The Camelot Code (24 page)

Bronty breaks from booking his Lundy trip and stands behind Mitzi to examine the digital copy of the painting. ‘This is of knights,’ he says disappointedly. ‘
The Ghent Altarpiece
shows several groups of people coming together to pay adoration to Christ. The missing panel is of judges, not knights.’

‘Meaning this is, like, the worst forgery ever?’

He leans closer to the monitor and peers at the edges of the oil. ‘I’m not an expert, but do you see this colouring here, around the edges? It’s not right. These dark shades are out of character with the rest of the painting.’

Mitzi shifts her head and looks at it from different angles. ‘Isn’t that some kind of border?’

‘It might be. Or, it could be evidence that there was once another painting over the top of it. One that’s been stripped away.’

‘The judges, you mean?’

‘There have been rumours in the past about the panels. During restoration work, it was suggested there was a painting underneath at least one of them. Certainly, that would fit with the way the folding canvases show different scenes when the altarpiece is opened and closed. And remember this is the work of two men, firstly Hubert van Eyck, then his brother Jan.’

Mitzi has to trawl her memory. ‘You know this crook Deagan showed the painting to Christie’s – to a bunch of art experts – and they said it was a fake. They must have looked at the same things you’re staring at and dismissed them as baloney.’

Bronty’s still focused on the image, studying every brush stroke. ‘Maybe at that time the painting hadn’t been stripped back.’

‘I can ask Kirstin to check in the files.’

He pulls up a chair and sits alongside her. ‘The altarpiece is a really important piece of work. Which is why everyone from Napoleon to Hitler tried to steal it. The triptych is regarded by many as the first major painting of the Renaissance, the forerunner of realism and certainly the greatest oil of its time. So to put these knights in there, to give them credibility, to immortalize them as a major presence in the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb was hugely significant at the time.’

Mitzi’s almost afraid to ask the question. ‘Why? They’re just knights.’

‘No, they’re not. Like I said, van Eyck had already painted a panel of knights fitting that description. This is different. Look more closely.’

‘That one in the middle isn’t – you know who?’

Bronty nods. ‘It might well be. And if it is, those knights gathered around and behind him are of the Round Table.’ He pokes the monitor with his fingertip. ‘Look here and you can see a circular emblem on their shields and three golden crowns on the flag behind Arthur.’

Mitzi’s not looking. Her eyes are on something else. ‘Holy shit, have you seen this?’ She taps the screen.

Bronty studies a background figure of a priest, shown on horseback, carrying a bible and a cross. The crucifix is identical to the one they have a sketch of. The one Amir Goldman was killed for.

A knock on the office door turns their heads.

It opens and Annie Linklatter stands there, timidly, holding an envelope. ‘This is the DNA profile you’ve been waiting for, ma’am.’

It’s been an unusual day for Angelo Marchetti.

No alcohol. No coke. No gambling.

The Italian has stayed clean for almost twenty-four hours and has spent the time getting his head together. Devising a way to stay alive and start a new and untroubled life. The key to it all is recovering the original memory stick. He can use this to leverage Gwyn into a situation that will make him vulnerable to Mardrid. Without it, he’s a dead man.

Sophie Hudson said a lot before she died. She named the cops investigating the Goldman shooting and gave up the fact that she handed the memory stick to a woman from the FBI.

Mitzi Fallon.

Marchetti is staring at a head and shoulders squad shot of the lieutenant as he works from his hotel room. She’s in full LAPD blues and looks too momsy to press his buttons. He prefers slimmer, younger women with bigger breasts and longer hair. That said, she’s clearly an exceptional investigator, with the emphasis on
ex.

Ex robbery squad. Ex homicide with an ex-husband.

The briefing note he’s got shows her life almost has as many screw-ups in it as his. She’s short of money and has two young daughters to look after.

Those are all the facts he needs to know.

For now.

The single glossy sheet looks like a weird heart-monitor graph with uneven columns rising and falling. Certain parts of the readout show dark pairs of numbered codes.

Mitzi’s seen hundreds of genetic fingerprints, but Bronty hasn’t.

‘What am I looking at?’ he asks. ‘I know it’s Dalton’s DNA, taken from the water bottle you stole —’

‘Appropriated.’

‘I stand corrected – that you
appropriated
from Gwyn’s office. But how do you make any sense of this?’

‘You don’t,’ says Mitzi, taking the print off him. ‘You just find a match for it. Juries love DNA. They don’t understand it either, but they know it’s the blueprint of a human being, they know we’re all different and they trust that genetic fingerprinting is accurate. That’s all that matters.’

Bronty is still intrigued. ‘I get all that, but can you explain the science?’

‘Kind of. I saw it ten years ago before automation, now it all happens in a machine but the process is similar. The lab pulls DNA out of a single cell they’ve swabbed – in our case that would be Dalton’s from the water bottle. Enzymes are used to isolate the critical sections. Those parts are zapped with electricity. This separates them into unique pairs and patterns, then the whole thing is transferred onto a physical print.’

‘That’s really all it is?’

‘Essentially, yeah. But like I say, it’s all done by machines now. You ask some professor and he’ll tie your mind up in knots with
dioxy-this
and
ribonucleic-that
and stories about
hyper-variable satellite somethingorothers
, but in the end, yeah, it’s the way I said.’ She goes back to the desk and taps on her computer. ‘What I’m gonna do now is use our case file database to compare Dalton’s DNA profile with the profile we got from the blood in the diner at Dupont Circle.’

‘And if they match, then Dalton is Deagan’s killer?’

‘That’s a jump too far. We still can’t prove Deagan’s dead – for the moment, he’s down as a “missing-presumed”. One thing for sure, though, it would irrefutably put Dalton at the place Deagan was seen alive.’

They watch the database churn through its records and wait.

‘I worked out once that I spend sixty minutes a week just waiting for computers to process stuff,’ says Mitzi. ‘Four hours a month, forty-eight hours a year. That’s a whole damned working week a year just waiting.’

There’s a ping and the screen freezes.

Two separate sets of columns are displayed. One is superimposed over the other.

The word
MATCH
punches the middle of the frame.

‘Well, looky here,’ says Mitzi. ‘Seems like I get to go see our new British friends again while you’re off on your sea trip to Spooky Hollow.’

CNN plays on one of the screens in Owain’s private office; Sky News and Bloomberg are turned low on two others. All are running post-bombing interviews with government ministers and defence experts.

Owain mutes them all as a call from Gareth Madoc comes in on an encrypted line.

‘Gareth, how are you?’

‘Better, and so will you be. I have some good news.’

‘Nabil?’

‘No. He’s still lying low. But we got to the girl.’

‘And from your tone, it sounds as though she’s cooperating.’

‘She is. Zachra Korshidi’s father Khalid is the principal fundraiser and trustee of the local mosque, and it’s one of the biggest in the States.’

Owain is momentarily distracted by a bottom-of-screen caption on Bloomberg saying the price of Mardrid stock has fallen two per cent after he bought a company in Colombia
alleged to have links to Farc, the left-wing rebels.
He makes a note on a yellow jotter, then apologizes. ‘I’m sorry; I just had to write something down. Is this girl’s father only a financial player, or is he operationally active as well?’

‘If not operational, then certainly influential. Khalid Korshidi is chairman of New York’s Sharia Council and is known as a hard line fundamentalist. Zachra says he’s too controlling and egotistical to take a back seat to anyone on anything. She’s sure he knows everything that’s going on.’

‘And there’s no love lost between them?’

‘None at all. She hates him. Wants to get as far away as possible.’

‘Then we need to help her, but do you really think this is going to lead us to Nabil and who he reports to?’

‘Our girl says she knows Nabil. I showed her a photograph and she instantly ID’d him as someone who had come regularly to her house over the past year, usually alone or with one other man. Her mother served tea while he talked with her father in the front room. Usually, when they’d finished, they’d say they were going to the mosque and drive off together.’

Owain pieces things together. ‘That means Khalid has Nabil’s trust. Time is against us, Gareth; we can’t afford to simply tail the father and hope we hit the jackpot.’

‘I know. I’ve asked her to copy his cell phone directory. I’ve given her a reader. And she’s going to put a tracker tack into a heel of his shoe. If he sees it, he’ll think he just stood on a bit of metal. Apparently, he only ever wears an old black pair, so we should be on him easy enough.’

‘Can we get eyes and ears in the house, preferably in this front room?’

‘She’s nervous about that, but I’ll push her again once we’ve got the tracker in play and we start working his phone.’

‘Do it within the next twenty-four hours, Gareth. Myrddin is in a sweat and you know what that means.’

‘Visions?’

‘Bad ones. The worst I’ve known him have.’

Mitzi takes a black cab over to the CEI offices, while Bronty heads for a train from London to Ilfracombe and then, if he’s lucky, the last ferry out to Lundy.

Mitzi hates boats. She gets seasick just lying in a bubble bath. Nic Karakandez, her ex-partner in the LAPD, had a boat and regularly took the girls out on it, but she always declined and went grocery shopping or holed up in the harbour coffee shop with a book. Karakandez was a great cop and a more-than-decent guy. Handsome enough for her to have a serious crush on him. Had she not hung on to the remnants of her tattered marriage, life might have been different and he might not have spent all his money on that old tug of his, jacked in his job and set off to sail the seven seas.

She thinks about him and the whole world of might-have-been as she waits in the vast CEI reception full of expensive wood, antique leather and people talking English with accents she’s only ever heard on TV.

A glass-fronted lift slides into view and gradually reveals Melissa Sachs’s elegant black shoes, suntanned legs, fashionable orange skirt, white frilly-cuffed shirt and finally a head of perfectly cut shoulder-length dark hair.

By comparison, Mitzi feels like a beaten up bag lady as she heads her way.

‘Lieutenant Fallon, I’m most surprised to see you here.’ The PA flashes a friendly smile but her eyes are full of questions. ‘We don’t have any meetings with you in the diary, so how can I help?’

‘I need to speak to your boss and to George Dalton.’

‘I’ve no idea where Mr Dalton is. I understand you have some numbers for him so you could try those, or go through the embassy.’

‘It’s easier to communicate with the dead than get an answer from an embassy. What about Sir Owain?’

‘Not here, I’m afraid. He’s gone to his home in Wales and will be working from there for a few days. Would you like me to give him a message?’

‘Yeah, tell him I’m coming to see him.’ Mitzi starts to head to the exit.

‘That’s not a good idea.’ Melissa follows her. ‘He has a strict policy on not mixing his personal and professional lives. I’ll call him and ask him to get back to you with a time that you can meet in his office. That will be more convenient for everyone.’

‘Listen, lady; your boss and his boy George are up to their very British stiff upper lips in a homicide. Now, I guess if that was made public, it wouldn’t do either of their reputations any damned good.’ She opens her arms and turns slowly in a circle. ‘To say nothing of what it would do to the value of this
fine
company.’

‘Lieutenant, I suggest —’

‘Don’t! Suggesting is a really bad thing for you to do.’ She glares at her. ‘Call your boss and tell him I’m mad as hell. So mad I’m gonna trek to the middle of freakin’ nowhere to see him, and when I arrive I expect decent black coffee and honest answers.’

Mitzi doesn’t wait for a reply.

Outside, the noise of London hits her like a slap. She’s had enough of this case now. She wants to go home and nurse her sick daughter, wants to make peace with Jade, wants to hold her sister’s hand, pour a glass of wine and help her sort her marriage out.

What she
does not
want
is to be going to some country named after a mammal to get jerked around by Sir Lah-De-dah.

‘Taxi!’ She walks in the road with her hand held high.

A cab pulls over and a window slides down revealing a bald-headed old Londoner in a Chelsea shirt. ‘Where do you want to go to, Mrs?’

‘San Francisco.’ Mitzi pulls open the door. ‘But take me to Dean Street, and hey, buddy, just ’cause you hear an American accent, don’t think you can go the long way round and make a mug outta me.’