The Gilded Seal (14 page)
him in the shoulder. The man cried out in pain, fi ring three
shots wildly in Tom’s direction as he staggered back down-
stairs.
Tom bounded down after him and burst on to the street,
only to be met by a violent shriek of rubber as the waiting car
accelerated away. He lowered his gun, not wanting to risk
hitting Eva, and quickly made his way back upstairs to re-
trieve his bag.
Milo wanted them alive. That’s what the Moroccan had
said. That meant there was still time to find her, still time to
bargain for her life, perhaps even with the forged
Yarnwinder
painting he had just recovered. What was certain was that
this time, he wouldn’t abandon her. He owed it to her. He
owed it to Rafael.
And given what she’d said about his father and how he’d
died, maybe he even owed it to himself.
C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N
SOUTH STREET, NEW YORK
19th April— 3:40 p.m.
You got any idea what it means?” Mitchell asked Jennifer
as she returned the piece of paper to him.
“Nope,” she said. “But a hundred million would buy you a
hell of a lot of legal advice. Even if the guy giving it has to
pay for this sort of a view.”
She gestured toward the window and Mitchell stepped
forward, nodding appreciatively. A lone yacht was slicing
through the whitecaps out into the Long Island Sound, its red
sail flexing in the crisp breeze. In the distance towered the
Statue of Liberty, her face tanned by the afternoon sun, the
corrugated folds of her robe alternating between ridges of
burnished green and plunging shadow.
“It sure is special,” he agreed, with an admiring sigh.
“Weird how much more peaceful the city looks from up here.
Like all the dirt and ugliness got washed away.”
“So why not look at it?” Jennifer asked with a frown, nod-
ding at the way Hammon’s desk had been arranged to face
into the room. “If you were paying these prices, wouldn’t you
want to see what your money was getting you?”
“Maybe he preferred fish,” he suggested, only half seri-
ously.
9 2 j a m e s
t w i n i n g
Jennifer nodded. He may have been joking, but Mitchell
had a point. The desk was positioned squarely in front of the
fi sh tank.
“I guess so.” She approached the tank and peered through
the thick glass, a light positioned somewhere above it refract-
ing through the water.
“That’s odd,” she mused. “I wonder if . . .” She strode back
to the desk.
“What?”
“Turning your back to that view I could just about under-
stand,” she replied, running her hands along the underside of
the polished cherrywood surface. “Maybe he had vertigo or
something. But staring at a tank that doesn’t have any fi sh in
it? That I don’t buy.”
Mitchell’s bulging eyes snapped to the tank, clearly only
now seeing what Jennifer had only just observed herself—
apart from the steady stream of bubbles fizzing their way to
the surface and a few slivers of weed swaying in an unseen
current, it was empty.
“There!” she exclaimed as her fingers detected the button
she had guessed she would find. She pressed it and looked
up. There was a low hum from the fish tank as it slid back a
few inches and was then lowered out of sight. The space it
had vacated was immediately filled by a white panel that de-
scended from above and then edged forward until it was fl ush
with the rest of the wall. And in the center of the panel,
housed within an elaborate gilded frame, was a painting.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” Mitchell had a dazed grin on
his face.
The painting showed a table covered in a bright purple
napkin. Resting on the napkin was a bowl of vividly colored
fruit and a vase exploding with red fl owers.
“Chagall,” Jennifer said slowly, recognizing the style and
confirming her instinct against the signature in the bottom
right corner.
“Valuable?”
“Valuable enough to hide it.”
“What’s wrong with a bank?”
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
9 3
“Maybe this way he could see it whenever he wanted with-
out the risk of hanging it out in the open.”
“I thought half the reason these rich fucks bought their
expensive toys was to show them off.”
She frowned. Again, she couldn’t fault Mitchell’s logic.
“Maybe he didn’t want anyone to know he had it. Maybe
he wasn’t meant to have it? Maybe . . .”
She paused, struck by a sudden thought, then reached
into her bag for the catalog Cole had given her the previous
day. Hurriedly she leafed through it, pausing about twenty
pages in.
“
La Nappe Mauve
by Marc Chagall,” she read. “Estimate
one million dollars.”
“What’s that?” Mitchell inquired with a curious nod.
“The proof of a catalog for an auction in Paris,” she ex-
plained, measuring her words. “Hammon was hiding the
painting because, according to this, someone else owns it.”
BASILICA DE LA MACARENA, SEVILLE
19th April— 10:31 p.m.
The rhythmic tolling of the Basilica’s bell ushered Tom
inside. It was a muffled, almost sleepy strike that seemed
to be bemoaning the lateness of the hour, despite the fact that
some of the neighboring bars were only now rousing them-
selves for the night ahead, taking advantage of the warm
weather to conjure up chairs and tables on the wide pave-
ments.
The interior was dimly lit, the swaying flames from the
many votive candles arranged down each aisle painting the
walls with a warm glow that disguised the functional sim-
plicity, some might even say ugliness, of its relatively mod-
ern construction.
The altar, by contrast, sparkled as if a thousand Chinese
lanterns had just been released into the night sky, a small
oasis of light amidst the rest of the building’s restrained
gloom. A few shadowy figures were spaced along the pews
in front of it, peering up hopefully at the crucifi ed fi gure sus-
pended high overhead or threading a rosary between their
fingers, their eyes closed.
Tom sat down. He wasn’t quite sure what he was expecting
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
9 5
to fi nd here. He only knew that, less than an hour after sup-
posedly coming for confession, Rafael had been dead.
There must be something here that Rafael had wanted to
see or do. Something that he might be able to use to get Eva
back before it was too late. Eva. He shook his head, banish-
ing his final image of her from his thoughts, knowing that the
memory, still raw, would only cloud his judgments.
Tom flipped open the file he had snatched off Gillez and
found the relevant pages. The witness reports pinpointed
the confessional Rafael had been seen going into. Second
on the left. Right-hand booth. Tom got up and made his way
over to it. It seemed as good a place to start as any.
The booth was empty, a sign over the middle door where
the priest normally sat indicating the times confession could
be heard. He smiled, amused by the thought that even God
had opening hours.
He slipped inside and pulled the door shut behind him.
Settling on the hard bench, his eyes adjusting to the dusty
gloom, he quickly scanned the small space around him to see
if there was an obvious place where Rafael might have se-
creted something away.
It only took a few minutes of feeling his way around, how-
ever, to see that there was nothing here. Nothing, apart from
bare wooden walls and a faded red velvet curtain across the
blackened grille through which sins were spoken and pen-
ances heard. Nothing, apart from the musty smell of guilt,
tears and stale alcohol, although it was difficult to judge
whether these came from his side or the priest’s.
Nothing, unless . . . he leaned forward, his hands reaching
between his legs and feeling under his seat. There. The tips
of his fingers had brushed against something. A piece of pa-
per? A package?
It was an envelope. A large brown envelope, its fl ap
gummed shut. What he noticed immediately, however, was
the small symbol in the top left- hand corner—a triangle. Un-
derneath it was a small note written in English in Rafael’s
distinctively spidery script.
Look after her.
9 6 j a m e s
t w i n i n g
His heart beating, Tom gingerly unsealed the fl ap and
reached inside, carefully removing a further padded enve-
lope and a computer memory stick.
Placing the memory stick down on the seat next to him,
Tom opened the second envelope and gingerly pulled out
what at first seemed to be a piece of board but which he could
see now was wood. Painted poplar wood.
He heard himself breathe in sharply as he realized what he
was holding, the sound seeming strangely disembodied, as if
for a moment he had floated outside of himself. A pair of
velvety brown eyes and a teasing smile returned his awe-
struck gaze and slowly drew him back down to earth.
It was a forgery, of course, a product of da Vinci’s genius
and Rafael’s talent for imitation. But it was glorious all the
same. And it provided him, finally, with the explanation he
had been searching for.
This was what Milo was really interested in, not the
Yarn-
winder
. This was what Rafael had been working on for him.
This was why Milo had had him killed. This was how Tom
could get Eva back.
He grabbed his phone and dialed a number. It was an-
swered on the third ring.
“Archie, it’s Tom. I need you to meet me in Paris. It’s
Milo—I know what he’s up to.”
He paused and let his fingers brush against the silent fi g-
ure’s soft cheeks and the gentle curve of her slender neck
before continuing.
“He’s making a play for the
Mona Lisa
.”
You might as well pretend that
one could steal the towers of
the cathedral of Notre Dame.
Théophile Homolle,
Director of the Louvre 1910
115TH AND CENTRAL PARK WEST, NEW YORK
20th April— 6:15 a.m.
Ithought we’d agreed that you were going to keep your head
down?” FBI Director Green elbowed past her, his heels
tip- tapping officiously across the parquet.
“I can explain,” Jennifer stammered as she fastened her
dressing gown around her waist, any hint of tiredness in-
stantly evaporating under the harsh light of Green’s tone. As
she closed the door, one of the secret service agents who had
accompanied Green upstairs winked at her sympathetically
through the shrinking crack.
“You’d better make it good.”
His fleshy face had gone a deep pink, a shiny slick of sweat
forming on his top lip and forehead. Jennifer wasn’t sure if
this reflected his mood or the fact that he’d had to walk up six
flights of stairs. The elevator was out of action. Again.
“Have you any idea how bad this looks?”
She unfolded the newspaper that he had thrust angrily to-
ward her, her heart sinking as she saw that the front page was
almost entirely taken up with a picture of her shoving a
shocked-looking Lewis to the ground. By some cruel coinci-
dence, the photographer seemed to have caught her at her
most angry, eyes ablaze and teeth bared like a rabid animal.
1 0 0 j a m e s
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“
Black Widow Strikes Again
,” Green, grim-faced, quoted
the headline. “
Now FBI femme fatale attacks our man
.”
There was an inset picture of a mournful-looking Lewis
holding up his shirt to show where it had been ripped open at
the elbow. The picture was so clearly staged that at any other
time she would have laughed. Green, however, clearly wasn’t
getting the joke.
“What the hell were you thinking, Browne? We’ve got
civil liberties groups crawling up our ass and you go and give
them a new pin- up boy. I mean, there are four pages of this