A pause, Faulks giving a thin smile at her laboured breathing as Logan tightened his grip on her arm which he had bent behind her back.
‘What do you want?’
‘I have some information for the Delian League.’
‘Who?’
‘I think we’re a little beyond that,’ she said, nodding in the direction of the documentation in the small room.
‘Earl, are you in here?’
Faulks’s head snapped round at the sound of Verity’s approaching voice.
‘Damn,’ he swore, then turned back to Allegra with an impatient shrug. He didn’t have time for this. Not today of all days. Not now. But after the lengths she’d gone to…there was no telling what she knew or who she’d told. He had to be sure. The League had to be sure. ‘You’re right. We’re way beyond that.’
Stepping forward, he grabbed the end of his umbrella and swung its handle hard against her temple. Groaning, she went limp in Logan’s arms.
‘Take her to the back and keep her quiet,’ he hissed. ‘When we’re finished here, load her up with the rest of the shipment.’
Turning on his heel, he walked back out on to the corridor. Verity was marching towards him, her face drawn into a thunderous scowl, hands clenched like an eagle swooping to snatch a rabbit out of long grass.
‘Earl, I don’t know what you’re playing at, but…’
‘Verity, I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am,’ he apologised, arms outstretched, palms upturned, his brain working hard. ‘There’s been a terrible mistake. Terrible. And it’s entirely my fault.’
‘The only mistake was me agreeing to come here,’ she retorted angrily. ‘Abused, accused, abandoned…’
‘We were on the wrong floor!’ He laughed lustily, hoping that it didn’t sound too forced. ‘Can you believe it? It’s old age. It must be. I’m losing it.’
‘The wrong floor?’ she repeated unsmilingly.
‘The landlord needed access to my old offices to begin the demolition planning, so they’ve moved me up here,’ he explained, with what he hoped was a convincingly earnest wide-eyed look. ‘I’m so used to going to the second floor after all these years, that I didn’t even think about it. I’m so sorry.’
‘So everything’s here?’ She glanced past him with a sceptical frown.
‘Absolutely.’ He gave an emphatic nod. ‘Thank God, because for a terrible moment I thought…’
‘I know. Me too.’ She let out a nervous, hesitant laugh. He forced himself to join in.
‘Can you ever forgive me?’
‘That depends on what’s inside.’ She flashed him a smile.
Ushering her in, he led her through to the middle room, Verity murmuring with appreciation at some of the items she could see stacked there.
‘Good God, Earl, this is wonderful.’
‘Even better, it’s all for sale,’ he reminded her with a smile as he crouched next to the safe, flicked the dial and heaved it open.
‘Is that it?’ Verity breathed over his shoulder, pulling on a pair of white cotton gloves.
‘That’s it.’ Sliding the shallow box out, he carefully placed it on top of one of the neighbouring packing crates. Removing his jacket, he lay it over another crate so that its scarlet lining covered it. Then he gingerly removed the mask and set it on top of the lining, the pale ivory leaping off the red material. Finally he stepped back and ushered her forward.
‘Please.’
Approaching slowly as if she was afraid of waking it, Verity pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves and carefully picked the mask up. She raised it level with her face, eyes unblinking, the colour flushing her throat and cheeks, her breathing quickening, hands trembling. For a moment, it seemed she might kiss it. But instead, she gave a long sigh of pleasure and lowered it unsteadily back into its straw bed, her shoulders shaking.
‘So? What do you think?’ Faulks asked, after giving her a few moments to compose herself.
Verity made to speak, but no sound came out, her lips trembling, tears welling in her eyes. She looked up at him, her hand waving in front of her mouth as if she was trying to summon the words out of herself.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ she breathed eventually. ‘It’s like…it’s like gazing into the eyes of God.’
‘Attribution?’
‘Assuming the dating is right…’
‘Oh, it’s right.’
‘Then Phidias. Phidias, Phidias, Phidias!’ Her voice built to an ecstatic crescendo. ‘We would have heard of any other sculptor from that period of this quality.’
‘Then I hope you won’t mind confirming that to my buyer?’ Faulks pulled out his phone and searched for a number. ‘Or the valuation you’ll put on it once he donates it to you?’
‘Of course,’ she enthused, snatching the phone from him as soon as it started ringing. ‘What’s his name?’
SEVENTY-SIX
Over Milan, Italy
20th March-6.27 p.m.
Darkness. The smell of straw. A dog barking.
Coming round, Allegra lifted her head and then sank back with a pained cry. There was something above her preventing her from sitting up. Something smooth and flat and…wooden. She moved her hands gingerly across it, sensing first its corners and then the constrictive press of the walls at her side. It was a box. She was lying in a wooden box.
The last thing she remembered was Faulks, wildeyed, raising his umbrella above her like an executioner’s axe and then…darkness. Darkness, the smell of straw, a dog barking, something hard and uneven underneath her, her head throbbing where he’d struck her. And in the background a low, incessant drone, a rushing whistle of air, a bass shudder.
A plane. She was on a plane. Lying in a wooden box in the hold of a plane.
She nervously patted her inner thigh, and then sighed with relief. The location transmitter was still there-taped to her skin at the top of her leg where they only would have found it if they had stripped her down.
She’d taken a big risk, she knew. A risk that Tom would never have agreed to. But as soon as it had become clear that there was nothing in either Faulks’s papers or the safe that was going to give them even the slightest hint as to where the League was meeting that night, she’d known what she had to do. Grab the transmitter and some tape out of the bag. Hold back amid the confusion of their hurried retreat as Faulks pounded along the corridors towards them. And then try to talk or shock him into delivering her to the League himself. It was that or give up on getting to the painting before Santos could hand it over to the Serbs. It was that, or admit that they couldn’t stop him.
‘Stop’ was a euphemism, she knew, for what the Serbs would do to him if he failed to deliver the Caravaggio. The strange thing was that, after the horrors she’d witnessed and endured over the past few days, she felt remarkably sanguine about his likely fate. Especially when the alternative was that, armed with his diplomatic immunity and the proceeds of the Caravaggio’s sale, Santos would escape any more conventional form of justice.
Tom had said that the radius of the transmitter was three miles. No use at thirty thousand feet, but if he’d realised what she was doing when she hadn’t come back down, and then followed her signal to the airport, he should have been able to work out where she was heading and take another flight to the same destination where he would hopefully be able to pick up her signal again when she landed. At least, that was had been her rough, ill-conceived plan.
For now, all she had was darkness and the sound of her own breathing. Its dull echo, in fact, that seemed to be getting louder and louder as the box’s walls closed in, pressed down on her chest, her lungs fighting for air.
Suddenly she was back in the tomb. The entrance blocked, the earth cold and clammy underneath. She called out, her fists pounding against the sides, her feet drumming against the end, twisting her body so that she could lever her back up against the lid.
There. Above her head. Two small, perfectly round holes in the wood that she hadn’t been a
ble to see before. She inched forward on her stomach, pressed her face to them, drinking in the narrow rivulets of air and light with relief, her heart rate slowing.
She looked down, struck by a sensation of being watched.
In the dim light, a pair of lifeless eyes stared back up at her, cold lips parted in a hard smile, nose sliced off.
She was lying on top of a statue. A marble statue. But to Allegra the statue might as well have been a corpse, and the box a coffin, and the rumble of the engines the echo of loose earth being shovelled back into her grave.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
Cimitero Acattolico, Rome
20th March-10.22 p.m.
‘I’ve lost her,’ Tom barked.
‘What do you mean, you’ve lost her?’ Archie grabbed the receiver from him and shook it. ‘She was just there.’
‘Well, she isn’t now,’ Tom shot back, his anger betraying his concern.
Until now, Allegra had proved surprisingly easy to track, her signal leading them from the Freeport to the cargo terminal at Geneva airport, where they had observed Faulks’s driver overseeing several large crates being loaded on to a plane bound for Rome. It hadn’t taken much imagination to deduce that she had been placed inside one of them. They had therefore immediately booked themselves on to an earlier flight to ensure that they would already be in position to pick up the signal again by the time her plane landed.
Watching through his binoculars from the airport perimeter fence, Tom had been able to tell that this was a well-established smuggling route for Faulks, the Customs officers welcoming him off the plane on to a remote part of the airfield with a broad smile as a black briefcase had swapped hands.
The cargo had then been split, some heading for the warm glow of the main terminal, the rest to a dark maintenance hangar into which Faulks had driven, the doors quickly rolling shut behind him. Then for two, maybe three hours nothing. Nothing but the steady pulse of her location transmitter on the small screen cradled in his lap. A pulse that had served as a taunting reminder of the fading beat of Jennifer’s heart-rate monitor in the helicopter over the desert. A pulse which they had carefully followed here, only to see it flatline.
Sheltered by regimented lines of mourning cypresses and Mediterranean pines, the Cimitero Acattolico nestled on the slope of the Aventine Hill, in the time-worn shadow of the Pyramid of Caius Cestius and the adjacent Aurelian walls. Even by moonlight, Tom had been able to see that it was populated by an eclectic tangle of stone monuments, graves and family vaults, separated by long grass woven with wild flowers. These elaborate constructions were in stark contrast to the trees’ dark symmetry: pale urns, broken columns, ornate scrollwork and devotional statuary bursting in pale flashes through the gaps in their evenly spaced trunks, as if deliberately planted there in an attempt to prove the superiority of human creativity over natural design.
If so, it was increasingly obvious to Tom that this was an argument that nature was winning, decades of neglect having left monuments eroded by pollution and tombs cracked open by weeds and the cruel ebb and flow of the seasons. In one place, a pine tree had shed a branch, the diseased limb collapsing on to a grave and smashing its delicately engraved headstone into pieces. In another, the ground had risen up, snapping the spine of the vault that had dared to surmount it. And now it seemed to have swallowed Allegra’s signal too.
‘Where was the last reading from?’ Dominique asked, ever practical.
‘Over there-’ Tom immediately broke into a loping run, vaulting the smaller graves and navigating his way around the larger tombs. Then, just as he was about to emerge into one of the wide avenues that cut across the cemetery, he felt Archie’s hand grab his shoulder and force him to the ground.
‘Get down,’ he hissed.
Three men had emerged from the trees ahead of them, their machine guns glinting black in the moonlight, torch beams slicing the darkness. Moving quickly, they glided over to a large family vault, their boots lost in the long grass so that they almost appeared to be floating over the ground. As Tom watched, they ghosted up its steps and vanished inside.
‘She must be in there,’ Tom guessed, standing up.
The vault was a small rectangular building designed to echo a Roman temple, a few shallow steps leading up to the entrance, a Doric frieze carved under the portico, white Travertine walls decorated with columns that gave the illusion of supporting the tiled roof. The entrance was secured by a handsome bronze door that the elements had varnished a mottled green. A single name had been carved over it: Merisi. Tom pointed at it with a smile as they crept towards it.
‘What?’ Dominique whispered.
‘Merisi was Caravaggio’s real name.’
They paused, straining to hear a voice or a sound from inside. But nothing came apart from the silent echo of darkness.
With a determined nod at the others, Tom carefully eased the door open with one hand, his gun in the other. This and three other ‘clean’ weapons had been sourced by Archie from Johnny Li while they had been watching the hangar at Rome airport. The price had been steep-the money he claimed Tom still owed him, plus another ten for his trouble. Archie had only just stopped cursing about it, although Johnny had at least held his half of their earlier bargain and returned Tom’s watch.
Inside, a thin carpet of dirt and leaves covered the black-and-white mosaic floor and lay pooled in the room’s dark corners. At the far end stood a black marble altar with the name Merisi again picked out in bronze letters above a date-1696. In front of this were two high-backed prayer stools, once painted black and upholstered in a rich velvet, but now peeling and rotted by the cold and the damp. Above the altar, suspended from the wall, was a crucifix, one arm of which had broken off so that it hung at an odd angle.
The room was empty.
‘Where the hell have they gone?’ Archie exclaimed, rapping the walls to make sure they were solid.
Tom examined the floor with a frown.
‘How did they expect to bury anyone in here?’
‘What do you mean?’ Dominique frowned.
‘It’s a family vault. There should be a slab or something that can be lifted up.’
‘No inscriptions either,’ Archie chimed in. ‘Not even a full set of dates.’
‘And the one that’s here doesn’t fit,’ Dominique pointed out. ‘This graveyard wasn’t used until the 1730s. No one would have been buried here in 1696.’
‘It could be a birth year,’ Tom suggested, crouching down in front of the altar. ‘Maybe the second date has come away and…’
The words caught in his throat. As he’d rubbed the marble, his fingers had brushed against the final number, causing it to move slightly. He glanced up at the others to check that they had seen this too, then reached forward to turn it, the number spinning clockwise and then clicking into place once it was upside down so that it now read as a nine.
Archie frowned. ‘1699? That doesn’t make no sense either?’
‘Not 1699-1969,’ Tom guessed, turning each of the previous three numbers so that they also clicked into place upside down. ‘The year the Caravaggio was stolen.’
There was the dull thud of what sounded like a restraining bolt being drawn back from somewhere in front of them. Then, with the suppressed hiss of a hydraulic ram, the massive altar began to lift up and out, pivoting high above their heads, stopping a few inches below the coffered ceiling.
They jumped back, swapping a surprised look. Ahead of them, a flight of steps disappeared into the ground.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
20th March-10.37 p.m.
The steps led down to a brick-lined corridor set on a shallow incline. It was dimly lit, the sodium lighting suspended from the vaulted ceiling at irregular intervals forming pallid pools of orange light that barely penetrated the cloying darkness. In places the water had forced its way in, the ceiling flowering with calcite rings that dripped on to the glistening concrete floor.
Treading carefully, their guns aiming towards
the darkness into which the three armed men who had preceded them down here had presumably disappeared, they crept down the tunnel. Tom had the vague sense that they were following the contour of the Aventine as it rose steeply to their right, although it was hard to be sure, the passage tracing a bewildering course as it zigzagged violently between the graveyard’s scattered crypts and burial chambers. Eventually, after about two hundred yards, it ended, opening up into a subterranean network of interlinking rooms supported by steel props.
‘It’s Roman,’ Dominique whispered, stooping to look at a small section of the frescoed wall which hadn’t crumbled away. ‘Probably a private villa. Someone rich, because this looks like it might have been part of a bath complex.’ She pointed at a small section of the tessellated floor which had given way, revealing a four-foot cavity underneath, supported by columns of terracotta tiles. ‘They used to circulate hot air through the hypercaust to heat the floors and walls of the caldarium,’ she explained.
They tiptoed through into the next room, their path now lit by spotlights strung along a black flex and angled up at the ceiling, the amber glow suffusing the stone walls. Dominique identified this as the balneum, a semicircular sunken bath dominating the space.
Picking their way through the thicket of metal supports propping the roof up, they arrived at the main part of the buried villa, the tiled floor giving way to intricate mosaics featuring animals, plants, laurel-crowned gods and a dizzying array of boldly coloured geometric patterns. Here, some restoration work appeared to have been done: the delicate frescoes of robed Roman figures and carefully rendered animals showed signs of having been pieced back together from surviving fragments, the missing sections filled in and then plastered white so that the fissures between the pieces resembled cracks in the varnish on an old painting.
An angry shout echoed towards them through the empty rooms.
‘You think Santos is already here?’ Dominique whispered.
‘Allegra first,’ Tom insisted. ‘We worry about Santos and the painting when she’s safe.’
The Geneva Deception Page 29
