The Geneva Deception (19 page)

Lungotevere Vaticano, Rome 19th March—11.53 a.m.

Looking around him, Tom could see that the truck’s interior had been furnished like an expensive office, the floor laid with thick carpet, the sides lined with a cream wallpaper decorated with tropical birds. To his left a red leather sofa abutted what he assumed was a toilet cubicle, its door latched shut. In the far right-hand corner, meanwhile, stood an elegant cherrywood desk on which a brass banker’s lamp illuminated a laptop and a police scanner spitting static. Overhead were four flat-panel screens, each tuned to a different news or business channel. Most telling, perhaps, was the gun rack opposite the sofa, which contained four MP5s, half a dozen Glock 17s and a pair of Remington 1100s. Neatly stacked on the shelves below were two dozen grenades and several boxes of ammunition. Enough to start and win a small war.

The gears crunched and the truck swayed forward with a determined snarl. The gunman who had followed them inside waved at them to sit down and then instructed them to handcuff themselves to the hoop bolted to the wall above them so that their arms were held above their heads. Stepping forward, he made sure that the ratchets were tight against their wrists and then emptied their pockets and Tom’s bag, pausing over the FBI file and the Polaroid of the ivory mask. In the background, Tom could make out the opening aria of the
Cavalleria Rusticana
.

There was the muffled sound of the toilet flushing. The latch clicked open and a man walked out, placing a folded newspaper down on the desk as he turned to face them. Tall and square faced, he had a thinning head of hair that rose in white waves at the front and then foundered into a black expanse at the rear. He was smartly dressed in a grey Armani suit and gaudy Versace tie with matching pocket handkerchief. The collar of his white shirt, however, appeared to be several sizes too small, as if he had gambled on not buying a new one in the belief that he would lose some weight. If so, it was a bet that he appeared destined to lose, his once sharp cheekbones sinking into his face like smudged lines on a charcoal drawing, a fleshy crevice forming in the cleft of his chin.

The guard handed him the file and the Polaroid.
He glanced at each of them, then sat down. Swivelling to face them, he adjusted his cuffs, carefully covering his watch.

‘Welcome to Rome, Signor Kirk.’ He spoke in a thick accent, his eyes fixing them with a cold, mortuary gaze.

‘You know him?’ Allegra’s voice was both angry and disbelieving.

Tom frowned as he tried to place the face, then gave a small shake of his head.

‘Should I?’

‘Should he?’ the man asked Allegra, his face creased into a question.

‘He’s Giovanni De Luca,’ Allegra replied unsmilingly. ‘The head of the Banda della Magliana.’

Tom’s eyes flickered in recognition. So much for tracking the Delian League down and the element of surprise. Instead, one half of it had come looking for them and sprung its own trap.

‘Felix doesn’t know me,’ De Luca said, his flickering smile suggesting he was pleased that she had recognised him. ‘But I had the pleasure of meeting his mother once.’

‘My mother?’ Tom breathed, not knowing whether to sound angry or astonished.

‘A fundraising dinner many years ago. A beautiful woman, if I may say so. A terrible loss. Of course, it was only many years later that I heard of you.’

‘Heard what, exactly?’ Allegra asked, eyeing
Tom with the same suspicious look she’d had back in Cavalli’s house when she’d first met him.

‘It’s hard to be good at what Felix does without word getting out. He has a special talent.’

‘Had,’ Tom corrected him. ‘I got out a few years ago.’

‘And yet, from what I hear, you’re still running.’ He nodded towards the scanner.

‘Is that what this is about?’ Tom asked impatiently. His arms were beginning to ache and every gear change and bump in the road was making the cuffs saw a little deeper into his wrists.

‘What’s this?’ De Luca waved the photo at him.

‘We found it in Cavalli’s car,’ Tom explained. ‘We think he was trying to sell it.’

‘What do you know about Cavalli?’ De Luca shot back, spitting the name out in a way that revealed more than he had probably intended.

Tom nodded slowly, immediately guessing at the truth.

‘Why did you kill him?’

De Luca paused, then inclined his head in a small bow, as if acknowledging applause.

‘Strictly speaking, the river killed him.’

‘Did he work for you?’

‘Pfff! He was one of Moretti’s.’

Moretti. Tom recognized the name as the person Allegra had identified as supposedly heading up the
other
half of the Delian League. De Luca’s supposed business partner.

‘What had he done?’ Allegra asked.

‘I only kill for two reasons. Theft and disloyalty.’ De Luca counted them off on his fingers as if he were listing the ingredients for a recipe. ‘In Cavalli’s case, he was guilty of both.’

‘You mean he’d betrayed the League?’ Tom asked.

‘It seemed fitting to mark his treachery on the spot of an earlier treason,’ De Luca nodded, confirming what they’d already guessed on the bridge.

The van turned sharply left. Allegra slid across the seat, pressing up against Tom.

‘And Ricci?’ Allegra asked.

‘I took care of Cavalli to protect the League. But Moretti, the old fool, got it into his head that I was about to make a move on the whole operation.’ De Luca’s tone hardened, his jaw clenching. ‘He had Ricci killed to warn me off. Argento was me evening the score.’

Tom nodded as the realisation dawned that far from being a conversation the careful echoing and symbolism of the various deaths had in fact been the opening shots of a very public, very acrimonious divorce.

‘And now it seems my accountant in Monaco has disappeared,’ he continued angrily. ‘Well, if Moretti wants a war, I’m ready for him.’ He struck his chest with his fist, the dull thud revealing that he was wearing a bullet-proof vest under his shirt.

‘What did Jennifer Browne have to do with your war?’ Tom demanded angrily.

‘Who?’ De Luca frowned.

‘The FBI agent you had killed in Vegas.’

‘What FBI agent?’

‘Don’t lie to me,’ Tom shouted, his wrists straining against the handcuffs.

‘Cavalli was going to sing, so I clipped his wings,’ De Luca said in a low, controlled voice. ‘Ricci and Argento—that’s just business between Moretti and me. But I had nothing to do with killing any FBI agent. I’ve never even heard of her.’

‘She was closing in on the Delian League, so you had her taken out,’ Tom insisted.

‘Is that what this is about? Is that why you’re here?’ De Luca picked up the FBI file and glanced at its monogrammed cover with a puzzled shrug. ‘Well, then maybe somebody did us a favour. Either way, I never ordered the hit.’

‘Well, somebody in the League did,’ Tom insisted. ‘And I’ll take you all down to find them, if I have to.’

There was a pause. De Luca blew out the sides of his cheeks, clearly mulling something over. Then, with a shrug, he nodded.

‘Yes. I expect you probably would.’

Tom felt the needle before he saw it, a sharp stab of pain in his neck where the guard had stepped forward and pulled the trigger on an
injection gun. Allegra was next, her head slumping forward as he felt the room begin to spin and darken. The last thing he was aware of was De Luca’s voice, deepening and slowing as if being played back at half speed.

‘Do give my best to your mother.’

Sotheby’s auction rooms, Quai du Mont Blanc, Geneva 19th March —1.32 p.m.

Short, perhaps only four feet high, she had braided hair that fell across her forehead and down her neck. Dressed in a simple tunic that hung from her body in smooth folds, a hunting strap ran down from her shoulder and across her breasts, pulling the material tight against their firm slope. Gazing straight ahead, she wore a slight smile, lips parted as if she was about to speak. Her arms were cut off at the elbows.

‘Statue of the goddess Artemis; fourth century BC,’ Archie murmured to himself as he looked down from the marble sculpture to the auction catalogue and scanned through the entry again. ‘Believed to be from a settlement near Foggi. Private Syrian collection.’

This last detail made Archie smile. Even if Tom
hadn’t asked him to investigate this lot, the fact that it had supposedly come from a Syrian family would have made him suspicious anyway. The simple truth was that, while the contents of most major European and American collections were well documented, little, if anything, was known about the majority of Middle Eastern and Asian private collections. Anyone trying to disguise the fact that an artefact was looted, therefore, was far more likely to tie it back to some obscure family collection where they could convincingly claim it had been languishing for the last eighty years, than to risk the awkward questions that a European provenance might trigger.

He stepped back and pretended to study some of the other lots, ignoring the call on his phone which he guessed, from the New York prefix, was the lawyer they’d met at Senator Duval’s funeral still trying to arrange a meeting with Tom. Next time, he’d know better than to hand out his card so readily, he thought to himself with a pained sigh.

Looking up, he caught sight of Dominique de Lecourt standing near the entrance. Seeing her now, blonde hair cascading on to her delicate shoulders, it struck him that her pale, oval face mirrored something of the goddess Artemis’s cold, sculpted and remote beauty. There was a parallel too, between the statue’s simple tunic and her tailored linen dress, and perhaps even an echo of
the carved hunting strap in the rearing stallion that he knew Dominique had had tattooed on her shoulder when younger. But any resemblance was only a fleeting one, the illusion shattered by her Ducati biker jacket and the way her blue eyes glittered with a wild freedom that the marble sculpture would never taste.

She was too young for him, although that hadn’t stopped him thinking about what might have been from time to time. Still only twenty-five, in fact. Not that her age had prevented her from successfully running Tom’s antiques business, having helped him transfer it from Geneva to London after his father died. This was her first time back here since then, and he could tell she was finding it difficult, however much she was trying to hide it.

She had been close to Tom’s father—far closer, in fact, than Tom. The way she told the story, he had saved her from herself, offering her a job rather than calling the cops when he’d caught her trying to steal his wallet. With it had come a chance to break free from the spiralling cycle of casual drugs and petty crime that a childhood spent being tossed between foster homes had been steering her towards; a chance she’d grabbed with both hands. All of which made what they were about to do that much more ironic.

He nodded at her as Earl Faulks turned to leave the room, leaning heavily on his umbrella. Even if the auctioneer hadn’t accepted the care
fully folded five-hundred-euro note to finger him as the lot’s seller, Archie would have guessed it was him. It wasn’t just that he had returned four times during the viewing period that had marked him out, but the questioning look he had given anyone who had strayed too close to the statue. It rather reminded Archie of a father weighing up a potential boyfriend’s suitability to take their teenage daughter out on a date.

Seeing Archie’s signal, Dominique set off, bumping into Faulks heavily as they crossed.

‘
Pardon,’
she apologised.

‘That’s quite all right,’ Faulks snapped, a cold smile flickering across his face before, with a curt nod, he limped on.

‘Go,’ she whispered as she walked past Archie, their hands briefly touching as she handed him Faulks’s PDA.

Turning to face the wall, Archie deftly popped off the rear cover, removed the battery and then slipped out the SIM card. Sliding it into a reader connected to an Asus micro laptop, he scanned its contents, the software quickly identifying the IMSI number, before girding itself to decrypt its Ki code.

Archie glanced up at Dominique, who had moved back towards the entrance and was signalling at him to hurry. Archie gave a grim nod, his heart racing, but the programme was still churning as it
tried to break the 128-bit encryption, numbers scrolling frantically across the screen.

He looked up again, and cursed when he saw that she was now mouthing that Faulks was leaving. Damn! He’d counted on him staying for the auction itself, although he knew that some dealers preferred not to attend their own sales in case they jinxed them. He looked back down at the computer. Still nothing. Dominique was looking desperate now. Back to the screen again.

Done.

Snatching the SIM card out of the reader, he hurried to the door, fumbling as he slid it back into Faulks’s phone and fitted the battery and then the cover. He crossed Dominique, their hands briefly touching again as slipped her the micro-computer, leaving her the final task of programming a new card.

‘He’s outside,’ she breathed.

Archie sprinted into the hall, down the stairs and through the main entrance. Faulks was settling back in the rear seat of a silver Bentley, his chauffeur already at the wheel and turning the ignition key.

‘Excuse me, mate,’ Archie panted, rapping sharply on the window.

The window sank and Faulks, sitting forward on his seat, fixed him with a suspicious look.

‘Can I help you?’

‘You dropped this.’

Faulks looked at the phone, patted his breast pockets, then glanced up at Archie.

‘Thank you,’ he said, his wary look fading into a grateful smile. Taking it with a nod, he sat back, the window smoothly sealing itself shut.

As Faulks’s car accelerated away, Dominique appeared at Archie’s shoulder.

‘All sorted?’ he puffed.

‘We’ve got him.’ She nodded, handing him the newly cloned phone.

Nr Anguillara Sabazia, northwest of Rome 19th March - 8.34 p.m.

Tom’s eyes flickered open. The room slowly came into focus. Allegra was lying on the tiled floor next to him. Still breathing.

Gingerly pulling himself upright, he sat with his back against the wall, trying not to vomit. The drugs had left him dizzy and with a bitter taste at the back of his throat. Worse still was the headache centred behind his right eye, the daggered pain ebbing and flowing with the hammer beat of his pulse. Within seconds he’d fainted back to sleep, vaguely aware of a dancing blue light licking the walls, of the whisper of running water, of the deadened echo of his own breathing, and of De Luca’s warm breath on his neck.
Do give my best to your mother.

‘Tom?’

Allegra had rolled over on to her side to face
him, her dark hair tumbling forward over her face. She looked worried and he wondered how long she had been calling his name.

He groaned as he sat up, his neck stiff where his head had fallen forward on to his chest.

‘What time is it?’ she asked.

He checked his watch, then remembered with a rueful grimace that it was still wrapped around Johnny Li’s tattooed wrist.

‘No idea.’

‘
Merda.
’ She rubbed her hands wearily across her face, then sat up next to him. ‘Where do you think they’ve taken us?’

Tom looked around with a frown. They were at one end of a windowless room that had been almost entirely swallowed by what appeared to be a large swimming pool. Five feet deep, sixty feet long and thirty feet across, it was lined with white tiles, the water spilling with a gurgling noise over the edges into an overflow trench and washing through skimmers. The underwater lights cast a shimmering flicker on to the white-washed concrete walls.

Standing up, Tom walked unsteadily to the edge. His eyes adjusting, it took him a few moments to realise that the dark shapes lurking under the water’s silvered surface were rows of antique vases and jars, each carefully spaced one from the other along the pool floor like vines anchored to a steep slope. Stiff and still, they reminded him of a Roman
cohort arranged in a
testudo
formation, their shields held over their heads like a tortoise’s shell, bracing themselves for an attack.

‘It’s a chemical bath,’ he said, pointing at the blue drums that explained the slight burning sensation in his eyes.

‘I’ve seen something like this before,’ Allegra nodded, joining him. ‘But not this big. Not even close.’

‘Over there,’ Tom pointed hopefully at a door on the far side of the pool.

They passed through into a large room, its tiled walls lined with glass-fronted cabinets that contained a rainbow array of paints and chemicals in differently sized and shaped tins and jars. Beneath these, running along each wall, were polished stainless steel counters loaded with microscopes, centrifuges, test-tube racks, scales, shakers and other pieces of laboratory equipment.

The centre of the room, meanwhile, was taken up by two large stainless steel benches and deep sinks. A trolley laden with knives, saws, picks, tweezers, drills and other implements had been drawn up next to them, as if in preparation for an imminent procedure. In the corner was a coiled hosepipe, the white tiled floor sloping towards a central drain as if to carry away blood.

‘Cleaning, touching up, repairs, open-heart surgery…’ Tom pursed his lips. ‘This is a tombaroli restoration outfit.’

‘On an industrial scale,’ she agreed, Tom detecting the same instinctive anger in her voice as when she’d found the orphan vase fragment in Cavalli’s car.

There was another unlocked door which gave, in turn, on to a third room, lit by a single naked bulb whose weak glare didn’t quite reach to the corners. Here there was a more rustic feel, the ceiling supported by parallel lines of closely spaced wooden beams, semicircular iron-framed windows set into the stone walls at above head height and welded shut. A flight of stone steps led upstairs to another door. Predictably, this one was locked.

Shrugging dejectedly, Tom made his way back down. Allegra was waiting for him, silently pointing, her outstretched arm quivering with rage.

Looking around, he could see that the paved floor was covered in a foaming sea of dirty newspapers, wooden crates and old fruit and shoe boxes, some stacked into neat piles, others split open or listing dangerously where the cardboard had collapsed under their combined weight. He only had to open a few to guess at the contents of all the others - antique vases still covered in dirt, loose jumbles of glass and Etruscan jewellery, envelopes bulging with Roman coins, gold rings strewn on the floor. In the corner was what had once been an entire fresco, now hacked away
from the wall and chain-sawed into laptop-sized chunks. Presumably to make them easier to move and sell.

‘How could they do this?’ Allegra breathed, her anger tinged by a horrified sadness.

‘Because none of this has any value to them other than what they can sell it for. Because they don’t care. Look.’

He nodded with disgust towards one of the open shoeboxes. It was stuffed with rings and human bones, the tombaroli having simply snapped off the fingers of the dead to save time.

‘You think this is where Cavalli got the ivory mask?’ she asked, looking away with a shudder.

‘I doubt it,’ Tom sighed, sitting down heavily on the bottom step. ‘Whoever owns this place must work for De Luca, and he certainly didn’t look like he’d ever seen the mask before.’

‘He may not have seen it, but he might have found out that Cavalli was ripping him off,’ she suggested, sitting down next to him. ‘Theft and disloyalty, remember? According to De Luca, Cavalli was guilty of both. Maybe Cavalli was trying to sell the mask behind the League’s back.’

‘So De Luca killed Cavalli, Moretti evened the score by murdering Ricci, and then De Luca struck back by executing Argento. He was right. We’ve stumbled into a war.’

‘That must be why they both put the lead discs on the bodies.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Remember I told you that the original Delian League was to have lasted as long as the lead its members had thrown into the sea didn’t rise to the surface? The discs were to signal that this new alliance was fracturing.’

‘None of which explains who ordered the hit on Jennifer or why.’ He sighed impatiently.

‘You don’t think De Luca had anything to do with it?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe…No. I think he would have told me if he had.’

‘Then who?’

Tom shook his head, still no closer to the truth. There was a long pause.

‘She must have meant a lot to you,’ Allegra said gently. ‘For you to have come all this way. For you to be risking so much.’

‘She trusted me to do the right thing,’ Tom answered with a half smile. ‘That’s more than most have ever done.’

There was another, long silence, Tom staring at the floor.

‘How did you two meet?’

He was glad that Allegra hadn’t picked up on the obvious cue and said that she trusted him too. He wouldn’t have believed her if she had. Not yet at least.

‘In London,’ he began hesitantly. ‘She thought I’d broken into Fort Knox.’ He smiled at the
memory of their first bad-tempered exchange in the Piccadilly Arcade.

‘Fort Knox!’ She whistled. ‘What did she think you’d…’

She broke off as the door above them was unbolted and thrown open. A man stood silhouetted in the doorway, his long shadow stretching down the stairs towards them. He was holding a hip flask.

‘Let’s go for a drive.’