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 Federico 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.
What he’d found instead was the cracked, worn old diary, its writing faded with age. For the next twenty-five years, not a week had passed without his returning to re-read it obsessively, like a devout believer drawn to his bible, certain that it contained the key. And he’d been right, in the end. Yet now, just when once again he’d thought he was about to lay his hands on the lost relic of his dreams, his hopes had been dashed a second time in a forgotten Russian cemetery. The map inside the picture frame had been accur ate enough – but someone had got there before him.
Could the search for the Dark Medusa finally be over?
Maybe it was, Shikov thought. Maybe he’d be in his own grave before it was done.
At least he could console himself that he wouldn’t be the only one.
He picked up one of the duelling pistols. The antique lockwork gave a delicate
‘Ben Hope, you are dead,’ he said. And that thought, at this moment, was the only thing in the world that gave him any joy.
Just after midnight, Darcey Kane was escorted from the helipad on the roof of the SOCA regional HQ by plain-clothes agents who checked her name, rank and number into a register and took away her weapon to be logged into secure storage. Less than three minutes later she was whisked into a large, plush office on the top floor, and found herself alone with a man she’d only ever heard of before but never met.
Sir William Applewood, SOCA’s Senior Director of Intelligence, personally appointed by the Home Secretary, was a heavyset man of sixty-two with skin turned the colour of chalk by the strain of his job. Behind his half-moon spectacles, there were dark rings around his eyes. Maybe the whispered legend that he needed only three hours of sleep a night wasn’t true after all. He glanced up as she was shown into the room, and expressionlessly waved her
