The Geneva Deception (14 page)

Headquarters of the Guarda di Finanza, Viale XXI Aprile, Rome 19th March—7.22 a.m.

‘Colonel? We’ve got her.’

‘About time!’ Gallo grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair, pausing in front of the mirror to do up the silver buttons and centre his tie. ‘Her phone?’

‘She switched it on about ten minutes ago,’ Salvatore nodded, still standing in the corridor and leaning into the office.

‘How long for?’

‘Long enough. The signal’s been triangulated to a street in Travestere.’

‘Cavalli’s house?’ Gallo snapped, looking up into the mirror to seek out Salvatore’s eyes over his left shoulder.

‘Could be.’

Salvatore flinched and then relaxed into an
uneasy smile as Gallo turned and raised his hand and gave him a sharp clap on the back.

‘Well done.’

Fixing his peaked cap on his head, he strode towards the lift. Twenty seconds later they stepped outside and walked outside towards two waiting cars. They climbed in, but just as Gallo was about to turn the key in the ignition, Salvatore’s phone rang. Gallo paused, glancing across questioningly as he took the call.

‘We know where she stayed last night,’ Salvatore explained, still listening, but with his hand shielding the microphone.

‘A hotel?’ Gallo guessed.

‘Out near the airport. The manager saw her picture this morning and called it in.’

‘They ran the story?’

Salvatore reached across to the back seat and handed Gallo a copy of that morning’s
La Repubblica.
Allegra’s face dominated the front page under a single shouted headline:

Killer cop on the run.

‘Apparently she checked in late last night and paid in cash. I guess we got lucky.’

‘Funny how much luckier you get when you load the dice,’ Gallo growled as he scanned through the article. He wouldn’t normally have leaked the details of a case, but he’d seen enough of Allegra to realise that, for all her inexperience, she was smart. And in a city of 2.7 million
people, that was more than enough to hide and stay hidden. The more people who knew what she looked like, the better. As long as he found her first.

Salvatore ended his call. Gallo turned the key.

‘Who else is running it?’

‘Everyone.’

‘What about the old man?’

‘Professor Eco?’

‘Is that what he calls himself?’ Gallo shrugged as he checked his mirrors and swung out, tyres shrieking.

‘According to him, she took off before telling him anything.’

‘I want him watched anyway,’ Gallo insisted. ‘Just in case she tries to contact him again.’

‘She’s probably armed now, by the way. Eco had a gun. Illegal. Says he can’t find it any more.’

‘Even better.’ Gallo gave a satisfied nod. ‘Gives us an excuse to go in heavy.’

Smiling, he punched the siren on.

Vicolo de Panieri, Travestere, Rome 19th March—7.27 a.m.

Allegra wasn’t about to take any chances. Snatching the gun from Tom’s grasp, she immediately turned it back on him. Unflustered, he settled into his chair.

‘Who are you running from?’ he asked.

The easy thing, the smart thing, she knew, would be to walk away right there and then. She had enough of her own problems already, without getting swept up into his.

But it wasn’t that simple. For a start, it was hard to ignore that, whoever this man was and whatever dark secret had drawn him to this place, it seemed to involve Cavalli and the mysterious symbol that had been linked to three different corpses. What’s more, he’d just placed his fate in her hands by handing her the gun. It was, she knew, a rather unsubtle attempt to win her trust.
But it was a powerful gesture all the same, and one that had, if nothing else, earned him the right to be heard.

‘How can you help me?’ she demanded, answering his question with one of her own.

There was a pause, and she guessed from the slight twitch of his left eye that he was debating how much he should tell her.

‘Thirty-six hours ago a friend of mine was murdered,’ he said eventually. ‘Shot by a sniper in a casino in Vegas. I think they were killed because they were closing in on someone.’

‘“Closing in”? What was he, a cop?’ Allegra guessed with a surprised frown. This guy didn’t look or feel like any policeman she’d ever met.

‘
She
was FBI,’ he corrected her. ‘Special Agent Jennifer Browne. Cavalli was fingered by a man she arrested in New York. A dealer for a tombaroli smuggling ring. She found a drawing of the symbol I showed you in his trash. I’ve got the case file, if you want to see it,’ he offered, leaning forward to reach into his bag.

‘Wait,’ she said sharply. ‘Kick it over here.’

With a shrug, he placed his bag on the floor and slid it towards her with his foot. Keeping her eyes fixed on him, she felt inside it, her fingers eventually closing around a thick file that she pulled on to her lap. Seeing the FBI crest, she shot him a questioning, almost concerned look.

‘Don’t tell me you’re FBI too?’

‘No,’ he admitted.

‘Then where did you get this?’

A pause.

‘I borrowed it.’

‘You borrowed it?’ She gave him a disbelieving smile. ‘From the FBI?’

‘When one agent gets killed, another one gets blamed,’ he said, an impatient edge to his voice for the first time. ‘Everyone was too busy covering their own ass to worry about finding Jennifer’s killer. I did what I had to do.’

‘And came here? Why? What were you hoping to find?’

‘I don’t know. Something that might tell me why Jennifer was murdered, or what this symbol means, or who the Delian League is.’

‘The Delian League?’ she shot back. ‘What do you know about them?’

‘Not as much as you, by the sound of things,’ he replied with a curious frown.

‘I just know what it used to be,’ she said, his story so far and the reassuring weight of the gun in her hand convincing her she wasn’t risking much by sharing a little more of what she knew.

‘What do you mean, “used to be”?’

‘There was an association of city states in Ancient Greece. A military alliance, formed to protect themselves from the Spartans,’ she explained. ‘The members used to throw lead into the sea when they joined, to symbolise that their
friendship would last until it floated back to the surface.’

‘Lead. Like the engraved disc you found on Cavalli?’

‘Not just on Cavalli,’ she admitted, trying not to think of Ricci’s sagging skin and Argento’s tortured smile. ‘There have been two other murders. The discs were found with them too.’

‘Did Cavalli know them?’

‘I doubt it,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Cavalli was an attorney based in Melfi. Adriano Ricci was an enforcer for the De Luca crime family. While Giulio Argento worked for the Banco Rosalia, a subsidiary of the Vatican bank. A priest would have more in common with a prostitute than those three with each other.’

‘But the same killer, right?’

Allegra’s eyes snapped to the door before she could answer, the sound of approaching sirens lifting her to her feet.

‘You must have been followed,’ Tom glared at her accusingly.

She ignored him, instead picking up a chair and swinging it hard against one of the sliding glass doors. It fractured on the third blow, the safety glass falling out in a single, crazed sheet. They leapt through the frame as they heard three, maybe four cars roar up the street outside.

‘Here—’

Tom cradled his hands and gave Allegra a boost,
then reached up so she could help haul him up on to the garden wall beside her.

‘You’ll slow me down,’ she said with a firm shake of her head.

‘You need me,’ Tom insisted.

‘I’ve done okay so far.’

‘Really? Then how do you explain that?’ Tom glanced towards the muffled sound of the police banging on the front door.

‘They got lucky,’ she said with a shrug, readying herself to jump down.

‘You mean they got smart. Let me guess. You turned your phone on just before you got here, right?’

‘How did you know…?’ she breathed, Tom’s question pulling her back from the edge. She had briefly switched it on. Just long enough to see if Aurelio had left her a message. Something, anything, that might explain what she had overheard. But all there had been was a series of increasingly frantic messages from her boss to turn herself in.

‘It only takes a few seconds to triangulate a phone signal. You led them straight here.’

She took a deep breath, a small and increasingly insistent voice at the back of her head fighting her instinct to just jump down.

‘Who are you?’

‘Someone who knows what it’s like to be on
the run,’ he shot back. ‘Someone who knows what it takes, keep running fast enough to stay alive.’

Sighing heavily, she reached down, her hand clutching on to his.

Verbier, Switzerland 19th March—7.31 a.m.

It had snowed last week—recently enough for the village’s blandly functional concrete heart to still be benefiting from its decorative touch, long enough ago for the briefly pristine white streets to have been turned into a dirty river of slush and mud-stained embankments.

Faulks had never seen the point of skiing, never understood the attraction of clamping his feet into boots that in another age would have likely been in the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, and then hurling himself off a mountain on two narrow planks just to only to get to the bottom so that he could have to queue and pay for the privilege of repeating the whole infernal experience again. And again.

Glancing up from his phone as they drove past, he almost felt sorry for them, a few early starters
clomping noisily down the street trying not to break their necks on the ice, skis balancing precariously on their shoulder, their edges sawing down to the bone. It seemed a heavy price to pay to ensure you could hold your own at the school gates with the other parents or be able to join in with the dinner party circuit chit chat.

Still, if there was one thing he’d learnt over the years it was that there was no limit to people’s ingenuity when it came to devising irrational ways to spend their money. And the richer they were, the more irrational and ingenious they seemed to become. It was a status symbol. A badge of honour. In fact, compared to some things he’d witnessed over the years, skiing was almost sane.

Chalet Septième Ciel was perched in an isolated spot high above the village, facing westward and with a breathtaking view over the valley below. Converted from an old school, its name meant Seventh Heaven; strangely inappropriate, given that most of its occupants, Faulks was fairly sure, were fated for a far warmer destination when their time came. Maybe that was why they chose here, Faulks mused. The prospect of an eternity roasting in the fires of Hell was perhaps all the incentive they needed to pay the extortionate fees this place charged. Anything to spend their final days somewhere cold.

Faulks’s silver 1963 Bentley S3 Continental pulled up and Logan got out to open his door for
him. A former paratrooper from the outskirts of Glasgow, he’d done two tours in Afghanistan before realising that he could make more in a year as a private bodyguard than ten being shot at for Queen and country. Wearing a suit and his regimental tie, he had straw-coloured hair and a wide, round face, his nose crooked and part of one earlobe missing. His jaw was permanently clenched, as if he was chewing stones.

A female voice answered the intercom.

‘I’m here to see Avner Klein,’ Faulks announced in French.

The door buzzed open and he stepped inside, a dark-haired nurse in a white uniform rushing forward to greet him, a stern expression on her face.

‘Visiting hours aren’t until nine,’ she informed him icily.

‘I know, but I’ve just flown in from Los Angeles,’ he explained apologetically. ‘And I have to be back in Geneva mid morning. I knew that if I didn’t at least try to see him now…’

‘I understand,’ she relented, her face softening as she placed a comforting hand on his sleeve. ‘In this case…well, time is short. I’m sure he’ll see you. He’s not been sleeping well recently. Follow me.’

She led him downstairs and down a long, dark corridor, Faulks marking every third step with the sharp clip of his umbrella against the wooden floor. Reaching the last door she knocked gently.
From the other side came a faint call that seemed barely human to Faulks, but which the nurse clearly took as permission to enter, nodding at him to go in.

‘Mrs Carroll is having breakfast on the terrace,’ she called as she retreated back along the corridor before he could stop her. ‘I’ll let her know you’re here.’

The curtains had been partly drawn, throwing a narrow ribbon of light across the otherwise dark room. This had unravelled along the floor and then spooled up and across the bed, revealing the pale hands of the person lying in it, his face wreathed in darkness.

‘Avner?’ Faulks said, his eyes straining to adjust to the sepulchral half light.

‘Earl, is that you?’ a thin voice rasped from the bed.

‘How are you doing, sport?’ Faulks stepped across to the bed with what he hoped was an encouraging smile.

Klein looked barely alive, his cheeks hollowed out, eyes sunk into the back of his head, hair missing, skin wrinkled and sagging. Wires from several machines disappeared under the white bedclothes that shrouded his body, their monitors flashing up a hieroglyphic stream of numbers and graphs and pulsing dots. There was a drip too, Faulks noticed, the line seeming to vanish somewhere in the direction of Klein’s groin, the livid purple patches along
his wizened forearm suggesting that they couldn’t find a vein there any more.

‘I’m dying,’ Klein replied, the very effort of blinking seeming to make him wince in pain.

‘Rubbish,’ Faulks assured him breezily. ‘You’ll be back on your feet in time for the Triple Crown. I’ve got a killer tip on the Derby this year. A guaranteed winner!’

Klein nodded weakly, although his empty smile told Faulks that they both knew he was lying.

‘Thank you for visiting,’ Klein wheezed. ‘I know you’re busy.’

He nodded at the drink next to the bed and Faulks reached across and held it for him, trying not to wrinkle his nose in disgust as Klein’s cracked lips sucked at it greedily, a drop escaping from the corner of his mouth and trickling down his chin like a tear.

‘Never too busy for an old friend.’ A pause. ‘And there is something I wanted to show you.’

‘Oh?’

Rather than curiosity, there was a resigned sadness in Klein’s voice, as if Faulks had somehow confirmed a rumour that he’d been hoping wasn’t true.

‘I knew you wouldn’t want to pass up a chance like this,’ Faulks enthused, opening his wallet and extracting a small Polaroid. ‘Look—’

Klein lifted himself forward and then almost immediately collapsed back on to his pillow, convulsing under the grip of a sudden hacking cough.

‘Verity Bruce wants it,’ Faulks continued through the noise, glancing lovingly at the picture. ‘I’ve brought all the paperwork ready for you to sign. All you need to do is authorise the payment and—’

Faulks broke off as Deena Carroll, Klein’s second wife, stormed into the room behind him, gold bangles and earrings clanging like a Passing Bell.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she said, roasted coffee bean eyes blazing out of a leathered face crowned by a swooping wave of dyed platinum blonde hair.

‘Visiting an old friend,’ Faulks shrugged. ‘I mean, old friends,’ he added with a small bow of his head.

‘You’re no friend,’ she hissed contemptuously, snatching the photograph from him and waving it in his face. ‘Friends don’t try and hawk their grimy trinkets to a dying man.’ She flicked the photograph to the floor. ‘You make me sick, Earl.’

‘Those grimy trinkets have made the Klein-Carroll collection one of the greatest in the world,’ he reminded her tersely as he knelt down stiffly to retrieve the photograph. ‘And now that you’ve donated it to the Met, a permanent monument to your taste and generosity.’ He spat these last two words out, as if he’d just bitten into a bar of soap.

‘We both know what that collection is and where it came from,’ she said with a hollow laugh. ‘And if it’s a monument to anything, it’s to your greed.’

‘Be careful, Deena,’ Faulks said sharply, still smiling. ‘I’ve buried a lot of bodies for Avner over the years and dug up even more. And I can prove it. You should think about how you want him to be remembered.’

She went to answer but said nothing, glancing instead at Klein. Hands clasped together on the crisp sheets, grinning lovingly at her, he had quite clearly not followed a word of their exchange. She walked over to his side and smiled, tears welling as she stroked the few wisps of hair that clung stubbornly to his scalp.

‘Just go, Earl,’ she said in a toneless voice. ‘Find someone else to dig for.’