The Colours: A spy thriller packed with intrigue and deception Read online

  Clem smiled, not pleasantly. Henri smirked.

  “Well, you make your statement, Gustave,” he said. “You know what I want out of all of this. A hundred thousand Euros and a one-way ticket to Mexico on a clean passport. That’s my price. You take the loot. I’ve no idea how you’re going to shift the kind of stuff we have in there, but that’s your business. Make a statement, sell it, hang it over your bed, I’ll be on the other side of the world! A long way from my debts, and my ex-wife, and you. That’s my price, like I said before.”

  “Relax, Henri, I said we could do that,” said Gustave. “Clem can handle the ID, right, Clem?”

  “Sure, easy.”

  “Now, the money,” continued Gustave. “Of course we’d have to sell something to raise that kind of cash, but your fee would be the first thing covered.”

  “No! No! That’s not what you said, my friend!” Henri, red-faced, was pointing at Gustave. “Up front, you said! I need my fee! I need my fee, you understand, before any of you, any of you, set foot in that Freeport!”

  The room went cold.

  “Freeport?” The word came out of Pippin’s mouth as a whisper. The argument carried on.

  “Without me you don’t even get through the door. I’m the inside guy, remember? The clearing agent! You need me, and I’m telling you there’s no plan unless I have my cash in advance. That stuff in there, it’s worth millions. You put something up front, Gustave, you show willing here, or the project goes nowhere.”

  Gustave held his hands up.

  “Okay, okay. I mean, Henri, do any of us look like millionaires? I’d sell one of my paintings to get you the dough, but current fashion has determined that it isn’t worth anything! If I had something else, something like the stuff in Pippin’s room…”

  He gave Pippin a sideways glance.

  Clem looked thoughtful.

  “What’s he got in there?” he asked Gustave.

  “A Swedish Impressionist painting of a nude woman and child. The artist is Anders Zorn, says Max. Lovely piece of work. Worth a few million at auction. Of course it will probably never get to an auction. You know someone who might be interested?”

  Clem shrugged. “I might. For the right price.”

  Pippin had a sip of his drink. It was pastis, strong and sweet.

  “You’re not seriously thinking about a Freeport, are you?” he asked. “Even the big guys haven’t tried that. Those places are fortresses. You’re up against state-of-the-art technology, twenty-four hour armed security. The value of what’s inside, I mean…”

  He trailed off, six eyes boring into him. Henri turned to Gustave.

  “I thought you said this guy was a pro.”

  Pippin answered him directly. “I do small town museums, private homes. I work on my own. This is like walking into the Louvre! You don’t even realise what you’re up against. If you haven’t spent your whole lives working heists on this level, forget it!”

  An awkward silence. The three of them exchanged glances.

  “Well, that’s a blow,” said Henri. “We can’t do it without him, can we?”

  “No, we can’t,” said Gustave. “We need an agent and a customs officer, Clem is the delivery guy and Henri gets us in. It’s a four-man job. We can’t do it with three.”

  “Listen to me,” said Pippin, not feeling at all sure they would. “There are plenty of takings round here. Those villas along the coast, top of the range real estate. What do you think is inside those places? And they’re empty a lot of the time. The towns round here are stuffed with museums. There must be twenty at least here in Nice. And all the art galleries on top of that. You want to steal art, you can steal art, but a Freeport? Do you know the kind of people who use Freeports? These are the richest people in the world. In the world! They won’t just shrug and walk away, and neither will their insurance companies.”

  It was the most he’d said to anyone in a long time. Another silence, then Gustave.

  “You’re forgetting we have someone on the inside. He’s going to lead us right in.”

  “And then what?” asked Pippin. “He’ll persuade the armed guards to let us walk right out again carrying whatever we want?”

  “We’ll be equipped to handle the armed guards,” was Gustave’s response. “Right, Clem?”

  “Not a problem,” said the gravelly voice.

  Pippin felt his jaw go slack. “Guns? You’re going in there with guns? A stick-up? You’re all mad!”

  “You know, you should be more ambitious, Pippin,” said Gustave, his lips thin. “Swiping candlesticks and chatting up old widows is all very well, but what does it change? This is on a different scale. It’s an opportunity to do something big, something glorious. This will be the biggest heist of your life. You’ll be making history. And getting a message out there. Yes, you’re right, we’re no professional outfit. But imagine the reaction when a bunch of people like us break apart one of these bastions! These prisons, where the human spirit is locked away for the benefit of a tiny elite! We can do this. Who are you to say we can’t? You’ve been under the thumb for too long, creeping about, hiding away in attic rooms. I bet the people who run these places are arrogant. I bet they’re not prepared for a bust like this.”

  “It’s true,” said Henri. “There are holes in the system. For sure.”

  He looked serious. So did Clem. So did Gustave.

  “And don’t forget, Pippin,” said Gustave. “The police might be interested in seeing some of the stash in your room. And to know your real name. The one that’s on your identity card.”

  They stared at each other. There was anger in Gustave’s face, intransigence, passion, bitterness, determination. He wasn’t going to let this go. He wasn’t going to let Pippin go. Pippin was trapped. His stomach flipped at the thought.

  Like it or not, he was going to rob a Freeport.

  Chapter 14

  M. Bernard was in his office with the door closed. That meant he was doing something important that Zoe wasn’t needed for. Zoe didn’t much care, and anyway she had a stack of paperwork to sort out. Something else as well. Another small task which might save everything. Ruin everything, if she were caught.

  There wouldn’t be a better time than this. The girls she shared an office with were out. M. Bernard was behind a door. If he opened it, she had two or three seconds to clear her screen. It was enough. She went into the customer database and clicked on Search. Anna had given her the company name, Smart Russia Holdings, Inc. She typed it in and waited.

  It was there. A corporation based in Monaco. She scrolled through the record. The bank had set up a number of offshore companies for this client, associated with the company. Vanuatu. Cyprus. Seychelles. All channelled through the Monaco entity. But that wasn’t what she needed. Who controlled the company? She clicked through to the incorporation details. The company director was M. Bernard. The company secretary was Zoe. That wasn’t unusual. She’d signed hundreds of those declarations. It was just a formality. The legal agreement set out how the company was managed. That spelled out what they as nominees could and couldn’t do.

  The legal documents were on another drive, but Zoe had access. Zoe had access to most things. Their workstations were tracked; people could look up what she was searching for. If they did, they’d want to know why, but she had a couple of excuses lined up if that happened. She found the right date folder and did a search. What she wanted was in the top ten results. She opened and scrolled down. Pages of legal speak. She skipped to the end. There was the name! Igor Yunayev. The beneficial owner. That was it. Mission accomplished. But the name told her nothing. It was just a name. His Monaco address was there too, a penthouse near the Casino. There was another forwarding address – a company in Zurich. That was where they’d send any mail they got from the offshore domains. They had a process for that: put the mail inside a brown envelope with a fresh address, and send it on. So the offshore accounts couldn’t be linked to him except by whoever opened the envelope.


  She got a notepad and wrote it all down. She closed all the files and slipped the note into her bag. Job done.

  She looked at the notepad on her desk. What if they did that thing where they rub something across it to read what was written on top? She had no idea who would do that, but she’d seen it on crime shows. What if she got mugged when she went to meet Anna? What if someone found the note in her bag? She’d get fired. Maybe even arrested.

  Now she couldn’t think about anything else. She threw the whole notepad into her bag, picked it up and went to the ladies’ room. Inside the cubicle she sat and got out her personals bag. She tore the wrapper off a tampon, pulled out the tampon and put it in the sanitary bin. She took the paper with the name and addresses, rolled it up and put it inside the applicator, the waxy tube. She stuffed some toilet paper down each end and put it back in the wrapper, back in the bag. No mugger was going to look in there. She took the top two pages of the notepad, tore them up and flushed them down the toilet.

  She went back to her desk. Nobody was back yet. She sat and smiled. That was kind of fun. Now for the paperwork. This included the forms for Hector and Pearl, the first stage of their investment of their vacuum cleaner fortune. But her mind went back to Igor Yunayev. He’d done bad things, Anna said. Zoe started to wonder what kind of bad things.

  There was still no one about. On her phone she searched the internet for his name. Nothing of note. She went back to the company database. This time she searched for Yunayev himself, not the company. The results included Smart Russia and a bunch of other entities as well. She looked at those, and the corporations linked with each. Quite a few. She picked a company in the Seychelles that had been established for a while and checked out its bank account details. Because she was a nominee, she could access the online account and had a record of all transactions. As one of the nominees, she would in fact have to authorise any transaction, following instructions from the beneficial owner or someone on his behalf. Though to save time, the paper trail for these authorisations was often created using blank pre-signed forms. She’d signed thousands of blank forms over the years, to speed up processing. It was the kind of thing they did every day. She looked up the current balance. The company account contained just over eleven million US dollars.

  Before that conversation with Anna, those numbers in front of her would just have been dots on the screen. None of her business. She was there to serve the clients and would carry out the task, whatever it was. But eleven million dollars? Where did that kind of money come from, sitting in the account of someone who wasn’t very nice? What did that mean? Was it amassed from bribes, was it stolen, was it drug money? She stared at the figure until her eyes went funny. Or it could be, she kept telling herself, that Anna was spinning her a story and it was just legitimate business earnings.

  She shouldn’t be thinking about this. She should take her four thousand Euros and be grateful. But she started to consider all the other entities that were part of this same web, leading back to that guy. If they were all worth eleven million as well, that would be… she did the sums in her head. A lot. An obscene amount. Hard to imagine how anyone could make a sum like that, then just keep it sitting in these accounts. And why would one client need so many of them? Most of these companies had bearer shares. She knew where all the bearer shares were kept, in the vault. Until now she’d just seen them as pieces of paper, admin, that was all. She’d never thought before about what they were worth.

  The door of M. Bernard’s office opened. She moved her mouse and minimised the screen. He wanted her to bring him a coffee. The door closed again. She heard voices outside; the girls were back. She closed everything down and went to make coffee. But her mind kept turning it all over.

  Back at her desk, finally starting now on the paperwork, her phone vibrated. It was Noah. Everything should be fixed now with Noah, the gang got their money and it was all squared off. Anna’s other two thousand she’d keep somewhere safe. But when Noah’s name appeared on her screen, she had a bad feeling.

  Why was he phoning her now? He should be at college and he knew Zoe was at work.

  She picked up.

  Chapter 15

  It wasn’t a very glitzy building, the Monaco Freeport. Shy, in fact. Fairchild knew all about the new Freeport in Luxembourg, its gala opening resembling a high-profile exhibition; these places were positioning themselves as private galleries, museums and exchanges, all-inclusive fine art hubs for the super-wealthy investor-collector. Monaco was not one of the newer state-of-the-art places, but the agent, a Henri Murat, welcomed him effusively enough in the lobby and took him down in the client elevator.

  From the outside the Freeport looked just like any other commercial building. Regular offices adjoined it on all sides. A goods entrance had security gates but the facility itself wasn’t gated, crammed as it was into the built-up downtown area near the heliport. He remarked on all of this to Murat as they descended.

  “Oh, if you have any concerns whatsoever about security, M. Fairchild, let me give you every reassurance,” said Murat. “The facility allows only biometric access and nobody can come in unless accompanied by a registered clearing agent. Also, we have CCTV,” – he nodded up at the camera in the lift – “recording and monitored live by the security team on the front desk. They always know what’s going on throughout the building.”

  They stepped out of the lift into a clean and shining corridor with white walls and floors and uniform fluorescent light. It stretched away into the distance, heavy fire doors and metal shutters lining each side.

  “Video surveillance here as well, twenty-four hours.” Murat pointed out the cameras above as they walked. Fairchild took careful note, feeling the man’s eyes on him. “Also, the anti-intrusion alarms are individual as well as collective. Separate vaults with additional security are available for special items or collections, as well as the main warehousing areas. We go this way to the viewing rooms. You know we can custom-fit the viewing rooms to suit – bespoke flooring, wall coverings, lighting and so on. Your personal art gallery!”

  Fairchild nodded, examining the substantial metal doors. “Fireproof?”

  “Of course. The fire alarms are highly sensitive.”

  “Sprinklers?” Fairchild made himself look unimpressed.

  “Well, as I’m sure you know, the most modern facilities now draw oxygen out of the room instead of applying water, to protect the artwork. We have that in some of our individual vaults, should it be your requirement. It’s a new feature we’re in the process of installing throughout. As you can see, the floors are dustproof and there’s nothing in this environment that would start or spread a fire.”

  But Fairchild had moved on. “You control the light and humidity, I take it.”

  “Of course. Temperature and hygrometry strictly monitored and kept constant in all areas. Here’s the viewing room. Excuse me.”

  He placed his thumb on the fingerprint pad and leaned into the retinal scan. The door clicked. He opened it. The room inside was small with white walls, a single picture hanging centrally on the largest wall, tastefully illuminated. Even in this limited space it looked too small, too slight for the setting. A three-seat sofa with thin legs was positioned in front of it.

  Fairchild went and stood directly in front of the picture. He knew every millimetre, every colour gradation, every shape on this image. His eye travelled over every part of its surface. The agent stayed back.

  “I don’t want to see any degradation,” said Fairchild. “No fading, no discolouration, no rippling. Perfect condition, front and back.”

  “Monsieur, we store all works upright in the packaging supplied by the client in the climate-controlled warehouse, as I said. It’s not exposed to light, heat or humidity. Of course, if the materials were inferior in the first place, that’s not something we can control. Some of the oils used by Van Gogh, for example,” – Fairchild turned to look at him when he said the name – “have faded with time, such as the chrome yello
w used for his famous Sunflowers. But this is different altogether…it’s an original?”

  Fairchild turned back to the work. “It’s a print. A Japanese woodblock print. Many copies are made from the same woodblocks. That’s the whole idea. So there’s no such thing as an ‘original’.”

  “Of course,” said Murat, backtracking, “but what I mean is, does it date from the time of the artist? Those have more value, do they not?”

  Fairchild kept examining the print as he spoke. “Eighteenth or nineteenth century. Landscape featuring cherry blossom and a bridge. A little-known artist. Printed from the original blocks with some skill. Printer’s name not recorded. But his artistry is just as important as that of the artist himself.”

  “Is it part of a set?”

  “If it is, this is the only piece I know about.”

  Fairchild sat in the middle of the sofa and contemplated the print, as he’d done before so many times. The agent continued to hover. He gave a low cough.

  “We are able to arrange a valuation, if that’s of interest?” he suggested. “In fact, I thought – that’s often the reason why our clients request to view a work.”

  “Well, I just wanted to view it,” said Fairchild without turning round.

  A long pause. Fairchild’s eyes traced the shape of the cherry blossom trees, saw those same shapes hanging up in several of the homes he remembered from childhood – there were so many. He’d stared at this print so many times over the years. What was he not seeing?

  Another slight cough. “If you’re at all interested in selling, that’s something else I could perhaps assist with. A sale doesn’t necessarily mean the work has to be moved. We can just re-categorise it within the Freeport, if the buyer is happy to keep it here. Such transactions attract no tax, no need to declare —”