The Icon Thief (36 page)

As he reached the bridge, however, he understood that he had to make her suffer. In London, he would be nothing but a name. If he wanted to be feared, he had to resolve this situation in a way that silenced any questions.

Caught up in these thoughts, he did not notice the car
that passed through the toll gate a second after he did, following him onto the bridge. It had tracked him faithfully from Brooklyn, keeping a block’s distance at all times.

In the car, Ilya glanced at his fuel gauge. He had not expected the
vor
to travel so far. With every mile, the chances of his success, which had not been great in the first place, grew increasingly remote.

An hour ago, when Sharkovsky pulled over in Brooklyn, after making a brief stop at a convenience store, Ilya had been forced to keep going, since there were no other spaces available. Driving past with his head turned away, he had circled the block and doubled back. When he returned, the pickup had still been there, but Sharkovsky had been gone. Since none of the houses seemed more likely than any other, he had seen no choice but to park and wait, hoping that the old man would reappear.

A few minutes later, he had been startled by the appearance of another familiar face. From outside his line of sight, a girl had come running around the corner. For a second, their eyes had locked, and he had recognized her. Before he could approach, she had disappeared. And another hour had passed before Sharkovsky, freshly bruised, had returned to the truck.

Now the truck passed under the central tower of the bridge. As Ilya followed, ten lengths behind, he tried to make sense of what he had seen. The appearance of the girl from the mansion, whose face he remembered well, could not be a coincidence. Sharkovsky, he saw, had been ordered to silence her, but somehow she had escaped. Now the old man was tracking her again.

As they continued along the interstate, then merged onto the turnpike, he sensed that his moment of retribution was being postponed. If so, that was fine. Tzaddikim knew how to be patient. They could wait forever, if necessary. And he knew that his time was coming soon.

T
he voice emerging from the speakerphone, transformed by distance into a metallic rasp, was that of a forensic examiner in Fort Detrick, Maryland. He sounded worried. “You’re sure that nobody else touched this thing?”

“Yes, we’re sure,” Powell said, leaning across the table to talk into the phone. “The agent acted in accordance with his training. As soon as he realized what he had, he sealed it off and alerted his unit commander.”

The speakerphone rasped again. “And where’s the agent who handled the device?”

“He’s under observation,” Barlow said. “Quarantined. Until we know what the fuck it is we’re dealing with.”

They were seated in Barlow’s office, along with Wolfe. Spread before them was a series of photos depicting, from various angles, a single lens reflex camera that an agent had found in a drawer at the club. As the agent was examining it, the back of the camera had come off in his hands. Within the hour, it had been airlifted to the bioforensics lab for analysis.

“We’ve completed our preliminary evaluation,” the forensic examiner said. “The inner workings were
removed from the camera and replaced with new components. A heating element vaporizes a solution in the central chamber, and a pressurized cartridge propels the atomized substance across a limited area when the shutter release button is pressed.”

Wolfe took notes on her copy of the pictures. “Any idea what this stuff could be?”

“It looks a lot like a drug called pravastatin. In large doses, it can cause adverse skin reactions, including toxic epidermal necrolysis, as well as psychological effects like anxiety and paranoia. In most cases, they aren’t nearly as severe as the symptoms you’ve reported, but a weaponized version might be responsible for what you saw in Archvadze. And the dog.”

Powell made a note of this. Following one of his hunches, agents had used a methane probe to uncover a dog that had been buried in the yard of the house where Ilya had been staying. The dog, though badly decomposed, had shown symptoms similar to what he had seen in Archvadze, with most of its fur and skin eaten away. “So this drug is some kind of lethal agent.”

“That’s how it looks. From what I can tell, it’s perfect for assassination. The dosage is small, and it can be easily inhaled.”

“One question,” Wolfe said, looking up from the photos. “When the chemical was deployed, several guests at the party were standing nearby. Why haven’t they shown any symptoms?”

“My best guess is that we’re dealing with a binary weapon,” the forensic examiner said. “Two separate substances are required, each one relatively harmless in itself. One component is inhaled as a vapor, while the other
might be absorbed through the skin. It could be a gel rubbed onto the body, for example, or brushed onto a doorknob or steering wheel—”

Powell remembered what Archvadze had said at the hospital. “Or a cell phone?”

“It’s possible. In the past, they’ve spread contact poisons, like cadmium, on telephone receivers. This wouldn’t be so different.”

“Let’s be clear here,” Barlow said. “When you say
they
, who are you talking about?”

“Russian intelligence,” the forensic examiner said. He seemed surprised by the question. “This murder has their fingerprints all over it. We’re looking at a textbook example of covert assassination.”

“Great,” Barlow said, although he did not seem at all happy about this. “We’ll touch base with you again soon.”

Barlow pressed a button on the phone, ending the call. He sat back in his chair with a peculiar expression, like a climber working his way across a difficult rock face. “So what do you think?”

“He’s right,” Wolfe said. “This was a political murder. Whoever was behind this assassination wanted to send a message. They made sure to kill him as slowly and agonizingly as possible.”

Barlow looked pained. “Counterintelligence will be all over us. Compared to this, the guns are nothing.”

Powell remained silent. If it turned out that they had overlooked an assassination plot in their haste to pursue the weapons angle, the assistant director would not hesitate to transfer the investigation to a separate division. In order to retain control of the case, they had to make it
seem as if they had been following this lead from the beginning. And as Powell felt Barlow’s eyes on his own, he found that he knew exactly what the other man was thinking.

“A FISA court approved our warrant for the wiretap of Sharkovsky’s phone,” Barlow said carefully. “The existence of our request demonstrates that we were concerned that he might be the agent of a foreign power. Powell, in your deposition, you made sure to mention this fact?”

“Yes,” Powell said. “However, the emphasis of the warrant was on his possible ties to terrorist groups. I seem to remember that I was strongly encouraged to make that connection—”

Barlow dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “That’s irrelevant. What matters is that we have you testifying, on the record, that the mob is a tool of foreign intelligence. When you come right down to it, that’s how we got our warrant. Which means that we’ve been pursuing this angle all along.” He picked up his phone. “I’ll arrange for you to brief the executive assistant director.”

“I thought that you saw me as a liability,” Powell said. “Why do you want me there?”

“Why do I want you there?” Barlow looked genuinely surprised. “Because you’re the agent in charge of this case.”

As Barlow dialed, it occurred to Powell that he had won. For now, at least, the gradients of power, which had been turned against him for so long, were flowing in his direction. His first thought, strangely, was to call his father, although he knew that the old man would forget the conversation at once. A moment later, the impulse
passed, caught up in the wave of work that remained to be done.

Powell rose. As he gathered up his notes, his eye was caught by a photo of the camera. He remembered the oligarch’s last words, forced out of his dying lungs. Somehow he had understood that a camera had been used to kill him. Powell wondered how he had known this.

Looking at the photo, he saw a word in his mind’s eye, in blurred Cyrillic characters, as it might have appeared to the dying man. It was then that he realized that the oligarch had not been talking about a camera at all.

Kamepa
. In Russian, it meant
chamber
. A room, a cell. It made him think of the vault in which the painting had been kept, the hospital room in which Archvadze had died, and even of the installation itself. But beyond these obvious connotations lay something else, something deeper, darker—

Powell’s fingertips grew cold, but as he picked up his notes, his hands did not tremble. He maintained an impassive expression until he had left the office, the skin tingling on his face, then turned to Wolfe. “Meet me in the kitchen in an hour. I need to make some calls.”

Before she could ask him why, he had retrieved his jacket from its hook. Opening his cell phone, he checked to make sure that the numbers he needed were there, then headed for the elevator.

He spent most of the following hour in a café across the street, speaking first with a former colleague at the Met and then with a contact at the Security Service. After calling in a request to evidence control, he met Wolfe in the office kitchen, where he explained what he had
found. “Archvadze knew who killed him. He told me before he died. Remember his last words?”

Wolfe, seated at the table, took a sip of cocoa from a stained ceramic mug. “
Camera
.”

“Right. But he wasn’t trying to tell me that a camera was involved. He was telling me who made the poison. Kamera, or chamber, was a code name for Laboratory Twelve. The poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services.”

“I’ve heard of these guys,” Wolfe said. “Weren’t they involved in the Markov case?”

“And others. The Soviets were always big on poisons. Kamera was their most ambitious project. Its mandate was to develop poisons that wouldn’t appear in a conventional autopsy. They experimented with mustard gas, digitoxin, ricin. They conducted tests on convicts in prison. And they’ve been implicated in at least one murder, that of a journalist investigating an intelligence scandal, where the victim died of toxic epidermal necrolysis. So if they went after Archvadze, too—”

“—he might have been doing something similar,” Wolfe said. “All right. Let’s say he’s conducting an investigation into something that would embarrass state intelligence. They get wind of it and arrange for him to be silenced. It wouldn’t be worth the trouble unless he had found something big. But what?”

“I can think of one possibility. Let’s say that state intelligence is trafficking in stolen art to raise money for covert operations. If they were working with organized crime to move art out of Russia, it’s possible that Archvadze got his hands on evidence of this. Or almost did.”

“You’re talking about Budapest,” Wolfe said. “The
courier was going to cut a deal with Archvadze, but someone else got to him first. Then they went after the oligarch himself, using a method that gave him dementia and paranoia, so that nobody would believe his story—”

“It’s possible. And if we’re right, I’ll bet that Archvadze tried to get his hands on stolen art before. Hence his secret collection. He was buying art to investigate its origins and make the connection to state intelligence. And if that was his plan, maybe this painting was the smoking gun.”

Wolfe stood. “So we need to look at the other paintings in his collection. If Archvadze bought them from someone he suspected was trafficking in stolen art, there has to be a record of it. His lawyer might be willing to talk. And we can access the provenance data online.”

“Do it,” Powell said. They left the kitchen together. “But keep it to yourself for now. I don’t want to run it past Barlow until we’re absolutely sure. If we go to him with a partial case—”

“—he’ll think we’re stalling,” Wolfe said. “I know. Let’s compare notes in an hour.”

As she headed down the corridor, Powell returned to his cubicle, where he found the package that he had requested from evidence control. It was the stretcher from Ilya’s hotel room. It still bore the manila tag used to mark evidence in storage, but otherwise, it seemed untouched.

Turning the stretcher over, he examined its other side, which would be hidden whenever the canvas was put on display. It was a simple wooden armature with a strut running across the middle, marked with exhibition stickers, gallery labels, and douane stamps. Looking at it, he
remembered what the oligarch had said before he died. Not the front. The back.

His eye was drawn to the largest label, which ran across the central strut. It was made of thin paper and pasted directly to the wood.
Ch. Pottier / Emballeur / 14 Rue Gaillon / Paris
. Even with his bad French, he could tell that it was the label of a packing company that had crated the canvas at some point in its long history. And yet something about the label seemed strange.

Powell reached out and took the uppermost corner of the label in his fingers. When he pulled, it peeled away from the stretcher with surprising ease, revealing the wood underneath. Something had been written on the strut beneath the label, a row of letters painted hastily with a fine brush. He tugged at the label until the first four letters were exposed, then paused.

Underneath the label, there was a hidden message, and its first four letters said
R
OSE
.

O
n Market Street in Philadelphia, beneath the old post office, vans were selling Jamaican food, the aroma of jerk chicken carving out pockets of spice in the air. Maddy emerged from the bus, following a line of passengers onto the sidewalk. As she passed the driver, she tried to give him a smile, something to show that she was all right, but was unable to do so.

Walking past the train station, she began to feel better, as if the indifferent industrial settings were surrounding and protecting her. Compared to the blind grandeur of industry, the Rosicrucians seemed almost insignificant. The world was run by bureaucrats and engineers, not an occult brotherhood. They were not as powerful as the banks. They were not as powerful as compound interest.