slats of its wooden crate.
‘He’s got shit here from all over,’ Archie noted, taking care to look where he was treading. ‘And fakes too.’ He pointed at two identical Cycladic statues of a harp player. ‘The original’s in Athens.’
But Tom wasn’t listening, having seen the large safe at the far end of the room. He tried the handle, more in hope than expectation. It was locked.
‘Over here.’
Allegra was standing at the threshold of a third room, much smaller than the others, but no less surprising. For where they had been flooded with antiquities, this was drowning in documentation – Polaroids, invoices, valuation certificates, consignment notes, shipping manifests, certificates of authenticity, remittance notes. All carefully filed away by year in archive boxes.
The photographs, in particular, told their own grim story. One set picked at random showed an Attic kylix covered in dirt and in pieces in the boot of a car, then the same object cleaned and partially restored, then fully restored with all the cracks painted and polished, and finally on display in some unnamed museum, Faulks standing next to the display case like a proud father showing off a new-born child.
‘Like Lazarus raised from the dead,’ Allegra murmured, peering over Tom’s shoulder.
‘Only this time with the evidence to prove it,’ Dominique added. She’d found several long rectangular boxes crammed with five-by-eight-inch index cards. Written on each one in Faulks’s looping hand was a meticulous record of a particular sale he’d made – the date of the transaction, the object sold, the price paid, the name of the customer. ‘The Getty, the Met, the Gill brothers, the Avner Klein and Deena Carroll collection…’ she said, flicking through the first few cards. ‘This goes back fifteen, twenty years…’
‘Insurance,’ Archie guessed. ‘In case anyone tried to screw him.’
‘Or pride,’ Tom suggested. ‘So he could remind himself how clever he was. He just never counted on anyone finding it.’
‘Does it matter?’ Dominique snapped her fingers impatiently. ‘It’s quarter to one. That means we’ve only got just over three hours until Faulks gets back.’
‘Just about enough time to get his safe open,’ Tom said with a smile.
SEVENTY
20th March – 12.46 p.m.
Five feet tall and three feet across, the safe had a brutish, hulking presence, its dense mass of hardened steel and poured concrete exerting a strange gravitational pull that almost threatened to fold the room in on itself. A five-spoke gold-plated handle jutted out of its belly, the Cyclops eye of a combination lock glowering above it, the whole crowned with an elaborate gilded copperplate script that proudly spelt out its manufacturer’s name. Under the flickering lights its smooth flanks pulsed with a dull grey glow, like a meteorite that had just fallen to earth.
With Dom having gone to fetch Tom’s equipment, Tom, Allegra and Archie stood in a line in front of it, like art critics at an unveiling.
‘How do you know the watches are inside?’ Allegra asked.
‘I don’t. But I don’t see where else he would keep them.’
‘He certainly wasn’t wearing one,’ Archie agreed.
‘Can you open it?’ She was trying to sound positive, but she couldn’t quite disguise the sceptical edge to her question.
‘It’s a Champion Crown,’ Tom said, rubbing his chin wearily.
‘Is that bad?’
‘Two-and-one-eighth-inch thick composite concrete walls with ten-gauge steel on the outside and sixteen- gauge on the inside. A five-inch-thick composite concrete door secured by twenty one-and-a-half-inch active bolts. Internal ball-bearing hinges. Sargent & Greenleaf combination dial with a hundred million potential combinations…’ Tom sighed. ‘It’s about as bad as it gets.’
‘Don’t forget the sodding re-lockers,’ Archie added with a mournful sigh.
‘Re-lockers?’ Allegra looked back to Tom with a frown.
‘The easiest way to crack a safe is to drill through the door,’ Tom explained. ‘That way you can use a borescope, a sort of fibre-optic viewer, to watch the lock wheels spin into position while you turn the dial, or even manually retract the main bolt.’
‘Only the manufacturers have got smart,’ Archie continued. ‘Now they fit a cobalt alloy hardplate around the lock mechanisms and sprinkle it with tungsten carbide chips to shatter the drill bits. Sometimes the bastards even add a layer of steel washers or ball bearings too. Not particularly hard, but they spin round when the drill bit touches them, making them a bugger to cut through.’
‘The answer used to be to go in at an angle,’ Tom picked up again. ‘Drill in above or to the side of the hardplate and get at the lock pack that way. So the high-end safes now have a re-locker mechanism. A plate of tempered glass that shatters if you try to drill through it, releasing a set of randomly located bolts which lock the safe out completely. Some of them are even thermal, so that they trigger if you try and use a torch or plasma cutter.’
‘So you can’t open it?’ Given what she’d just heard, it seemed like a fair, if depressing conclusion.
‘Everything can be opened, given the right equipment and enough time,’ Archie reassured her. ‘You just need to know where to drill.’
‘Manufacturers build in a drill point to most types of safes,’ Tom explained, running his hand across the safe’s metal surface as if trying to divine its location. ‘A specific place where locksmiths can more easily drill through the door and, for a safe like this, a hole in the glass plate to get at the lock. They vary by make and model, and if you get it wrong…’
‘You trigger the re-lockers.’ Allegra nodded in understanding.
‘Drill-point diagrams are the most closely guarded secret in the locksmithing world,’ Archie sighed, before turning to face Tom. ‘We’ll have to get them off Raj.’
‘Who’s Raj?’ She asked.
‘Raj Dhutta. A locksmith we know. One of the best.’
‘It’s too late for that.’ Tom shook his head. ‘Even if he could get it to us in time, it would still take hours to drill through the hardplate with the kit I’ve got.’
‘Then your only option is a side entry.’ Archie dragged three crates out of the way to give them access to the safe’s flanks.
‘And then in through the change-key hole,’ Tom said.
‘You what?’ Archie gave a disbelieving, almost nervous laugh.
‘It’ll take too long to drill back through into the lock pack. It’s the only way in the time we’ve got.’
‘What’s a change-key hole?’ Allegra asked with a frown. Hardplate. Re-locker. Change-key. Part of her wondered if they were deliberately tossing in these terms to confuse her.
Dominique interrupted before Tom could answer, breathing heavily as she hauled Tom’s equipment bag behind her.
‘Did you get lost?’ Tom asked, surprised it had taken her so long.
‘I got out at two by mistake,’ she panted. ‘I was banging on the door like an idiot until I realised that I was on the wrong floor. They all look the same.’
‘And there was me thinking your new boyfriend was showing you his torch,’ said Archie, grinning.
‘I’ll bet it’s bigger than yours,’ she retorted, screwing her face into an exaggerated smile.
‘Stop it you two,’ Tom said as he knelt down and unzipped the bag, and then carefully lifted out the magnetic drill rig.
‘What about all that?’ Allegra asked, nodding towards the paperwork in the third room.
‘What about it?’ Archie frowned.
‘It’s evidence. Proof of every deal the Delian League has ever done. We can’t just leave it.’
‘Why not?’
