James Twining - The Geneva Deception

It was an uncomfortable, dislocating experience, and Allegra had the strange impression of having stepped on to a film set – an imagined vision, rendered with frightening detail, of some future, post-apocalyptic world where the few remaining survivors had been reduced to taking shelter where they could and eking out an existence amidst the ashes.

‘This looks like where it started.’ She picked her way over the charred wreckage to a room that looked out over the harbour. The fire here seemed to have been particularly intense, the steel beams overhead twisted and tortured, opaque pools of molten glass having formed under the windows, the stonework still radiating a baked-in heat that took the edge off the chilled sea breeze. There was also some evidence of the beginnings of a forensic examination of the scene: equipment set up on a low trestle table, mobile lighting arranged in the room’s corners.

‘Probably here,’ Tom agreed, pointing his torch at a dark mound that was pressed up against what was left of a bookcase. ‘As you’d expect.’

‘What do you mean?’

Tom reached into his backpack and pulled out one of the photographs that had been left for them in the helicopter.

‘What do you see?’

She studied it carefully, then ran her torch over the burnt bookcase with a frown. As far as she could tell they looked the same. There certainly didn’t seem…She paused, having just noticed a rectangular shape on the photo that the torchlight revealed to be a small metal grille set into the wall at about head height.

‘What’s that?’ she asked with a frown.

‘That’s what I wondered too,’ Tom muttered. ‘Probably nothing. But then again…’ He stepped closer and rubbed gently against a section of the wall. Through the damp layer of soot, a narrow groove slowly revealed itself.

‘A hidden door,’ Allegra breathed.

‘A panic room.’ Tom nodded. ‘The grille must be for an air intake that would have been concealed by the bookcase. D’Arcy hasn’t disappeared. He never even left his apartment.’

‘Can you open it?’

‘Half-inch steel, at a guess.’ Tom rapped his knuckles against the door with a defeated shrug. ‘Electro-magnetic locking system. Assuming they’ve cut the mains power, the locking mechanism will release itself as soon as the batteries run out.’

‘Which is when?’

‘Typically about forty-eight hours after they kick in.’

‘Which is still at least twelve hours away,’ she calculated, thinking back to the time of the fire given in the missing persons report. ‘We can’t hang around here until then.’

‘We won’t have to,’ Tom reassured her. ‘Here, give me a hand clearing this away.’

Reaching up, they ripped what was left of the bookcase to the floor, the charred wood crisping as they grabbed it, the dust making them both cough.

‘There would have been an external keypad, but that must have melted in the fire,’ Tom explained as the panic room’s steel shell emerged through the soot. ‘But there’s usually a failsafe too. A secondary pad that they conceal inside the room’s walls in case of an emergency. That should have been insulated from the heat.’

Stepping forward, he carefully ran his hands across the filthy steel walls at about waist height.

‘Here.’

He spat into his hand and wiped the dirt away in a series of tarred smears to reveal a rectangular access panel that he quickly unscrewed.

‘It’s still working,’ Allegra said with relief as she shone her torch into the recess and made out the keypad’s illuminated buttons and the cursor’s inviting blink.

Tom reached into his bag and pulled out a small device that looked like a calculator. Levering the fascia off the panic room’s keypad to reveal the circuit board, he knelt down next to it and connected his device. Immediately the screen lit up, numbers scrolling across it in seemingly random patterns until, one by one, it began to lock them down. These then flashed up on the keypad’s display, hesitantly at first, and then with increasing speed and confidence, until the full combination flashed up green: 180373.

With a hydraulic sigh, the panic room’s door rolled back.

20th March – 3.44 a.m.

Allegra approached the open doorway, then staggered back.

‘ Cazzo!’ She swore, her hand over her mouth. Peering through the opening, Tom understood why.

The emergency lighting was on, the room soaked in its blood-red glaze. D’Arcy was lying slumped in the corner and had already begun to bloat in the heat, the sickly sweet stench of rotting meat washing over them. Head lolling against his chest, his eyes were bulging as if someone had tried to pop them out on to his cheek, his stomach ballooning under his white shirt, the marbled skin mottled blue-green through the gaps between the buttons.

Breathing through his mouth, and trying to ignore the way D’Arcy’s black and swollen tongue had forced his jaws into a wide, gagging smile, Tom stepped inside the cramped space. Allegra followed close behind.

‘The smoke would have killed him,’ Tom guessed, pointing out some plastic sheeting hanging loose from the air vent which it looked as though D’Arcy had tried to seal shut with bandages and plasters raided from a first-aid kit. ‘Then he must have started to cook in the heat.’

‘ Cazzo ,’ she breathed to herself again.

Glancing round, it seemed pretty clear that D’Arcy had taken to using the room for storage rather than survival, with filing boxes stacked to the ceiling against the far wall, and a large server array providing some sort of data backup facility to whatever computers he guessed must have once stood on the desk outside. Clearly, like most people who had these types of rooms installed, D’Arcy had drawn comfort from knowing it was there should he want to use it, without ever really expecting that he would ever need to.

‘Help me lift one of these down.’

Mindful of not tripping over D’Arcy’s outstretched legs, he lifted down a box and opened it up. Inside were four or five lever-arch files, neatly arranged by year, containing hundreds of invoices.

‘Renewal fees for a burial plot in the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome,’ Allegra read, opening the most recent file and then turning the pages. ‘Private jet hire. Hotel suites. Yacht charter agreements. It’s expensive being rich.’

‘Anything linking him to De Luca?’ Tom asked, hauling a second box down.

‘Nothing obvious. Trade confirmations, derivatives contracts, settlement details, account statements…’ She flicked through a couple of the folders.

‘This one’s the same,’ Tom agreed, having heaved a third box to the floor.

‘Look at this, though,’ Allegra said slowly, having come across a thick wedge of bank statements. ‘Every time his trading account went over ten million, the surplus was transferred back to an account at the Banco Rosalia.’

‘The Banco Rosalia?’ Tom frowned. ‘Wasn’t that where Argento worked?’

‘Exactly. Which ties D’Arcy back to the other killings.’

‘Except there’s nothing here that links his death to either Caesar or Caravaggio,’ Tom pointed out. ‘Why would Moretti have broken the pattern?’

‘Maybe he didn’t. Maybe D’Arcy locked himself in here before Moretti could get to him,’ she suggested.

Tom nodded, although he wasn’t entirely convinced. Compared to what he’d heard about the other murders, this one seemed rushed and unplanned. Different.

‘What do you know about the Banco Rosalia?’ he asked.

‘Nothing really.’ She shrugged. ‘Small bank, majority owned by the Vatican. I met the guy who runs it at the morgue, ID-ing Argento’s body.’