With his occasional research for the agency, his pension, a family inheritance, and some modestly ambitious investments, Malloy made a decent income and always had. It had just taken him a few years to remember the wisdom of his youth, but as he came toward a head-on collision with fifty, he got it firmly in his grasp again: he could do whatever he wanted. He had only to be ready to pay the price. It wasn't a profound point. He had believed it all his life, but after he lost what he once considered his life's work and had been plunged into the despair of retirement at the tender age of forty-two it had taken a bit of time to get past the idea that Charlie Winger had done him in. The truth was it had been time for him to move on. He needed the freefall and so he had let it happen. Now he needed the work - even if it was work of his own making - and so he was up to his old tricks.
At the Met, Malloy took the broad steps stretching across the front of the building without hurrying. Pure habit. When you go to an urgent meeting, never look like that is what you are doing. He checked out the students and tourists lounging on the steps as he went. He was a man enjoying a glimpse of youth on a blustery spring afternoon. The kids sprawled across the stone steps in an attitude of leisure only kids can master. He liked to think he had been different when he was young, but he knew the truth. He had not imagined the wealth he had owned with his empty pockets and guileless smile anymore than they did. Oh, but what he could do with that innocence now!
Waiting for his turn to purchase a ticket, Malloy studied a flier about an upcoming exhibit his wife Gwen wanted to attend. Gwen knew very little about Malloy's professional life, having met him soon after his retirement. She was aware that he had worked overseas for a number of years. He had led her to believe he did contract work these days for the State Department as a forensic accountant. Admitting to being an accountant, he had learned from long experience in the game, usually ended all queries about his professional life. The forensic aspect excited Gwen's interest a bit, but that was fine. He didn't mind his wife thinking of him as a detective of sorts. The rest was probably a bit more than she was ready to believe anyway. She asked him once about his wounds. 'A visit to a bank in Lebanon,' he told her, which was true, 'a case of mistaken identity,' which was not. It had been Malloy's first assignment. In the course of an afternoon he had lost all of his assets, the people he had recruited in other words, and learned as no lesson before or since never to tell the truth about anything to anyone.
Gwen was a painter, lately a very successful one. In her world what she said was true and the people she associated with she either liked or avoided. She knew her husband kept weapons and was trained in their use, but she wouldn't touch them and preferred actually never to see them. That was fine. With Gwen, Malloy could be. . . well, not exactly himself, he was only himself when he was working, but at least content. Call it what it was: with Gwen he was happy.
Gwen was a good soul with a streak of disobedience toward authority that he shared. He liked to think he had worked through his transition on his own, but he knew he had only made it back to his own two feet because Gwen loved him. The shame of it was she never really knew how much she had done to make him a man again. But that was his only regret.
Having bought his ticket, Malloy meandered through the Greek and Roman sections, stopping occasionally as if to consider the stone visages but in fact memorizing the living faces within the hall. When he moved on he wanted to be sure no one was following him without his knowledge. Good guys, probably, but nothing irritated him more than letting anyone know what he was doing.
He saw a pretty long-haired girl in a short skirt studying a mosaic featuring long-haired naiads, and took a moment to reflect how little had changed in two thousand years, at least with regard to hair styles, young girls, and the eternal erotic in the fantasies of the male of the species. In the next hall the girl showed up again and studiously avoided eye contact again. He could imagine it was coincidence if he believed in such a thing, but he knew better and lost her after a fast turn.
She was waiting with just a hint of a blush at having been shaken so easily when he came to the centre of the museum's labyrinth, the Metropolitan's impressive medieval collection. The hall was mostly empty except for the long-haired girl and a tall blonde in her thirties, who studied a Byzantine triptych with far too much earnestness. Jane was employing children! But then, as he recalled only too well, she had hooked him at a tender age as well, bullet-riddled and desperate for a second chance.
Jane was good. She ran operatives the way the best operatives ran their assets - pay, coddle, cajole, pay some more, and have a heart, as long as it served a purpose. In two or three more years the young girl would go to the ends of the earth for Jane and probably wouldn't get spotted doing it. The one in her thirties was already there and might well have followed him without his knowing. If Jane had wanted Malloy dead, this one would have accomplished that too and without a flicker of conscience. It was something to keep in mind.
A guard sat contentedly at the far end of the room, probably not one of Jane's people. When two boys ran through the hall, their shouts awakening his attention, he wandered dutifully after them. The kids might have been Jane's doing. The girl with the long hair now walked toward a smaller room, and Malloy followed her as if to a tryst.
Jane Harrison was contemplating a Byzantine fibula crossbow, a weapon that could be held in one hand like a pistol and was good for killing at a range of no more than about two or three metres. Naturally, it was not only deadly, but quite ornate. Malloy had never warmed to Byzantine art. It was too formularized for his tastes, but he thought their weaponry showed real imagination — the true art of that gold-laced god- driven culture.
Jane was in the spirit of things. She didn't want to be seen, so she had come frumpy: large square glasses with a good smudge or two, no makeup, and even a bit of an old lady totter. Her hair was slightly frazzled, giving her the look of a slightly off balance schizophrenic with an expression that said, 'Talk to me, I dare you!'
She had finished her composition with shoes that were scuffed and breaking down at the heel, because pros always looked at the shoes. Jane believed frumpy old women in frumpy overcoats were invisible to the human eye - the prototype of stealth bombers - as she had put it years ago. She claimed actually to have run some experiments to prove it. Put fifteen people in a room and ask trained agents to recall each individual in detail. The frumpy old lady not only didn't get a colour of hair or exact height or weight, she actually vanished sixty-two percent of the time - or so Jane said. Jane had Malloy's failing. She lied so earnestly and constantly you never knew what was true. The fact that a statement wasn't important had no relevance. Lying was an art one employed for all occasions because a time might come when it would keep you alive or get you killed. It paid to be good at telling a lie and even better at reading one.
In this case, if it wasn't the truth, it ought to have been. Except she wasn't invisible to Malloy. To him Jane was simply amazing. Malloy had admired very few people in his life: his father, his mother, Gwen and Jane Harrison. He trusted a few more than that, but oddly enough, both his father and Jane failed to make the cut on his 'trust' list.
Looking at her costume it was hard to imagine Jane was currently the deputy director of operations at Langley, nearly impossible to believe she had started her career with a field assignment inside the Italian terror cells, spouting Marxist tripe and making love by the numbers.
'A thousand Madonnas,' Malloy muttered, 'and I find you admiring the only weapon in the room.'
'There aren't a thousand Madonnas here, T. K.'
Malloy looked around at the stiff Madonnas holding their miniature men wearing halos and giving the old hippy peace sign. 'Feels like it,' he said.
'Not a fan of Byzantine art?'
'They made nice weapons.'
Finally she smiled. 'Didn't they?'
Jane turned and walked toward an especially primitive painting of the Crucifixion. Malloy followed via a Madonna and child. As he passed by her for the sake of a slightly more interesting Crucifixion, Jane said, 'What have you gotten me into, T. K.?'
Malloy inspected the second Crucifixion. The spear of Longinus had just pierced the flesh of Christ. The blood spurted out like a fountain. A man in silk robes stood at the foot of the cross catching the blood in a gold chalice. It was bad science - Christ, being dead when struck by the spear, wasn't going to bleed like that - and bad art certainly, but what struck him was the notion of the blood itself. The medieval mind had believed in its power beyond all else. It was the blood staining the spear, the Chalice, the thorns, and the Cross, that made those relics the most prized possessions of the faith. It was not the same as the 'blood' of the Eucharist either. Not for those folks. For even the hint of a stain of the Saviour's blood they had been known to trade away whole kingdoms.
'You're talking about Jack Farrell?' he said with a touch of well-rehearsed surprise.
Jane stood slightly behind him now, just off to his side as if she too wanted to examine the arc of blood from the hanging corpse to the cup. 'This was supposed to be a quiet operation, T. K.'
'What can I say? I didn't think he would run.'
'It wasn't the running that got the media's attention. It was stealing half-a-billion dollars before he took off.'
'Taking his secretary along didn't help.'
'The secretary was a nice touch — from the media's standpoint.' Jane sounded tired, frustrated and justifiably pissed off.
Jack Farrell might have caused the problem, but she was blaming Malloy.
She walked toward another painting whilst Malloy continued to stand before Longinus and his spear. The Holy Lance, if one thought about it, was a curiously ambivalent symbol. Normally an instrument of violent death, its use on a living man being crucified would have been an act of mercy. Understandably, it was the most popular relic of Medieval Europe - a weapon everyone knew and understood. By modern times, the popularity had grown into the notion that whoever possessed the True Lance held in his hand the destiny of the world. Hitler had apparently been fascinated by this notion and had brought what he thought was the True Lance out of Austria once he had subjugated that country in 1938. He had kept the relic in the cathedral of Nuremberg to the end of the war, according to some, the supreme treasure of the Third Reich.
'You told me you could make Farrell an asset.'
Malloy resisted confessing he was wrong. Confessions, even genuine ones, only antagonised Jane. She had disliked the idea of recruiting Jack Farrell from the beginning. As far as she could see, Farrell was too big, too public. Besides if he was really connected to European crime families she ought to put someone else on it. Malloy was more valuable to her working black ops. The truth was Malloy had wanted Jack Farrell for his own reasons and so had claimed, without offering proof, that he was the only person capable of turning the man.
Jane had got to be an old woman by trusting no one - especially her best operatives. 'There's something you are not telling me,' she had answered. As usual there was a great deal he was not telling her, but what Malloy had said to her was this: 'If we go after Jack Farrell, I think we could end up inside the largest crime families in Europe.' That got Jane's attention. Was Farrell really so dirty? Malloy had lied to her with utter conviction: he was sure of it.
Jane had people on the ground in most of the major European cities. She knew the key families and the politicians who protected them. She had a reasonable idea of the nature of their activities and a good estimate of the kind of money involved. What could Jack Farrell give her beyond that?
'With Jack Farrell,' Malloy told her, 'I'll have the bank account numbers of the bosses.' This had led to a series of questions. How had he settled on Jack Farrell? Interesting fellow. Jane had laughed at him. That was no answer. What did he
like
about Farrell? His old friends - the ones he avoided these days. Anyone she knew? Malloy dropped a few names. The more pertinent question was how much Jack Farrell really knew. Did Malloy have any idea what his role was inside the various syndicates? What did he do? What did he know? What piece of information was going to take them inside? How did he intend to turn the guy? What did Malloy know that someone else could not learn and use? Why did he have to be Malloy's asset? And her greatest concern: what if laundering funds was the extent of his involvement? 'We go to a lot of trouble and get nothing but intelligence we already have - and I've called in markers. . . for what?'
'Jack Farrell knows things we don't,' Malloy told her.
Was she supposed to take that as an article of faith? Why not? Well, for one thing, he had no criminal record, no known contacts with any of the crime families. . .
Not exactly true, Malloy had told her. He had business dealings with various companies connected in one way or another to Giancarlo Bartoli. Jane had answered this with the obvious: most international companies had dealings with Bartoli, like it or not. Besides Bartoli was grey. He was also international. If you dealt with Italy - if you dealt with Europe - you brushed up against him. Malloy had countered with the observation that Bartoli was considered mostly legitimate because of a lack of good intelligence. With Jack Farrell as Malloy's asset, Giancarlo, his son Luca, and their whole syndicate would come tumbling down.