‘Best we can. How much do you know?’ Charles Hatfield suspects it’s at least as much as he does.
‘Only the briefest details. Bomb on the Eurostar. Explosion at the British end. Something like fifty dead.’
‘Might be more. We won’t know until the emergency services report back. The device went off south of Ashford, five minutes from the station. A pensioner saw a man doing something with wires inside a rucksack and she alerted train staff. When the guard questioned the suspect, he made a run for the toilet, locked himself inside and exploded the bloody thing.’
A live video feed from a helicopter is already up on the monitor in front of the ambassador. It shows the splayed track, smoke and flames rising from the concertinaed carriages, corpses on the rails and the blinking lights of fire engines and ambulances. ‘I’m finishing up a meeting here and then I’ll come into Whitehall. I assume you’ll be putting together a Cabinet Office briefing?’
‘Research team is already working on it. When can you join us?’
‘Within the hour.’
‘Good.’ Hatfield checks fresh data on his computer as he speaks. ‘I know this is of no comfort to those victims or their blessed families, but thank God the bomb didn’t go off in the tunnel. A blast mid-channel would have been an even bigger tragedy.’
‘That must have been the intention.’ Gwyn watches the helicopter on his screen come to a stationary hover directly over the cratered track. ‘Anyone claimed responsibility yet?’
‘Not yet. But it’ll be al-Qaeda.’
Gwyn puts the phone down and returns to Dalton. He can tell his colleague is worried. ‘What is it, George?’
‘I’ve been thinking about the interview with the Americans. I fear I may have messed things up.’
‘Why?’
‘In retrospect, I don’t think that lieutenant knew I was at the diner near Dupont, and now I’ve confirmed I was.’
‘The fact she raised it with you meant she had good reason to believe you were there. The big mistake was taking the Lincoln.’
‘I had no choice. I was in the Lincoln when I got the message that Marchetti’s men were heading out to Kensington. Had I swapped cars, I would never have got there in time.’
‘I need to get directly involved in this Eurostar blast, so you must take care of the Americans. Have someone find out where they’re staying. I want their room turned over and electronic or human surveillance on them all the time, until I say otherwise. Let’s see if we can stop this investigation before it stops us.’
72
News of the train bombing plays on the radio in the Rolls.
Once the bulletin finishes, Mitzi calls Sir Owain’s office and leaves a message with Melissa. The ambassador had been right, there was good reason for her to apologize.
The journey to their new hotel is a long and muted one. Despite the privacy glass, neither she nor Bronty feel comfortable discussing their interview.
They book into The Dean, a new hotel in Soho, close to famous media haunts like the Groucho Club and Ivy and debrief over room-service club sandwiches, fries and two large pots of coffee.
‘So what did you make of our friend the British Consul?’ He slaps the bottom of a ketchup bottle to release a blat of sauce.
‘Dalton’s up to his neck in the whole thing.’ She opens her sandwich like a book. ‘Why is this bacon so much better than the stuff I have back home?’
‘The Brits do good bacon. How d’you know he’s implicated?’
‘First slip he made was to admit the Lincoln had been outside Amir Goldman’s store. No surveillance footage put him there. Then he got nervous and referred to the brown SUV as “the target car”.’
‘Maybe he’s an ex-soldier, or policeman.’
‘He’s not. I checked before we flew out. But he might be a former spook, MI5 or 6.’
‘It’d explain the manner in which he followed the Escalade.’
‘Yeah. But not why he followed it. Or what he was doing when the SUV stopped in the woods and Sacconni got whacked.’
‘You think Dalton killed him?’
‘No. I think Sacconni was killed by his partner-in-crime, Bradley Deagan. But I think Dalton may have killed Deagan at the Dupont diner.’ She reaches into her purse and produces a small plastic bottle of water. ‘Which is why this little baby might help us.’
‘Your drink from Gwyn’s office?’
She smiles, ‘No, not mine. Dalton’s. And I’m willing to bet the DNA on this matches the profile we lifted from blood in the diner’s bathroom — blood mingled with Deagan’s.’
‘Who exactly is Deagan?’
‘A fraudster who tried to pull a con on an auction house with a painting called The Ghent Altarpiece.’
His eyes widen. ‘Also known as The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. One of the greatest and most stolen pieces of art ever created.’ He points to her laptop. ‘Mind if I use that for a second?’
‘Be my guest.’
He opens a search engine and types in ‘Ghent Altarpiece’. ‘Here, look at this.’
He paraphrases text below the paragraph. ‘It was commissioned in the fifteenth century for an altar in a private chapel in Belgium. The twenty-four panels form one overall picture when opened up and then a completely different one when closed.’
‘I only see twelve.’
‘Twelve front, twelve back.’
Now she sees it. ‘Stupid me.’
‘It’s been the object of thirteen crimes over six centuries, including six separate thefts and a ransom demand.’
She pours fresh coffee for them both. ‘Come on then, more detaiclass="underline" tell me the juicy stuff.’
‘In the early nineteenth century some panels were pawned by the Ghent Diocese and ended up in England. They were bought by the King of Prussia and exhibited in Berlin. After the First World War, they were confiscated from the Germans as part of reparations. When the Second World War broke out the Belgians sent the paintings to the Vatican for safekeeping. At least that was the plan. Hitler’s troops intercepted them, brought them to Bavaria and locked them in a castle. When Allied attacks intensified, he moved them into salt mines. Then when we beat the Nazis, our troops returned them to the Belgians.’
‘And the ransom?’
He takes a second. ‘Let me get this right. Back in the thirties, two panels, a front and back, were stolen from St Bavo Cathedral in Ghent. Often it’s reported as one, but actually there were two. One called ‘The Just Judges’ and the other John the Baptist. A lot of ransom letters were sent. They demanded more than a million Belgian Francs and warned that unless it was paid the paintings would be destroyed.’
‘What happened?’
‘The bishop never paid the money. There were some negotiations and the John the Baptist painting was recovered, but ‘The Just Judges’ was never found. Another painter was hired to fill in the blank on the altarpiece, but by all accounts there are errors in the scene.’
‘Okay, enough history,’ says Mitzi. ‘My head’s exploding and to be honest the last thing I want is a missing painting to add to a homicide that already has religious relics and secret codes.’
‘Have the cryptologists got anywhere with that?’
‘I have to call Vicks and check. It would be great if this Code X stick gave us all the answers.’
‘Did you say “Code X”, as in the letter X?’
‘Yeah. Why do you ask?’
‘Have you got the stick?’
‘Sure.’ She digs it out of her purse and passes it to him.
Bronty reads ‘C-O-D-E-X’ and smiles.
‘What?’
‘It’s “Codex” not “Code X”. One word, Latin by origin, as in ancient bibles and manuscripts. So your secret code is no new thing. It’s hiding something that’s probably been hidden for centuries. Something people are probably prepared to kill to keep hidden.’