door, he cordoned the toilet entrance off and then disappeared inside, reappearing a few moments later with a smile.
‘It’s empty.’
‘Is that good?’ she asked, an impatient edge to her voice as she followed him inside.
The room was as he remembered it: four wooden stalls painted a pale yellow to his right, six porcelain urinals separated by frosted-glass screens to his left. Unusually, the centre of the room was dominated by a large white marble counter with two sinks set on each set of a double-sided arched mirror. The walls were covered in grey marble tiles.
‘Six across, three down.’
He showed her the numbers scratched on to the chip and then turned to face the urinals and began to count, starting in the far left corner and moving six tiles across, then dropping three tiles down.
‘I make it this one,’ he said, stepping forward and pointing at a tile over the third urinal.
‘Me too,’ Allegra agreed with a curious frown.
Snatching up the silver fire extinguisher hanging just inside the door, he swung it hard against the tile they had picked out. There was a dull clunk as it caved in.
‘It’s hollow,’ Allegra breathed.
Tom swung the extinguisher against the wall again, the hole widening as the tiles around the opening cracked and fell away until he had revealed a rectangular space. Throwing the extinguisher to the floor, he reached into the space and hauled out a large black holdall.
‘How long’s that been here?’
‘Three or four years?’ he guessed. ‘Nico paid off the builder the casino hired to re-tile this room. It was Archie’s idea. A precaution. Enough to get us operational again if we ever had to cut and run. He chose here and a few other places around the world where we had people we could trust.’
Allegra leaned forward as he unzipped the bag.
‘What’s inside?’
‘Batteries, tools, drill, borescope, magnetic rig, backpack,’ he said quickly, sorting through its contents. ‘Money, guns,’ he continued, taking one of the two Glocks out, checking the magazine was full and placing it in his pocket.
‘And this?’ Allegra asked, frowning as she took out a small object the size of a cigarette packet.
‘Location transmitter. Three-mile radius,’ He pulled out the receiver, slotted a fresh battery in place and then turned it on to show her. ‘Stick it on, if you like. At least that way I won’t lose you.’
‘Don’t worry, you won’t get rid of me that easily.’ She smiled, tossing it back.
‘Good. Then you can give me a hand with this up the stairs. Nico will be waiting by now.’
FIFTY-EIGHT
Boulevard de Suisse, Monaco 20th March – 3.35 a.m.
Barely ten minutes later, they pulled in a little way beyond D’Arcy’s building. Nico had been right – you couldn’t miss it. Not only was a police car parked outside on the narrow one-way street, but the upper stories of the otherwise cream apartment block were scorched and coated with ash, like a half-smoked cigarette that had been stood on its filter and then left to burn down to its tip.
Tom gave her a few minutes to struggle out of her dress and heels and into the casual clothes that had been left for them in the car, and then rapped impatiently on her window. She lowered it and he thrust the second Glock and a couple of spare clips through the gap.
‘Ready?’
‘Are there actually any bullets in this one?’ she asked, eyebrows raised sceptically.
It wasn’t that she minded carrying a gun. In fact, she quite liked its firm and familiar presence on her hip, like a dance partner’s hand leading her through a rehearsed set of steps. It was just that she preferred to know what she was dealing with.
‘Let’s not find out.’ He winked.
The building was called the Villa de Rome, an appropriate and perhaps not entirely coincidental name if they were right about D’Arcy’s involvement with De Luca and the Delian League. Although old, it betrayed all the signs of a recent and rather ill-judged refurbishment, the entrance now resembling that of a two-star hotel with ideas above its station – all rose marble, smoked glass and gold leaf.
‘
‘Thierry Landry. Caroline Morel,’ Tom snapped in French, each of them flashing the special passes that Nico had produced for them. ‘From the palace.’
‘Yes, sir, madam,’ the officer stuttered, his back straightening and heels sliding almost imperceptibly closer together.
‘We’d like to see D’Arcy’s apartment.’
‘Of course.’ He nodded eagerly. ‘The elevator’s still out, but I can escort you up the stairs to the penthouse.’
‘No need,’ Tom insisted, stepping deliberately closer. ‘We were never here. You never saw us.’
‘Saw what, sir?’ The officer winked, then froze, as if realising that this was probably against some sort of royal protocol. To his visible relief, Tom smiled back.
‘Exactly.’
Leaving the officer saluting to their backs, they climbed the stairs in silence, the fire’s charred scent growing stronger and the floor getting wetter as water dripped through from the ceiling like rainwater percolating into an aquifer. There was a certain irony, Allegra reflected, in how the fire brigade had probably caused more damage to the flats below D’Arcy’s than the blaze they were meant to be protecting them from. She couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t a warning there for them both: were they causing more harm by trying to fix things than if they had just let matters run their natural course?
On the third floor, Tom stopped and swung his backpack off his shoulder. Reaching inside, he took out a small device that he stuck on to the wall at about knee height, then turned on.
‘Motion sensor,’ he explained, holding out a small receiver that she guessed would sound if anyone broke the transmitter’s infrared beam.
They continued on, emerging half a minute later on the top landing, the fire’s pungent incense now so heavy that she could almost taste the ash sticking to the back of her throat. Tom flicked his torch on, the beam immediately settling on the door to D’Arcy’s apartment that had been unscrewed from its hinges and placed against the wall.
‘Quarter-inch steel and a four-bar locking mechanism,’ Tom observed slowly. ‘Either he knew his attackers or someone let them in.’
They stepped inside the apartment on to a sodden carpet of ash and charred debris, weightless black flecks fluttering through their torch beams like flies over a carcass. The walls had been licked black by the cruel flames and the ceiling almost entirely consumed, so that she could see through it to the roof’s steel ribs and, beyond them, the sky. The furniture, too, had been skeletonised into dark shapes that were both entirely alien and strangely familiar, although the fire, ever capricious, had inexplicably spared a single chair and a large section of one wall, as if to deliberately emphasise the otherwise overwhelming scale of its devastation.
It was an uncomfortable, dislocating experience, and Allegra had the strange impression of having stepped on to a film set – an imagined vision, rendered with frightening detail, of some future, post-apocalyptic world where the few remaining survivors had been reduced to taking shelter where they could and eking out an existence amidst the ashes.
‘This looks like where it started.’ She picked her way over the charred wreckage to a room that looked out over the harbour. The fire here seemed to have been particularly intense, the steel beams overhead twisted and tortured, opaque pools of molten glass having formed under the windows, the stonework still radiating a baked-in
