The Palace Read online

  “Where is this coming from?” asked Simon, setting his pint on the counter.

  Rafael de Bourbon stood next to him, nearly half a foot taller, tie loosened, glaring down at him like the devil himself. “I like to know who I can trust.”

  “And you can’t trust me?”

  “Difficult when I’m not even sure who I’m talking to.”

  Simon looked into his friend’s eyes. Usually, they sparkled with mischief and good humor. At the moment, they were dull and steadfast.

  The pub was packed to overflowing, mostly youngish men and women from the myriad financial institutions that made their home in the City. The air was warm and fuggy, the din loud enough to make conversation a chore.

  When Simon said nothing, Rafa slapped a fat envelope against Simon’s chest.

  “For me?”

  “Not for you,” said Rafa. “About you. Addressed to no less than Sherlock herself.”

  Simon took the envelope, noting its girth and heft. “Sherlock” was the nickname given to the bank’s head of human resources, or HR, a rail-thin, intense, and feared woman named Edwina Calloway who wielded absolute power over the trajectory of one’s career.

  “I nicked it,” Rafa went on. “Go ahead. Take a look. Nothing you don’t know. A chronicle of your life, or maybe I should say your secret life…Monsieur Ledoux.”

  At the sound of his former name, Simon’s stomach dropped. Rafa was right. He was a liar. In a way, his entire life—or the part of it he’d fashioned with careful planning, dedication, and unremitting toil since he’d left France—was a lie. A hard-won lie, but a lie nonetheless.

  Simon studied the institutional envelope, the words “Ministère de la Justice” stamped on the upper-left-hand corner, an address in Paris beneath it. The envelope had been opened and not much care given to conceal the fact.

  “My first job every morning is to open Sherlock’s mail and sort it according to priority,” said Rafa. “Hope you don’t mind that I gave it a read. Decided that Sherlock didn’t really need to see it.”

  Simon looked through the papers. He needed five minutes to revisit the worst episode of his life. It was all there. His criminal record courtesy of the Marseille police, the highlight saved for the final page: felony armed robbery and attempted murder of a police officer. There were copies of court transcripts, the order for his delivery into the French penal system at Les Baumettes, a maximum-security prison located on the outskirts of Marseille.

  “Is Ledoux your real name?” asked Rafa. “I’ve always thought Riske sounded rather too clever.”

  “My mother’s married name, second time around. Sorry, I really am Simon Riske.”

  He replaced the papers and handed Rafa the envelope back.

  “Yours to keep,” said Rafa. “We sure as hell can’t let Sherlock find them.”

  “But how…?” Simon narrowed his eyes, shaken by the turn of events.

  “You’re a rock star. You’re being put up to work as an assistant to the vice chairman. Sherlock decided to do a little more digging to make sure they had the right man and requested your transcript from Sciences Po. Somewhere there was mention of both names, Riske and Ledoux. Her curiosity was piqued.”

  “And now? She’ll be expecting something.”

  “Relax. No one has ever accused the French government of being efficient. We’ll have some fun. Copy the stationery, write our own reply. ‘Nothing found. All a clerical error.’ She won’t look any further.”

  Simon tried to share in his friend’s jocularity. He couldn’t. He felt as if he’d stepped off the curb while looking in the wrong direction and only narrowly avoided being run over by a city bus. Had Rafa not been assigned to HR, had he not broken every rule imaginable and risked his own job to steal the envelope, Simon would have been summarily dismissed from the bank. There would have been no question of a letter of recommendation. His career in finance would have been over before it started.

  “Thank you.” Simon could think of no other words.

  “De nada,” said Rafa, gifting him with a pat on the shoulder.

  “I owe you.”

  “You would have done the same,” said Rafa. “Cheers, then. To both of us.” Then after they’d taken a swig: “I have a confession to make, too. I’m a liar, just like you. No jail. We called it el reformatorio.”

  “You?”

  “Don’t tell me you thought I was a saint. I’m insulted.”

  “You don’t have to worry on that account,” said Simon, feeling a little better already.

  “When I was sixteen I was sent to el reformatorio. Half boarding school, half prison. For teenage boys who’d gotten into trouble with the law one too many times and whose parents couldn’t or wouldn’t buy them out. I wasn’t really bad, I just liked to get into a little trouble. Pinch a bottle of beer. Break a window. Borrow a Vespa. Finally they got sick of my nonsense and sent me to the reformatorio. When I left two years later, I took two things with me.” Rafa rolled up his sleeve, revealing a colorful tattoo. “This lovely piece of artwork and a vow never to set foot in that place again. I got a job as a runner at a bank in Madrid paying spit and a little change. I never looked back.” Rafa pointed at a sliver of blue ink extending from beneath Simon’s sleeve. “You too, I see. What’s that one?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, let Rafa see.”

  Simon rolled up his left sleeve, revealing a larger, more intricate, and colorful tattoo of a grinning skeleton with its arms around an anchor, surrounded by crashing waves.

  “‘La Brise de Mer,’” said Rafa, reading the words scrolled across the anchor.

  “It means ‘sea breeze.’ Corsican mafia.”

  “You? Riske…the teacher’s pet? You were in the mafia?”

  “Made man at eighteen. Youngest ever. Guess that’s something to be proud of.”

  “Now it all makes sense,” said Rafa. “So how did you get here…from there?”

  “Long story.”

  “I’m from the land of Cervantes. We love long stories.”

  “This is one you can’t tell anyone.”

  “We’re brothers, no?”

  Simon rolled down his sleeve and buttoned the cuff. “Give me a cigarette.”

  “You don’t smoke.”

  “I don’t. Ledoux did.”

  Rafa shook loose a cigarette and offered the pack to Simon. He rolled it between his fingers but refused the lighter. Holding it was enough to trigger the memories. And so Simon told him.

  How after his father’s death—Simon never said “suicide”—he was sent to live with his mother in the South of France. He was the sixth child and eighth body in a house built for four. His stepfather viewed the new arrival strictly as another mouth to feed, one that didn’t speak French and looked nothing like him. Marseille was a violent city, especially the northern districts. Simon, always a quick learner, adapted. By fourteen, he had forsaken homework for a job acting as a lookout for the small-time crime bosses who ruled the government housing blocks that sprung from the steep hillside behind his home. By sixteen, he was no longer a watcher but a participant. His specialty was boosting automobiles. No one could break into a car and have it running and on the road faster than Simon Ledoux.

  At eighteen, after taking part in a series of audacious heists targeting jewelry stores, banks, and armored cars, he came to the attention of Il Padrone, a fifty-year-old Corsican who ruled organized crime in Marseille with an iron fist. Il Padrone gave Simon his own crew, and Simon delivered in spades, turning over hundreds of thousands of euros to his boss in short order. He learned how to use an AK-47. He also learned how to drink and abuse drugs on a daily basis. Life was good and getting better.

  At nineteen, he planned his most daring heist yet, taking down a government payroll delivery to the French navy. Unbeknownst to him an informer had alerted the police. When it was over, four of his men were dead. Simon took three bullets before laying down his weapon. His sentence was six years. He spent the first
two in solitary confinement, imprisoned in an underground cell measuring ten feet by six without a window and lit by a weak incandescent bulb twenty-four hours a day. A fellow prisoner saved him from insanity. He was an elderly man, a fallen Jesuit priest sentenced to life imprisonment, for what, he never would say. Simon called him “the monsignor.”

  The priest gave Simon the education he had so assiduously avoided yet secretly yearned for. Classes were taught through a tunnel the width of his fist, which he and the monsignor had bored in the rotting concrete and plaster that divided their cells. Math, history, philosophy, art, Latin, modern languages. No fee was extracted, save Simon’s promise that one day he would leave his old life behind. The monsignor eventually told Simon he had only one thing of value to his name. A treasure held inside a safe-deposit box at a prominent bank in London. The monsignor had no key, no proof that it belonged to him. He couldn’t remember the number, just the name and branch of the bank. To gain access to it, Simon took the only route he could. He earned a university degree, then obtained employment at the bank. One day he would find out what was inside.

  All this he’d told Rafa.

  Slowly, Simon returned to the present. An urgent energy ran through him. He looked at the envelope Dickie Blackmon had left him.

  Long ago a debt had been incurred, and damn the Spaniard, despite his desperate circumstances, for not reminding Simon of it, for not shouting that he was owed and that it was Simon’s obligation to repay him. A man incarcerated in a foreign prison thousands of miles from his home, facing a sentence that would surely kill him, had taught Simon the ultimate lesson. How to behave as a gentleman.

  The monsignor would approve. Cervantes, as well.

  Chapter 9

  Umbria, Italy

  Luca Borgia stood on the terrace of Castello dell’Aquila, one leather boot on the stone retaining wall, as he overlooked the rugged, densely forested hills of the Nera Valley. It was old country, dark, imposing, essentially untouched since man had come to the Apennine Peninsula millennia before. It was a land of myth and folklore, of legend and superstition.

  The Borgia family had owned most of the valley and adjoining countryside for five hundred years. He could recite the names of the ten oldest families in the region, most of whom had lived here as long as his own. Many worked for the Borgias, on farms growing olives and hunting truffles, on ranches breeding cattle and sheep, in towns and cities toiling in factories owned by the Borgias. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him. It was a land of long tradition and prized heritage. Proud country for proud Italians.

  As the sun edged above the horizon, mist shrouded the treetops, snaking through ravines and rising up the steep mountainsides. Borgia turned his head, catching the far-off growl of an approaching vehicle. Flashes of silver and black blinked from beneath the canopy. He checked his wristwatch, his father’s Omega worn strapped atop his cuff. His visitors were on time. One would expect no less from the German military.

  Borgia slipped his sterling-silver cigarette case from the pocket of his riding jacket and, using a manicured thumbnail, flipped the catch. He favored English cigarettes, Silk Cuts, a reminder of his time at Cambridge, limiting himself to ten a day. As he lit the cigarette, his phone rang.

  “Guten Morgen, Herr General,” he answered in perfect High German.

  “Guten Morgen,” answered the German. “We will be there in ten minutes.”

  “You’ll be the first to arrive,” said Borgia. It was ever so. First, the Germans, and last, his own Italians. “The coffee is hot, and Mariella has prepared a plate of your favorite pastries.”

  “Thank you, Luca. Prato Bornum.”

  “Prato Bornum.”

  Borgia ended the call. By now he’d spotted the convoy of vehicles climbing the switchbacks leading to the town of Castelluccio, and he set off across the terrace. He was a tall man, fifty years old, wiry black hair swept off his forehead and kept in place by a generous handful of pomade. He walked with an aristocrat’s bearing, shoulders back, jaw raised, and had an aristocrat’s features, too: prominent cheekbones, a Roman nose, steadfast mouth, cleft chin adorning an indomitable jaw. His skin was tan and weathered, his forehead carved with deep lines. One eye was blue, the other brown. This never failed to provoke a moment of discomfort when first meeting someone. His profile belonged on a valuable coin. A gold aureus, if he had his choice. He was not a handsome man, thank God, but there was no mistaking his vigor. So when he smiled and broke into a spontaneous laugh, which he did often, it came as a surprise. One didn’t expect such warmth from so fierce and commanding a figure.

  Borgia walked through the stable, stopping at the ties where a groom curried his horse, Charlie, and instructing him to add an extra measure of alfalfa to the animal’s breakfast. Charlie, short for Charlemagne, a fitting name for a Hanoverian gelding that stood eighteen hands and thought himself a king. Borgia ran a hand along the horse’s muzzle and kissed his nose. After a last pat, he left the stable, walking briskly through the rose garden. In the cool morning air, his breath was visible, his boots raising puffs of dust from the gravel path.

  Inside the mudroom, he pulled off his boots and threw them in the corner to be cleaned and polished. A servant waited with his espresso. He drank it and replaced it on her tray before running upstairs to his living quarters. He showered and dressed, a bespoke midnight-blue suit of Vitale Barberis Canonico wool, white shirt, no necktie. He took care with his grooming and appearance. A splash of cologne…

  His phone rang. A familiar name on the screen. He put the call on speaker.

  “Danni,” he said, impressed. “A woman who keeps to a schedule. You may be the first.”

  “Your boy is a smooth operator. He knew we’d come looking.”

  “How so?”

  “He fragmented his hard drive. It’s like throwing a hand grenade into a china store.”

  “Has that stopped you before?”

  “Nothing stops us. It has, however, slowed us down.”

  “I thought I’d made the urgency of the situation clear. Perhaps I’m speaking with the wrong person.”

  “You have my father’s number.”

  “Please excuse me, Danni. I didn’t mean to insult you.”

  “Ah, Luca, you never have to worry about that.”

  Borgia fought down a bolt of anger. The woman was impudence itself. “Am I permitted to inquire about the length of the delay?”

  “Twenty-four hours.”

  “That long?”

  “I can tell you one thing we’ve learned. I don’t think you will find it good news. The last action Mr. De Bourbon performed before destroying his computer was to send an email from his personal address. It appears he’d opened a message from a Mr. Paul Malloy approximately ninety seconds before. Does the name mean anything?”

  “Go on.”

  “There was a packet attached.”

  “A packet?”

  “Files. We have no idea what they contained. However, if you were worried about the theft of corporate materials—”

  “How many?”

  “Impossible to say.”

  “Can you at least tell me who he sent the files to?”

  “For the moment, no, but soon.”

  The sound of footsteps congregating in the welcome hall drifted into the bedroom. The Germans had arrived. General Hugo Voss, chief of the country’s elite counterterrorism force, GSG 9, along with his deputy, and Renata König, the leader of the New Germany party, a potent voice from the Right.

  “Give me a name, Danni. I want to know to whom De Bourbon sent that message and what exactly was in that packet.”

  Borgia ended the call before she could respond. Take that. He walked to the door and peered downstairs, glimpsing several dark uniforms. More guests would be arriving at any moment. It was imperative none found out about De Bourbon and the threat he posed. He closed the door and placed another call.

  “Any change?”

  “Stubborn as ever,” said Colonel Albert
Tan. “Let me arrange for an accident. A fight in the cell. An unstable prisoner. These things happen.”

  “And then? It’s urgent we recover the information De Bourbon stole.”

  “I can be quite convincing.”

  “I have no doubt of that, but I prefer a lighter hand. At least for now.”

  It wasn’t just a question of recovering the information De Bourbon had stolen. Borgia needed to know the actions he’d taken to carry out his threat against Malloy. First and foremost, if he’d sent sensitive information to a journalist.

  “I beg you to reconsider.”

  Borgia could hear the disappointment in Tan’s voice. The man was a thug. Like a carpenter, give him a hammer, and, well…easy enough to guess the results. Better to go the other way. The carrot, not the stick.

  “For now, we play the game by De Bourbon’s rules. Let him believe we are cooperating. There will be more than enough time to deal with him after we get back what’s ours.”

  Borgia ended the call. He reconsidered his words to Colonel Tan. If anyone were to take care of De Bourbon, it would not be the Thais. They were impetuous, undisciplined, and messy. God forbid De Bourbon’s name appeared in the newspaper beneath the headline FORMER EUROPEAN BUSINESSMAN MURDERED IN THAI JAIL CELL. Borgia might not know much about computers, but he knew more than enough about the Internet and the word “viral.”

  A steadier hand was needed.

  Still, it was time to start cleaning things up before they got any messier.

  A last call.

  The man answered on the first ring. Sometimes Borgia felt certain he possessed a sixth sense.

  “Kruger.”

  “Hello, my friend,” said Borgia. “Ready for a short trip? I hear Switzerland is beautiful in the spring.”