by Sam Christer
It doesn’t.
But in Welsh, the name Owain does mean Young Warrior, which is rewarding enough for her to continue tapping in his name and trawling the net.
Her perseverance is rewarded with a couple of news reports and legal articles that disclose that the British Knight is highly litigious and has taken legal action against innumerable companies and individuals who in his mind have threatened his privacy.
Top of the list is a notoriously eccentric Welsh historian called Rhys Mallory, who had written an unauthorized biography about him. Gwyn also obtained a series of injunctions to prevent Mallory from ‘…in any way conveying any information about the Gwyn family that is not already in the public domain to any individual, group of individuals or data distribution system that can be privately or publicly read, seen, heard or in the instance of braille, felt.’
While Vicky is no detective, she’s smart enough to realize the historian has some sensitive story to tell that the ambassador really doesn’t want anyone to hear. She finds contact details and adds them to the summary paper that she types up and sends to Mitzi and Bronty.
Job done, she decides her hard work is worth a small bar of peppermint cream chocolate. She’s just about to claim her prize when her desk phone rings. ‘Cantrell.’
‘Vicky?’ The voice is the linebacker’s.
Her heart misses a beat. ‘Hello.’
‘Hi, it’s James. How you doing?’
She thinks of his easy smile and soft brown eyes and instantly makes herself nervous. ‘I’m… I’m… good.’
‘Listen, I’m sorry I missed lunch. I’m out in the field, helping rig a computer surveillance system. How are you fixed for dinner tonight?’
‘Dinner?’ She really hadn’t been expecting this. ‘You mean as in dinner date dinner, or just dinner as in food?’ She can’t believe she said all that. ‘Oh God, I sound stupid now, don’t I?’
‘No, you don’t. Yes, I mean dinner as in dinner date dinner.’
‘Then yes. I like you very much – I mean, I’d like to very much.’
He laughs. ‘That’s good, because I like you very much too. Say eight?’
91
NEW YORK
Behind the privacy of the limo’s tinted windows, Zachra Korshidi removes the niqab from her face. She straightens her hair and stares at the driver and the man she’s sat in the back with. ‘Who are you? Police? CIA?’
‘Neither,’ replies Gareth Madoc. ‘Though I can get both here within minutes if you’d prefer to talk to them?’
‘No.’ Her voice is sharp with tension. She’s taken enormous risks getting into the vehicle. Her father has friends everywhere in the neighbourhood. ‘Who, then?’
‘Let’s say I work for a philanthropically minded organization that would like to help you.’
She looks at him cynically. ‘Why?’
‘Because in stopping young women like you becoming suicide bombers it saves American lives.’
Now she feels so ashamed that she can’t look at him. ‘You said you could help me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Does that mean if I wanted to get far away from here and never be found, you could do that?’
‘If you cooperate with me, I can fix for you to live anywhere you like, with a new identity, a little money, maybe a job and somewhere to live.’
She stares at the black robe on her lap and knows all it stands for. But what the man with the English accent wants is for her to betray her family and everything they stand for.
Gareth dips inside the jacket of his blue suit and pulls out a pack of small photographs. ‘You need to see these. They’re not pleasant, but you should look.’
Hesitantly, she takes them from him. The first picture is a wide shot of a big, round dumpster on thick, black roller wheels. It’s at the back of a fried-chicken joint and the kitchen door is open, a fryer and long grill are visible. The second is of a pile of semi-tied, semi-ripped black garbage bags dumped in the yard. In the third, the bags are being opened by uniformed cops. The fourth shows the contents. Severed limbs. Hands. Feet. Arms.
Zachra’s heart makes the connection before she sees the fifth.
Javid’s head.
The face of her lover stares up at her. His skull has been severed from his body and his eyes are milky-white and pitted with flies. The hair she once loved to hold as she kissed him is matted in blood and food slops.
It takes almost a minute for her to get her breath back. For her to survive a hurricane of emotions. Finally, she finds her voice. And the words that she knows will change her life. ‘I can help you. There are things that I know.’
92
POLICE HQ, WASHINGTON DC
Kirstin Collins runs nail-bitten fingers through her spiky hair and stares at the painting in front of her.
The small, crappy old oil was recovered from Bradley Deagan’s small, crappy old apartment. She’s really not sure it’s going to be of any interest to Mitzi but she promised to keep her up to speed on developments, so that’s what she’s doing.
The young detective puts it face down on the big scanner in the squad room, makes a JPEG, attaches it to an email and calls Mitzi’s number.
‘Fallon.’
‘Lieutenant, it’s Kirstin Collins. You near a computer?’
‘Too near. I’m going stir-crazy in an office smaller than my kids’ bathroom. What’ve you got?’
She hits send. ‘I just mailed you a copy of a painting uniforms recovered from Deagan’s apartment. It was wrapped in cloth and hidden beneath boards.’
Mitzi checks her mailbox. ‘Not here yet. Any sign of Deagan – dead or alive?’
‘Nope. He and his vehicle have just vanished. Mail was stacked up at his place. No one has seen or heard of him since he was at the Dupont diner.’
‘This painting, is it the one he tried to stage the con with?’
Kirstin stares as it. ‘I don’t know. I’ve not had time to check. There was no picture on the case papers.’
‘Does it look religious?’
‘Not really. But it’s very old and seems the right shape and size. Way I figure it, if it was a fraud the court would have let him keep it, right?’
‘Sure. It’d be his property. Your mail’s just come. Hang on while I open it.’
Kirstin doodles and waits. She draws flowers. Big sprays of them. It’s the only thing she can sketch.
Mitzi watches the image shutter its way from top to bottom of the frame. ‘How’re things, Kirstin? How you holding up?’
She finishes the head of a rose. ‘Okay, I miss Irish and can’t believe he’s not about to walk through the door. The funeral’s in a couple of days. Probably won’t be many people there. Hell, it might just be me and the priest. Will you come?’
Mitzi squirms. ‘Like to, but to be honest, I can’t afford the flights or the time. I’ve got two kids waiting for me back in California, my sister’s breaking up with her husband and my ass is stuck in London. I’m sorry. Why don’t you mail me the details and I’ll send flowers.’
Kirstin scrubs over the roses she’s drawn. ‘You know what – he’s got no use for flowers. Send me a bottle of whisky and I’ll drink it in his memory and have one for you too.’
‘You got it.’ The full painting is now on her screen. ‘Download is okay, Kirstin – I got it now.’
‘Is it the one you mentioned?’
‘Don’t know, but I know a man who will. Thanks for thinking of me.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘Hey, you need something – you need to talk about anything – you call me, right?’
‘Thanks.’
Kirstin Collins hangs up. She puts the painting back in the cloth it was wrapped in and ties string back around it.
Then she goes to Irish’s desk and sits there. Just squats in his tatty old chair and swings it left and right, left and right. And she keeps on swinging until she feels a tiny bit better.
93
AMERICAN EMBASSY, LONDON<
br />
Bronty breaks from booking his Lundy trip and stands behind Mitzi to examine the digital copy of the painting. ‘This is of knights,’ he says disappointedly. ‘The Ghent Altarpiece shows several groups of people coming together to pay adoration to Christ. The missing panel is of judges, not knights.’
‘Meaning this is, like, the worst forgery ever?’
He leans closer to the monitor and peers at the edges of the oil. ‘I’m not an expert, but do you see this colouring here, around the edges? It’s not right. These dark shades are out of character with the rest of the painting.’
Mitzi shifts her head and looks at it from different angles. ‘Isn’t that some kind of border?’
‘It might be. Or, it could be evidence that there was once another painting over the top of it. One that’s been stripped away.’
‘The judges, you mean?’
‘There have been rumours in the past about the panels. During restoration work, it was suggested there was a painting underneath at least one of them. Certainly, that would fit with the way the folding canvases show different scenes when the altarpiece is opened and closed. And remember this is the work of two men, firstly Hubert van Eyck, then his brother Jan.’
Mitzi has to trawl her memory. ‘You know this crook Deagan showed the painting to Christie’s – to a bunch of art experts – and they said it was a fake. They must have looked at the same things you’re staring at and dismissed them as baloney.’
Bronty’s still focused on the image, studying every brush stroke. ‘Maybe at that time the painting hadn’t been stripped back.’
‘I can ask Kirstin to check in the files.’
He pulls up a chair and sits alongside her. ‘The altarpiece is a really important piece of work. Which is why everyone from Napoleon to Hitler tried to steal it. The triptych is regarded by many as the first major painting of the Renaissance, the forerunner of realism and certainly the greatest oil of its time. So to put these knights in there, to give them credibility, to immortalize them as a major presence in the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb was hugely significant at the time.’
Mitzi’s almost afraid to ask the question. ‘Why? They’re just knights.’
‘No, they’re not. Like I said, van Eyck had already painted a panel of knights fitting that description. This is different. Look more closely.’
‘That one in the middle isn’t – you know who?’
Bronty nods. ‘It might well be. And if it is, those knights gathered around and behind him are of the Round Table.’ He pokes the monitor with his fingertip. ‘Look here and you can see a circular emblem on their shields and three golden crowns on the flag behind Arthur.’
Mitzi’s not looking. Her eyes are on something else. ‘Holy shit, have you seen this?’ She taps the screen.
Bronty studies a background figure of a priest, shown on horseback, carrying a bible and a cross. The crucifix is identical to the one they have a sketch of. The one Amir Goldman was killed for.
A knock on the office door turns their heads.
It opens and Annie Linklatter stands there, timidly, holding an envelope. ‘This is the DNA profile you’ve been waiting for, ma’am.’
94
LONDON
It’s been an unusual day for Angelo Marchetti.
No alcohol. No coke. No gambling.
The Italian has stayed clean for almost twenty-four hours and has spent the time getting his head together. Devising a way to stay alive and start a new and untroubled life. The key to it all is recovering the original memory stick. He can use this to leverage Gwyn into a situation that will make him vulnerable to Mardrid. Without it, he’s a dead man.
Sophie Hudson said a lot before she died. She named the cops investigating the Goldman shooting and gave up the fact that she handed the memory stick to a woman from the FBI.
Mitzi Fallon.
Marchetti is staring at a head and shoulders squad shot of the lieutenant as he works from his hotel room. She’s in full LAPD blues and looks too momsy to press his buttons. He prefers slimmer, younger women with bigger breasts and longer hair. That said, she’s clearly an exceptional investigator, with the emphasis on ex.
Ex robbery squad. Ex homicide with an ex-husband.
The briefing note he’s got shows her life almost has as many screw-ups in it as his. She’s short of money and has two young daughters to look after.
Those are all the facts he needs to know.
For now.
95
AMERICAN EMBASSY, LONDON
The single glossy sheet looks like a weird heart-monitor graph with uneven columns rising and falling. Certain parts of the readout show dark pairs of numbered codes.
Mitzi’s seen hundreds of genetic fingerprints, but Bronty hasn’t.
‘What am I looking at?’ he asks. ‘I know it’s Dalton’s DNA, taken from the water bottle you stole —’
‘Appropriated.’
‘I stand corrected – that you appropriated from Gwyn’s office. But how do you make any sense of this?’
‘You don’t,’ says Mitzi, taking the print off him. ‘You just find a match for it. Juries love DNA. They don’t understand it either, but they know it’s the blueprint of a human being, they know we’re all different and they trust that genetic fingerprinting is accurate. That’s all that matters.’
Bronty is still intrigued. ‘I get all that, but can you explain the science?’
‘Kind of. I saw it ten years ago before automation, now it all happens in a machine but the process is similar. The lab pulls DNA out of a single cell they’ve swabbed – in our case that would be Dalton’s from the water bottle. Enzymes are used to isolate the critical sections. Those parts are zapped with electricity. This separates them into unique pairs and patterns, then the whole thing is transferred onto a physical print.’
‘That’s really all it is?’
‘Essentially, yeah. But like I say, it’s all done by machines now. You ask some professor and he’ll tie your mind up in knots with dioxy-this and ribonucleic-that and stories about hyper-variable satellite somethingorothers, but in the end, yeah, it’s the way I said.’ She goes back to the desk and taps on her computer. ‘What I’m gonna do now is use our case file database to compare Dalton’s DNA profile with the profile we got from the blood in the diner at Dupont Circle.’
‘And if they match, then Dalton is Deagan’s killer?’
‘That’s a jump too far. We still can’t prove Deagan’s dead – for the moment, he’s down as a “missing-presumed”. One thing for sure, though, it would irrefutably put Dalton at the place Deagan was seen alive.’
They watch the database churn through its records and wait.
‘I worked out once that I spend sixty minutes a week just waiting for computers to process stuff,’ says Mitzi. ‘Four hours a month, forty-eight hours a year. That’s a whole damned working week a year just waiting.’
There’s a ping and the screen freezes.
Two separate sets of columns are displayed. One is superimposed over the other.
The word MATCH punches the middle of the frame.
‘Well, looky here,’ says Mitzi. ‘Seems like I get to go see our new British friends again while you’re off on your sea trip to Spooky Hollow.’
96
CAERGWYN CASTLE, WALES
CNN plays on one of the screens in Owain’s private office; Sky News and Bloomberg are turned low on two others. All are running post-bombing interviews with government ministers and defence experts.
Owain mutes them all as a call from Gareth Madoc comes in on an encrypted line.
‘Gareth, how are you?’
‘Better, and so will you be. I have some good news.’
‘Nabil?’
‘No. He’s still lying low. But we got to the girl.’
‘And from your tone, it sounds as though she’s cooperating.’
‘She is. Zachra Korshidi’s father Khalid is the principal fundraiser and trustee of the local mosque, and i
t’s one of the biggest in the States.’
Owain is momentarily distracted by a bottom-of-screen caption on Bloomberg saying the price of Mardrid stock has fallen two per cent after he bought a company in Colombia alleged to have links to Farc, the left-wing rebels. He makes a note on a yellow jotter, then apologizes. ‘I’m sorry; I just had to write something down. Is this girl’s father only a financial player, or is he operationally active as well?’
‘If not operational, then certainly influential. Khalid Korshidi is chairman of New York’s Sharia Council and is known as a hard line fundamentalist. Zachra says he’s too controlling and egotistical to take a back seat to anyone on anything. She’s sure he knows everything that’s going on.’
‘And there’s no love lost between them?’
‘None at all. She hates him. Wants to get as far away as possible.’
‘Then we need to help her, but do you really think this is going to lead us to Nabil and who he reports to?’
‘Our girl says she knows Nabil. I showed her a photograph and she instantly ID’d him as someone who had come regularly to her house over the past year, usually alone or with one other man. Her mother served tea while he talked with her father in the front room. Usually, when they’d finished, they’d say they were going to the mosque and drive off together.’
Owain pieces things together. ‘That means Khalid has Nabil’s trust. Time is against us, Gareth; we can’t afford to simply tail the father and hope we hit the jackpot.’
‘I know. I’ve asked her to copy his cell phone directory. I’ve given her a reader. And she’s going to put a tracker tack into a heel of his shoe. If he sees it, he’ll think he just stood on a bit of metal. Apparently, he only ever wears an old black pair, so we should be on him easy enough.’
