The Lost Relic bh-6 Read online

  ‘They’re gonna get wiped out,’ McLaughlin said.

  Somehow, the Range Rover made it across the intersection.

  Almost. Its driver was too panicked or too bold to get out of the way of an articulated Tesco lorry that sideswiped it at over forty and sent it flying like a tin can. The Range Rover flipped end over end, crushed a barrier and ploughed a massive furrow in a grass verge before coming to rest upside down in the dirt.

  The chopper was hovering right overhead, roadside shrubbery pressed flat under the wind of its blades. Voices yelled urgently on Walker’s radio. There was a screech of sirens in the distance.

  Darcey rolled in over the sea of smashed glass and wreckage. The road looked like a bomb site, vehicles and glass and pieces of twisted bodywork strewn everywhere. The driver of the Tesco lorry had climbed down from his cab. There was blood on his face from a gash above the eye. He gaped at the Range Rover, then up at the descending helicopter, shielding his eyes from the white glare of its spotlamp. A car horn was stuck on, wailing loudly. Other passengers were venturing out from their cars, looking dazed and frightened.

  No sign of movement inside the Range Rover.

  Darcey unclipped her seatbelt and took out her pistol. She instinctively checked the breech. A glint of shiny brass against matt black steel.

  ‘Here we go,’ McLaughlin said, taking up the MP-5K. ‘Watch yourselves out there,’ Darcey said, not taking her eyes off the Range Rover.

  The three SOCA agents climbed out of the car. Swirling blue lights appeared through the drizzle as a fleet of police cars came swarming in from all directions.

  The driver’s door of the upside-down Range Rover opened a crack, and then swung out wide. A hand appeared, groping about, then a balding head that Darcey instantly recognised.

  Gremaj. She’d been staring at the same grainy black-and-white image of the elusive drug baron for three months. Now he was hers, helpless and vulnerable as he tumbled free of his tangled seatbelt and sprawled out onto the muddied grass. Darcey felt flushed with victory as she walked towards him, clutching her Glock tightly in a double-handed grip. It was an end to the cruel suffering he and his minions had been bringing onto the streets of Britain for the last seven years. A bullet in the brain of his nefarious career – and a defining moment in hers. God knew she’d grafted for it.

  Gremaj had blood trickling from the corner of his mouth as he crawled away from the overturned Range Rover. He spat red. His jacket fluttered in the blast of the landing helicopter, and the flashing blue lights were reflected in his glasses. One lens was cracked. The butt of a nickel-plated custom .45 auto stuck out of his waistband; it was a typical showoff gangsta weapon, the kind of impractical piece of tinsel a pimp would like to flourish about. It had probably never been fired. Gremaj got other people to do that kind of thing for him.

  He glanced up at Darcey as she approached, and the look in his eyes made it clear that he understood she had every intention of shooting him dead if he didn’t play this right. He gingerly slipped the pistol out between index finger and thumb and tossed it away. He raised his face to the sky, held up his arms.

  Darcey opened her mouth to say the words she’d been dreaming of saying for far too long: ‘Thomas Gremaj, you are under arrest.’ But before she could speak, she heard Walker’s radio fizz, and a new voice issuing a clipped command that she could only barely make out over the chaos of noise all around her.

  She froze. Turned. Had she heard right?

  Walker was striding towards her, holding out the radio. ‘You need to hear this, guv.’ She took it from him, and this time she heard the order loud and clear.

  ‘Base to Alpha One – you are to stand down, repeat stand down immediately. Your presence urgently required at headquarters. Do you copy? Over.’

  McLaughlin and Walker looked aghast. ‘Fuck them,’ Darcey said under her breath. And for one heady moment, it felt good to defy the faceless superiors who were trying to snatch away her moment of glory. This was her case. Her arrest. Nobody was going to deprive her of it.

  But then she thought better of it. She swallowed hard. Her heart felt like a lead brick behind her ribs.

  How could this be happening to her?

  She watched in a daze as tactical firearms officers came pouring out of their rapid response vehicles and circled the Range Rover, clutching MP-5s and taser guns, bulky in their bulletproof vests. They knew their job. Darcey had been one of them once, not so very long ago, and she couldn’t deny that Gremaj was in capable hands. In seconds, he and three more injured occupants of the vehicle had been laid out face down on the wet grass with their wrists trussed behind their backs. Weapons were seized and bagged. One of the officers emerged from the wreckage of the Range Rover holding a white object: shrink-wrapped, the size of a house brick. He jabbed a gloved finger towards the back seat as if to say ‘come take a look at this’.

  So her gamble had paid off. Darcey smiled, but it was a bitter smile as she watched the situation slipping away from her. More officers were spilling out of the vans that came screeching up in the background, taking control of the crowd that was rapidly forming around the demolition derby of strewn vehicles. Three ambulances were already on the scene, and paramedics were attending to the injured.

  The chopper had touched down, rotors slapping air at idle speed, side hatch open. Its co-pilot was a SOCA agent Darcey and her team knew well. He was waving his arms for her to get into the aircraft.

  The voice on the radio was demanding acknowledgement.

  Darcey hesitated. Her mind was reeling at the enormity of what was being done to her. From the looks on their faces, Walker and McLaughlin couldn’t believe it either. It was a body-blow for all of them. Nobody spoke for a few seconds until McLaughlin said, ‘You’d better respond, guv.’

  ‘Bastards,’ she muttered, then pressed the talk button. ‘This is Alpha One. Copy instruction, returning to base. Out.’ She tossed the radio back to Walker in disgust.

  ‘Shitty call,’ Walker said.

  ‘Yup,’ was all she replied. Then she made her weapon safe, clipped it back in its holster and started walking towards the helicopter.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Rome

  A person who’d just stumbled over the scene of a murder could do one of two things. The first option was to do what most normal people would do: call the cops. In Ben’s case, it was too late for that. And he wasn’t inclined to stick around to find out what Capitano Roberto Lario would make of this further ‘irregularity’. The questioning wouldn’t be so laid back this time, and he was in no mood to spend the rest of the night back in Carabinieri HQ trying to convince a bunch of very angry police that he hadn’t shot Tassoni and his guys, hadn’t dumped his .357 Magnum in some clever hiding place nearby. It was all just a bit too complicated. Ben didn’t need those kinds of complications until he’d figured out the answers for himself.

  So option one was out. The second option, if you couldn’t behave like a law-abiding citizen, was to act the way the killer would act and put as much distance between yourself and the scene of the crime as possible, as quickly as possible. Ben had walked fast for a long time through the suburbs, keeping his mind blank, not letting his spinning thoughts slow him down. Night had fallen as he kept moving. Eventually, as he left the suburban sprawl behind him and the streets got busier, he’d flagged down a second cab. Another taxi, another hotel.

  By ten, he’d been sitting downstairs in the empty bar and flouting the no-smoking regulations over a triple whisky on the rocks as he tried to understand what had just happened.

  He laid out what he knew. Fact: Tassoni’s big ape of a bodyguard was one of the gallery robbers. Fact: Tassoni knew something about it too. Now Tassoni was dead, along with his man and a second heavy who might or might not have been involved as well. All of which meant that someone was cutting their ties. Which in turn meant that the politician hadn’t been top of the food chain. He’d been in league with someone else, someone higher and
more dangerous.

  And that offered the solution to a question that had been burning a hole in Ben’s mind for the last twenty-five or so hours. The robbery had clearly been some kind of co-ordinated joint operation. Italians and Russians. The two nationalities seemed to have been keeping themselves to themselves. Maybe partly for reasons of communication, but maybe also because each side knew each other and had worked together before. A bringing together of two gangs, one Italian, one Russian, required someone in each country to organise their side of things: recruitment, transportation, logistics.

  Maybe Tassoni had been the guy behind the scenes on the Italian side. Whoever had killed Tassoni might then have been his Russian counterpart. Why would they do that? Fighting over the spoils, maybe, such as they were. Or perhaps Tassoni was being punished as a result of the plan going sour. The reasons why didn’t matter so much. What mattered was who was top of the food chain.

  Ben lit another cigarette and thought about the man he’d killed. Anatoly Shikov. Clearly someone used to violence. Clearly someone used to getting his own way. A dangerous guy to have around. Unruly, undisciplined. Possible psychotic tendencies. Not an effective leader, not someone who could remain in command of an organised criminal gang. Yet he’d been put in charge.

  By whom? An influential contact? Had Anatoly had a friend in a high place? A relative? Was he someone’s brother?

  Someone’s son?

  By the time he’d finished his second triple shot of whisky, Ben’s instincts were telling him that the top man, beyond any doubt, was a Russian. And no mere art robber, not sending their boys in that heavy.

  Russian mafia. That went a long way towards explaining these men’s ruthlessness, the violence, the lack of hesitation when it came to pulling the trigger.

  And Ben had a name to go on. Shikov.

  He thought again about Donatella, and Gianni. Remembered the ghastly, haunted look on Fabio Strada’s face in the hospital.

  Then he thought about justice. Who was going to deliver it to the Stradas, and to the rest of the victims, the survivors, their families? Roberto Lario? Ben didn’t think so.

  It was pushing midnight by the time the hotel bar closed and he headed back up to his small room on the first floor. The door clicked shut behind him. He left the light off. By the intermittent dull glow of the blinking neon hotel sign on the wall outside, he walked over to the armchair where he’d dumped his leather jacket and picked it up. It was heavy from the weight of the .45 Ruger he’d taken from Tassoni’s place. He slipped the hotel room card key into the other pocket, then slouched back on the bed, closed his mind to the night traffic rumble wafting up through the open window, and shut his eyes.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Georgia

  Far away over the hills, a wolf’s howl pierced the deepness of the night: a plaintive, mournful sound, like a lament for lost souls. Grigori Shikov turned away from the railing of his balcony and walked slowly back into the shadows and silence of the house to refill his glass with chilled vodka.

  He had spoken to nobody since hearing of the murder of his old friend.

  First Sonja. Then Anatoly. Now Urbano. So much death. Death all around him.

  And there would be more. Always more.

  In his study, Shikov opened one of the display cabinets. He laid his hands on the smooth, cool veneer of the old cherry-wood box inside, carefully lifted it out and laid it on his desk. He opened the lid and gazed for a few moments at the pair of antique percussion duelling pistols nestling inside the red velvet lining. The finest Italian craftsmanship, from a more civilised era when gentlemen could settle their disputes honourably, in blood. He ran his fingers lovingly down the guns’ slender barrels. His mind drifted back twenty-six years.

  It had been 1985, around the time he’d first seriously contemplated a career in politics, that the then twenty-nine-year-old Urbano Tassoni had presented his friend with the magnificent gift. For a serious amateur historian like Shikov, the cased pair of duelling pistols would have made a fine addition to his collection whatever their background, but Tassoni had had particular reason for picking those specific guns. Aware of his friend’s passion for all things even indirectly connected with the bygone epoch of Imperial Russia, he’d known that the weapons’ unique history would hold a special appeal.

  The pistols had once belonged to an Italian aristocrat by the name of Count Rodingo De Crescenzo, a man of small historic consequence save for the little-known fact that, exactly sixty years earlier, he was rumoured to have used these very same weapons to fight one of the last illegal duels in European history. What made the duel especially interesting for Shikov was that the count’s rival had been an exiled Russian prince, who had subsequently died from his wound. By its very nature, the duel had been something the count’s agents had been keen to cover up. No formal charges had ever been brought, nothing had ever been proved. Only a handful of historians, including the antiquarian who had sold Tassoni the pistols, had ever known of the scandalous episode.

  On receiving the gift, Shikov had been mightily touched by his friend’s gesture. But when Tassoni had told him the name of the Russian prince who’d been involved in the duel, he’d been completely staggered, blown away to the point of stupefaction. It was too incredible to be a coincidence. For the first and only time in his life, Shikov had been convinced that the hand of Fate was at work.

  Prince Leonid Alexandrovich Borowsky. Born into one of the richest and most powerful noble families in Imperial Russia, second only to the ruling Romanov dynasty and Tsar Nicholas II himself. Exiled to Europe after the 1917 revolution and the fall of the Romanov empire and – according to the whispered legend that decades of short-sighted dismissal by egghead historians could not snuff out – the owner of a priceless relic, a unique and exquisite treasure worth killing, even dying for.

  In the exclusive circles of wealthy, dedicated, hardcore antiquities collectors to which Shikov belonged, the relic was known as the Dark Medusa. All his adult life, ever since he’d made his first real money and taken his first tentative steps into amassing artefacts of historic value, Grigori Shikov had lusted after it, imagining himself owning it, willing to offer any price to acquire it.

  And trying to picture what it looked like. In all the long years since the disappearance of the magnificent relic, nobody had come forward claiming to have actually seen the Dark Medusa. No photographs or drawings of it were known to have survived, and only the sketchiest of descriptions existed in the historic archives. From his arrival in Europe after the Russian revolution to his death in 1925, there were no recorded witness accounts of Prince Leo showing his treasure to anyone; and after his untimely demise at the hands of the Italian count, the Dark Medusa had never again resurfaced.

  None of which had been able, now that fortune had gifted him with this incredible discovery, to deter Grigori Shikov from his renewed quest to find it. He’d been forty-eight years old then, at the height of his power and ready and willing to use every bit of it to cut as wide and bloody a swathe as necessary to get what he wanted.

  His experience had taught him that men would do anything to protect a secret of this value. That was why, when he’d traced the antiquarian who’d sold the pistols to Tassoni, intending to press any information out of him that might shed light on what had happened to Leo Borowsky’s priceless possession, the brutality of the interrogation had made even some of his hardest thugs blanch. By the time Shikov had been persuaded that the antiquarian really didn’t know anything useful, the man was too badly damaged ever to walk or talk or eat again. Shikov had personally ended his suffering by cutting his throat with a razor.

  The search had continued fruitlessly. It had often occurred to Shikov, back in those days, that Rodingo De Crescenzo might have known where the relic was – might even have taken it for himself after killing its owner. If so, where had it gone? The leads were few and far between. Investigations revealed that the count had succumbed to tuberculosis in 1934. His son Federi
co had been killed in Sudan during World War II. The only surviving descendant was Rodingo’s grandson, Pietro De Crescenzo, not yet thirty but already a leading patron of the arts and very much in the public eye.

  The young count’s celebrity wouldn’t have deterred Shikov in the slightest from using brute force to gain information from him. But in October 1986, just when he’d been about to issue the order that would have seen Pietro De Crescenzo strapped to a chair with a gun to his head, Shikov’s search had suddenly veered in a whole new direction. De Crescenzo would never know how lucky he’d been.

  It had been while tearing through an obscure, out-of-print book on the European aristocracy of the twentieth century that Shikov had found out about Rodingo De Crescenzo’s short-lived first marriage to the woman who had later gone on to become one of Italy’s most celebrated female artists, Gabriella Giordani. From what he could glean from the brief text, the relationship had ended abruptly in 1925. The same year as the duel.

  The discovery had sent Shikov’s imagination into overdrive. The possible motives for two men fighting a duel to the death over a woman were easy enough to speculate about. The question was, what secrets might the former countess have learned from Leo Borowsky before her husband had ended his life?

  Shikov had delved deeper. None of the biographies of the artist made any reference to that part of her past. The fact that Gabriella had kept so silent for so many years intrigued him all the more.

  His investigators had had little trouble tracking her down. She’d been pushing eighty by then, leading a solitary and reclusive existence in a rambling old country villa outside Cesena in the north of Italy. So alone. So vulnerable. So easy.

  Shikov could still remember that starlit night when he and his men had paid their visit to her. He recalled the delirious sense of elation he’d felt as they’d smashed their way into the isolated villa, convinced that he’d found his prize at last. He hadn’t.