“Suite 647 will suit our friend’s tastes,” Abdil said with a smile.
Ten minutes later, Conrad was shown his room. While considerably smaller than Abdil’s penthouse, it didn’t lack for amenities, including a young woman on his bed in nothing but a Miami Dolphins jersey.
“I’m Nichole,” she said in an American accent. “What’s your story?”
“Tired,” he said, and decided it was best for everybody if she did the talking. “Tell me yours.”
She was an American who had arrived in Gstaad a few months earlier after the Super Bowl with her boyfriend the professional football player. He’d left, she’d stayed. Blah, blah, blah.
Conrad concluded there was no way he could decline the present that Abdil had offered him. He didn’t want to offend his host or make it appear that the nubile Nichole was anything less than a sexy vixen worthy of a royal harem.
“So which Dolphin am I competing against here?” he asked her.
“All of them.” She giggled and pulled off her jersey.
19
LONDON
Midas finally emerged from his bluestone kabbalah tank after six hours. He found Natalia in the bedroom, propped up on a pillow naked and playing with her BlackBerry. Natalia was his London mistress whenever Mercedes wasn’t around, which at this point was for good.
“We have the private dining room at Roka reserved at nine o’clock,” Natalia said. “I’ve got six friends coming. Two artists, three actors, and a fashion designer.”
“We’re not going anywhere tonight,” Midas said flatly, and climbed into the bed.
She put the BlackBerry on the night table, revealing her full inviting breasts to him. “I’m still going to Paris, yes? I can’t miss Mercedes’s funeral. Every fashion icon in Europe will be there, and so will the press.”
“I’m not taking you to Paris for the funeral of my official girlfriend,” Midas said. “How would that look? Her father and family will be there. You can frolic with your friends another time.”
Natalia seemed on the verge of pouting but thought better of it. “How long before we can go out together, just the two of us?” There was a slight demand in her voice.
“A week,” he said, and she brightened considerably and kissed him voraciously. He felt himself respond in spite of his tiredness but still found himself distracted. “Tell me, have you news from any of your friends?”
Her friends were other Russian “it” girls prancing around the planet with billionaires and politicians of almost every nationality. Natalia, at twenty-six, had become a more formidable spymaster than his old superiors at the KGB.
She picked up her BlackBerry and said, “Little Nichole has a new friend in Gstaad.”
An alarm rang in Midas’s head, but he didn’t know why. “Who’s in Gstaad again?”
“Abdil Zawas. I think Nichole and the girls are stir-crazy. Like you, he doesn’t get out often enough.”
He ignored the displeasure in her voice. “That happens when you’re on the international global terrorist watch list, like Abdil,” he said. “Who is Nichole’s new friend?”
“Some guy named Ludwig,” she said, and showed him a picture that Nichole had sent her.
Midas sat up, grabbed the phone, and stared at the picture. He then used the phone to call Vadim, who sounded groggy when he picked up.
“I need you to get to Switzerland,” Midas told him. “I’ve found Yeats.”
20
The next morning Conrad woke up at the Sultan’s Palace to find a handwritten note from Nichole on the pillow next to him. She had gone snowboarding on Videmanette Mountain and wanted to meet up at Glacier 3000 for lunch at two p.m. He looked at the clock and saw that it was already ten. He had slept over twelve hours.
There was a continental breakfast with a newspaper on the table. He put his feet into the slippers waiting at the bottom of his bed and tied on a robe. Then he poured himself some hot coffee from a silver pot and sat down at the table to look at the copy of the French daily Le Monde.
There was a picture of Mercedes on the front page with a headline: monday services in france for mercedes le roche, 32.
He found a smaller picture of himself on the jump on page eight. How on earth could Nichole not know he was a fugitive? He had to pray she hadn’t seen it or never bothered to read a newspaper. He took comfort that the latter was more than probable.
Conrad figured Midas would have to show up at the funeral to put on a brave public face. Which gave him the perfect window: While Midas was in Paris at the funeral, Conrad would hit the bank in Bern.
Conrad put down the paper and saw that an envelope had been slipped under his door. He walked over and picked it up. Inside were architectural blueprints for the bank in Bern, marked up in French. An attached note from Abdil, written neatly in a female hand, instructed him to come up to the penthouse to meet with a Ms. Haury.
Conrad had no idea who Ms. Haury was, but he knew he had to keep moving forward and stay a step ahead of the Alignment, Interpol, and everybody else who was after him now. He had to get whatever was inside Baron von Berg’s safe deposit box in Bern. It was his only bargaining chip.
He opened a closet filled with made-to-measure suits for him from Milan’s Caraceni. The fabrics, fit for a prince, seemed to be cut from another world and fit perfectly.
A tailor would have had to work at gunpoint to pull this off so fast. Considering it was Abdil who had placed the order, Conrad could only wonder.
The two security guards posted outside his door escorted him down the hallway to the elevator. As they ascended to the penthouse, Conrad realized he couldn’t have taken the elevator down to the lobby even if he’d wanted to.
The only way out of this palace was up.
Abdil’s penthouse looked completely different in the full light of day. Conrad could have sworn it was fully refurnished, even the sculptures and art on the walls. Now it looked like a corporate boardroom of palatial proportions.
But there was no Abdil, only a curvy blonde standing next to the huge conference table, on which sat an ornate brass safe deposit box with a stainless steel door sporting four shiny brass dials and a brass keylock.
“I’m Dee Dee,” the woman said, “the American CFO of Abdil’s collectibles division. I understand from Mr. Zawas that you want to make a withdrawal from your box at the Gilbert et Clie bank in Bern.”
“That’s right,” Conrad said, looking at the box with the four shiny brass dials. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that this is the box in question.”
“I’m afraid so,” she said. “But the box you’ll be opening will almost certainly be of this type. Take a seat.”
Conrad sat down in a thronelike leather chair and listened to the polished Dee Dee explain the history of the box as if she were showcasing it on the Home Shopping Network.
“Any Swiss box with a number in the seventeen hundreds at Gilbert et Clie is among the most precious antique boxes in the vault,” she told him. “That’s because it’s a triple-lock box. Very unusual. Only a few were manufactured in 1923 by Bauer AG in Zurich. Extremely rare.”
Conrad touched the brass and steel box. It was only about three inches wide, two inches high, and seven inches long. Just how big was the secret Baron von Berg hoped to hide in such a small box?
“I see only two locks on the door,” he said. “The four-dial combination lock and the keylock next to it.”
“That’s all you’re supposed to see,” she told him. “The distinctive combination lock you can’t miss. It has four alphabetic brass dials for a total of 234,256 possible combinations. This is a lock you never forget.”
Neither did Baron von Berg, thought Conrad, already imagining himself turning the four dials in sequence to line up the letters A-R-E-S. “What about the other two locks?”
Dee Dee nodded and said, “The two other lever locks share a mechanism housed inside the box’s single keyhole.”
“Two locks inside one keyhole?” Conrad repeat
ed. “How does that work?”
“With two keys, of course,” she said, and placed two keys on the table. One was silver, the other gold. “One bank key and one client key. Let me show you. I’ll be the bank, you be the client.”
She handed him the gold client key and picked up the silver bank key. “First things first. You need to open the combination lock. I’ve set the code for this box. It’s OGRE.”
Conrad turned the first dial to the letter “O,” the second to the letter “G,” the third to the letter “R,” and the fourth to the letter “E,” and heard an unmistakable click inside the box. “Wait a second,” he said. “If the client has to open the combination lock first, before any keys are inserted, then the banker will know the combination to the client’s box.”
“Yes, but the client will change the combination before he closes the box,” she told him. “It’s like changing passwords on a computer system, only more secure.” She held up the silver bank key. “Now for the tumbler-lever lock. It has seven brass levers and two different bolt levers for a total of nine levers.” She inserted the silver key into the single hole. “The bank key moves the three top levers and the top bolt lever to unblock the first part of the lock.” She turned the key and then removed it. “This enables you, the client, to insert your key. Go ahead.”
Conrad inserted his gold key into the hole and turned it until he felt it stop.
“Your key moves the four bottom levers and the bottom bolt lever,” she said. “The bottom bolt lever is connected to the door bolt and the combination lock. That’s the resistance you’re feeling.”
“Why won’t it open?”
“Each dial of the alphabetical combination lock needs to be on the proper letter in order for you to be able to turn your key ninety degrees into a vertical position.”
Conrad checked the dials again. They clearly spelled OGRE. “The dials are right. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is that you’re not finished yet,” she told him. “Once the client key is vertical and the bolt is partially retracted, you need to scramble each dial again so your key can turn fully to the right and open the lock.”
Conrad shook his head. Von Berg, you paranoid son of a bitch, he thought. Then again, he’d have watched his back, too, if he had worked for the world’s craziest dictator.
Dee Dee seemed to feel she owed him an explanation. “Scrambling the combination before the door was opened was supposed to ensure that nobody else in the vault besides the banker could see the baron’s secret combination while he was busy inspecting the contents of his safe deposit box.”
“And if I make a mistake along the way somehow?”
“No second chances,” Dee Dee said. “The box’s chemical seal will break and destroy the contents. That’s why a man as powerful as Roman Midas can own the bank and still not get to the contents of Baron von Berg’s box. You have only one shot to open a box of this type. Go ahead. Give it a try.”
Conrad turned the key, and the lock clicked open. He lifted the box lid and saw stacks of U.S. dollars—Ben Franklins. There had to be ten million dollars in the box. Conrad looked up to see Dee Dee lock eyes with him. “You will exchange the contents of your box for this one with Mr. Zawas after you leave the bank,” she said, pausing to make sure they understood each other. Abdil Zawas didn’t miss a trick; he wanted to give Conrad every incentive to come back after the job.
“I get it,” Conrad said. “And if I don’t show, I’m sure Mr. Zawas has a bigger box to stuff my corpse in.”
“Mr. Zawas said that what you are after is not the contents of the box but the information those contents convey,” Dee Dee said, and closed the box. “That being the case, he wants the contents for himself and is happy to pay you for them at this agreed-upon price.”
“Fine, but there’s only one problem,” he told her. “I have the combination code, but I don’t have a client key.”
“The bank probably does,” Dee Dee said. “Clients like Nazi generals who traveled to far-flung or dangerous parts of the world often allowed the banks to keep their keys because they didn’t want to lose them. As long as they didn’t forget their box number or combination code—or share them with anybody else—it was pretty foolproof.”
“Even if I don’t look like Baron von Berg’s heir or, worse, I’m recognized on sight?”
“The bank’s huissier will know you have business there as soon as you write down your box number, and she’ll conclude from the seventeen hundred series that you’re one of the bank’s largest clients.”
“No biometrics or anything?”
“Only in the movies,” Dee Dee said. “The genius of the Swiss security system is that it’s plain and transparent. You don’t have to worry about somebody hacking your computer system and accessing your data or faking your biometrics. Locks, keys, and combinations beat the computer chip any day. Like the pyramids of Egypt that you raid, Swiss boxes will survive the ages. Think of this bank as just another tomb to raid, and you’ll be fine.”
“And when I present the box number and the huissier promptly informs Midas that someone has come to open the box?”
“Oh, they’ll let you open the box,” she said. “They just won’t let you walk out of the bank with it. I can’t help you there. But Mr. Zawas says you have the architectural blueprints to the bank.”
“Yes,” Conrad said. “But I don’t know how accurate they are.”
“I’m afraid that’s a combination I can’t help you with,” she told him. “No doubt Sir Roman Midas has made some modifications to the bank not reflected in your schematics.”
“No doubt,” Conrad said.
21
PARIS
It seemed to Serena that all of Paris had come to the church of Saint Roch to bid adieu to Mercedes Le Roche. Uniformed police held back the crowds lining Rue Saint-Honoré while office workers and residents in the buildings above leaned out their windows. All were straining to glimpse the celebrities arriving beneath a giant screen and loudspeakers broadcasting the funeral ceremony live.
Benito nudged the limousine ever closer to the hive of paparazzi ahead. Serena felt uneasy as she sank back in her seat and into the soft gray trouser suit and black trench coat that the people from Chanel had requested she wear to the funeral. A few years ago the Vatican’s public relations agency had made some sort of bizarre agreement granting Chanel the right to dress Serena for affairs of state. It was an arrangement that she had always found ways to ignore. But having already packed her bags—and globes—for sunny Rhodes and not the cool rain of Paris, she’d had to reluctantly oblige this time.
The idea of a funeral as a fashion show, however, made her ill.
“Her funeral has a budget bigger than all her documentaries put together,” she said. “Hardly anyone here knew her, and even fewer cared.”
“It’s Papa Le Roche’s rank in French society that has brought out all the movie stars and other celebrities who have come to offer him their condolences,” Benito said. “That would include you and President Nicolas Sarkozy.”
“Where are the ‘least of these’ that Jesus talked about, Benito?”
“Watching the television, signorina.”
Hopeless, she thought. Not only was she upset about what had happened to Mercedes, she was worried sick about Conrad and whether she’d ever see him again. She was also worried that she’d fail in Rhodes tomorrow. In fact, looking at the circus outside, she wondered if she and the Church had failed the world already with their complicity in this stagecraft of death. But Papa Le Roche had personally requested her presence for the family, and this was another chance to size up Roman Midas before Rhodes. Surely the grieving boyfriend would be on hand to eulogize the lover he had so ruthlessly slain.
She decided she desperately needed some fresh air. Cracking open her window just a bit, she could hear the crowds actually applauding every time a rocker or fashion designer stepped out of a limousine. As if this were some kind of award show. Which in a s
ense it was, she supposed, for Papa Le Roche.
“Skip the main entrance,” she ordered Benito. “Take me around to the side.”
They drove past the mob, turned a corner, and passed through a side gate, pulling up behind a black Volvo hearse. The hatch was up, and Serena could see Mercedes’s casket in the back before the driver with an earpiece shut the door. He was going to go around the block to the crowds at the main entrance, where pallbearers would bring the casket into the church.
She was greeted at the side door by a young priest, who escorted her inside to the sanctuary. She was seated in the front row alongside a grief-stricken Papa Le Roche, a rather smug Roman Midas, and an expressionless President Sarkozy and his beautiful wife, Carla Bruni.
Serena offered her condolences to Papa Le Roche, who thanked her profusely for coming. Sarkozy and Midas looked at each other awkwardly, as if to say that today was certainly an unscheduled stop on the way to the EU peace summit on Rhodes tomorrow. Serena knew that neither had anticipated seeing the other before then. But while Sarkozy looked like he would have preferred not to be seen so close to the former Russian oligarch boyfriend of a woman who had died so violently, Midas seemed to relish his photo op next to the French president and among European society.
It was the French first lady, however, whose curious gaze after their kiss-kiss had made Serena the most uncomfortable. For some odd reason, it had prompted her to recall that she was ten years junior to Carla, who herself had been ten years junior to Sarkozy’s second wife and thirteen years younger than his first. Then Serena saw the gray trouser suit beneath Carla’s open black trench coat and realized that they were wearing the same outfit. Somebody at Chanel clearly hadn’t cross-checked the cosmic social calendar.
Not that it bothered Serena. She was a linguist first and foremost, a nun second, and a celebrity who could raise funds for humanitarian aid a distant third. But she did feel bad for Karl Lagerfeld, the designer. He was sitting four pews behind with a row full of fashion icons, and when she glanced back to offer him a tender smile, he looked positively panic-stricken.
The Atlantis Revelation Page 10
