Rembrandt's Ghost

From the
USA Today
bestselling author of The Lucifer Gospel There is truth in art. But the truth can kill.

Young archaeologist Finn Ryan is laboring for a London auction house when she gets some unlikely luck. Along with the handsome young nobleman Billy Pilgrim, she’s inherited a house in Amsterdam, a cargo ship off Borneo South Pacific, and what appears to be a fake Rembrandt. But the fake hides a real Rembrandt portrait, which in turn hides a clue to a centuries-old mystery.

Finn and Billy aren’t the only ones who know what is at stake-and what is waiting to be found at the bottom of the South Pacific. Pursued around the globe by ruthless adversaries, Finn and Billy are thrown into the hunt for a forgotten treasure that could change their lives forever-or end their lives in an instant.

To Gabriel, an American boy in accordance
with whose classic taste the following
narrative has been designed,
Rembrandt’s Ghost
is now, in return for numerous delightful
hours, and with the kindest wishes, dedicated
by his affectionate grandfather, the author.

If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons,
And buccaneers, and buried gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of today:
—So be it, and fall on! If not,
If studious youth no longer crave,
His ancient appetites forgot,
Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,
Or Cooper of the wood and wave:
So be it, also! And may I
And all my pirates share the grave
Where these and their creations lie!
—Robert Louis Stevenson,
Treasure Island

Fiona Katherine Elizabeth Ryan, late of New York City and, before that, Columbus, Ohio, known as Finn to her friends and loved ones, stood at the window of her little flat above the restaurant on Crouch End Broadway in North London and watched Emir, the tobacconist on the far side of the street, roll up his shutters, opening his shop for the early-morning customers standing dripping and dreary, waiting at the bus stop on the rain-dark sidewalk in front of him.

Of course in England a sidewalk wasn’t a sidewalk—it was a pavement. A Broadway wasn’t a place where they had theaters—it was a High Street. And the locals weren’t the ones with an accent—Finn was. She sighed and swallowed the last of the mug of tea she’d just zapped with her immersion heater. It tasted like burned acorns. It was seven in the morning, it was April, and it was raining. Of course it was raining. In London, if it wasn’t snowing, it was probably raining no matter what time of the year it was.

Finn sighed again. London wasn’t what she’d expected at all. After her adventures in New York and her fugitive escapades in the Libyan desert and the depths of the Caribbean the year before she’d been ready for some serious work and study in an environment of culture and sophistication. Her job as a client adviser at the prestigious Mason-Godwin Auction House was supposed to take care of the sophistication, and living in the city that was still the center of the art world was supposed to take care of the culture.

Sadly, it hadn’t worked out that way. “Client adviser” at Mason-Godwin meant looking good in high heels and a short black cocktail dress on Sale Nights, finding out beforehand what a potential buyer’s bidding range, alcohol capacity, and net worth were, and fetching coffee, tea, and biscuits during daylight hours for the office’s high muckety-mucks, like the Ghastly Ronald, managing director of Mason-Godwin.

As far as sophistication went, it appeared to Finn that London had more Starbucks than Seattle, more KFCs than Kentucky, and its own version of
American Idol
. A burger and fries at Pick More Daisies, the self-styled California restaurant directly below her, cost eleven pounds—twenty-five bucks when you added the tax and tip. On top of that, she was paying more for a two-room flat with a hot plate and a bathroom down the hall in Crouch End than she had for her tidy little apartment in Manhattan. In a word, London was a rip-off.

Sighing again Finn slipped on her raincoat, grabbed her telescoping umbrella from the shelf by the door, and went downstairs to join the group of commuters waiting for the number 41 bus and the long ride down the hill toward the distant Thames and the City.

A little more than two thousand years ago, a small village appeared at the intersection of two Roman roads that converged just west of the port town of Londinium. This was the original Mayfair, named for the country market and annual pagan religious festival held there every spring.

Between 1720 and 1740 the entire village was expropriated and developed by the Grosvenor family and the Earl of Chesterfield, who was famous for putting velvet collars on his coats and the invention of the modern upholstered couch. By 1800 it was the most fashionable place to live in London with wall-to-wall stately mansions on its score of elegant cobbled streets.

By the turn of the new millennium, it had gone through a number of transformations, including some random bomb hits during World War Two, inevitable stock market crashes that turned the mansions into flats and apartments, and economic upturns that turned the street frontage into some of the priciest property on the planet, with rents paid by everyone from Fortnum and Masons to Prada and Dolce & Gabbana.

In the middle of it all was Cork Street, a single long block running between Clifford Street and Burlington Gardens, just a stone’s throw from Piccadilly and ending at the exit of the Burlington Arcade, where James Bond purchased his Mont Blanc pens and around the corner from the shop where he bought his handmade Morland’s cigarettes.

There are twenty-three art galleries on Cork Street selling everything from old Dutch Masters to Basquiat’s little scrawls and Keith Haring’s gentle doodles. More than a billion dollars’ worth of art on the current market, depending on how gullible you are, representing every major artist in the world, alive or dead, all packed into less than two hundred yards. And in the middle of all that, at 26-28 Cork Street is the firm of Mason-Godwin, fine art auctioneers, which was established in 1710, thirty-two years before Sotheby’s had its first little sale of old books for a total take of less than three hundred pounds—a fact that the management of Mason-Godwin was almost sure to impart at the drop of a hat to anyone willing to listen.

The premises had originally belonged to a firm of decorators and furniture makers specializing in clients with titles in front of their names. That firm eventually went bankrupt due to the unfortunate habit of those titled clients not paying their bills on time, if at all. After that, the large workrooms and warehouse floors were broken up into flats and apartments for the wealthy, then offices for the not so wealthy. A decade before World War Two, the property was purchased by a pair of closeted gay confectioners, who turned the property into a chocolate factory and showroom manufacturing a particularly popular bittersweet mint concoction known as Turner & Townsend’s Minto-Bits.

The two men and their company thrived until war came and knocked the stuffing out of the chocolate business. Sugar was rationed early and people had better things to do between 1939 and 1945 than either making or consuming Minto-Bits or the equally popular Hinto-Minto Collection. Mason-Godwin on the other hand did extremely well before, during, and after the war, buying and selling with equal zeal from both oppressed and oppressor, generally through Swiss intermediaries. In 1946 Mason-Godwin, bloated with cash and unsold inventory and looking to expand, snapped up the building on Cork Street, which was just beginning its paint-spattered climb to fame. The rest was history. All of this information, with the exception of Turner’s and Townsend’s sexual predilections, and the pre- and post-war art market in Switzerland, was included in the orientation brochure given to Finn when she joined the firm.