The Double Eagle

NINE

FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia19th July – 12:30pm

‘So we still don’t know if it’s a fake or not? This guy, Baxter, he couldn’t help with that?’

Corbett sat down on one of the wooden benches that lined the shaded banks of the Potomac in this part of the FBI compound and placed a polystyrene cup full of thick black coffee down on the ground between his feet. Jennifer sat down next to him, her sandwich still in its plastic wrapper. Lunch could wait.

‘Not without sending it to the lab for tests which I’ll do this afternoon. But he did mention something else.’

‘What?’

‘Well, it’s probably nothing…’

Jennifer noticed Corbett’s forehead creasing. Although he probably had many qualities, she suspected that patience was very definitely not one of them.

‘It’s just that Baxter said that all nine of the coins recovered by the Secret Services in the 1940s were destroyed. But I spoke to someone I know over at the Treasury on the way out here who owed me a favour. He told me, off the record, that although four of the nine coins recovered by the Secret Services in the 1940s were destroyed, the other five were put into storage back at the Philadelphia Mint before being moved to Fort Knox about ten years ago when they re-inventoried the place. As far as he knows, they’re still there.’

Corbett nodded slowly and settled back into the bench, the sunlight seeping under the branches of the overhanging tree. Jennifer studied his face and noticed the total lack of surprise at this latest piece of information. Her eyes widened in realisation.

‘But then, you already knew all that, didn’t you?’ she said slowly.

‘The French doctor who performed the autopsy on Ranieri happened to be a bit of a coin freak,’ Corbett admitted, his eyes fixed on the river, the occasional splash and glittering ripple showing where a fish had risen to the surface and then powered its way back down to the river bed, bending the water with a flick of its tail. ‘He recognised the coin. That’s why we got it back so quickly. I pulled the file. You just pretty much confirmed everything in it.’

‘So what’s this all been about, sir?’ Jennifer fought to control the anger in her voice. She’d thought she was being given a clear run, but Corbett was treating her with the same suspicion as everyone else. ‘Is this some sort of test? Because if it is, I resent…’

Corbett cut her off, his eyes boring into her.

‘You know, there’s a lot of people who think you’re damaged goods. That you’re a liability. That you should have been retired three years ago after the shooting.’

She paused before answering and returned his stare, trying not to let her voice sound too defensive.

‘I can’t help that.’

‘No. But it bugs you.’ He shrugged and turned to face the river again. ‘Me, I think that everyone makes mistakes. It’s how they deal with them that sets them apart. Some just go to pieces and never recover. Others move on and come back twice as strong.’

‘Which do you think I am, sir?’

He paused.

‘It took me two days to get the Treasury to confirm what happened to those other coins. You did it in one phone call. Let’s just say that you don’t strike me as a quitter.’ The hint of a smile crossed his face for the first time that afternoon. ‘The case is yours.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Jennifer stood up, a slight tremor in her voice. This was the sort of chance she had been hoping for. Praying for. ‘I’ll get right on it.’

‘Good.’ He flicked his eyes back round to hers. ‘I want you down in Kentucky first thing in the morning, checking on those coins. I’ll get a plane booked for you.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Jennifer got up and turned to leave, but Corbett called after her.

‘By the way, who bought that Farouk coin in the end? We’re probably going to need to talk to them too.’

Jennifer reached for her notebook and flicked through the first few pages until she found the right entry.

‘According to my Treasury contact several people bid for it. But it went to a Dutch property developer, a private collector.’ She found the name she was looking for and looked up as she said it to see if Corbett recognised it.

‘Darius Van Simson.’

TEN

The Marais, 4th Arrondissement, Paris19th July – 6:00pm

‘Vous savez pourquoi on appele ce quartier le Marais?’

His French faultless, Darius Van Simson was sitting behind the large mahogany desk that dominated the right hand side of his office. Circumflex eyebrows over a chopped angular face, his sandy hair and the firm arrow of his goatee were flickering slightly in the stiff breeze from the overhead air conditioning unit. He was sipping whisky from a heavy crystal glass.

‘Presumably because it used to be a swamp.’

The man sitting opposite him was short and round, with a puffy red face and small brown eyes. He had long since outgrown his suit and the fabric creased violently around his shoulders and across his arched back. His cracked black leather belt could not hide the fact that he wore his trousers with the top button undone.

‘Bravo, Monsieur Reinaud!’ Van Simson slapped the table in appreciation. ‘Quite so. The Knights Templar drained it in the 11th Century. Who would have thought then, that in the Middle Ages it would emerge at the epicentre of French political life? That aristocratic families would build their houses on its narrow streets so as to be near their King?’

Reinaud nodded awkwardly, as if unsure if he should say something. Van Simson put his glass down, stood up and crossed to the other side of the room so that Reinaud had to shuffle around in his chair to see him. He was wearing a blazer over dark grey flannel trousers, his white shirt open at the neck. He wore no socks, his bare feet clad in a pair of brown suede moccasins.

Four large windows had been set into the wall and in between each one was a different Chagall painting, each illuminated by a single recessed spotlight that made the colours glow as if the image had been projected onto the space, rather than merely hung there.

‘Of course, over the years, most of those grand houses were carved up into apartments or shops or offices or simply knocked down.’ Van Simson continued, gazing out the window at the courtyard below. ‘Why, this very house was a ramshackle assortment of restaurants, craft shops and dance studios before I bought them all out and had the place reconverted.’

‘Monsieur Van Simson, this is all very interesting, but I fail to understand how this is relevant to…’

‘Have you seen this?’ Van Simson walked over to the white architectural model that stood in a glass display case in the middle of the room. Reinaud heaved himself to his feet with a sigh and walked over.

‘What is it?’

‘Surely you recognise it?’

Reinaud frowned as he studied the layout of the streets. A shopping mall, a car park, office buildings, luxury apartments around an artificial lake. Suddenly, his eyes narrowed.

‘Never! I’ve told you, I’ll never allow it!’

Van Simson smiled.

‘Things change, Monsieur Reinaud. A swamp can grow to become the site of a royal palace; an aristocrat’s home decay into a slum. It is time for this land to evolve. You’re only fooling yourself if you think you can stand in the way of progress.’

‘No, you’re the one fooling yourself with your lawyers and accountants.’ Reinaud fired back, taking a step closer to him. ‘There will be no sale. Not now, not ever.’

Van Simson sighed. Nodding slowly, he reached into his inside jacket pocket and drew out a large chequebook which he laid flat on the display case. Unscrewing the lid of a silver fountain pen, he looked up at Reinaud with a smile.

‘You are a tough negotiator, Monsieur Reinaud, I’ll give you that. But come now, enough of this…’ He searched for the appropriate word. ‘… posturing. I have the planning permission. Everyone else has accepted my terms. My men have already broken ground on the first phase of this project. Yours is the only outstanding plot. How much do you want?’

‘The price is not the issue,’ Reinaud spluttered. ‘My family have lived on this land for six hundred years. My ancestors lie buried in its soil as I and my children and their children will one day. To us, this is more than just land. It’s our birthright. Our inheritance. Its spirit runs through our veins. It’s not a cell on a spreadsheet, not a footnote in your annual report. We will never sell it. I would rather die than see this … this monstrosity come into being.’

Van Simson’s smile faded, his face creasing and narrowing into a point, furrows of anger carved in neat, vertical lines across his cheeks. Under his blazer, he could sense his shirt beginning to stick to his back. He walked over to his desk, had another sip of his whisky, the ice tinkling against the crystal.

Suddenly, he spun round and in one violent movement hurled the glass across the room as hard as he could. It shot through the air, whistling past Reinaud’s head and crashing into the wall. The heavy base smashed on impact, an exploding petal of glass shards. Just for a moment, as the light caught them, hundreds of tiny rainbows fluttered through the air before falling to the floor.

‘That tumbler was one of a pair salvaged from the first class lounge of the Titanic. The only ones to have survived. Your stubbornness has just cost me a hundred thousand dollars,’ Van Simson hissed, advancing towards a now white-faced Reinaud. ‘You mean nothing to me, Reinaud.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Certainly less than that glass. Defy me and you will find out what it means to stand in my way. Now for the last time, what is your price?’

On the other side of the room, whisky ran down the wall in dark rivulets, pooling amidst the shattered glass. Against the pale brown carpet, it looked like blood.

ELEVEN

Highgate Cemetery, London20th July – 3:30pm

Tom made his way through the gravestones, the cracked and threadbare path snaking its way down the hill. In a couple of places the tarmac had worn away completely and here the surface of an earlier, cobbled path shone through, the stones brightly polished where generations of heavy-hearted feet had stumbled over them.

There was a time when he could have recited from memory the names on most of the tombstones between the upper gate and his mother’s grave. They jutted out from the fleshy earth like teeth, some overlapping, others separated by wide gaps, decaying according to the seasons in the wind and the sun and the cold. Here and there, plastic flowers leered from rain-filled jam jars. In the distance, the distinctive sceptre of the BT Tower rose above the city’s concrete ooze.

The solid black marble slab nestled snugly in the grass, sheltered by the drooping branches of a willow and the tangled undergrowth that concealed the crumbling cemetery wall. The gilding that had been painted into the carved inscription still shone brightly and Tom ran his fingers over the letters, silently tracing her name. Remembering. She would have been 60 that day.

Rebecca Laura Kirk née Duval

Everyone had told him at the time that it wasn’t his fault, that it was just one of those things. An accident, a terrible tragedy. Even the coroner had played it down, blaming mechanical failure, before suggesting that his mother had been at best reckless for letting a thirteen year old boy drive, even if it was just a short distance down a normally quiet road. For a moment he had almost believed them.

But the look in his father’s eyes at her funeral, the anger that had shone through the tears when he’d hugged him, convinced Tom that he, at least, thought otherwise. That if she had let him drive, then it was because Tom had begged and bawled until she had relented. That he had as good as killed her. When he was much older, he often wondered whether when his father had hugged him so tightly that day, he had really been trying to suffocate him.

Tom closed his eyes subconsciously toying with the ivory key-ring his father had given him a few weeks before he’d died. He breathed in deeply through his nose finding the smell of freshly turned earth and cut grass comforting. It reminded him of long lazy summer afternoons in the garden, before all that. Before he had been abandoned to his loneliness. And his guilt. Because after that day, his father had never hugged him again.

‘There’s a bloody fortune in marble here.’ A familiar voice broke into Tom’s thoughts. ‘I know a bloke who’d take all these off our hands.’ An impossible voice. ‘He just splits the top layer off and re-engraves ’em. Punters never know the difference.’ A voice that had no right being there.

‘Archie?’ Tom spun round. ‘How … why … what the hell are you doing here?’

Over the years, Tom had often wondered what Archie looked like, tried to mentally sketch a face to match the voice, an expression to suit the tone. With every conversation, a little more detail had been added to this picture; an extra crease around the eyes, a slight bump in the nose, a sharper edge to the jaw. At times, Tom had almost managed to convince himself that they must have met. But with Archie, the real Archie, actually standing there in front of him for the first time, his careful reconstruction instantly crumbled and now he found that he could not salvage a single memory of it.

Instead he saw a slim man – in his mid-forties, Tom guessed – about five feet ten. He had an oval face, his hair clipped very short and receding, so that it formed a fuzzy point right at the tip of his forehead. His three-buttoned suit was clearly bespoke, possibly Savile Row, a 10-ounce dark blue pinstripe that wouldn’t have looked out of place on any City trading floor.

His blue Gingham shirt was unbuttoned at the neck and Tom guessed that he was probably wearing a set of red braces to match his socks. These were expensive clothes with the right labels in the right places, subtle tribal markings that allowed Archie to circulate unchallenged through the smart and fast-moneyed world he inhabited.

And yet despite this, there was something rough and ready about him. His face was slightly crumpled, his chin dark with stubble, his ears sticking out slightly from the side of his head. He had the easy confident manner of someone who knew how to handle himself and others. But his dark brown eyes said different. They said that he was afraid.

Tom looked around anxiously, wary that Archie might not have come alone.

‘It’s all right, mate. Cool it.’ Archie held his hands up. ‘It’s just me.’

‘Don’t tell me to cool it,’ Tom’s voice was stone. ‘What’s going on? You know the rules.’

‘Of course I know the rules – I bloody well invented them, didn’t I?’ Archie gave a short laugh.

It had been Archie’s idea that they should never meet. Ever. It was safer that way, he had said, so that all they would have on each other was a name and a phone number. By coming to find him, Archie had broken his own, most important rule. It was an act of desperation, a cry for help. Or maybe a trick?

Tom leapt forward and fired off two quick punches, a right to the stomach and a left to the side of Archie’s head. The first winded him, the second dropped him to the ground.

‘Are you wearing a wire? Is that it, you bastard? Have you cut a deal with Clarke to ship me in?’ Tom knelt over Archie and patted him down roughly, feeling around his chest and groin to see if he was concealing some sort of transmitter. He wasn’t.

‘Fuck you.’ Archie heaved Tom off him and rubbed the side of his face, coughing as the air seeped back into his lungs. ‘I’m no fucking grass.’ He hauled himself back to his feet and gave Tom an angry look, brushing his jacket down.

‘Yesterday Clarke shows up promising to put me away. Then after ten years of our avoiding each other, you break cover. What am I meant to think? That it’s all a coincidence?’

‘Clarke, that hairy-arsed wanker? Do me a favour. You think I’d risk you, risk me for him? You should know me better than that.’

‘Should I? The Archie I know doesn’t break the rules.’

‘Look – I followed you here from your gaff. I’m sorry. I should have warned you or something.’ Archie had his breath back now, but was still patting his cheekbone gingerly.

‘You know where I live?’

Tom shook his head in disbelief, his anger mounting at this latest revelation.

‘Yeah, well, after our last little conversation I got a bit worried, didn’t I? So I did a bit of homework. There aren’t that many Tom Kirks in London. Your place was the third I tried.’

‘Christ, you even know my name.’ Tom looked around him in concern and lowered his voice to an angry whisper.

‘I hate to tell you this, mate, but I’ve always known. Ever since the first job you pulled for me. You don’t like taking risks and neither do I. Till now, I’ve never had any reason to need it.’

‘Well you’re wasting your time because this isn’t going to change anything. I’ve told you, you’ll have to find someone else to do the job.’

Archie had an awkward look on his face.

‘It’s not that simple.’

‘Sure it is.’ Tom’s eyes narrowed. ‘I didn’t sign up for Cassius. That was your call. Now you deal with it.’

Archie flashed Tom a guilty look.

‘I didn’t sign up to Cassius either. He signed up to you.’

‘What?’ It was Tom’s turn to sound concerned.

‘I got the usual visit from one of his people.’ Archie stared down at the floor as he spoke. ‘Another bloody foreigner. Sometimes I think all the English people have left this country.’ He shook his head. ‘Anyway, he said you were the best, that only you would do for the job, usual spiel. I told him that there’d been a death in the family, that you’d gone abroad for a few months to sort everything out and to find someone else. But he said he’d wait. When you came back it all sort of fell into place.’

‘So you did know that Cassius was behind this job right from the start. You lied to me.’

‘So what?’ said Archie, suddenly defensive. ‘What did you expect me to do? Turn him down?’

‘After all the jobs we’ve done, all the years we’ve worked together, I’d expect you to tell me the truth.’

A mobile phone rang, an annoying, rambling tune that bounced jarringly down a high-pitched scale like a child sliding down stairs. Archie reached into his jacket’s left inside pocket, the lining flashing emerald as he pulled a phone out, checked the number that had flashed up on the screen and killed the call. He looked up.

‘And I’d expect you to follow through on your promises. You signed up to both jobs. You can’t just back out because you feel like it. What do you think this is? A bloody game? I’m trying to run a business here. A business that has made you a very rich man. I find the buyers, you do the jobs. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s worked for the last ten years. Did I deliberately not tell you that the job was for Cassius? Too fucking right I did. A buyer is a buyer. His money is as good as anyone else’s.’

‘It’s always the money with you, isn’t it?’ Tom retorted. ‘Except now you’ve realized that his money isn’t the same. It comes with conditions attached.’

They were both silent and Archie moved closer to Tom, his black brogues sinking into the grass’s soft pile.

‘What’s really going on, Felix? Let’s go for a pint and sort this out.’

‘Felix is gone now. Finished.’

‘It’s just another job. Pack it in after that if that’s what you want.’

‘How long have you been doing this now, Archie? Twenty, twenty-five years?’

Archie shrugged.

‘About that.’

‘You never wonder how you got to this point in your life?’ Tom spoke with a low, urgent voice. ‘About how a different decision here or action there could have totally changed things? Sometimes I think my life has been like a row of dominoes that I knocked over fifteen years ago. I can’t even remember how the first one got toppled and suddenly I’m here.’

Archie gave a short laugh.

‘A thief with a mid-life conscience? Pull the other one.’

A phone rang again, this time with a series of frantic beeps that grew louder and more frequent the longer the phone rang. Archie reached down into his other jacket pocket and drew out a second phone, a thick gold bracelet glinting momentarily as his sleeve rode up his arm. Again he checked the number. This time he answered it.

‘Hello … not right now, no … about five hundred … no … no deal, not unless he takes the lot. All right, cheers.’

Tom waited for him to return the phone to his pocket and look up before continuing.

‘You know what? I’m thirty-five years old and I’ve never spent more than four weeks in the same place since I was twenty.’

Archie snorted.

‘What, am I meant to feel sorry for you or something? That’s how they trained you. It’s part of what makes you so good. It’s part of the job.’

‘There’s more to life than this job, Archie.’