False Impression (19 page)

‘And you went
along with that?’ said Leapman, his voice rising with every word.

We had no
choice, Mr Leapman. After all, it was her name on the manifest.’

!39

‘
Hi, it’s
Vincent.’

‘Hi. Is it true
what I’ve just heard?’

What have you
heard?’

‘That you’ve
stolen the Van Gogh.’

‘Have the police
been informed?’

‘No, he can’t
risk that, not least because our shares are still going south and the picture
wasn’t insured.’

‘So what’s he up
to?’

‘He’s sending
someone to London to track you down, but I can’t find out who it is.’

‘Maybe I won’t
be in London by the time they arrive.’

Where will you
be?’

‘I’m going
home.’

‘And is the
painting safe?’

‘Safe
as houses.’

‘Good, but there’s
something else you ought to know.’

What’s that?’

‘Fenston will be
attending your funeral this afternoon.’

The phone went
dead.
Fifty-two seconds.

Anna replaced
the
receiver,
even more concerned about the danger she
was placing Tina in. What would Fenston do if he were to discover the reason
she always managed to stay one step ahead of him?

She walked over
to the departures desk.

‘Do you have any
bags to check in?’ asked the woman behind the counter. Anna heaved the red box
off the luggage cart and onto the scales. She then placed her suitcase next to
it.

‘You’re quite a
bit over weight, madam,’ the woman said. I’m afraid there will be an excess
charge of thirty-two pounds.’ Anna took the money out of her wallet while the
woman attached a label to her suitcase and fixed a large ‘fragile’ sticker on
the red box.

‘Gate
forty-three,’ she said, handing her a ticket. ‘They’ll be boarding in about
thirty minutes. Have a good flight.’

Anna began
walking towards the departures gate.

Whoever Fenston
was sending to London to track her down would be landing long after she had
flown away. But Anna knew that they only had to read her report carefully to
work out where the picture would be ending up. She just needed to be certain
that she got there before they did. But first she had to make a phone call to
someone she hadn’t spoken to for over ten years, to warn him that she was on
her way. Anna took the escalator to the first floor and joined a long line
waiting to be checked through security.

‘She’s heading
towards gate forty-three,’ said a voice, ‘and will be departing on flight BA
272 to Bucharest at eight forty-four Fenston squeezed himself into a line of
dignitaries as President Bush and Mayor Giuliani shook hands with a selected group
who were attending the latest service at Ground Zero.

He hung around
until the President’s helicopter had taken off and then walked across to join
the other mourners. He took a place at the back of the crowd and listened as
the names were read out.

Each one
followed by the single peal of a bell.

Greg Abbot.

He glanced
around the crowd.

Kelly
Gullickson.

He studied the
faces of the relations and friends who had gathered in memory of their loved
ones.

Anna Petrescu.

Fenston knew
that Petrescu’s mother lived in Bucharest and wouldn’t be travelling to the
service. He looked more carefully at the strangers who were huddled together,
and wondered which one of them was Uncle George from Danville, Illinois.

Rebecca Rangere.

He glanced
across at Tina. Tears were filling her eyes, certainly not for Petrescu.

Brulio
Real Polanco.

The priest bowed
his head. He delivered a prayer, then closed his Bible and made the sign of a
cross. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,’ he declared.

‘Amen,’ came back
the unison reply.

Tina looked
across at Fenston, not a tear shed, just the familiar movement from one foot to
the other – the sign that he was bored.

While others
gathered in small groups to remember, sympathize and pay their respects,
Fenston left without commiserating with anyone. No one else joined the chairman
as he strode off purposefully towards his waiting car.

Tina stood among
a little group of mourners, although her eyes remained fixed on Fenston. His
driver was holding open the back door for him. Fenston climbed into the car and
sat next to a woman Tina had never seen before. Neither spoke until the driver
had returned to the front seat and touched a button on the dashboard to cause a
smoked-glass screen to rise behind him.

Without waiting,
the car eased out into the road to join the midday traffic. Tina watched as the
chairman disappeared out of sight. She hoped it wouldn’t be long before Anna
called again – so much to tell her, and now she had to find out who the waiting
woman was.

Were they discussing
Anna? Had Tina put her friend in unnecessary danger? Where was the Van Gogh?

The woman seated
next to Fenston was dressed in a grey trouser suit. Anonymity was her most
important asset. She had never once visited Fenston at either his office or his
apartment, even though she had known him for almost twenty years. She’d first
met Nicu Munteanu when he was bagman for President Nicolae Ceau§escu.

Fenston’s
primary responsibility during Ceau§escu’s reign was to distribute vast sums of
money into countless bank accounts across the world – backhanders for the
dictator’s loyal henchmen.

When they ceased
to be loyal, the woman seated next to Fenston eliminated them, and he then
redistributed their frozen assets.

Fenston’s
speciality was money laundering, to places as far afield as the Cook Islands
and as close to home as Switzerland. Her speciality was to dispose of the
bodies – her chosen instrument a kitchen knife, available in any hardware store
in any city, and unlike a gun not requiring a licence.

Both knew,
literally, where the bodies were buried.

In 1985,
Ceaugescu decided to send his private banker to New York to open an overseas
branch for him. For die next four years,

Fenston lost
touch with the woman seated next to him, until in 1989 Ceaugescu was arrested
by his fellow countrymen, tried and finally executed on Christmas Day. Among
those who avoided the same fate was Olga Krantz, who crossed seven borders
before she reached Mexico, from where she slipped into America to become one of
the countless illegal immigrants who do not claim unemployment benefit and live
off cash payments from an unscrupulous employer. She was sitting next to her
employer.

Fenston was one
of the few people alive who knew Krantz’s true identity. He’d first watched her
on television when she was fourteen years old and representing Romania in an
international gymnastics competition against the Soviet Union.

Krantz came
second to her team-mate Mara Moldoveanu, and the
press were
already tipping them for the gold and silver at the next Olympics.
Unfortunately, neither of them made the journey to Moscow. Moldoveanu died in
tragic, unforeseen circumstances, when she fell from the beam attempting a
double somersault and broke her neck. Krantz was the only other person in the
gymnasium at the time. She vowed to win the gold medal in her memory.

Krantz’s exit
was far less dramatic. She pulled a hamstring warming up for a floor exercise,
only
days before the Olympic team was
selected. She
knew she wouldn’t be given a second chance.

Like all
athletes who don’t quite make the grade, her name quickly disappeared from the
headlines. Fenston assumed he would never hear of her again, until one morning
he thought he saw her coming out of Ceaugescu’s private office. The short,
sinewy woman might have looked a little older, but she had lost none of her
agile movement, and no one could forget those steel-grey eyes.

A few
well-placed questions and Fenston learned that Krantz was now head of
Ceausescu’s personal protection squad. Her particular responsibility: breaking
selected bones of those who crossed the dictator or his wife.

Like all
gymnasts
,.
Krantz wanted to be number one in her
discipline. Having perfected all the routines in the compulsory section –
broken arms, broken legs, broken necks – she moved on to her voluntary
exercise, ‘cut throats’, a routine at which no one could challenge her for the
gold medal. Hours of dedicated practice had resulted in perfection. While
others attended a football match or went to the movies on a Saturday afternoon,
Krantz spent her time at a slaughter house on the outskirts of Bucharest.

She filled her
weekend cutting the throats of lambs and calves.

Her Olympic
record was forty-two in an hour. None of the slaughtermen reached the final.

Ceau§escu had
paid her well. Fenston paid her better. Krantz’s terms of employment were
simple. She must be available night and day, and work for no one else. In a
space of twelve years, her fee had risen from $250,000 to $1 million. Not for
her the handto-mouth existence of most illegal immigrants.

Fenston
extracted a folder from his briefcase and handed it across to Krantz without
comment. She turned the cover and studied five recent photographs of Anna
Petrescu.

Where is she at
the moment?’ asked Krantz, still unable to disguise her mid-European accent.

‘London,’
replied Fenston, before he passed her a second file.

Once again she
opened it and this time extracted a single colour photograph. “Who’s he?’ she
enquired.

‘He’s even more
important than the girl,’ replied Fenston.

‘How can that be
possible?’ Krantz asked as she studied the photo more carefully.

‘Because he’s
irreplaceable,’ Fenston explained, ‘unlike Petrescu.

But whatever you
do, don’t kill the girl until she’s led you to the painting.’

‘And if she
doesn’t?’

‘She will,’ said
Fenston.

‘And my payment
for kidnapping a man who has already lost an ear?’ enquired Krantz.

‘One
million dollars.
Half in advance, the other half on the day you deliver him to me, unharmed.’

‘And
the girl?’

‘The
same tariff, but only after I have attended her funeral for the second time.’
Fenston tapped
the screen in front of him and the driver pulled in to the kerb. ‘By the way,’
said Fenston, I’ve already instructed Leapman to deposit the cash in the usual
place.’

Krantz nodded,
opened the door, stepped out of the car and disappeared into the crowd.

‘
Goodbye, Sam,’
said Jack, as his cellphone began to play the first few bars of ‘Danny Boy’. He
let it go on ringing until he was back out on East 54th Street because he
didn’t want Sam to overhear the conversation. He pressed the green button as he
continued walking towards 5th Avenue. “What have you got for me, Joe?’

Tetrescu landed
at Gatwick,’ said Joe. ‘She rented a car and drove straight to Wentworth Hall.’

‘How long was
she there?’

‘Thirty minutes,
no more. When she came out, she dropped into a local pub to make a phone call
before travelling on to Heathrow, where she met up with Ruth Parish at the
offices of Art Locations.’ Jack didn’t interrupt. ‘Around four, a Sotheby’s van
turns up, picks up a red box...’

‘Size?’

‘About three
foot by two.’

‘No prizes for
guessing what’s inside,’ said Jack. ‘So where did the van go?’

‘They delivered
the painting to their West End office.’

‘And
Petrescu?’

‘She goes along
for the ride. When the van turned up in Bond Street, two porters unloaded the
picture and she followed them in.’

‘How long before
she came back out?’

‘Twenty minutes,
and this time she was on her own, except she was carrying the red box. She
hailed a taxi, put the painting in the back and disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’
said Jack, his voice rising. “What do you mean, disappeared?’

“We don’t have
too many spare agents at the moment,’ said Joe.

‘Most of our
guys are working round the clock trying to identify terrorist groups that might
have been involved in Tuesday’s attacks.’

‘Understood,’
said Jack, calming down.

‘But we picked
her up again a few hours later.’

‘Where?’ asked
Jack.

‘Gatwick
airport.
Mind you,’ said Joe, ‘an attractive blonde carrying a red box does have a
tendency to stand out in a crowd.’