The instant he saw the painting, he realised that he didn’t even have to check whether the features of the face were the same as those in the grainy, heavily pixelated spy cam photo; the face was a match; of this he was utterly certain. He was seized by uncontrollable tremors, and his extremities started to tingle and feel numb. This, this was it: the biggest discovery of his entire career. The chess pieces had been set in place, the manoeuvre meticulously planned – and now it was time to move them.
‘Checkmate,’ he whispered, hissing the words with naked aggression through tightly clenched teeth. ‘Checkmate Ma, you senile old fuck. I’ll be head, I’ll be the motherfuckin’ CEO of the motherfuckin’ Huntsmen! Check-fuckin’-mate! Fuck you, Ma! Fuck you, fuckity fuckity fuck you! Hahaha!’
He jumped up and slammed his fist onto the desk, breathing hard as an almost orgasmic lust of violent triumph fired the geriatric blood that oozed through his veins with new youth.
‘All right, all right, all right,’ he whispered to himself, trying to force himself to calm down. ‘We have to play this cool. First, I need to make this agent “disappear”, because only I can know about this. He knows, so he’s a liability, and I don’t work with liabilities. And I need to get word to Hutton.’
He used his fingerprint to unlock a safe in the wall, and from it he retrieved a satellite phone, on which there was only one number: the number of another satellite phone, this one located all the way on the other side of the world, in the heart of the Congo. He pressed ‘dial’ with trembling fingers, and waited for Hutton to answer the call, which she did within seconds.
‘Mr Deveraux, sir.’
The voice – a reedy, harsh female voice with a New York accent – was crackly, but clear enough for conversation.
‘I have the painting,’ Deveraux rasped, ‘and I’m sending an image to you right now. We have confirmation. I repeat, we have confirmation.’
Her voice dropped in register, her excitement almost tangible across the chasm of time and distance between them.
‘My God. Oh my God, sir…’
‘Fuckin’ right. We need an army out there, poste-fuckin’ haste. I’ll start making arrangements.’
‘I’m on the ground sir, ready to do whatever is necessary. I repeat, whatever is necessary, sir.’
‘I know you are, yes I know you are. It’s time. Oh fuckin’ yeah, it’s finally fuckin’ time…’
PART TWO
9
WILLIAM
March 1837. London, England
Dense, milky morning fog was doing its utmost to suffocate the cobbled streets of Whitechapel, and the weak sun hovered a mere inch or two above the horizon; one more gas lamp that burned on from the dead night, unextinguished. All around, the sounds of the waking city rattled, hummed and clanged in a tempestuous symphony; here sounded the crashing clatter of horse-drawn cabs and mounted riders, there the hoarse cries of vendors plying their wares, and in the background, the aggressive curses and slurred shouts of stumbling drunks, still intoxicated from last night’s excesses. Slicing across the foreground was a pack of feral mutts, barking frenetically as they chased after a terrified cat.
The feline careened through an alley between two police constables and a dumpy prostitute, who halted their conversation as the animal sprinted by. As they resumed talking, a beam of weak sunlight broke through the fog and struck the ramshackle dwelling next to them, a squat crammed between the hundreds of other makeshift shacks jumbled tight in these narrow, filth-encrusted alleys.
‘So you’re sure she ‘asn’t come out o’ there for five days then, love?’ asked a burly, hirsute constable, who sported a dense walrus moustache.
‘I’d swear it on a bible if you ‘ad one I could put me ‘and on,’ the woman answered. She looked to be hardly out of her teenage years, yet seemed to be carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders; her wan complexion, missing teeth and the dark rings beneath her eyes would have been more suited to a woman three times her age.
‘I bet you’d also swear that you’ve never ‘elped no blokes to put their Nebuchadnezzars out to grass, not so love?’
The prostitute glared at the smirking policeman and his chuckling companion.
‘Well if that’s your bleedin’ attitude, no wonder ‘alf o’ London can’t stop goin’ on about ‘ow bloody useless you lot are! Look, I’m trying to ‘elp my friend, and she’s not been out of ‘er room for the last ‘free days, an’ the last I saw of ‘er she was lookin’ awfully poorly. Judy’s got a wee chavy in there too, an’ I’m right worried about ‘im, I am.’
The constable turned reluctantly to his companion, scowling and rolling his eye.
‘Right then, let’s give it a knock and see if we can’t get to the bo’om o’ this then.’
The policemen stepped up to the door, trying to peer through the cracks where the wood was warped and rotten. The window itself was boarded up, and nothing was discernible inside the room in the feeble half-light of the breaking dawn. The alley outside was awash with myriad foul scents; raw sewage, spoiled fish and other decaying meat, along with rancid vegetables and the putrid stench of rotting mounds of general garbage, and topping this off was the overpoweringly rank stink of human waste, and the fetid odour of too many unwashed bodies crammed into too small a space. To top off this olfactory foulness, everything was seasoned liberally with the inescapable acridity of the coal-fires of industry. Near this particular door, however, a more powerful and unsettling stink cut through the stew of odours, causing the closest constable to wrinkle his nose in revulsion.
‘Blimey. Smells like some’fing isn’t right in this ‘ere rookery,’ he remarked gruffly before rapping on the door. There was no reply but silence, so he knocked again and waited. ‘Love, if you’re in there you’d best open this ‘ere door or I’ll be wont to batter it down, and I’m sure neither of us would be
