Crown Jewel Read online

  “Just give me the number.”

  Simon dialed as Martin read out the digits. Mr. Rafael Harriri, billionaire trading magnate, favorite son of Beirut, and collector of fine European automobiles, answered immediately.

  “Rafael? Simon Riske…Yes, it is a surprise…All good with you?” Pleasantries were exchanged with Simon explaining that no, he was not married, no children were on the way, legitimate or not, and that his business was doing nicely indeed. “Listen, Rafael,” Simon said when decorum permitted. “I’ve got a piece of rough news.”

  Martin sank lower in the chair. An unpleasant keening noise emanated from him as if he were suffering from a painful stomach ailment.

  “I’m afraid I’m stealing your Daytona,” Simon went on. “Yes, that’s right. I’m stealing it.”

  Martin dropped a hand from his eye. The moaning abated.

  “By the purest coincidence, I ran into your son this morning. He pulled up at a light next to me. I didn’t recognize him, but I knew the car in an instant.” Simon met Martin’s gaze. “It’s never looked better. Absolutely showroom condition. I realized then and there that I needed to take it with me to Monaco next weekend for the Concours. I got your boy’s attention—fine-looking young man, I might add—and, well…he’s sitting across the desk from me in my office as we speak. I know it’s asking a lot and on short notice, but what do you think? May I take it to Monte? Of course, we’ll put it on a truck there and back…No, no, I’ll pay the fees. I insist…Good. It’s settled, then.”

  Simon talked for another ten minutes before ending the call.

  Martin stared at him, dumbstruck. “Why?”

  “Everyone needs a guardian angel once in a while.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Risky.”

  Simon winced. “The e is silent.”

  “If there’s ever anything I can do…”

  Simon stood. “You can start by paying up. Did we settle on twenty thousand pounds?”

  Martin took the request in stride. “Do you accept cash?”

  Chapter 10

  Of course it was Karl Marshal who saw her first.

  It was during rugby practice two days earlier. Conditioning was finished and the team was practicing ball skills prior to a scrimmage. Coach MacAndrews had taken Robby to one side to tutor him on how to kick a drop goal, a skill that Robby had yet to master.

  “Drop. Skip. Kick,” said Coach MacAndrews.

  Robby did his best to follow the instructions. He held the big ball in his hands, dropped it onto the ground, and kicked it. Each time, the ball dribbled a few meters down the field and he would rush to retrieve it.

  “Dammit, man,” said the coach, squaring Robby’s shoulders toward the goalposts and walking him through the motions yet again. “Do as I say. Drop. Skip. Kick.”

  Robby made another vain attempt. The ball skidded off the side of his shoe and landed with a splat in the mud. The others laughed but Robby paid them no heed. Years ago, when he was little, that kind of teasing would have left him bawling. He’d been very good at crying. At some point, however, he’d stopped being affected by loud voices and heated remonstrations. Now he viewed the situation from a safe and objective distance. He was a twelve-year-old boy with limited athletic skills who could not kick a rugby ball. With practice, he would learn. The thing was to keep trying. A voice he was sure belonged to his father egged him on. One day, the voice said, he’d kick the farthest field goal that Scottish bastard MacAndrews had ever seen.

  “Marshal!” called the coach. “Show the little prince how to do it.”

  But for once Karl Marshal was not paying attention. He was standing well away from the rest of the boys, looking across the field toward the wanderweg, or footpath, that started in the village of Zuoz and led up the hillside past the athletic field, all the way to the peak of Piz Griatschouls, the mountain the boys called the Puke-erberg when they had to run up it each and every week at the end of Saturday morning practice.

  No one was thinking about running up the Puke-erberg right then.

  To a man, they were looking at the same thing that had captivated Karl.

  That “thing” was a woman, who at that moment was drawing alongside the field and was no more than twenty meters away. Or, Robby thought, about the same distance as a decent punt.

  It was not uncommon for people to walk past the field during practice. You could set your watch by Frau Baumgartner, the headmaster’s wife, who passed by when the bell tolled three o’clock on her daily trek to the monastery (to combat her thrombosis) and returned when the bell tolled four. In fact, so many people trafficked the wanderweg at all times of day that no one paid them any attention.

  Until her.

  The woman was tall and blond with a figure to satisfy every teenage boy’s desires. She was wearing tight blue jeans and an open-necked shirt covered by a quilted down vest. The shirt was of interest because it fluttered in the late afternoon breeze and afforded them a telling view of her cleavage. Finally, the woman was beautiful. There was no other way to put it. She was not merely sexy or pretty. She was jaw-droppingly, gut-wrenchingly, drop-dead gorgeous.

  Or, as Karl Marshal more succinctly put it later, “She was heinous.”

  No one spoke to her that first day. The entire team, including Robby, froze in their tracks and stared. She didn’t say anything either. In fact, it seemed that she didn’t even notice they were there. She glanced over their heads at the school buildings that stood on the hillside behind them but didn’t register their communal and, to be honest, rude stare. Even Coach MacAndrews was struck dumb. He forgot to yell at Karl for failing to pay attention, though a few seconds later (upon coming to his senses), he did grab him by the ear and order him to knock out twenty burpees.

  She came each day thereafter, always during practice, always wearing the quilted vest, her shirt buttoned just as the boys liked it. If they were scrimmaging, she would stop to watch and, by her rapt attention, appeared to know something about the sport.

  It was Stavros Livanos who first spoke to her. And it was because of him that they learned she was not Swiss at all, or French, as many of them guessed, but German.

  “Hey!” he’d shouted. “Wanna play?”

  And when she didn’t respond, he repeated the question in German.

  “Hey du, möchst du mit uns spielen?”

  Stavros was Greek, but he’d grown up in St. Moritz and spoke with an Engadiner’s bergschnur.

  “Nein, danke,” she answered. “Sie Buben sind viel zu stark und zu schnell für mich.”

  No, thank you. You boys are much too strong and fast for me.

  She spoke perfect high German. Moreover, Robby recognized the accent as being from Hesse, the region in central Germany where his own family came from.

  It was at that moment that he fell hopelessly in love with her.

  He was not alone. Since that first sighting, the mysterious woman was the subject of conversations from morning till night. Had she moved to the village? To whom did she belong? There was no chance someone so goddess-like could be unattached. Was she perhaps the rakish art teacher Signor Marelli’s mistress? Or a famous actress hiding out from the paparazzi? Or had a billionaire established residence nearby, and she was his companion? There was no shortage of guesses.

  In the boys’ locker room, a challenge was issued. Who among them was brave enough to ask her?

  Karl Marshal spoke up immediately, vowing to ask that very afternoon. Stavros Livanos promised to beat him to the punch. In seconds, every boy was shouting that it would be him. There had never been a room full of braver men. But ninety minutes later, when her blond head appeared behind the soccer goal and she came into full view wearing that vest and that shirt, with the wind behaving as instructed, and she walked alongside the field, no one said a word. Not Karl. Not Stavros. Not anyone.

  Instead, it was Robby who, emboldened by their Teutonic kinship, asked.

  “Guten Tag,” he said in a firm voice. “Entschuldigung. Wie heissen
sie?”

  Good afternoon. Excuse me. What is your name?

  The woman stopped and, seeing that the scrimmage had come to a halt and that the entire team was hanging on her response, grinned. It was a warmhearted, approachable grin, and every boy on the field smiled in return. Coach MacAndrews, too.

  “Mein Name ist Elisabeth,” she replied.

  My name is Elisabeth.

  And then she did what she did that caused Robby’s heart to burst from his chest and his feet to become glued to the ground.

  “Wie heisst du?” she asked.

  What’s your name?

  “Robert,” he replied, with the bearing and diction he’d been taught his entire life.

  “Allo, Robert,” she said. “Es hat mich sehr gefreut ihnen kennenzulernen. Bis morgen dann. Tschuss.”

  Hello, Robert. I’m very pleased to meet you. Until tomorrow, then. Bye-bye.

  Robby nodded, unable to come up with anything resembling an answer. It was no wonder he’d forgotten a thought he’d had only ten minutes before, when he’d gazed at the monastery and realized that he had not seen the two strange men since Elisabeth first arrived.

  Chapter 11

  Paris was behind him, as was the wait at the Channel tunnel, the industrial plain of the north, the furious traffic surrounding the French capital. He was in open country now, old France, the France of the Three Musketeers and Jean Valjean and Joan of Arc. It was the France of a thousand villages and hamlets, of rolling hills captained by church spires, of wheat fields recently harvested and medieval forests never touched, of towering limestone cliffs and lazy meandering rivers. He drove with the windows down, the wind warm and thick with the invigorating scent of tilled earth.

  It was an eight-hundred-mile trip better broken up into two days with an overnight stop in Beaune or Dijon. He wasn’t averse to a nice meal and a glass of decent red, and both cities offered numerous appealing opportunities. But Toby Stonewood had been adamant about getting started as quickly as possible and Simon had required a full day to ready himself for the job.

  The past twenty-four hours had given him a crash course in the dark arts of expert cheating, and that, along with D’Art’s plea that Simon not let Lloyd’s of London down, had left him consumed with seeing the job through to a successful end. And so it would be a one-day drive: the kind where your butt becomes glued to the seat and everything beyond your window melts into a blur.

  Everything except the silver Audi fastback that had been following him at a safe distance for the past two hours.

  Simon’s preparations had begun just after one o’clock in the afternoon the day before, when he presented himself at the front door of a modest country estate in Surrey, the kind of place that Jane Austen aspired to, an hour south of London. He was expected, and the large man who answered the door frisked him a little less roughly than he might have before leading him upstairs into a dimly lit, leathery office.

  “Well, well. If it isn’t Mr. Posh himself. Fifty quid says you left one of your fancy cars at home.”

  Simon squinted to see through a pall of cigar smoke thick as London fog. “Hello, Eddie. Considered opening a window?”

  “I pay top dollar for my Cubanos. I like to enjoy them. Now sit down, stop complaining, and tell me why you’re slumming.”

  His name was Edward Margrave, but he was known as Eightball Eddie, and he owned the concession to sell slot machines to pubs across the United Kingdom. Eightball Eddie was seventy, give or take, a sharply dressed bantamweight with graying hair swept off his forehead, a hearty laugh, and the worst false teeth in London. But it wasn’t the teeth you noticed. It was his eyeglasses: oversized black frames with convex lenses thick as a phone book that magnified his eyes to what appeared to be twice their size. He’d explained his condition to Simon once a few years ago, but the crux of it was that even with the glasses, he viewed the world through what amounted to a soda straw.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” said Simon. “I know you’re busy.”

  “Oh yes,” said Eddie. “Queuing at the door, they are. But I do appreciate your manners. You were always polite to a fault. I never forgot that. Others weren’t.”

  Before Simon became an investigator, he’d worked as a private banker at a major international bank in the City. Eightball Eddie was a client who’d followed him into his new line of work. There were two things to know about Eddie. One, he hated leaving his home. Not only was he going blind: he was agoraphobic. And two, he loved gambling. At one point, he’d been a professional billiards player, a hustler on the side, hence the nickname. He didn’t just bet on pool. He bet on everything, always, and for large sums of money.

  “Go on, then,” said Eddie. “You’ve got me all hot and bothered. You didn’t come all the way down here to see if I was still kicking.”

  “I need your help,” said Simon. “For a job. I’m happy to pay a consulting fee.”

  Eddie waved away the offer. “Wouldn’t think of it. Not after all the money you made for me, not to mention the other shenanigans. I should be paying you for what you done.”

  Simon preferred not to think of the “other shenanigans.”

  “Baccarat,” he said, after he was seated.

  “Toff’s game,” said Eddie. “Requires no skill whatsoever. Fucking chimp can win. What do you want to know about it?”

  “Just one thing,” said Simon. “How do you cheat?”

  Simon left Eightball Eddie’s country estate a good deal wiser about the game of baccarat and outfitted with a new understanding of the lengths to which some people will go—and the methods they may use—to earn a dishonest dollar. In his pocket, he carried a list of items required to suss out the person or, according to Eightball Eddie, the persons (no fewer than three and, more likely, as many as a dozen) who were stealing from the Société des Bains de Mer in Monaco.

  To obtain the items on that list, Simon traveled north back across the Thames, then due west toward Heathrow, leaving the M4 in Southall and turning up Havelock Road. To his left stood the gurdwara, the monumental temple catering to the city’s Sikh population. To look around him, he was in India, not England. Storefronts advertised fabrics and spices and money remittance services in Punjabi, with the English translations below. Pedestrians wore turbans and saris. Even the air smelled of curry and spices.

  He continued past Manor House Grounds and found a parking space on a leafy street of row houses. The business entrance was at the rear. A teenage boy in a hoodie, cell phone in hand, answered the door. “Hello, Simon.”

  “Shouldn’t you be at school?” Simon asked.

  “I passed my A levels in May,” said Arjit Singh.

  “You’re only fourteen.”

  The boy shrugged, eyes going to the phone in his hand.

  “And now?” asked Simon. “Off to Oxford?”

  “I’m going to the States. Caltech.”

  “Not alone?”

  “I have family in Fullerton, wherever that is. I’ll live with them.” He opened the door all the way and allowed Simon to pass. “Dad’s in his workshop.”

  Simon passed through the kitchen and opened the door to a steep staircase leading to the cellar. A rotund man in a dark lab coat stood at a workbench, a stainless steel attaché case open before him. Like all Sikhs, he wore a turban and kept his beard long and neatly groomed.

  “I think it presumptuous of you to expect me to drop everything the moment you call and devote myself to your odd requests,” said Vikram Singh.

  “And how are you today, Dr. Singh? Or is it professor? I always forget.”

  “Behind on a number of projects. You are not my only client.”

  “Just your favorite.”

  “Hardly.”

  “I pay cash.”

  “Your saving grace.”

  Simon approached the engineer and gave his shoulder a friendly tug. “Congratulations on Arjit’s being accepted at Caltech.”

  Singh said in a morose tone, “It isn’t MIT, but it will have to
do.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  Singh shook his head dismissively. By the look of anguish clouding his features, Simon knew he wasn’t simply playing down his son’s accomplishment. He meant it.

  “Everything you need is here,” said Singh. “If Mr. Margrave’s assumptions are correct, you should have little problem identifying the culprits.”

  To Simon’s eye, the case’s contents looked modest and unimpressive. Singh removed each item and explained its name, function, and operating instructions. The tools were not designed to help someone spot a cardsharp, but to flush out a disciplined and technologically sophisticated team of professionals. When he’d finished, Simon no longer thought the devices were either modest or unimpressive.

  “Da hag?” he asked—the two words of Punjabi he knew.

  “I won’t bother correcting your pronunciation, but you said that you love me.”

  “How much?” repeated Simon, sticking to his mother tongue.

  “Twenty.”

  “Twenty thousand pounds?”

  “And that’s with the cash discount.”

  Simon took the roll of bills Martin Harriri had given him that morning and pressed it into Singh’s hand. Easy come, easy go. “And Vikram,” he said in parting, “Caltech is amazing.”

  That was twenty-four hours earlier.

  Simon’s eyes returned to the rearview mirror. The silver Audi was still there, maintaining a neutral distance behind him. British plates. Lone driver, at least as best as Simon could tell.

  “No one will know about this,” Lord Toby had stated, as gravely as if swearing an oath. “Just the men in this room.”

  Simon studied the car in his rearview a moment longer, then downshifted and floored it.

  It was time to find out if Lord Toby Stonewood was a man of his word.

  Chapter 12

  Simon yanked the wheel to the right, crossing two lanes of traffic and taking the off-ramp for Voiron. The Audi sped past, as Simon expected it would. Any professional would do the same. If the car’s presence was in any way related to Simon’s assignment, there would surely be another car farther back. Mounting an operation to cheat a casino out of hundreds of millions of dollars was a feat requiring impeccable planning, discipline, and execution. Setting up a “three-car follow” was a piece of cake in comparison.