A plan came together in his head. Obtaining ABLE ARCHER’s phone number was easily accomplished through channels at HiveCo—all it took was an enquiry from the Bigge Organization about her availability for hire. Once he had her mobile number it was trivially easy to submit a location services disclosure order through one of the Bigge Organization’s security subsidiaries, and with the LSDO in hand to start stalking her phone. Presently the Bond was back in the DB9, crawling towards Kensington Park. Where he was pretty sure ABLE ARCHER would attempt to pick up the trail come morning.
Meanwhile, Eve’s escrow fixer had been busy overnight.
“Ms. Starkey? This is Andrei. I have news for you—yes, yes, your offer to preempt is accepted by the vendor. I keeped the offer to fifty million dollars US, this is acceptable, yes? The vendor requires completion within eighteen hours. The deposit wire transfer to VX Bank (BVI) Limited in Tortola for five million, I email you the account SWIFT and IBAN details now—”
“Excellent!” Eve smiled and nodded, even though there was no way Andrei could see her. She paused her review of options for improving her zygomatic arch and checked her Outlook inbox. Sure enough, the email appeared as she watched. “I’ll review this and issue payment immediately. How is fulfillment to proceed?”
“The vendor will email me the collection instructions once the bank confirms the deposit is in their suspense account. I have local subcontractors on-site in the British Virgin Islands: you don’t need to be aware of the details. Title deeds to appropriate properties to the value of forty-five million, held by the usual vehicles. We transfer ownership as usual: wire me my fee and I take care of repossession of assets once you confirm goods are correct.” He chuckled drily. After a second or two, Eve joined him. “Do you ever get the feeling that you’re living in a sixties crime caper movie?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, I can’t say that I do,” she said indulgently. Her cheek twitched. “But don’t let me keep you! I have funds to transfer.”
It took a little more than twenty minutes for Eve to dole out the payments—even with her stratospheric degree of access, Finance required confirmation that Rupert had authorized her to transfer millions of pounds to an anonymous numbered bank account in a tax haven, and to spend another few dozen million buying title to certain opaque investment vehicles that owned luxury properties and transferring them to a law firm in another tax haven—but by nine o’clock (eleven hundred hours in Dubăsari) the money had hit the vendor’s offshore account, and Andrei phoned her back to confirm that the payment was confirmed.
“They have the deeds, many gracious thank-yous, Ms. Starkey, and I am forwarding you the encrypted email they sent me under your public key. When you have opened it you need to reply to the address in it to confirm receipt, is that acceptable?”
“I’ll do that,” Eve said. Outlook binged for attention, and she glanced at her screen again. “Aha, this looks like it.” The message was quite large, and decrypting the attachments took almost a minute, but at last she could see them: a Word document and a PDF file, evidently a scan of some sort. “Excellent, I have decrypted them. I’ll be back in touch shortly to confirm stage two.”
Eve opened the covering letter first. The manuscript, it seemed, was bound inside the cover of another book, and misfiled on the wrong shelf in a private library somewhere in London. The directions to retrieve it could be found in the attached PDF, a scan of a hand-drawn treasure map of some antiquity. The handwriting was the beautiful copperplate cursive that clerks had used before typewriters, its authorship anonymous. She frowned as she looked at the scan. Weird: it wasn’t a normal map, one with an absolute frame of reference and a compass rose. Rather, it was a series of waypoints on a treasure hunt. The starting point was an oddly familiar address on Kensington Palace Gardens. And then—
She swore softly to herself. It’s a set-up. Got to be. There was absolutely no possible way that it could be a coincidence.
“Meet me at the same cafe as last time,” she told her brother, then copied the map onto a memory stick and deleted the unencrypted copy from her PC. “Make sure nobody follows you. And leave your phone at home.”
Half an hour later Imp sat down across the table from her in the branch of Costa. “Morning,” he grumped. “This had better be good.”
“Had a bad night? What did your crew say?”
“They said thanks for the forty large, now fuck off.” He rubbed his forehead. “I really don’t think it’s going to work.”
“Well, maybe I can change your mind.” Eve waited patiently while he stirred three sachets of sugar into his coffee. “While you were lying in, I sorted out the map. You don’t have to worry about anybody else coming after it—the auction is closed. And it turns out the manuscript is right on our doorstep. How well do you know—” And she told him the address.
“How well do I—” Imp froze—“the old family home?” he said, with studied disinterest. “Never been there, why?”
“It’s interesting that you should say that.” She smirked, and took a sip of her drink. “It turns out that’s where the directions to retrieve the manuscript start. It’s a schematic, a kind of diagram rather than a traditional map, and it says you need to start on the top floor—the third floor—of the ancestral pile, where there’s a secret door. Do you know anything
