The Lost Relic (2 page)

The man hadn’t changed a great deal physically over the years. He had to be fifty-eight or fifty-nine now, a little more grizzled but still as lean and wiry as a junkyard hound, with the same work-toughened look of a man who’d spent most of his life doing things the hard way. Something inside had softened, though. Those hard grey eyes had a diamond twinkle to them now.

‘It’s grand to see ye again, Ben.’ Boonzie was one of those Scots who could go the rest of his life without ever returning to the old country but would go on wearing his accent proudly like a flag until the day he died.

‘You look good, Boonzie. I can see you’re happy here.’

‘You wouldn’t have believed this dour auld fucker could find true bliss, would you?’

‘When did I ever call you a dour old fucker?’

Boonzie’s grin widened an inch. ‘What brings you all the way out here, Ben? You didn’t say much on the phone. Just that you wanted to talk to me about something.’

Ben nodded. He’d wanted this to be face to face. ‘Here, come in out of the sun.’

The house was as simple inside as it was out, but it was homely and inviting. As Boonzie ushered him through to a sitting room, a door opened and Ben turned to see a deeply tanned Italian woman walking into the room. She stood only chest-high to Boonzie, who put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed her affectionately to his side. The smile she flashed at Ben was broad and generous, like her figure. A mass of curly black hair with just a few silver strands tumbled down onto the shoulders of her blouse.

‘This is my wife Mirella,’ Boonzie said, gazing lovingly down at her.

Ben put out his hand. ‘
Piacere, Signora
.’

‘I am pleased to meet you too,’ Mirella replied in hesitant English. ‘Please call me Mirella. And I must practise my English, as Archibald only speaks Italian to me now that he has learned.’

Archibald! In all the years in the army together, Ben had never asked what his real name was. Ben shot a glance at Boonzie, who was staring in horror at his wife, and couldn’t resist breaking out into a grin that quickly threatened to spill over into a laugh. ‘You and Archibald have a beautiful home,’ he said.

Boonzie soon got over it. While Mirella returned to the kitchen, strictly forbidding any male to enter until dinner was prepared, Ben had a cold bottle of Peroni beer pressed into his hand and was given the tour of the smallholding.

‘Nine acres,’ Boonzie said grandly, sweeping an arm across his land. ‘Place was just a rocky wasteland when I found it. Not what you’d call a farm, but it keeps us going. The greenhouses are for basil, the rest of it is my tomato crop.’

Ben was no farmer. He shrugged and looked blank. ‘Just basil and tomato?’

‘That’s our wee business,’ Boonzie explained. ‘Mirella’s one hell of a cook. Her secret recipes for basil pesto and tomato sauce are like you wouldn’t believe, old son. I grow the stuff, she cooks it all up and we bottle it. Once a week I go out in the van and do the rounds of the local restaurant trade. Campo Basso, the whole area. It’ll never make us millionaires, but look at this place. It’s heaven, man.’

Ben gazed around him and found it hard to disagree. Running his eye across the neat rows of greenhouses, he noticed a gap between them that was just a rectangle of freshly-dug earth marked out with string. A shovel stood propped against a wheelbarrow, beside it a pile of aluminium framing and glass panels wrapped in plastic, some bags of ready-mix cement and a mixer.

‘New greenhouse,’ Boonzie explained, slurping beer. ‘Can’t build enough of the damn things. Need to finish putting it up.’

‘How about I give you a hand right now?’

It took a lot of persuading, but Boonzie finally relented and ran back to the house to fetch another shovel and more beer to keep them cool while they worked. Ben didn’t wait for him. He rolled up his sleeves, grabbed the shovel and dug in.

As the sun rolled by overhead, the greenhouse gradually took shape and Boonzie reminisced about the old days. ‘Remember that time Cole almost shat himself in the boat?’ he smiled as he bolted together a section of frame.

The legendary episode, retold countless times since, had happened during winter training up in Scotland, not long after Ben had joined 22
SAS
. He, Boonzie, and two other guys named Cole and Rowson had found themselves stranded in the middle of a misty Highland loch when the outboard motor on their dinghy had cut out. Drifting through impenetrable curtains of fog, Boonzie in his mischievous way had begun working on unnerving the lads with ripping yarns of the strange, terrible creatures that lurked in the depths. As Cole bent over the motor trying to get it started and muttering irritably at Boonzie to shut up, a black shape had suddenly exploded out of the water right in his face, sending Cole into a screaming panic that almost made him fall overboard. The ‘monster’ had turned out to be a seal.

Ben, Boonzie and Rowson,
SAS
hard guys draped in weapons, trained to kill, had been so weak with laughter that they’d hardly been able to paddle the damn dinghy back to shore.

Those were the stories you carried in your heart. Not like the darker memories, the tales of dead friends, ravaged battle zones, the horror and futility of war. The things nobody reminisced over.

‘So what was it you wanted to talk to me about?’ Boonzie asked as Ben poured a fresh load of cement into the barrow. ‘You didn’t come all the way here to shovel shite.’

‘Mirella seems like a lovely lady,’ Ben replied, avoiding the question.

‘Love at first sight, Ben, if ye could believe in such a thing. There I was in Naples. It was only meant to be a weekend away from getting soaked to the bollocks on some fucking God-forsaken hillside somewhere training a bunch of ignor ant squaddies. I’m sitting in this wee restaurant sucking up spaghetti like there’s no tomorrow and wondering how the fuck I’d got by on pot noodles and ketchup for all those years, when I hear screams from the kitchen and this guy comes running out like the hounds of hell’re tearing at his arse. Then next thing a saucepan flies out the door after him and almost takes my ear off.’

‘You’re kidding me,’ Ben chuckled.

‘I look up,’ Boonzie went on tenderly, ‘and there’s this fuckin’ apparition standing there in the kitchen doorway, still in her apron. Never seen a woman so wild. And I thought, Boonzie,
that’s
the one you’ve been looking for. Three days later, we were engaged and I’d put in my resignation. Hitched by the end of the month. I haven’t been back to Blighty since. And I dinnae miss it, either.’

‘I can see that. You picked a perfect spot, Boonzie.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘How did Mirella take to country life after Naples? She doesn’t feel too isolated out here?’

Boonzie used the back of his shovel to spread wet cement over the footings of the greenhouse. ‘When she first saw the place she was a wee bit worried about intruders and the like. Some friends of hers got burgled down in Ríccia.’ He grinned up at Ben, and his eye sparkled. ‘But she’s got no worries with me, Ben. I have my peace of mind, if you know what I mean.’

Ben did. He didn’t need to ask.

‘What about you?’ Boonzie said.

‘Me?’

‘Aye, did you ever settle down?’

‘I lived in Ireland for a while. Live in France now.’

‘What about a woman?’

Ben hesitated. The face that instantly flashed up in his mind’s eye belonged to a woman called Brooke. He held the image there for a long moment, seeing her warm smile, the auburn curls falling across her eyes as she laughed. He could almost smell her perfume, almost feel his hands stroking her skin. ‘Yeah, there’s someone,’ he said, and then went quiet.

Silence for a beat, and then Boonzie asked, ‘So are you going to tell me what you’ve come all this way for?’

‘It’s not important now.’

‘Ben, you’re like a son to me. Don’t force me to beat it out of you with this shovel.’

Ben gave a shrug. ‘OK. I came here to offer you a job.’

Georgia

Grigori Shikov’s private study was a place few people were allowed to visit. For some it was a privilege; for others a summons to the luxurious boathouse in the villa’s sprawling grounds, escorted by silent men in dark suits, spelled doom.

The dark-panelled room was filled with the treasures Shikov had assiduously collected over forty or more years. The vast antique sideboard behind him was dominated by a magnificent lapis lazuli bust of Frederick the Great. On an eighteenth-century gilt-bronze rococo commode by André-Charles Boulle stood a globe that had once belonged to Adolf Hitler; but it was the extensive collection of artefacts from Imperial Russia, dating between 1721 and 1917, reflecting Shikov’s lifelong passion for what he proudly regarded as his homeland’s golden era, that had earned him the nickname ‘the Tsar’. And it fitted him perfectly.

Of all the historic objects in Shikov’s study, the most physically impressive and intimidating was the immaculate 1910 Maxim water-cooled heavy machine gun, complete with its original wheeled carriage. It occupied the corner of the room, its snout aimed directly towards whomever might be sitting across from him at his massive desk. Between the fixed stare of the machine gun muzzle and the hard glower of the grizzled old mob boss, nobody could fail to be shrivelled to a pulp.

Nobody except Anatoly, Shikov’s only son, who at this moment was lounging in the plush chair as the old man leaned heavily on his desk and outlined the job he wanted done for him.

The third man present at the meeting was Yuri Maisky, Shikov’s nephew. He stood by the desk with his hands clasped behind his back, keeping quiet as his uncle did the talking. Forty-seven years old, small and wiry, Maisky secretly attributed his thinning hair and the deep worry lines on his brow to the strain of working for Shikov’s organisation for most of his adult life. He loved his uncle, but he also feared him.

There weren’t many men whom Maisky feared more than his boss. One was the boss’s son. When the old man looked at Anatoly all he saw was his beloved only child, his pride and joy; Maisky saw a thirty-four-year-old psychopath with a blond ponytail. The face was long and lean and chiselled, the eyes were quick and dangerous. Maisky’s belief that Anatoly Shikov was clinically insane was one he kept closely to himself.

Shikov could sense the tension emanating from his nephew. He knew that most of his associates and employees lived in dread and loathing of Anatoly. That just made him prouder of his only child, although he would never have shown it. Outwardly, he acted gruff and commanding.

‘Are you paying attention?’ Shikov snapped at Anatoly, interrupting himself.

‘Sure.’

‘Have you been drinking?’

‘Of course not,’ Anatoly lied. The Tsar abhorred alcohol. Anatoly did not. He shifted in the chair and glanced down to admire the hand-tooled perfection of his latest purchase, the alligator-skin boots he’d been trying to show off all day by turning up the legs of his Armani jeans. But not even Anatoly would have dared to put his feet up on the old man’s desk. ‘I’m listening. Go on.’

Anatoly had done plenty of jobs for his father, and it was something he enjoyed being called upon to do. Most guys he’d known who had worked for their dads had to go to the office, wear a suit and tie, attend meetings and conferences, sell shit of one kind or another. Not him. He felt highly privileged to be a valued member of the family firm. He and his old buddy Spartak Gourko had once kept a snitch alive for seventeen days under hard torture to extract a list of names of traitors in their organisation. Another time, Anatoly had spread-eagled a man between four posts in the ground, chains around his wrists and ankles, and lit a cigarette as Gourko drove a pickaxe through the guy’s sternum. When old Spartak got going, he was something to behold.

Anatoly enjoyed his work. He never asked questions about his father’s business, partly because you just didn’t ask the Tsar questions about his business, and partly because Anatoly didn’t really give a damn why things got done the way they did. The only questions he generally asked in life were
‘Can I own it?’; ‘Can I fuck it?’; ‘Can I kill it?’
. If the answer to any of the above was negative, he quickly lost interest.

This new job sounded like fun, though.

‘Our sources tell us that the piece of artwork in question will definitely be part of the exhibition,’ Maisky said.

‘And I want it,’ Shikov finished in his gravel voice. ‘I
will
have it.’

The sheaf of papers spread out across the desk was the report on the gallery’s security system, put together by one of the many experts on Shikov’s payroll, a usefully corruptible Moscow security tech engineer who had leaned on contacts in Milan to get the information they needed. The seventeen-page document contained the technical data on the bespoke alarm system recently installed into the gallery building whose photographs, taken with a powerful telephoto lens from a variety of angles just days before, were clipped together in a file next to the report.

Anatoly hadn’t heard the old man doing this much talking in years. Half-listening as his father went on, he flicked through the series of photos. The location in Italy was printed at the bottom. He could see that the gallery was an extension of a much older building. The kind of new-fangled architecture that appealed to arty types. It had only just been built; in the pictures that showed the rear of the gallery, he could see that the groundworks weren’t fully finished, with patches of freshly-dug earth and a half-built ornamental fountain. There was a works van present in two of the pictures, a slightly battered Mercedes with the company name
SERVIZI
GIARDINIERI
ROSSI
just about visible on the side.

Italy
, Anatoly thought. That was cool. He’d never been there before, but currently had two Ferraris, one red, one white, and most of his wardrobe came from there as well. He even spoke a bit of the language, mostly aped from the
Godfather
movies. Girls loved it. Yes, Italy was fine by him. Anatoly could appreciate art, too, as long as it involved depictions of naked female flesh.