg and tripped her, sending her sprawling headlong into an upturned chair. In a flash he was on top of her, digging his knee into the small of her back, trying to pin her arms to her sides. But with surprising force, she reached behind and, grabbing his arm, flipped him over her head and on to the floor, winding him.
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