The Geneva Deception

by James Twining

  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.

  FORTY-NINE

  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.’

  FIFTY

  Banco Rosalia head office, Via Boncompagni, Rome 19th March – 9.24 p.m.

  ‘So? How much are we down?’ Santos sniffed, helping himself to a half tumbler of Limoncella from the drinks trolley.

  Alfredo Geri looked up from his laptop, frowning slightly as he worked through the math. Five feet ten, he was wearing a grey suit, his tie yanked down, jacket trapped under the wheel of his chair where it had fallen on to the floor and he’d run over it. His thin black hair was slicked down against his marbled scalp, his face gaunt and bleached a cadaverous shade of white by lack of sleep and sunlight. To his right, balancing precariously on a slumping battlement of stacked files, was a pizza box that he’d not yet had time to open.

  ‘Now I’ve had a chance to look properly…eight…maybe nine?’

  ‘Eight or nine what?’ Santos snapped. He sat down heavily at the head of the table, a blanket of scattered paper stretching along its polished surface like an avalanche over a valley floor. ‘It’s a big number. Show it some respect.’

  ‘Eight or nine hundred million. Euro.’

  ‘Eight or nine hundred million euro.’ Santos closed his eyes and sighed heavily, then gave a rueful smile as he kicked back. ‘You know, the strange thing is that a few months ago losing just fifty million would have felt like the end of the world. Now, it feels like a rounding error.’

  He reached for his tin of liquorice, shook it, then popped the lid.

  ‘It’s the CDOs that have killed us,’ Geri continued, putting his half-moon glasses back on and hunching over his screen. ‘The entire portfolio’s been wiped out. The rest is from currency swings and counterparty losses.’

  ‘I thought we were hedged?’

  ‘You can’t hedge against this sort of market.’

  ‘And the League’s deposits and investments?’ Santos asked hopefully.

  ‘Antonio, the bank’s entire capital base is gone,’ Geri spoke slowly as if trying to spell out complicated directions to a tourist. ‘It’s all gone. Everything.’

  Santos sniffed, then knocked the Limoncella back with a jerk of his wrist.

  ‘Good. It makes things easier. This way I only need to worry about myself. Where did I come out in the end?’

  ‘I’ve liquidated what I can,’ Geri sounded almost apologetic. ‘Most of it at a loss, like I told you when we spoke. But the bulk of your portfolio would take weeks if not months to sell.’

  ‘How much?’ Santos snapped.

  ‘Three, maybe four million.’

  ‘That barely gets me a chalet,’ Santos said with a hollow laugh. ‘What about the money market positions?’

  ‘Already included, minus what you had to sell to fund your fun and games in Las Vegas last week,’ Geri reminded him in a reproachful tone.

  A long pause.

  ‘Fine,’ Santos stood up. ‘It is what it is and what it is…is not enough. I need the painting.’

  ‘You’ve found a buyer?’

  ‘The Serbs are lined up to take it off my hands for twenty million,’ Santos said with a smile. ‘I’m flying out to meet them later tonight.’

  ‘And the watches?’

  ‘I’ve got one already and another on its way. I’ll get the third on the night from De Luca or Moretti. They always wear theirs.’

  ‘They won’t let you get away with it,’ Geri pointed out, closing his file.

  ‘They won’t be able to stop me if they’re dead.’ Santos shrugged, moving round to stand behind him.

  ‘For every person you kill, the League will send two more. You can’t kill them all. Eventually they’ll find you.’

  ‘How?’ Santos shrugged, stepping even closer until he could see the liver spots and tiny veins nestling under Geri’s thin thatch. ‘The world’s a large place. And you’re the only other person who knows where I’m going.’

  ‘Well, you know I’ll never tell them,’ Geri reassured him, shoulders stiff, staring straight in front of him.

  ‘Oh, I know.’ Santos smiled.

  In an instant, he had locked his left arm around Geri’s throat and pulled him clear of the table. Geri lashed out with his legs, catching the edge of his file and sending it cartwheeling to the floor, paper scattering like feathers. Then with his right hand, Santos reached round and grabbed Geri’s chin.

  With a sharp jerk, he snapped his neck.

  FIFTY-ONE

  Nr Anguillara Sabazia, northwest of Rome 19th March – 9.56 p.m.

  ‘Drink?’

  Fabio Contarelli had turned in the passenger seat to face them, battered hip flask in hand. In his mid forties, short and pot-bellied, he had the warm, jovial manner of someone who prided himself on being on first-name terms with everyone in his village, and who the local butcher had come to favour with the best cuts. Shabbily dressed, his weather-worn face was brown and cracked like a dried river bed, although his fern green eyes shone, as if he was permanently on the verge of playing a practical joke. There was certainly little there to suggest that he had been responsible for the horrors Allegra and Tom had witnessed in the basement of his house.

  ‘No,’ she refused, then watched as Tom did the same. Contarelli shrugged and took a swig himself, turning back to face the road as the mudflecked Land Cruiser danced over the pot holes.

  ‘How long have you been a tombarolo?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Since I was a boy,’ Contarelli said proudly. He spoke fast and mainly in Italian, with a booming voice that was too big for his body. ‘It’s in the blood, you see. I used to come out to these fields with my father. In those days the earth would be littered with fragments of pottery and broken statues surfaced by the farmers’ ploughs. That’s when I realised there was another world under there.’ He gestured longingly out of the window towards the earthquake-scarred landscape now shrouded by night. ‘I sold what I found in the market, used the money to
buy some books, got smarter about what pieces were and how much they were worth, climbed through the ranks. Now I’m a Capo di Zona and it’s the only life I know.’

  ‘And you always go out at night?’

  ‘It depends on the site.’ He shrugged, lighting a cigarette from the smouldering stub of the one which had preceded it, his fingernails broken and dirty. He seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘For some of the larger ones, we offer the landowner a share in the profits. Then my boys turn up in the day with a bulldozer and some hard hats. If anyone asks, we tell them we’re working on a construction project. If they ask again, we pay them off. Or shut them up.’

  Allegra felt her anger rising, its delirious scent momentarily blinding her to the danger they were in and to the armed man seated in the back with her and Tom. She’d seen enough already to know that this wasn’t just tomb robbing. It was cultural vandalism, Contarelli’s brutal methods probably destroying as much as he found. The fact that he was now happily boasting about it only made it worse.

  ‘So you’ve never been caught?’ Tom asked quickly, his worried glance suggesting that he could tell she was about to snap.

  ‘The Carabinieri need to find us before they can catch us,’ he explained with a grin. ‘They do their best, but there are thousands of tombs and villas buried out here and they can’t be everywhere at once. Especially now the politicians are tablethumping about immigration, drugs and terrorism. You know, a few years ago, I even cleared out three graves in a field next to the police station in Viterbo. If they can’t stop us there, right under their snouts, what are their chances against us out here?’

  He laughed, slapping the knee of the driver next to him in merriment.

  ‘Why do you still do it?’ Allegra snapped. ‘Haven’t you made enough money?’