No sense lying. “I had no choice.”
Lyon shrugged. “We all have choices, but it matters not to me. I want your money, and you want a service. I assume you still want it?”
“More than ever.”
Lyon pointed a finger at him. “Then it will cost triple my original fee. The first hundred percent for your treachery. The second for the trouble you’ve put me to.”
He was in no position to argue. Besides, he was using club money anyway. “That can be arranged.”
“She gave you a book. What is it?”
“Is that part of the new arrangement? You are to know all of my business?”
“You should know, Lord Ashby, that I’ve found it hard to resist the urge of placing a bullet between your eyes. I detest a man with no character and you, sir, have none.”
Interesting attitude for a mass murderer, but he kept his opinion to himself.
“If not for your money-” Lyon paused. “Please, don’t try my patience any further.”
He accepted the advice and answered the man’s question. “It’s a project I’ve been working on. A lost treasure. The Americans confiscated a vital clue to keep me compliant. She returned it to me.”
“A treasure? I learned that you were once an avid collector. Stealing objects already stolen. Keeping them for yourself. Quite the clever one, you are. But the police put a stop to that.”
“Temporarily.”
Lyon laughed. “All right, Lord Ashby, you go after your treasure. Just transfer my money. By dawn. I’ll be checking,
“It will be there.”
He heard the guide draw the crowd together, telling them it was time to move on.
“I think I’ll finish the tour,” Lyon said. “Quite interesting, Jack the Ripper.”
“What about tomorrow? You know the Americans are watching.”
“That I do. It will be quite the show.”
MALONE DISSOLVED INTO THE TOUR AS THE CROWD INCLUDING Red, drew into the guide’s wake and they all ambled off into the darkness. He kept Red just inside his peripheral vision, deciding he was far more interesting than Ashby.
The tour continued another twenty minutes down coal-black streets, ending at an Underground station. Inside, Red used a travel card to pass through the turnstile. Malone hurried over to a token machine and quickly purchased four, making his way past the gate to the escalator just as his quarry stepped off at the bottom. He did not like the bright lights and the sparse crowd, but had no choice.
He stepped off the escalator onto the platform.
Red was standing twenty feet away, still holding his shopping bag.
An electronic billboard indicated the train was 75 seconds away. He studied a schematic of the London subway hanging on the wall and saw that this station serviced the District Line, which paralleled the Thames and ran east to west the city’s full length. This platform was for a westbound train, the route taking them to Tower Hill, beneath Westminster, through Victoria Station, and eventually beyond Kensington.
More people filtered down from above as a train arrived.
He kept his distance, positioning himself well behind, and followed his quarry into the car. He stood, hugging one of the stainless-steel poles, Red doing the same thirty feet away. Enough people were crammed into the car that no one face should draw much attention.
As the train chugged beneath the city, Malone studied his target, who seemed an older man, out for the evening, enjoying London.
But he spotted the eyes.
Amber.
He knew Peter Lyon possessed one anomaly. He loved disguise, but a genetic eye defect not only oddly colored his irises, but also made them overly susceptible to infection and prevented him from wearing contact lenses. Lyon preferred glasses to shield their distinctive amber tint, but had not worn any tonight.
He watched as Lyon engaged in a conversation with a dowager standing beside him. Malone noticed a copy of
He also kept track of the stations.
Fifteen came and went before Lyon exited at Earl’s Court. The stop was shared by the District and Piccadilly lines, blue and green signs directing passengers to either route. Lyon followed the blue signs for the Piccadilly Line, headed west, which he boarded with Malone a car behind. He didn’t think it prudent to share the same space again and was able to spy his quarry through windows in the car ahead.
A quick glance at a map over the doors confirmed they were headed straight for Heathrow Airport.
FORTY-SIX
PARIS
THORVALDSEN STUDIED THE TWO PAGES OF WRITING FROM THE Merovingian book. He’d expected Malone to hand over the entire book to Murad when they’d met earlier at the Louvre but, for some reason, that had not occurred.
“He only made me copies of the two pages,” Murad said to him. “He took the book with him.”
They were again sitting at the Ritz, in the crowded Bar Hemingway.
“Cotton didn’t happen to mention where he was going?”
Murad shook his head. “Not a word. I spent the day at the Louvre comparing more handwriting samples. This page, with the fourteen lines of letters, was definitely written by Napoleon. I can only assume that the Roman numerals are in his hand too.”
He checked the clock on the wall behind the bar. Nearly eleven PM. He did not like being kept in the dark. God knows he’d done that enough to others, but it was a different matter when it was his turn.
“The letter you told me about,” Murad said. “The one Ashby found on Corsica, with the raised letters coded to Psalm 31. Any letter written by Napoleon to his family would have been an excercise in futility. His second wife, Marie Louise, had by 1821 birthed a child with another man, while still legally married to Napoleon. The emperor surely never knew that since he kept a portrait of her in his house on St. Helena. He revered her. Of course, she was in Austria, back with her father, the king, who’d aligned himself with Tsar Alexander and helped defeat Napoleon. There’s no evidence that the letter Napoleon wrote ever made it to her, or his son. In fact, after Napoleon died, an emissary traveled to Vienna with some last messages from him, and she refused to even see the messenger.”
“Lucky for us.”
Murad nodded. “Napoleon was a fool when it came to women. The one who could have really helped him, he discarded. Josephine. She was barren and he needed an heir. So he divorced her and married Marie Louise.” The professor motioned with the two photocopies. “Yet here he is, sending secret messages to his second wife, thinking her still an ally.”
“Any clue what the reference to Psalm 31 means from the letter Ashby found?” he asked.
The scholar shook his head. “Have you read that Psalm? Seems his way of feeling sorry for himself. I did come across something interesting, though, this afternoon in one of the texts for sale at the Louvre. After Napoleon abdicated in 1814, the new Paris government sent emissaries to Orleans to confiscate Marie Louise’s clothing, imperial plate, diamonds, everything of value. They questioned her at length about Napoleon’s wealth, but she told them she knew nothing, which was probably true.”
“So the search for his cache started then?”
“It would seem so.”
“And continues to this day.”
