The Lost Relic

others a summons to the luxurious boathouse in the villa’s sprawling grounds, escorted by silent men in dark suits, spelled doom.

The dark-panelled room was filled with the treasures Shikov had assiduously collected over forty or more years. The vast antique sideboard behind him was dominated by a magnificent lapis lazuli bust of Frederick the Great. On an eighteenth-century gilt-bronze rococo commode by Andre-Charles Boulle stood a globe that had once belonged to Adolf Hitler; but it was the extensive collection of artefacts from Imperial Russia, dating between 1721 and 1917, reflecting Shikov’s lifelong passion for what he proudly regarded as his homeland’s golden era, that had earned him the nickname ‘the Tsar’. And it fitted him perfectly.

Of all the historic objects in Shikov’s study, the most physically impressive and intimidating was the immaculate 1910 Maxim water-cooled heavy machine gun, complete with its original wheeled carriage. It occupied the corner of the room, its snout aimed directly towards whomever might be sitting across from him at his massive desk. Between the fixed stare of the machine gun muzzle and the hard glower of the grizzled old mob boss, nobody could fail to be shrivelled to a pulp.

Nobody except Anatoly, Shikov’s only son, who at this moment was lounging in the plush chair as the old man leaned heavily on his desk and outlined the job he wanted done for him.

The third man present at the meeting was Yuri Maisky, Shikov’s nephew. He stood by the desk with his hands clasped behind his back, keeping quiet as his uncle did the talking. Forty-seven years old, small and wiry, Maisky secretly attributed his thinning hair and the deep worry lines on his brow to the strain of working for Shikov’s organisation for most of his adult life. He loved his uncle, but he also feared him.

There weren’t many men whom Maisky feared more than his boss. One was the boss’s son. When the old man looked at Anatoly all he saw was his beloved only child, his pride and joy; Maisky saw a thirty-four-year-old psychopath with a blond ponytail. The face was long and lean and chiselled, the eyes were quick and dangerous. Maisky’s belief that Anatoly Shikov was clinically insane was one he kept closely to himself.

Shikov could sense the tension emanating from his nephew. He knew that most of his associates and employees lived in dread and loathing of Anatoly. That just made him prouder of his only child, although he would never have shown it. Outwardly, he acted gruff and commanding.

‘Are you paying attention?’ Shikov snapped at Anatoly, interrupting himself.

‘Sure.’

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘Of course not,’ Anatoly lied. The Tsar abhorred alcohol. Anatoly did not. He shifted in the chair and glanced down to admire the hand-tooled perfection of his latest purchase, the alligator-skin boots he’d been trying to show off all day by turning up the legs of his Armani jeans. But not even Anatoly would have dared to put his feet up on the old man’s desk. ‘I’m listening. Go on.’

Anatoly had done plenty of jobs for his father, and it was something he enjoyed being called upon to do. Most guys he’d known who had worked for their dads had to go to the office, wear a suit and tie, attend meetings and conferences, sell shit of one kind or another. Not him. He felt highly privileged to be a valued member of the family firm. He and his old buddy Spartak Gourko had once kept a snitch alive for seventeen days under hard torture to extract a list of names of traitors in their organisation. Another time, Anatoly had spread-eagled a man between four posts in the ground, chains around his wrists and ankles, and lit a cigarette as Gourko drove a pickaxe through the guy’s sternum. When old Spartak got going, he was something to behold.

Anatoly enjoyed his work. He never asked questions about his father’s business, partly because you just didn’t ask the Tsar questions about his business, and partly because Anatoly didn’t really give a damn why things got done the way they did. The only questions he generally asked in life were ‘Can I own it?’; ‘Can I fuck it?’; ‘Can I kill it?’. If the answer to any of the above was negative, he quickly lost interest.

This new job sounded like fun, though.

‘Our sources tell us that the piece of artwork in question will definitely be part of the exhibition,’ Maisky said.

‘And I want it,’ Shikov finished in his gravel voice. ‘I will have it.’

The sheaf of papers spread out across the desk was the report on the gallery’s security system, put together by one of the many experts on Shikov’s payroll, a usefully corruptible Moscow security tech engineer who had leaned on contacts in Milan to get the information they needed. The seventeen-page document contained the technical data on the bespoke alarm system recently installed into the gallery building whose photographs, taken with a powerful telephoto lens from a variety of angles just days before, were clipped together in a file next to the report.

Anatoly hadn’t heard the old man doing this much talking in years. Half-listening as his father went on, he flicked through the series of photos. The location in Italy was printed at the bottom. He could see that the gallery was an extension of a much older building. The kind of new-fangled architecture that appealed to arty types. It had only just been built; in the pictures that showed the rear of the gallery, he could see that the groundworks weren’t fully finished, with patches of freshly-dug earth and a half-built ornamental fountain. There was a works van present in two of the pictures, a slightly battered Mercedes with the company name SERVIZI GIARDINIERI ROSSI just about visible on the side.

Italy, Anatoly thought. That was cool. He’d never been there before, but currently had two Ferraris, one red, one white, and most of his wardrobe came from there as well. He even spoke a bit of the language, mostly aped from the Godfather movies. Girls loved it. Yes, Italy was fine by him. Anatoly could appreciate art, too, as long as it involved depictions of naked female flesh.

Sadly, the item his father seemed so desperate to acquire depicted nothing of the sort. Anatoly glanced at the glossy blow-up taken from the exhibition brochure. Just some colourless drawing of a guy on his knees praying. Who would desire such a thing? Obviously it was worth some serious cash, strange though that might seem.

‘You’re not listening to me, boy.’

‘You were saying the alarm system’s a bastard.’

Maisky cleared his throat and cut in politely. ‘That’s putting it mildly. The perimeter protection system is state of the art. If you can get through it, the building is filled with cameras watching from every possible vantage point. The inside of the gallery itself is scanned constantly by photo-infrared motion sensors that could pick up a cockroach. The whole thing is automated, and the only way to override it is to enter a set of passcodes that are kept under lock and key in three separate locations. You need all three to disable the system. Furthermore, the passcodes are randomly re generated each day by computer, in staggered intervals so that the combination’s constantly changing. Any breach of the system will trigger the alarms as well as sending an instant signal to the police.’

‘Seems impossible,’ Anatoly ventured.

‘Nothing is impossible, boy.’ Shikov snatched a printed sheet from his desk and flipped it over.

Anatoly picked it up. There were three names on the sheet, all Italian, all unknown to him. De Crescenzo, Corsini, Silvestri. Beside each name was an address and a thumbnail picture. De Crescenzo was a gaunt-looking man with thinning black hair. Corsini was round and fat. Silvestri looked like a preening popinjay, a man in love with himself even when he didn’t know his picture was being taken. ‘Who are they?’

‘The three men who hold the passcodes,’ Maisky told him.

‘Now here’s the plan,’ Shikov said. ‘Tomorrow evening is the inaugural opening of the gallery. Invitation only, some local VIPs and art critics, people like that, about thirty-five in all. All three passcode holders will be present. Your team will be waiting as they leave, and follow them home. At 3 a.m., you’ll snatch them simultaneously from their homes, bring them back to the gallery and make them enter the codes. How you do it is up to you, but you keep them alive.’

‘Right. And then we go in and grab what we came for.’

Maisky had been waiting for the first sign that the hotheaded young punk was going to handle this in his usual reckless way. Here we go, he thought.

‘It’s not that simple,’ he said. ‘Because the only time the owners might have to override the alarm system would be an emergency situation such as a fire, earthquake or other potential threat to the valuable contents of the gallery, the system’s designers built in a function that will send an automatic alert to the police should the override codes be entered. That function is hard-wired into the system and can’t be disabled remotely in any way. It uses a broadband frequency via the optic fibre landline, with cellular backup in the event that the main lines are down. So it’s essential that before you go in, you ensure that the landline is chopped. And that you use this.’ He pointed at a