“It’s real, by the way,” said Franco Tedeschi.
“The passport? Of course it’s real.”
Tedeschi gazed out his window. “I was referring to your Prada handbag, Rikke Jorgensen.”
***
The villa stood on the highest point of the cape, shielded from view by towering hedgerows and protected by security measures worthy of the Palais de l’Élysée. There were twelve bedrooms, sixteen bathrooms, eight assorted drawing rooms and parlors, two professional kitchens, a library and adjoining office suite, a wine cellar, a cinema, a discotheque, a game room, a hotel-sized spa and fitness center, a Turkish bath and sauna, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a red clay tennis court, a caretaker’s villa, a ten-car garage, and a man-madelake patrolled by a flotilla of snow-white mute swans. Upon its many walls hung a portion of the owner’s collection of fine art. Some of his best pictures, however, adorned his mansion in Highgate, which had been seized, along with its contents, by the British government. He had more than a hundred paintings stashed in the Geneva Freeport and a dozen more hidden aboardAnastasia, his eighty-five-meter superyacht. At present the vessel was moored in Golfe-Juan, which he could see from the window of his private study on the second floor.
It was never the life Alexander Prokhorov could have imagined for himself when he was a boy in the Soviet Union, but he had come to believe it was the life he deserved. He had worked harder and been more resourceful, he assured himself, had seen opportunity where others saw only collapse and ruin. And he had become rich as a tsar in the process, a billionaire many times over. Had he cut corners and broken laws? Yes, of course. He had also resorted to violence on occasion. But so had many other men like him, men who had dared to stake their claim in the Wild East. He had nothing but contempt for those who were too stupid or lazy to make their mark in the brave new world of Russia’s gangster capitalism—or in the supposedly rules-based economies in the West, for that matter. There were winners and losers in life, and Alexander Prokhorov was a winner. The needs of the homeless and the hungry, the disabled and the mentally ill, were of no concern to him. His own bottomless needs were all that mattered.
What Alexander Prokhorov craved most was respect. He wanted to be known not as a man who had made his fortune manufacturing industrial pipe but as a modern-day Medici. It was the reason he had invested more than a billion dollars in paintings—because nothing conferred a patina of elegance and sophistication faster than fine art, even upon those who possessed neither. Once word leaked that hewas the owner of a newly discovered portrait by the greatest artist who ever lived, the rich and the famous would be beating down his door to have a look at it. All his many sins would soon be forgotten, absolved by thesfumatobrushwork of a long-dead painter from the tiny Tuscan hamlet of Vinci.
But elegance and sophistication would not come cheap. For Alexander Prokhorov the price was $500 million. It was far more than he had wanted to spend for the painting, but the price had soared during the final days of the frenzied secret auction. Prokhorov’s man at Société Générale was awaiting his order to initiate the wire transfer. With the press of a button, the money would flow to SBL PrivatBank, and the Leonardo would be his. Pending the results of one final examination, of course. The viewing would take place downstairs in the Gatsbyesque library. Stéphane Tremblay was waiting there now, magnifying glass and ultraviolet torch at the ready.
Prokhorov, for his part, was enjoying a few moments alone upstairs in his private study. He looked down at the single sheet of stationery—from Smythson of Bond Street—lying on the desk. On it, he had written out the number, with all its many zeros. It was, by any reckoning, an extraordinary amount of money. Still, it represented only a fraction of his immense personal wealth. Yes, he had lost the house in Highgate, and there were two hundred million or so at Barclays and HSBC that he would never see again. But when all was said and done, he had emerged from his scrape with the British in remarkably good shape. By his own calculation he was closing in on a net worth of $30 billion. For a man like Alexander Prokhorov, $500 million was pocket change.
The phone on his desk purred softly. It was the security guard at the front gate, informing him that his guests had arrived. He went to the window and glimpsed a pair of matching S-Class Mercedessedans making their way up the long drive. They rolled to a stop in the circular forecourt and six men emerged, one of whom was in possession of the painting that soon would be Prokhorov’s.
Only four of the men headed toward the entrance of the villa. The remaining two—security guards, presumably—lowered themselves into the back seat of the first car and closed the doors. Alexander Prokhorov cast a final glance at the number written on the piece of stationery lying on his desk, then headed downstairs to meet his destiny. It was, he assured himself, exactly what he deserved.
39
Antibes–Lugano
On the western side of Cap d’Antibes was a marina with a boat dealership and a dive shop and a small café. Gabriel and his three Police Nationale chaperones sat in the unmarked Renault in the car park. Gabriel’s notebook computer rested atop the museum case, connected to the Internet via his mobile hot spot. With the help of the hacking malware Proteus, he was eavesdropping on an art transaction taking place in a palatial villa located approximately one hundred and fifty meters to the east. For the past fifteen minutes, four men had been engaged in a spirited discussion—a Dutch art dealer, a French art consultant, the CFO of Camorra Inc., and a Kremlin-connected Russian oligarch. There was nothing to indicate that Ingrid was in the room. Given her recent exploits in Moscow, it was probably for the best.
“Where do you suppose she is?” asked the officer sitting at his side.
“It is my profound hope that she’s outside in the car with Rocco and Enzo. It is also my profound hope that Alexander Prokhorov and his art adviser don’t realize that they’re about to spend five hundred million dollars for an original Gabriel Allon. Otherwise things will get rather ugly.”
“The heist of the century,” remarked the officer, whose name was Jean-Luc.
“Not yet, it isn’t.”
“It sounds to me as though you’ve got him.”
“In that case, why hasn’t he signed the sales agreement?”
“Give him a few minutes, Monsieur Allon. Five hundred million is a great deal of money.”
“Once upon a time it was. But not anymore.”
Just then the conversation in the villa fell silent. For several minutes not one of the four men present spoke a single word.
“It’s over,” said Gabriel darkly.
“Almost,” agreed the French policeman.
“I’m done for.”
“You’re just fine. And so is your friend Ingrid.”
Two more minutes went by. Not a sound.
“Come on, Proko,” pleaded Gabriel. “What are you waiting for?”
***
