James Twining - The Geneva Deception

‘Heard what, exactly?’ Allegra asked, eyeing Tom with the same suspicious look she’d had back in Cavalli’s house when she’d first met him.

‘It’s hard to be good at what Felix does without word getting out. He has a special talent.’

‘Had,’ Tom corrected him. ‘I got out a few years ago.’

‘And yet, from what I hear, you’re still running.’ He nodded towards the scanner.

‘Is that what this is about?’ Tom asked impatiently. His arms were beginning to ache and every gear change and bump in the road was making the cuffs saw a little deeper into his wrists.

‘What’s this?’ De Luca waved the photo at him.

‘We found it in Cavalli’s car,’ Tom explained. ‘We think he was trying to sell it.’

‘What do you know about Cavalli?’ De Luca shot back, spitting the name out in a way that revealed more than he had probably intended.

Tom nodded slowly, immediately guessing at the truth.

‘Why did you kill him?’

De Luca paused, then inclined his head in a small bow, as if acknowledging applause.

‘Strictly speaking, the river killed him.’

‘Did he work for you?’

‘Pfff! He was one of Moretti’s.’

Moretti. Tom recognized the name as the person Allegra had identified as supposedly heading up the other half of the Delian League. De Luca’s supposed business partner.

‘What had he done?’ Allegra asked.

‘I only kill for two reasons. Theft and disloyalty.’ De Luca counted them off on his fingers as if he were listing the ingredients for a recipe. ‘In Cavalli’s case, he was guilty of both.’

‘You mean he’d betrayed the League?’ Tom asked.

‘It seemed fitting to mark his treachery on the spot of an earlier treason,’ De Luca nodded, confirming what they’d already guessed on the bridge.

The van turned sharply left. Allegra slid across the seat, pressing up against Tom.

‘And Ricci?’ Allegra asked.

‘I took care of Cavalli to protect the League. But Moretti, the old fool, got it into his head that I was about to make a move on the whole operation.’ De Luca’s tone hardened, his jaw clenching. ‘He had Ricci killed to warn me off. Argento was me evening the score.’

Tom nodded as the realisation dawned that far from being a conversation the careful echoing and symbolism of the various deaths had in fact been the opening shots of a very public, very acrimonious divorce.

‘And now it seems my accountant in Monaco has disappeared,’ he continued angrily. ‘Well, if Moretti wants a war, I’m ready for him.’ He struck his chest with his fist, the dull thud revealing that he was wearing a bullet-proof vest under his shirt.

‘What did Jennifer Browne have to do with your war?’ Tom demanded angrily.

‘Who?’ De Luca frowned.

‘The FBI agent you had killed in Vegas.’

‘What FBI agent?’

‘Don’t lie to me,’ Tom shouted, his wrists straining against the handcuffs.

‘Cavalli was going to sing, so I clipped his wings,’ De Luca said in a low, controlled voice. ‘Ricci and Argento-that’s just business between Moretti and me. But I had nothing to do with killing any FBI agent. I’ve never even heard of her.’

‘She was closing in on the Delian League, so you had her taken out,’ Tom insisted.

‘Is that what this is about? Is that why you’re here?’ De Luca picked up the FBI file and glanced at its monogrammed cover with a puzzled shrug. ‘Well, then maybe somebody did us a favour. Either way, I never ordered the hit.’

‘Well, somebody in the League did,’ Tom insisted. ‘And I’ll take you all down to find them, if I have to.’

There was a pause. De Luca blew out the sides of his cheeks, clearly mulling something over. Then, with a shrug, he nodded.

‘Yes. I expect you probably would.’

Tom felt the needle before he saw it, a sharp stab of pain in his neck where the guard had stepped forward and pulled the trigger on an injection gun. Allegra was next, her head slumping forward as he felt the room begin to spin and darken. The last thing he was aware of was De Luca’s voice, deepening and slowing as if being played back at half speed.

‘Do give my best to your mother.’

Sotheby’s auction rooms, Quai du Mont Blanc, Geneva 19th March -1.32 p.m.

Short, perhaps only four feet high, she had braided hair that fell across her forehead and down her neck. Dressed in a simple tunic that hung from her body in smooth folds, a hunting strap ran down from her shoulder and across her breasts, pulling the material tight against their firm slope. Gazing straight ahead, she wore a slight smile, lips parted as if she was about to speak. Her arms were cut off at the elbows.

‘Statue of the goddess Artemis; fourth century BC,’ Archie murmured to himself as he looked down from the marble sculpture to the auction catalogue and scanned through the entry again. ‘Believed to be from a settlement near Foggi. Private Syrian collection.’

This last detail made Archie smile. Even if Tom hadn’t asked him to investigate this lot, the fact that it had supposedly come from a Syrian family would have made him suspicious anyway. The simple truth was that, while the contents of most major European and American collections were well documented, little, if anything, was known about the majority of Middle Eastern and Asian private collections. Anyone trying to disguise the fact that an artefact was looted, therefore, was far more likely to tie it back to some obscure family collection where they could convincingly claim it had been languishing for the last eighty years, than to risk the awkward questions that a European provenance might trigger.

He stepped back and pretended to study some of the other lots, ignoring the call on his phone which he guessed, from the New York prefix, was the lawyer they’d met at Senator Duval’s funeral still trying to arrange a meeting with Tom. Next time, he’d know better than to hand out his card so readily, he thought to himself with a pained sigh.

Looking up, he caught sight of Dominique de Lecourt standing near the entrance. Seeing her now, blonde hair cascading on to her delicate shoulders, it struck him that her pale, oval face mirrored something of the goddess Artemis’s cold, sculpted and remote beauty. There was a parallel too, between the statue’s simple tunic and her tailored linen dress, and perhaps even an echo of the carved hunting strap in the rearing stallion that he knew Dominique had had tattooed on her shoulder when younger. But any resemblance was only a fleeting one, the illusion shattered by her Ducati biker jacket and the way her blue eyes glittered with a wild freedom that the marble sculpture would never taste.

She was too young for him, although that hadn’t stopped him thinking about what might have been from time to time. Still only twenty-five, in fact. Not that her age had prevented her from successfully running Tom’s antiques business, having helped him transfer it from Geneva to London after his father died. This was her first time back here since then, and he could tell she was finding it difficult, however much she was trying to hide it.

She had been close to Tom’s father-far closer, in fact, than Tom. The way she told the story, he had saved her from herself, offering her a job rather than calling the cops when he’d caught her trying to steal his wallet. With it had come a chance to break free from the spiralling cycle of casual drugs and petty crime that a childhood spent being tossed between foster homes had been steering her towards; a chance she’d grabbed with both hands. All of which made what they were about to do that much more ironic.

He nodded at her as Earl Faulks turned to leave the room, leaning heavily on his umbrella. Even if the auctioneer hadn’t accepted the carefully folded five-hundred-euro note to finger him as the lot’s seller, Archie would have guessed it was him. It wasn’t just that he had returned four times during the viewing period that had marked him out, but the questioning look he had given anyone who had strayed too close to the statue. It rather reminded Archie of a father weighing up a potential boyfriend’s suitability to take their teenage daughter out on a date.