‘Fine,’ Archie sighed. ‘But you can deal with Hewson.’ Archie stepped back and pointed down the slope towards a lonely figure who appeared to be patiently waiting for them to return. ‘He’s doing my bloody head in.’

‘Whatever he’s got for me, it’s waited this long -’ Tom sat back with a shrug - ‘it can wait a day longer.’

FIVE

Largo di Torre Argentina, Rome 17th March - 6.06 p.m.

Allegra could just about make out one of the men’s low voices. A pathologist, she guessed.

‘Cause of death? Well, I’ll only know when I open him up. But at a guess, oedema of the brain. Upside down, the heart continues to pump blood through the arteries, but because the veins rely on gravity, his brain would have become swollen with blood. Fluid would then have leaked out of his capillaries, first causing a headache, then gradual loss of consciousness and finally death, probably from asphyxiation as the brain signals driving respiration failed. Terrible way to go.’

‘How long has he been here?’ the man next to him asked. From his flinty, aggressive tone, Allegra knew immediately that this had to be Gallo.

‘All day. Possibly longer. It was a cold night and that would have slowed decomposition.’

‘And no one saw him until now?’ Gallo snapped, his voice both angry and disbelieving. She could just about detect the vestiges of a Southern accent, presumably carefully discarded over the years. After all, provincial roots were not exactly something you advertised if you wanted to get ahead. Not in Rome.

‘No one works here at the weekend,’ Salvatore explained in an apologetic tone. ‘And you couldn’t see him from the street.’

‘Terrible way to go,’ the pathologist repeated, shaking his head. ‘It would have taken hours for him to die. And right until the end he would have been able to hear people walking around the site and the cars coming and going overhead, and not been able to move or call for help.’

‘You think I give a shit about how this bastard died?’ Gallo snorted dismissively. ‘Don’t forget who he was or who he worked for. All I want to know is who killed him, why they did it here and why like this. The last thing I need is some sort of vigilante stalking the streets of Rome re-enacting Satanic rituals.’

‘Actually, Colonel, it’s Christian, not Satanic,’ Allegra interrupted with a cough.

‘What?’ Gallo rounded on her, looking her up and down with a disdainful expression. He was six feet tall and powerfully built, with a strong, tanned face covered in carefully trimmed stubble. About forty-five or so, she guessed, he was wearing the full dress uniform of a colonel in the Guarda di Finanza and had chin-length steel-grey hair that parted down the centre of his head and fell either side of his face, forcing him to sweep it back out of his eyes every so often. He also had on a pair of frameless glasses with clear plastic arms. From the way he adjusted them on his nose, she sensed that these had only recently been prescribed and that he still resented wearing them, despite having done what he could to make them as unobtrusive as possible.

‘The inverted crucifixion,’ she explained, ignoring the horrified look on Salvatore’s face. ‘It’s taken from the Acts of Peter.’

‘The Acts of Peter?’ Gallo snorted. ‘There’s no such book in the Bible.’

‘That’s because it’s in the Apocrypha, the texts excluded from the Bible by the church,’ she replied, holding her temper in check. ‘According to the text, when the Roman authorities sentenced Peter to death, he asked to be crucified head down, so as not to imitate Christ’s passing.’

Gallo said nothing, his eyes narrowing slightly as he brushed his hair back.

‘Thank you for the Sunday school lesson, Miss…’

‘Lieutenant. Damico.’

‘The antiquities expert you asked for, Colonel,’ Salvatore added quickly.

‘You work at the university?’ It sounded like a challenge rather than a question.

‘I used to be a lecturer in art and antiquities at La Sapienza, yes.’

‘Used to be!’ he spluttered, glaring at Salvatore.

‘The university passed me on to the Villa Giulia. One of the experts there recommended her,’ Salvatore insisted.

‘Now I’m in the TPA,’ she added quickly, spelling out the acronym for the Nucleo Tutela Patrimonio Artistico, the special corps within the Carabinieri tasked with protecting and recovering stolen art. He looked her up and down again, then shrugged.

‘Well, you’ll have to do, I suppose,’ he said, to Salvatore’s visible relief. ‘I take it you know who I am?’

She nodded, although part of her was itching to say no, just to see the look on his face. Ignoring the other two men standing there, which she assumed meant that he did not consider them important enough to warrant an introduction, Gallo jabbed his finger at the man next to him.

‘This is Dottore Giovanni la Fabro from the coroner’s office, and this is, or was, Adriano Ricci, an enforcer for the De Luca family.’

Allegra nodded. The GICO’s involvement was suddenly a lot clearer. The De Luca family were believed to run the Bande della Magliana, one of Rome’s most notorious criminal organisations. Gallo clearly thought this was some sort of professional hit.

He stepped back and introduced the corpse with a sweep of his hand. Even dead, she could tell that Ricci had been overweight, loose skin sagging towards the ground like melted wax on the neck of a bottle. He was bare-chested with a large Lazio football club tattoo on his left shoulder, and was still wearing a striped pair of suit trousers that had fallen halfway down his calves. His wrists and ankles were bleeding where the chicken wire used to bind him to the cross had bitten into his flesh.

‘Why am I here?’ she asked with a shudder, glancing back to Gallo.

‘This -’ He led her forward to the body and snapped his flashlight on to illuminate its face.

For a few moments she couldn’t make out what he was pointing to, her attention grabbed by Ricci’s staring, bloodshot eyes and the way that, from the shoulders up, his skin had turned a waxy purple, like marble. But then, trapped in the light of Gallo’s torch, she saw it. A black shape, a disc of some sort, lurking in the roof of Ricci’s mouth.

‘What is it?’ she breathed.

‘That’s what you’re meant to be telling me,’ Gallo shot back.

‘Can I see it, then?’

Gallo snapped his fingers and la Fabro handed him a pair of tweezers. To Allegra’s horrified fascination, he levered the object free as if he was prising a jewel from an ancient Indian statue and then carefully deposited it inside an evidence bag, holding it out between his fingertips as if it contained something mildly repellent.

‘Knock yourself out,’ he intoned.

‘I thought it might be some sort of antique coin,’ Salvatore suggested eagerly over her shoulder as she turned it over in the light. ‘It seems to have markings etched into it.’

‘The ancient Romans used to put a bronze coin in the mouths of their dead to pay Charon to ferry their souls across the Styx to the Underworld,’ she nodded slowly. ‘But I don’t think that’s what this is.’

‘Why not?’

‘Feel the weight, it’s lead. That’s too soft to be used in everyday coinage.’

‘Then what about the engraving?’ Gallo asked impatiently.

She traced the symbol that had been inlaid into the coin with her finger. It showed two snakes intertwined around a clenched fist, like the seal from some mediaeval coat of arms.

‘I don’t know,’ she said with an apologetic shrug. ‘But whatever this is, it’s not an antique nor, I would say, particularly valuable.’

‘Well, that was useful.’ Glaring angrily at Salvatore, Gallo turned his back on Allegra as if she had suddenly vanished.

‘I’m sorry,’ Salvatore stuttered. ‘I thought that…’

‘We’ve wasted enough time. Let’s just get him bagged up and out of here so the forensic boys can move in,’ Gallo ordered as he turned to leave. ‘Then I want a priest or a cardinal or somebody else in sandals down here to tell me more about…’

‘It can’t be a coincidence though, can it, Colonel?’ Allegra called after him.

Gallo spun round angrily.

‘I thought you’d gone?’

‘It can’t be a coincidence that they killed him here?’ she insisted.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘In Roman times, this entire area was part of the Campus Martius, a huge complex of buildings that included the Baths of Agrippa to the north, the Circus Flaminius to the south and the Theatre of Pompey to the west,’ she explained, pointing towards each point of the compass in turn. ‘The Senate even met here while the Curia was being rebuilt after a fire in 54 BC -’ she pointed at the floor - ‘in a space in the portico attached to the Theatre of Pompey.’

‘Here?’ Gallo looked around him sceptically, clearly struggling to reconcile the fractured ruins at his feet with the imagined grandeur of a Roman theatre.

‘Of course, the one drawback of this spot was that the Campus Martius stood outside the sacred pomerium, the city’s official boundaries, meaning that, although it was quieter than the Forum, it was not subject to the same restrictions against concealed weapons.’

‘What’s your point?’ Gallo frowned wearily, and she realised that she was going to have to spell it out for him.

‘I mean that Ricci isn’t the first person to be killed here,’ she explained, a tremor of excitement in her voice. ‘I mean that in 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated on almost this exact same spot.’

SIX

The Getty Villa, Malibu, California 17th March - 10.52 a.m.

Verity Bruce had been looking forward to this day for a while. For nearly three years, to be precise. That’s how long it had been since she had first been shown the dog-eared Polaroid in a smoky Viennese café, first been winded by the adrenaline punch of excitement at what was on offer and chilled by the fear of possibly losing out.

She’d shaken on the deal there and then, knowing that the director would back her judgement. The trustees had taken a little more convincing, of course, but then they didn’t know the period like she did. Besides, once they’d understood the magnitude of the find, they’d bitten and bitten hard, sharing her mounting frustration at the years lost to the scientists as test upon test had heaped delay upon deferral until she was sure they must have finished and started all over again. And then, of course, the lumbering and self-perpetuating wheels of international bureaucracy had begun to turn, a merry-go-round of sworn affidavits, authentication letters, legal contracts, bank statements, money transfer forms, export and import licences and Customs declarations that had added months to the process. Still, what was done was done. Today, finally, the waiting ended.

She positioned herself in front of the fulllength mirror she’d had bolted to the back of her office door. Had the intervening years between that first breathless, absinthe-fuelled encounter and today’s unveiling aged her? A little, perhaps, around her fern-green eyes and in the tiny fissures that had begun to fleck her top lip like faint animal tracks across the snow. Ever since she’d turned forty-five, the years seemed to weigh a little heavier on her face, as if they were invisibly swinging from grappling hooks sunk into her skin. She could have had surgery, of course - God knows everyone else her age in LA seemed to have had work done - but she hated anything fake or forced like that. Highlights in her long, coiled copper hair were one thing, but needles and knives …Sometimes, nature had to be allowed to run its course.

Besides, she reminded herself as she put the finishing touches to her makeup, it wasn’t as if she’d lost her looks. How else to explain the fact that that gorgeous thirty-two-year-old speech writer she’d met at a White House fund-raiser the other month was pestering her to travel up to his place in Martha’s Vineyard next fall? And she still had great legs, too. Always had. Hopefully always would.

‘They’re ready for you.’

One of the Getty PR girls had edged tentatively into the room. Verity couldn’t remember her name, but then all these girls looked the same to her - blonde, smiley, skinny, jutting tits that would hold firm in a 6.1 - as if the city was ground zero in some freakish cloning experiment. Even so, the girl’s legs still weren’t as good as hers.

‘Let’s do it,’ she said, grabbing her leather jacket off the chair and slipping it over a black couture Chanel dress that she’d bought in Paris last year. It was an unlikely combination, but one deliberately chosen to further fuel the quirky image that she’d so carefully cultivated over the years. It was simple really. If you wanted to get ahead in the hushed and dusty corridors of curatorial academia without waiting to be as old as the exhibits themselves, it paid to get noticed. She certainly wasn’t about to tone things down now, despite the occasion, although she had at least upgraded from flats to a vertiginous pair of scarlet Manolos that matched her lipstick. After all, this was a ten-million-dollar acquisition and the Los Angeles Times would be taking pictures.

The small group of donors, experts and journalists that she and the director had hand-picked for this private viewing to guarantee maximum pre-launch coverage was already gathered expectantly in the auditorium. The figure had been draped, rather melodramatically she thought, in a black cloth and then placed in the middle of the floor so that people had to circle, brows furrowed in speculation, around it. Snatching up a glass of Laurent-Perrier Rosé from a tray at the door, Verity swept inside and began to work the room, shaking the hands of some, kissing the cheeks of others, swapping an amusing anecdote here and clutching at a shared memory there. But she was barely aware of what she was saying or what was being said to her, her excitement slowly building as the minutes counted down until she could hear only the pregnant thud of her heart.

‘Ladies and gentlemen…’ The director had stepped into the middle of the room. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention please,’ he called, ushering the audience closer. The lights dimmed. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, today marks the culmination of a remarkable journey,’ he began, reading from a small card and then pausing for effect. ‘It is a journey that began over 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece. And it is a journey that ends, here, in Malibu. Because today, I am delighted to unveil the Getty Villa’s latest acquisition and, in my opinion, one of the most important works of art to enter the United States since the Second World War.’

With a flourish, the cloth slipped to the floor. Under a lone spotlight stood a seven foot tall marble sculpture of a young boy, his left foot forward, arms at his sides, head and eyes looking straight ahead. There was a ripple of appreciative, even shocked recognition. Verity stepped forward.

‘This uniquely preserved example of a Greek kouros has been dated to around 540 BC,’ Verity began, standing on the other side of the statue to the director and speaking without notes. ‘As many of you will undoubtedly know, although inspired by the god Apollo, a kouros was not intended to represent any one individual youth but the idea of youth itself, and was used in Ancient Greece both as a dedication to the gods in sanctuaries and as a funerary monument. Our tests show that this example has been hewn from dolomite marble from the ancient Cape Vathy quarry on the island of Thassos.’

Talking in her usual measured and authoritative style, she continued her description of the statue, enjoying herself more and more as she got into her stride: its provenance from the private collection of a Swiss physician whose grandfather had bought it in Athens in the late 1800s; the exhaustive scientific tests that had revealed a thin film of calcite coating its surface resulting from hundreds, if not thousands of years of natural lichen growth; the stylistic features linking it to the Anavysos Youth in the National Museum in Athens. In short, a masterpiece that was yet further evidence of the Getty’s determination to build the pre-eminent American collection of classical antiquities.

Her speech drew to a close. Acknowledging the applause with a nod, she retreated to allow people forward for a closer look, anxiously watching over the figure like a parent supervising a child in a busy playground.

At first all went well, a few people nodding appreciatively at the sculpture’s elegant lines, others seeking her out to offer muted words of congratulations. But then, without warning, she sensed the mood darkening, a few of the guests eyeing the statue with a strange look and whispering excitedly to each other.

Thierry Normand from the Ecole Française d’Athène was the first to break ranks.

‘Doesn’t the use of Thassian marble strike you as rather… anomalous?’

‘And what about the absence of paint?’ Eleanor Grant from the University of Chicago immediately added. ‘As far as I know, all other kouroi, with the possible exception of the Melos kouros, show traces of paint?’

‘Well, of course we considered…’ Verity began with a weak smile, forcing herself not to sound defensive even though she could hardly not feel insulted by what they were implying.

‘I’m sorry, Verity,’ Sir John Sykes, the highly respected Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford University interrupted with an apologetic cough. ‘It just isn’t right. The hair is pure early sixth-century BC, as you say, but the face and abdomen are clearly much later. And while you can find similarly muscular thighs in Corinth, I’ve only seen feet and a base like that in Boeotia. The science can only tell you so much. You have to rely on the aesthetics, on what you can see. To me, this is almost verging on the pastiche.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, Sir John, but we couldn’t disagree more…’ Verity began angrily, looking to the director for support but seeing that he appeared to have retreated to the periphery of the group.

‘Actually, Sir John, the word I’d use,’ Professor Vivienne Foyle of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University added, pausing to make sure everyone was listening, ‘is fresh.’

The loaded meaning of the word was clear. Foyle was suggesting that the statue was in fact a forgery, that it had been knocked up in some backstreet workshop and never been in the ground at all. Verity was reeling, but the mood in the room was now such that she knew she had no chance of sensibly arguing her case.

The interrogation continued. Why didn’t the plinth have a lead attachment like other kouroi? Couldn’t the degradation of the stone have been caused deliberately by oxalic acid? How was it that such an exceptional piece had only surfaced now? What due diligence had been carried out on it’s provenance?

She barely heard them, her ears filled with the dull pulse of her mounting rage. Her face white and cold as marble, she nodded and smiled and shrugged at what seemed opportune moments, not trusting herself to open her mouth without swearing. A further ten minutes of this torture had to be endured before the director, perhaps sensing that she might be about to erupt, finally saw fit to bring an end to her ordeal.

‘Fresh? I’ll give that senile old bitch fresh,’ she muttered angrily as she stalked back to her office. ‘Sonya?’

‘I’m Cynthia,’ the PR girl chirped, skipping to keep up with her.

‘Whatever. Get me Faulks on the phone.’

‘Who?’

‘Earl Faulks. F-A-U-L-K-S, pronounced like folks. I don’t care where he is. I don’t care what he’s doing. Just get him for me. In fact, I don’t want just to speak to him. I want to see him. Here. Tomorrow.’

SEVEN

Over Nebraska 17th March - 8.43 p.m.

Normally used to scoop whales into the casino’s deep-throated net, Kezman’s private jet was a potent introduction to the Vegas experience: snowwhite leather seats with a gilded letter ‘A’ embroidered into the head-rests, leopard-skin carpets, polished mahogany panelling running the length of the cabin like the interior of a pre-war steamer, a small glass bar lit with blue neon. At the front, over the cockpit door, hung a photo of Kezman, all teeth and tan, gazing down on them benevolently like the dictator of some oil-rich African state.

Tom, lost in thought, had immediately settled back into his seat, politely declining the offer of a drink from the attentive stewardess whose skirt seemed to have been hitched almost as high as her top was pulled low. Head turned to the window, gaze fixed on some distant point on the horizon, he barely noticed the plane take off, let alone Jennifer move to the seat opposite him.

‘You’re still wearing it then?’ she asked, head tilted to one side so that her curling mass of black hair covered the top of her right shoulder.

He glanced down at the 1934 stainless steel ‘Brancard’ Rolex Prince on his wrist. It had been a gift from the FBI for Tom’s help on the first case he’d worked on with Jennifer, although Tom suspected that the decision to offer it to him, and the choice of watch, had been all hers.

‘Why?’ He turned to face her with a smile. ‘Do you want it back?’

Five feet nine, slim with milky brown skin, she had a lustrous pair of hazel eyes and was wearing her usual office camouflage of black trouser suit and cream silk blouse. Her ‘Fuck You’ clothes, as she’d once described them, as opposed to the ‘Fuck Me’ outfits that some of the other female agents favoured, only to wonder why they got asked out all the time but never promoted. The truth was that the odds of a woman succeeding in the Bureau, let alone a black woman, were stacked so heavily against her, that she had to load the dice any way she could just to be given a fair spin of the wheel. Then again, from what he’d seen, Jennifer knew what it took to play the game, having risen from lowly field agent in the Bureau’s Atlanta Division to one of the most senior members of its Art Crime Team. That didn’t happen by accident.

‘Not unless you’re having second thoughts.’

‘Should I be?’

‘You just seem a bit… distracted,’ she ventured.

‘Not really.’ His gaze flicked back to the window. ‘I guess I was just thinking about today.’

‘About your grandfather?’

‘About some of the people there. About my family, or what’s left of it. About how little I know them and they know me.’

‘You’re a difficult person to get to know, Tom,’ she said gently.

‘Even for you?’ He turned back to her with a hopeful smile.

‘Maybe especially for me,’ she shot back, an edge to her voice that was at once resigned and accusing.

He understood what she meant, although she had got closer to him than most over the years. Not that things had started well between them when they had first met, necessity strong-arming their initial instinctive mutual suspicion into a grudging and fragile working relationship. And yet from this unpromising beginning a guarded trust, of sorts, had slowly evolved which had itself, in time, built towards a burgeoning friendship. A friendship which had then briefly flowered into something more, their growing attraction for each other finding its voice in one unplanned and instinctive night together.

Since then, the intervening years and a subsequent case had given them both the opportunity at different times to try and revive those feelings and build on that night. But for whatever reason, the other person had never quite been in the same place - Tom initially unwilling to open up, Jennifer subsequently worried about getting hurt. Even so, the memory had left its mark on both of them, like an invisible shard of metal caught beneath the skin that they could both feel whenever they rubbed up against someone else.

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