James Twining - The Geneva Deception

Seeing Archie’s signal, Dominique set off, bumping into Faulks heavily as they crossed.

‘ Pardon,’ she apologised.

‘That’s quite all right,’ Faulks snapped, a cold smile flickering across his face before, with a curt nod, he limped on.

‘Go,’ she whispered as she walked past Archie, their hands briefly touching as she handed him Faulks’s PDA.

Turning to face the wall, Archie deftly popped off the rear cover, removed the battery and then slipped out the SIM card. Sliding it into a reader connected to an Asus micro laptop, he scanned its contents, the software quickly identifying the IMSI number, before girding itself to decrypt its Ki code.

Archie glanced up at Dominique, who had moved back towards the entrance and was signalling at him to hurry. Archie gave a grim nod, his heart racing, but the programme was still churning as it tried to break the 128-bit encryption, numbers scrolling frantically across the screen.

He looked up again, and cursed when he saw that she was now mouthing that Faulks was leaving. Damn! He’d counted on him staying for the auction itself, although he knew that some dealers preferred not to attend their own sales in case they jinxed them. He looked back down at the computer. Still nothing. Dominique was looking desperate now. Back to the screen again.

Done.

Snatching the SIM card out of the reader, he hurried to the door, fumbling as he slid it back into Faulks’s phone and fitted the battery and then the cover. He crossed Dominique, their hands briefly touching again as slipped her the micro-computer, leaving her the final task of programming a new card.

‘He’s outside,’ she breathed.

Archie sprinted into the hall, down the stairs and through the main entrance. Faulks was settling back in the rear seat of a silver Bentley, his chauffeur already at the wheel and turning the ignition key.

‘Excuse me, mate,’ Archie panted, rapping sharply on the window.

The window sank and Faulks, sitting forward on his seat, fixed him with a suspicious look.

‘Can I help you?’

‘You dropped this.’

Faulks looked at the phone, patted his breast pockets, then glanced up at Archie.

‘Thank you,’ he said, his wary look fading into a grateful smile. Taking it with a nod, he sat back, the window smoothly sealing itself shut.

As Faulks’s car accelerated away, Dominique appeared at Archie’s shoulder.

‘All sorted?’ he puffed.

‘We’ve got him.’ She nodded, handing him the newly cloned phone.

Nr Anguillara Sabazia, northwest of Rome 19th March – 8.34 p.m.

Tom’s eyes flickered open. The room slowly came into focus. Allegra was lying on the tiled floor next to him. Still breathing.

Gingerly pulling himself upright, he sat with his back against the wall, trying not to vomit. The drugs had left him dizzy and with a bitter taste at the back of his throat. Worse still was the headache centred behind his right eye, the daggered pain ebbing and flowing with the hammer beat of his pulse. Within seconds he’d fainted back to sleep, vaguely aware of a dancing blue light licking the walls, of the whisper of running water, of the deadened echo of his own breathing, and of De Luca’s warm breath on his neck. Do give my best to your mother.

‘Tom?’

Allegra had rolled over on to her side to face him, her dark hair tumbling forward over her face. She looked worried and he wondered how long she had been calling his name.

He groaned as he sat up, his neck stiff where his head had fallen forward on to his chest.

‘What time is it?’ she asked.

He checked his watch, then remembered with a rueful grimace that it was still wrapped around Johnny Li’s tattooed wrist.

‘No idea.’

‘ Merda. ’ She rubbed her hands wearily across her face, then sat up next to him. ‘Where do you think they’ve taken us?’

Tom looked around with a frown. They were at one end of a windowless room that had been almost entirely swallowed by what appeared to be a large swimming pool. Five feet deep, sixty feet long and thirty feet across, it was lined with white tiles, the water spilling with a gurgling noise over the edges into an overflow trench and washing through skimmers. The underwater lights cast a shimmering flicker on to the white-washed concrete walls.

Standing up, Tom walked unsteadily to the edge. His eyes adjusting, it took him a few moments to realise that the dark shapes lurking under the water’s silvered surface were rows of antique vases and jars, each carefully spaced one from the other along the pool floor like vines anchored to a steep slope. Stiff and still, they reminded him of a Roman cohort arranged in a testudo formation, their shields held over their heads like a tortoise’s shell, bracing themselves for an attack.

‘It’s a chemical bath,’ he said, pointing at the blue drums that explained the slight burning sensation in his eyes.

‘I’ve seen something like this before,’ Allegra nodded, joining him. ‘But not this big. Not even close.’

‘Over there,’ Tom pointed hopefully at a door on the far side of the pool.

They passed through into a large room, its tiled walls lined with glass-fronted cabinets that contained a rainbow array of paints and chemicals in differently sized and shaped tins and jars. Beneath these, running along each wall, were polished stainless steel counters loaded with microscopes, centrifuges, test-tube racks, scales, shakers and other pieces of laboratory equipment.

The centre of the room, meanwhile, was taken up by two large stainless steel benches and deep sinks. A trolley laden with knives, saws, picks, tweezers, drills and other implements had been drawn up next to them, as if in preparation for an imminent procedure. In the corner was a coiled hosepipe, the white tiled floor sloping towards a central drain as if to carry away blood.

‘Cleaning, touching up, repairs, open-heart surgery…’ Tom pursed his lips. ‘This is a tombaroli restoration outfit.’

‘On an industrial scale,’ she agreed, Tom detecting the same instinctive anger in her voice as when she’d found the orphan vase fragment in Cavalli’s car.

There was another unlocked door which gave, in turn, on to a third room, lit by a single naked bulb whose weak glare didn’t quite reach to the corners. Here there was a more rustic feel, the ceiling supported by parallel lines of closely spaced wooden beams, semicircular iron-framed windows set into the stone walls at above head height and welded shut. A flight of stone steps led upstairs to another door. Predictably, this one was locked.

Shrugging dejectedly, Tom made his way back down. Allegra was waiting for him, silently pointing, her outstretched arm quivering with rage.

Looking around, he could see that the paved floor was covered in a foaming sea of dirty newspapers, wooden crates and old fruit and shoe boxes, some stacked into neat piles, others split open or listing dangerously where the cardboard had collapsed under their combined weight. He only had to open a few to guess at the contents of all the others – antique vases still covered in dirt, loose jumbles of glass and Etruscan jewellery, envelopes bulging with Roman coins, gold rings strewn on the floor. In the corner was what had once been an entire fresco, now hacked away from the wall and chain-sawed into laptop-sized chunks. Presumably to make them easier to move and sell.

‘How could they do this?’ Allegra breathed, her anger tinged by a horrified sadness.

‘Because none of this has any value to them other than what they can sell it for. Because they don’t care. Look.’

He nodded with disgust towards one of the open shoeboxes. It was stuffed with rings and human bones, the tombaroli having simply snapped off the fingers of the dead to save time.