Arlington National Cemetery, Washington DC 17th March - 11.46 a.m.
‘You sure about this?’ Special Agent Bryan Stokes stepped out of the car behind her, his tone making his own doubts clear.
‘Absolutely,’ Jennifer Browne nodded, surprised at the unforced confidence in her voice as she watched Tom set off towards them, his short brown hair plastered down by the rain. He had seemed pleased to see her, his initial surprise having melted into a warm smile and an eager wave. That was something, at least.
‘So what’s the deal with you two?’ Stokes wedged a golf umbrella against his shoulder with his chin and flicked a manilla file open. Medium height, about a hundred and seventy pounds, Jennifer guessed that Stokes had been born frowning, deep lines furrowing a wide, flat forehead, bloodless lips pressed into a concerned
grimace. In his early forties, he was dressed in a severe charcoal suit and black tie that had dropped away from his collar, revealing that the button was missing.
‘There is no deal,’ she said quickly, looking away in case he noticed her smile.
‘Then how do you know him?’
‘We’ve worked a couple of cases together, that’s all.’
Tom was navigating his way towards them through the blossom scatter of white gravestones like a skiff through a storm, tacking first one way and then the other as he plotted a route up the hill. Not for the first time she noted that despite his tall, athletic frame, there was something almost feline about the way he moved - at once graceful and fluid and yet strong and sure-footed.
‘It says here he was Agency?’
‘Senator Duval was on the Senate Intelligence Committee and recommended him,’ she explained, picking her words carefully. FBI Director Jack Green had made it crystal clear that the specific circumstances in which Tom had joined and left the CIA were highly classified. ‘They recruited him into a black op industrial espionage unit. When they shut it down five years later, Kirk went into business for himself, switching from technical blueprints and experimental formulas to fine art and jewellery.’
‘Was he any good?’
‘The best in the business. Or so they said.’
‘And the guy with him?’
‘Archie Connolly. His former fence. Now his business partner. And his best friend, to the extent he allows himself to have one.’
There was a pause as Stokes consulted the file again. It had been Jennifer’s idea to come here, of course. INS had flagged Tom’s name up when he’d landed at Dulles and it hadn’t taken her much to figure out where he’d be headed. But now that she was actually here, she was surprised at how she was feeling. Excited to be seeing Tom again after almost a year, certainly. But there was also a nagging sense of nervousness and apprehension that she couldn’t quite explain. Or perhaps didn’t want to. It was always easier that way.
‘And now they’ve gone straight?’ There was the suggestion of suppressed laughter in Stokes’s voice.
‘I’m not sure that someone like Tom can ever go straight,’ she mused. ‘Not in the way you and I mean it. The problem is, he’s seen too many supposedly straight people do crooked things to think those sorts of labels matter. He just does what he thinks is right.’
‘And you’re sure about this?’ Stokes pressed again, her explanation seeming to have, if anything, heightened his initial misgivings.
She didn’t bother replying, hoping that he would interpret her silence in whichever way made him most comfortable. Instead she stepped forward to greet Tom, who had reached the final incline that led up to where they were waiting. Tom, however, hesitated, his eyes flicking to Stokes and then back to her. He was clearly surprised that she hadn’t come alone.
‘Tom -’ She held out her hand. It felt all wrong, too formal, but with Stokes hovering she didn’t exactly have much choice. Besides, what was the alternative? A hug? A kiss? That also didn’t seem right after eleven months.
‘Special Agent Browne,’ Tom shook her hand with a brief nod, having clearly decided to ape her stilted greeting. He looked healthier than when she had last seen him, his handsome, angular face having lost some of its pallor, his coral blue eyes clear and alive.
‘This is Special Agent Stokes.’
‘Agent Stokes,’ Tom nodded a greeting.
Stokes grunted something indistinct in reply and glanced nervously over his shoulder, as if he was worried about being seen out in the open with him.
‘Come to pay your respects?’
‘We need some help on a case,’ Jennifer began hesitantly.
‘You mean this wasn’t a coincidence?’
Despite his sarcastic tone, she sensed a slight
tension lurking behind his smile. Annoyance, perhaps, that she was only there because she wanted something. Or was that just her projecting her own guilty feelings?
‘
I
need your help,’ she said.
There was a pause, his smile fading.
‘What have you got?’
‘Why don’t we get in…’ She held the Suburban’s rear door open. Tom didn’t move. ‘There’s something I want to show you. It’ll only take a few minutes.’
Tom hesitated for a moment. Then, shrugging, he followed Jennifer into the back, while Stokes climbed into the driver’s seat.
‘Recognise this?’
She handed him a photograph sealed inside a clear plastic evidence bag. Tom smoothed the crinkles flat so that he could see through it. It showed a nativity scene, an exhausted Mary clutching her belly and staring blankly at the Christ child lying on the straw in front of her, an angel plunging dramatically overhead. Unusually, in the foreground a spiky-haired youth, his back to the viewer and one foot touching the baby, has turned to face an aged Joseph, his face tortured by a mischievous disbelief.
Tom looked up, a puzzled smile playing across his lips. Outside, the sky had darkened even further, the rain thrashing the roof, the water
running off the windscreen in sheets like rolled steel off a mill.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘Do you recognise it?’ Stokes repeated, although Jennifer could already tell from Tom’s face that he did.
‘Caravaggio.
The Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco
,’ he pointed at the two other men in the painting gazing adoringly at the infant. ‘Painted in 1609 for the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily. Missing since 1969. Where did you get it?’
It was Tom’s turn to repeat his question.
Jennifer looked to Stokes and took his muted sigh and faint shrug as agreement to continue.
‘Special Agent Stokes is from our Vegas field office,’ she explained. ‘A week ago he took a call from Myron Kezman.’
‘The casino owner?’ Tom asked in surprise.
‘The photo arrived in his personal mail.’
‘It had a New York City post mark,’ Stokes added. ‘We’ve checked the envelope for prints and DNA. It was clean.’
‘There was a cell-phone number on the back of the photo,’ Jennifer continued; Tom turned it over so he could see it. ‘When Kezman called it there was a recorded message at the other end. It only played once before the number was disconnected.’
The windows had started to fog up. Stokes
started the engine and turned the heating on to clear them, a sudden blast of warm air washing over them.
‘What did it say?’
‘According to Kezman it made him a simple offer. The painting for twenty million dollars. And then a different cell-phone number to dial if he was interested in making the trade.’
‘That’s when Kezman called us in,’ Stokes took over. ‘Only this time we taped the call. It was another message setting out the instructions for the exchange. The denominations for the cash. The types of bags it should be in. The meet.’
‘And then they called you?’ Tom turned to Jennifer.
‘The Caravaggio is on the FBI Art Crime team’s top ten list of missing art works, so it automatically got referred our way,’ she confirmed. ‘I got pulled off a case to help handle it. I’ve been camping out in an office here in DC, so when I saw that you’d been flagged up at Dulles …’
‘You thought that maybe I could handle the exchange for you.’
‘How the hell did you…?’ Stokes eyed him suspiciously.
‘Because you’ve never dealt with anything like this before.’ Tom shrugged. ‘Because you’re smart and you know that these types of gigs never go down quite like you plan them. Because you know I might spot something you won’t.’
There was a pause as Stokes and Jennifer both swapped a look, and then laughed.
‘That’s pretty much it, I guess.’ Stokes nodded with a grudging smile.
‘When’s this happening?’
‘Tonight in Vegas. On the main floor at the Amalfi.’
‘Kezman’s joint?’
‘Yep,’ Stokes nodded.
‘That’s smart. Busy. Exposed. Plenty of civilian cover. Multiple escape routes.’
‘So you’ll do it?’ Jennifer asked hopefully.
There was a sharp rap on the window. Tom lowered it and Archie peered in, the rain dripping off his umbrella.
‘Very bloody cosy,’ he observed with a wry smile. ‘Not interrupting anything, am I?’
‘I don’t think you two have ever actually met before, have you?’ Tom asked, sitting back so Jennifer could lean across him and shake his hand.
‘Not properly.’ She smiled.
‘What do you want with my boy this time?’ Archie sniffed, eyeing her carefully.
‘The
Nativity
has turned up,’ Tom answered for her. ‘They want me to fly to Vegas with them to help handle the exchange.’
‘I’ll bet they do. What’s our take?’
Tom looked searchingly at Jennifer and then at Stokes, who shrugged sheepishly.
‘Looks like the usual fee,’ he said with a smile. ‘Attaboys all round.’
‘Well, bollocks to that, then,’ Archie sniffed. ‘You and I are meant to be meeting Dom in Zurich tomorrow night to see a real client. One that pays and doesn’t try and lock you up every five seconds.’ He gave first Jennifer, then Stokes, a reproachful glare.
Tom nodded slowly. Having given up on the Swiss police, the curator of the Emile Bũhrle Foundation wanted their help recovering four paintings worth a hundred and eighty million dollars taken at gunpoint the previous month. Archie had a point.
‘I know.’
A pause. He turned back to Jennifer.
‘Who’ll handle the exchange if I don’t?’
‘Me, I guess,’ she replied with a shrug. ‘At least, that was the plan until you flashed up on the system.’
There was a long silence, Tom looking first at Jennifer, then Stokes. He turned back to Archie.
‘Why don’t I just meet you in Zurich tomorrow.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Tom,’ Archie protested. ‘I don’t know why I bother sometimes.’
‘One night. That’s all,’ Tom reassured him. ‘I’ll be on the first flight out.’
‘Fine,’ Archie sighed. ‘But you can deal with Hewson.’ Archie stepped back and pointed down
the slope towards a lonely figure who appeared to be patiently waiting for them to return. ‘He’s doing my bloody head in.’
‘Whatever he’s got for me, it’s waited this long -’ Tom sat back with a shrug - ‘it can wait a day longer.’
Largo di Torre Argentina, Rome 17th March - 6.06 p.m.
Allegra could just about make out one of the men’s low voices. A pathologist, she guessed.
‘Cause of death? Well, I’ll only know when I open him up. But at a guess, oedema of the brain. Upside down, the heart continues to pump blood through the arteries, but because the veins rely on gravity, his brain would have become swollen with blood. Fluid would then have leaked out of his capillaries, first causing a headache, then gradual loss of consciousness and finally death, probably from asphyxiation as the brain signals driving respiration failed. Terrible way to go.’
‘How long has he been here?’ the man next to him asked. From his flinty, aggressive tone, Allegra knew immediately that this had to be Gallo.
‘All day. Possibly longer. It was a cold night and that would have slowed decomposition.’
‘And no one saw him until now?’ Gallo snapped, his voice both angry and disbelieving. She could just about detect the vestiges of a Southern accent, presumably carefully discarded over the years. After all, provincial roots were not exactly something you advertised if you wanted to get ahead. Not in Rome.
‘No one works here at the weekend,’ Salvatore explained in an apologetic tone. ‘And you couldn’t see him from the street.’
‘Terrible way to go,’ the pathologist repeated, shaking his head. ‘It would have taken hours for him to die. And right until the end he would have been able to hear people walking around the site and the cars coming and going overhead, and not been able to move or call for help.’
‘You think I give a shit about how this bastard died?’ Gallo snorted dismissively. ‘Don’t forget who he was or who he worked for. All I want to know is who killed him, why they did it here and why like this. The last thing I need is some sort of vigilante stalking the streets of Rome re-enacting Satanic rituals.’
‘Actually, Colonel, it’s Christian, not Satanic,’ Allegra interrupted with a cough.
‘What?’ Gallo rounded on her, looking her up and down with a disdainful expression. He was six feet tall and powerfully built, with a strong, tanned face covered in carefully trimmed stubble. About forty-five or so, she guessed, he was wearing
the full dress uniform of a colonel in the Guarda di Finanza and had chin-length steel-grey hair that parted down the centre of his head and fell either side of his face, forcing him to sweep it back out of his eyes every so often. He also had on a pair of frameless glasses with clear plastic arms. From the way he adjusted them on his nose, she sensed that these had only recently been prescribed and that he still resented wearing them, despite having done what he could to make them as unobtrusive as possible.
‘The inverted crucifixion,’ she explained, ignoring the horrified look on Salvatore’s face. ‘It’s taken from the Acts of Peter.’
‘The Acts of Peter?’ Gallo snorted. ‘There’s no such book in the Bible.’
‘That’s because it’s in the Apocrypha, the texts excluded from the Bible by the church,’ she replied, holding her temper in check. ‘According to the text, when the Roman authorities sentenced Peter to death, he asked to be crucified head down, so as not to imitate Christ’s passing.’
Gallo said nothing, his eyes narrowing slightly as he brushed his hair back.
‘Thank you for the Sunday school lesson, Miss…’
‘Lieutenant. Damico.’
‘The antiquities expert you asked for, Colonel,’ Salvatore added quickly.
‘You work at the university?’ It sounded like a challenge rather than a question.
‘I used to be a lecturer in art and antiquities at La Sapienza, yes.’
‘Used to be!’ he spluttered, glaring at Salvatore.
‘The university passed me on to the Villa Giulia. One of the experts there recommended her,’ Salvatore insisted.
‘Now I’m in the TPA,’ she added quickly, spelling out the acronym for the Nucleo Tutela Patrimonio Artistico, the special corps within the Carabinieri tasked with protecting and recovering stolen art. He looked her up and down again, then shrugged.
‘Well, you’ll have to do, I suppose,’ he said, to Salvatore’s visible relief. ‘I take it you know who I am?’
She nodded, although part of her was itching to say no, just to see the look on his face. Ignoring the other two men standing there, which she assumed meant that he did not consider them important enough to warrant an introduction, Gallo jabbed his finger at the man next to him.
‘This is Dottore Giovanni la Fabro from the coroner’s office, and this is, or was, Adriano Ricci, an enforcer for the De Luca family.’
Allegra nodded. The GICO’s involvement was suddenly a lot clearer. The De Luca family were believed to run the Bande della Magliana, one of Rome’s most notorious criminal organisations.
Gallo clearly thought this was some sort of professional hit.
He stepped back and introduced the corpse with a sweep of his hand. Even dead, she could tell that Ricci had been overweight, loose skin sagging towards the ground like melted wax on the neck of a bottle. He was bare-chested with a large Lazio football club tattoo on his left shoulder, and was still wearing a striped pair of suit trousers that had fallen halfway down his calves. His wrists and ankles were bleeding where the chicken wire used to bind him to the cross had bitten into his flesh.
‘Why am I here?’ she asked with a shudder, glancing back to Gallo.
‘This -’ He led her forward to the body and snapped his flashlight on to illuminate its face.
For a few moments she couldn’t make out what he was pointing to, her attention grabbed by Ricci’s staring, bloodshot eyes and the way that, from the shoulders up, his skin had turned a waxy purple, like marble. But then, trapped in the light of Gallo’s torch, she saw it. A black shape, a disc of some sort, lurking in the roof of Ricci’s mouth.
‘What is it?’ she breathed.
‘That’s what you’re meant to be telling me,’ Gallo shot back.
‘Can I see it, then?’
Gallo snapped his fingers and la Fabro handed him a pair of tweezers. To Allegra’s horrified fascination, he levered the object free as if he was prising
a jewel from an ancient Indian statue and then carefully deposited it inside an evidence bag, holding it out between his fingertips as if it contained something mildly repellent.
‘Knock yourself out,’ he intoned.
‘I thought it might be some sort of antique coin,’ Salvatore suggested eagerly over her shoulder as she turned it over in the light. ‘It seems to have markings etched into it.’
‘The ancient Romans used to put a bronze coin in the mouths of their dead to pay Charon to ferry their souls across the Styx to the Underworld,’ she nodded slowly. ‘But I don’t think that’s what this is.’
‘Why not?’
‘Feel the weight, it’s lead. That’s too soft to be used in everyday coinage.’
‘Then what about the engraving?’ Gallo asked impatiently.
She traced the symbol that had been inlaid into the coin with her finger. It showed two snakes intertwined around a clenched fist, like the seal from some mediaeval coat of arms.
‘I don’t know,’ she said with an apologetic shrug. ‘But whatever this is, it’s not an antique nor, I would say, particularly valuable.’
‘Well, that was useful.’ Glaring angrily at Salvatore, Gallo turned his back on Allegra as if she had suddenly vanished.
‘I’m sorry,’ Salvatore stuttered. ‘I thought that…’
‘We’ve wasted enough time. Let’s just get him bagged up and out of here so the forensic boys can move in,’ Gallo ordered as he turned to leave. ‘Then I want a priest or a cardinal or somebody else in sandals down here to tell me more about…’
‘It can’t be a coincidence though, can it, Colonel?’ Allegra called after him.
Gallo spun round angrily.
‘I thought you’d gone?’
‘It can’t be a coincidence that they killed him here?’ she insisted.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘In Roman times, this entire area was part of the Campus Martius, a huge complex of buildings that included the Baths of Agrippa to the north, the Circus Flaminius to the south and the Theatre of Pompey to the west,’ she explained, pointing towards each point of the compass in turn. ‘The Senate even met here while the Curia was being rebuilt after a fire in 54 BC -’ she pointed at the floor - ‘in a space in the portico attached to the Theatre of Pompey.’
‘Here?’ Gallo looked around him sceptically, clearly struggling to reconcile the fractured ruins at his feet with the imagined grandeur of a Roman theatre.
‘Of course, the one drawback of this spot was that the Campus Martius stood outside the sacred
pomerium
, the city’s official boundaries, meaning that, although it was quieter than the Forum, it
was not subject to the same restrictions against concealed weapons.’
‘What’s your point?’ Gallo frowned wearily, and she realised that she was going to have to spell it out for him.
‘I mean that Ricci isn’t the first person to be killed here,’ she explained, a tremor of excitement in her voice. ‘I mean that in 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated on almost this exact same spot.’