The Geneva Deception

by James Twining

  ‘Merci, monsieur, but four should cover everything.’ He slid a one-thousand-euro chip back, then signalled at the floor manager that he needed to be relieved.

  ‘You lost both those hands on purpose, didn’t you?’ Allegra muttered as they made their way back towards the entrance.

  ‘He charges a ten-thousand-euro fee.’

  ‘Fee for what?’

  ‘For looking after this -’ He held up the chip that the croupier had returned to him in change. Two numbers had been scratched on to its reverse. ‘Come on.’

  Reaching the main entrance lobby, Tom led her over to the far side of the galleried space, where a mirrored door on the right-hand side of the room gave on to a marble staircase edged by an elaborate cast-iron balustrade. They headed down it, the temperature fading, until they eventually found themselves in a narrow corridor that led to the men’s toilets on one side and the women’s on the other.

  Checking that they hadn’t been followed, Tom opened the small cupboard under the stairs and removed two brass stands joined by a velvet rope and an Hors Service sign. Pinning the sign to the door, he cordoned the toilet entrance off and then disappeared inside, reappearing a few moments later with a smile.

  ‘It’s empty.’

  ‘Is that good?’ she asked, an impatient edge to her voice as she followed him inside.

  The room was as he remembered it: four wooden stalls painted a pale yellow to his right, six porcelain urinals separated by frosted-glass screens to his left. Unusually, the centre of the room was dominated by a large white marble counter with two sinks set on each set of a double-sided arched mirror. The walls were covered in grey marble tiles.

  ‘Six across, three down.’

  He showed her the numbers scratched on to the chip and then turned to face the urinals and began to count, starting in the far left corner and moving six tiles across, then dropping three tiles down.

  ‘I make it this one,’ he said, stepping forward and pointing at a tile over the third urinal.

  ‘Me too,’ Allegra agreed with a curious frown.

  Snatching up the silver fire extinguisher hanging just inside the door, he swung it hard against the tile they had picked out. There was a dull clunk as it caved in.

  ‘It’s hollow,’ Allegra breathed.

  Tom swung the extinguisher against the wall again, the hole widening as the tiles around the opening cracked and fell away until he had revealed a rectangular space. Throwing the extinguisher to the floor, he reached into the space and hauled out a large black holdall.

  ‘How long’s that been here?’

  ‘Three or four years?’ he guessed. ‘Nico paid off the builder the casino hired to re-tile this room. It was Archie’s idea. A precaution. Enough to get us operational again if we ever had to cut and run. He chose here and a few other places around the world where we had people we could trust.’

  Allegra leaned forward as he unzipped the bag.

  ‘What’s inside?’

  ‘Batteries, tools, drill, borescope, magnetic rig, backpack,’ he said quickly, sorting through its contents. ‘Money, guns,’ he continued, taking one of the two Glocks out, checking the magazine was full and placing it in his pocket.

  ‘And this?’ Allegra asked, frowning as she took out a small object the size of a cigarette packet.

  ‘Location transmitter. Three-mile radius,’ He pulled out the receiver, slotted a fresh battery in place and then turned it on to show her. ‘Stick it on, if you like. At least that way I won’t lose you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, you won’t get rid of me that easily.’ She smiled, tossing it back.

  ‘Good. Then you can give me a hand with this up the stairs. Nico will be waiting by now.’

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Boulevard de Suisse, Monaco 20th March – 3.35 a.m.

  Barely ten minutes later, they pulled in a little way beyond D’Arcy’s building. Nico had been right – you couldn’t miss it. Not only was a police car parked outside on the narrow one-way street, but the upper stories of the otherwise cream apartment block were scorched and coated with ash, like a half-smoked cigarette that had been stood on its filter and then left to burn down to its tip.

  Tom gave her a few minutes to struggle out of her dress and heels and into the casual clothes that had been left for them in the car, and then rapped impatiently on her window. She lowered it and he thrust the second Glock and a couple of spare clips through the gap.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Are there actually any bullets in this one?’ she asked, eyebrows raised sceptically.

  It wasn’t that she minded carrying a gun. In fact, she quite liked its firm and familiar presence on her hip, like a dance partner’s hand leading her through a rehearsed set of steps. It was just that she preferred to know what she was dealing with.

  ‘Let’s not find out.’ He winked.

  The building was called the Villa de Rome, an appropriate and perhaps not entirely coincidental name if they were right about D’Arcy’s involvement with De Luca and the Delian League. Although old, it betrayed all the signs of a recent and rather ill-judged refurbishment, the entrance now resembling that of a two-star hotel with ideas above its station – all rose marble, smoked glass and gold leaf.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ a junior officer from Monaco’s small police force rose from behind the reception desk and greeted them warmly, relieved, it seemed, at the prospect of a break in his vigil’s lonely monotony.

  ‘Thierry Landry. Caroline Morel,’ Tom snapped in French, each of them flashing the special passes that Nico had produced for them. ‘From the palace.’

  ‘Yes, sir, madam,’ the officer stuttered, his back straightening and heels sliding almost imperceptibly closer together.

  ‘We’d like to see D’Arcy’s apartment.’

  ‘Of course.’ He nodded eagerly. ‘The elevator’s still out, but I can escort you up the stairs to the penthouse.’

  ‘No need,’ Tom insisted, stepping deliberately closer. ‘We were never here. You never saw us.’

  ‘Saw what, sir?’ The officer winked, then froze, as if realising that this was probably against some sort of royal protocol. To his visible relief, Tom smiled back.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Leaving the officer saluting to their backs, they climbed the stairs in silence, the fire’s charred scent growing stronger and the floor getting wetter as water dripped through from the ceiling like rainwater percolating into an aquifer. There was a certain irony, Allegra reflected, in how the fire brigade had probably caused more damage to the flats below D’Arcy’s than the blaze they were meant to be protecting them from. She couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t a warning there for them both: were they causing more harm by trying to fix things than if they had just let matters run their natural course?

  On the third floor, Tom stopped and swung his backpack off his shoulder. Reaching inside, he took out a small device that he stuck on to the wall at about knee height, then turned on.

  ‘Motion sensor,’ he explained, holding out a small receiver that she guessed would sound if anyone broke the transmitter’s infrared beam.

  They continued on, emerging half a minute later on the top landing, the fire’s pungent incense now so heavy that she could almost taste the ash sticking to the back of her throat. Tom flicked his torch on, the beam immediately settling on the door to D’Arcy’s apartment that had been unscrewed from its hinges and placed against the wall.

  ‘Quarter-inch steel and a four-bar locking mechanism,’ Tom observed slowly. ‘Either he knew his attackers or someone let them in.’

  They stepped inside the apartment on to a sodden carpet of ash and charred debris, weightless black flecks fluttering through their torch beams like flies over a carcass. The walls had been licked black by the cruel flames and the ceiling almost entirely consumed, so that she could see through it to the roof’s steel ribs and, beyond them, the sky. The furniture, too, had been skeletonised into dark shapes that were both entirely alien and strangel
y familiar, although the fire, ever capricious, had inexplicably spared a single chair and a large section of one wall, as if to deliberately emphasise the otherwise overwhelming scale of its devastation.

  It was an uncomfortable, dislocating experience, and Allegra had the strange impression of having stepped on to a film set – an imagined vision, rendered with frightening detail, of some future, post-apocalyptic world where the few remaining survivors had been reduced to taking shelter where they could and eking out an existence amidst the ashes.

  ‘This looks like where it started.’ She picked her way over the charred wreckage to a room that looked out over the harbour. The fire here seemed to have been particularly intense, the steel beams overhead twisted and tortured, opaque pools of molten glass having formed under the windows, the stonework still radiating a baked-in heat that took the edge off the chilled sea breeze. There was also some evidence of the beginnings of a forensic examination of the scene: equipment set up on a low trestle table, mobile lighting arranged in the room’s corners.

  ‘Probably here,’ Tom agreed, pointing his torch at a dark mound that was pressed up against what was left of a bookcase. ‘As you’d expect.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Tom reached into his backpack and pulled out one of the photographs that had been left for them in the helicopter.

  ‘What do you see?’

  She studied it carefully, then ran her torch over the burnt bookcase with a frown. As far as she could tell they looked the same. There certainly didn’t seem…She paused, having just noticed a rectangular shape on the photo that the torchlight revealed to be a small metal grille set into the wall at about head height.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked with a frown.

  ‘That’s what I wondered too,’ Tom muttered. ‘Probably nothing. But then again…’ He stepped closer and rubbed gently against a section of the wall. Through the damp layer of soot, a narrow groove slowly revealed itself.

  ‘A hidden door,’ Allegra breathed.

  ‘A panic room.’ Tom nodded. ‘The grille must be for an air intake that would have been concealed by the bookcase. D’Arcy hasn’t disappeared. He never even left his apartment.’

  ‘Can you open it?’

  ‘Half-inch steel, at a guess.’ Tom rapped his knuckles against the door with a defeated shrug. ‘Electro-magnetic locking system. Assuming they’ve cut the mains power, the locking mechanism will release itself as soon as the batteries run out.’

  ‘Which is when?’

  ‘Typically about forty-eight hours after they kick in.’

  ‘Which is still at least twelve hours away,’ she calculated, thinking back to the time of the fire given in the missing persons report. ‘We can’t hang around here until then.’

  ‘We won’t have to,’ Tom reassured her. ‘Here, give me a hand clearing this away.’

  Reaching up, they ripped what was left of the bookcase to the floor, the charred wood crisping as they grabbed it, the dust making them both cough.

  ‘There would have been an external keypad, but that must have melted in the fire,’ Tom explained as the panic room’s steel shell emerged through the soot. ‘But there’s usually a failsafe too. A secondary pad that they conceal inside the room’s walls in case of an emergency. That should have been insulated from the heat.’

  Stepping forward, he carefully ran his hands across the filthy steel walls at about waist height.

  ‘Here.’

  He spat into his hand and wiped the dirt away in a series of tarred smears to reveal a rectangular access panel that he quickly unscrewed.

  ‘It’s still working,’ Allegra said with relief as she shone her torch into the recess and made out the keypad’s illuminated buttons and the cursor’s inviting blink.

  Tom reached into his bag and pulled out a small device that looked like a calculator. Levering the fascia off the panic room’s keypad to reveal the circuit board, he knelt down next to it and connected his device. Immediately the screen lit up, numbers scrolling across it in seemingly random patterns until, one by one, it began to lock them down. These then flashed up on the keypad’s display, hesitantly at first, and then with increasing speed and confidence, until the full combination flashed up green: 180373.

  With a hydraulic sigh, the panic room’s door rolled back.

  FIFTY-NINE

  20th March – 3.44 a.m.

  Allegra approached the open doorway, then staggered back.

  ‘Cazzo!’ She swore, her hand over her mouth. Peering through the opening, Tom understood why.

  The emergency lighting was on, the room soaked in its blood-red glaze. D’Arcy was lying slumped in the corner and had already begun to bloat in the heat, the sickly sweet stench of rotting meat washing over them. Head lolling against his chest, his eyes were bulging as if someone had tried to pop them out on to his cheek, his stomach ballooning under his white shirt, the marbled skin mottled blue-green through the gaps between the buttons.

  Breathing through his mouth, and trying to ignore the way D’Arcy’s black and swollen tongue had forced his jaws into a wide, gagging smile, Tom stepped inside the cramped space. Allegra followed close behind.

  ‘The smoke would have killed him,’ Tom guessed, pointing out some plastic sheeting hanging loose from the air vent which it looked as though D’Arcy had tried to seal shut with bandages and plasters raided from a first-aid kit. ‘Then he must have started to cook in the heat.’

  ‘Cazzo,’ she breathed to herself again.

  Glancing round, it seemed pretty clear that D’Arcy had taken to using the room for storage rather than survival, with filing boxes stacked to the ceiling against the far wall, and a large server array providing some sort of data backup facility to whatever computers he guessed must have once stood on the desk outside. Clearly, like most people who had these types of rooms installed, D’Arcy had drawn comfort from knowing it was there should he want to use it, without ever really expecting that he would ever need to.

  ‘Help me lift one of these down.’

  Mindful of not tripping over D’Arcy’s outstretched legs, he lifted down a box and opened it up. Inside were four or five lever-arch files, neatly arranged by year, containing hundreds of invoices.

  ‘Renewal fees for a burial plot in the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome,’ Allegra read, opening the most recent file and then turning the pages. ‘Private jet hire. Hotel suites. Yacht charter agreements. It’s expensive being rich.’

  ‘Anything linking him to De Luca?’ Tom asked, hauling a second box down.

  ‘Nothing obvious. Trade confirmations, derivatives contracts, settlement details, account statements…’ She flicked through a couple of the folders.

  ‘This one’s the same,’ Tom agreed, having heaved a third box to the floor.

  ‘Look at this, though,’ Allegra said slowly, having come across a thick wedge of bank statements. ‘Every time his trading account went over ten million, the surplus was transferred back to an account at the Banco Rosalia.’

  ‘The Banco Rosalia?’ Tom frowned. ‘Wasn’t that where Argento worked?’

  ‘Exactly. Which ties D’Arcy back to the other killings.’

  ‘Except there’s nothing here that links his death to either Caesar or Caravaggio,’ Tom pointed out. ‘Why would Moretti have broken the pattern?’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t. Maybe D’Arcy locked himself in here before Moretti could get to him,’ she suggested.

  Tom nodded, although he wasn’t entirely convinced. Compared to what he’d heard about the other murders, this one seemed rushed and unplanned. Different.

  ‘What do you know about the Banco Rosalia?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing really.’ She shrugged. ‘Small bank, majority owned by the Vatican. I met the guy who runs it at the morgue, ID-ing Argento’s body.’

  ‘We should take the disks.’ Tom pointed at a stack of DVDs that he guessed were server backups. ‘If the bank’s involved, the money trail might show us how.’

 
; ‘What about him?’ She motioned towards D’Arcy’s distended corpse.

  ‘We’ll re-seal the door and leave him for the cops to find when it opens tomorrow,’ he said with a shrug. ‘There’s nothing he can tell them that we -’ He broke off, having just caught sight of D’Arcy’s wrist.

  ‘What’s up?’

  Tom knelt down and gingerly lifted D’Arcy’s arm.

  ‘His watch,’ he breathed as he tried to get at the fastening. The cold flesh had risen like dough around the black crocodile-skin strap, his blackened fingers leaving dark bruise-like marks on D’Arcy’s pale skin.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s a Ziff.’

  ‘A Ziff?’

  ‘Max Ziff. A watch-maker. A genius. He only makes three, maybe four pieces a year. They sell for hundreds of thousands. Sometimes millions.’

  ‘How can you tell it’s one of his?’ She crouched down next to him.

  ‘The orange second hand,’ he explained, the catch coming free and the strap peeling away, leaving a deep welt in the skin. ‘That’s his signature.’

  ‘I’ve seen one of these before,’ she frowned, reaching for it.

  ‘Are you sure it was a Ziff?’ he asked with a sceptical look. Not only were there so few of them around, but they were so unobtrusive that most people never noticed them when they saw them. In fact that was half the point.

  ‘It wasn’t a Ziff. It was the same Ziff,’ she insisted. ‘It was in Cavalli’s evidence box. White face with no make on it, steel case, roman numerals, orange second hand and…’ she flipped it over ‘…Yes. Engraved Greek letter on the back. Only this is delta. Cavalli’s was gamma.’

  ‘Are you sure it…?’ he asked again.

  ‘I’m telling you, it was identical.’

  Tom shook his head in surprise.

  ‘It must have been a special commission. He normally only makes one of anything.’

  ‘Then we should talk to him,’ Allegra suggested. ‘If it’s unusual, he might remember who ordered it and where we can find them?’