James Twining - The Geneva Deception

They were filling the entrance in.

19th March – 11.06 p.m.

They didn’t have long, Tom knew. Each breath used a little more of the oxygen sealed within the bag. He could already feel the plastic rubbing against his face, warm and moist; hear it crinkling every time he inhaled, growing and shrinking like a jellyfish’s pulsing head. In a few minutes the air would all be gone and then the CO 2levels in his blood would rise, shutting down first his brain’s cerebral cortex and then the medulla.

It was a cruel death – light-headedness, followed by nausea, then unconsciousness. And finally oblivion. But then that was hardly a surprise, given that they were here at the orders of the same man who had, by his own admission, ordered Cavalli to be slowly choked by the Tiber’s strong current and Argento to be partially decapitated and left to bleed out like a slaughtered lamb.

Lying next to him, Allegra had stopped struggling but was still shouting, using up her air far more quickly than she should. He’d have to get to her first. He shuffled back towards her, feeling for her with his hands, which were still tied behind his back. Touching her arm, he bent forward and pulled himself round with his feet until he made contact with the hood’s slippery surface. She seemed to guess what he was doing, because she went quiet and bent towards him until he was able to feel the outline of her mouth.

Digging his finger hard into the shallow depression formed between the hard edges of her teeth, he gouged the thick plastic with his nail, weakening its surface until it suddenly gave way. There was a loud whistling noise as Allegra sucked air greedily through the small hole.

But the effort had cost Tom more than he’d expected. He felt light-headed, almost as if he was floating outside of himself. He didn’t have long before he went under. Thirty seconds at most. He shuffled down, bending his head towards where he guessed Allegra’s hands had been retied behind her back so that she could feel for his mouth. With her longer nails, it took far less time for her to rupture the plastic, the chamber’s stale air tasting sweet to Tom’s starving lungs.

‘You okay?’ Tom called through the darkness when his head had cleared, the plastic hood both muffling and amplifying his voice.

‘Not really,’ she answered, coughing.

‘Where are your hands?’

Feeling for her wrists, he carefully picked away at the knot, the rope resisting at first, until little by little he was able to loosen it and then undo it completely. Sitting up, Allegra returned the favour. As soon as he was free they felt for each other in the darkness and hugged with relief – relative strangers brought unexpectedly close by the intimacy of fear.

‘Which way’s the entrance?’ Tom asked as he broke away and ripped the remainder of the plastic hood from his neck.

‘We should be able to find it if we feel our way along the walls,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps if we…what’s this?’

A light clicked on, forcing Tom to shield his eyes as it was pointed at him. Allegra snatched it away with an apology. Unless it had fallen from Contarelli’s pocket, it appeared that he had left them a torch. Perhaps he had anticipated that they might free themselves? Perhaps he was trying to help them escape? The thought filled Tom with hope.

He glanced around excitedly, noting the low domed roof above them and the earthen floor littered with pottery fragments. Lying discarded in the corner was a bundle of rags that Tom suspected marked what was left of the tomb’s original occupant.

‘That way -’ Allegra pointed towards the low tunnel that led to the entrance.

He crawled hopefully down it, but soon found his path blocked. As the shovelling sound earlier had suggested, the entrance had been filled in. And not just with earth, but with a massive stone plug that they must have brought there with this single purpose in mind.

‘We should have left the bags on,’ Allegra said in a shaky voice. ‘I’d rather suffocate quickly than starve down here.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about starving,’ Tom said with a grim smile. ‘I’d say we have six hours of air, eight max.’

‘That’s reassuring.’ She gave a short laugh, then frowned as her torch picked out a dull metal object lying near the entrance.

It was a Glock 17. Tom picked it up and checked the magazine. It contained two bullets.

Contarelli, it seemed, was offering them a way out after all.

Avenue Krieg, Geneva, Switzerland 20th March – 12.02 a.m.

‘This can’t be it,’ Dominique whispered.

Normally Archie would have agreed with her – a half-empty building with a broken lift, shabbycommunal areas, half the light bulbs blown and the name plate hanging loose, certainly didn’t seem to fit with what he’d seen of Faulks. But the porter he’d bribed in the Sotheby’s loading bay had been adamant that this was the right address, floor and suite number for the company who’d sold the Artemis. In fact, he’d proved it.

‘He showed me the bloody receipt,’ Archie grunted as he tried to force the final locking pin out of the way. ‘Galleries Dassin is registered here.’

‘It just doesn’t feel right,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘We should have spoken to Tom first.’

‘I’ve been trying to get him on the blower all day,’ Archie reminded her sharply, his tone reflecting both his irritation at being secondguessed and his concern. It wasn’t like Tom to be out of touch this long. Not deliberately. ‘Besides…’ With a final effort, the pin fell into place and the lock clicked open. ‘…We’re in now. We might as well have a butcher’s.’

Pulling their masks down over their faces, they slipped inside and gently closed the door behind them. The suite consisted of a large open-plan space with perhaps four desks in it, a small kitchen, a meeting room, and what Archie guessed was the owner or manager’s personal office.

‘Still sure this is the right place?’ Dominique whispered as her torch picked out bookcases overflowing with legal and tax reference books, stacks of paperwork secured by treasury tags, filing cabinets, printers and shredders, and a series of insipid paintings of a yacht sailing across the lake. Archie sighed. He hated to admit it, but it looked as though she might be right after all.

‘I’ll have a quick shifty in there,’ Archie suggested, nodding towards the manager’s office. ‘You have a look through this lot.’

The office was dominated by a vast, monolithic desk whose primary purpose could only have been to intimidate anyone standing on the other side of it. Behind this ran thick-set, mahogany shelves loaded with books, photo frames and various stress-busting executive toys. Archie couldn’t help himself but set off the Newton’s Cradle, his eyes dancing to the metronomic click-click-click of the balls as they swung back and forth. Glancing up with a smile, he absent-mindedly picked up one of the photo frames, then frowned. Rather than be confronted by Faulks’s patrician scowl as he had expected, he instead found himself staring at a heavily overweight man in swimming trunks trying to pour himself into a wetsuit.

Replacing it with a shudder, Archie turned his attention to the two filing cabinets lurking in the corner. Opening the drawers in turn, he walked his fingers along the tabs until he found one marked Galleries Dassin.

‘I’ve got something,’ he called in a low voice, carrying it to the entrance. Dominique looked up from where she had been leafing through the papers arranged on one of the desks. ‘ Galleries Dassin, ’ he read, flicking through a few of the pages. ‘ Registered address, 13 Avenue Krieg. That’s here. Fiduciary owner, Jérome Carvel. ’ He glanced up at the door and saw the same name picked out on it in black letters. ‘That’s him.’