Artemis put on a set of surgical gloves, teasing the painting from the cylinder. It plopped on to the table in a tight roll, but sprang loose almost immediately; it hadnt been in the tube long enough to retain the shape.
Artemis spread the canvas wide, weighing the corners with smooth gel sacs. He knew immediately that this was no fake. His eye for art took in the primary colours and the layered brushwork. Herves figures seemed to be composed of light. So beautifully were they painted, the picture seemed to sparkle. It was exquisite. In the picture, a swaddled baby slept in its sun-drenched cot inside an open window. A fairy with green skin and gossamer wings had alighted on the window sill and was preparing to snatch the baby from its cradle. Both of the creatures feet were on the outside of the sill.
It cant go inside, muttered Artemis absently, and was immediately surprised. How did he know that? He didnt generally voice opinions without some evidence to back them up.
Relax, he told himself. It was simply a guess. Perhaps based on a sliver of information he had picked up on one of his Internet trawls.
Artemis returned his attention to the painting itself. He had done it. The Fairy Thief was his, for the moment at any rate. He selected a surgical scalpel from his kit, scraping the tiniest sliver of paint from the pictures border. He deposited the sliver in a sample jar and labelled it. This would be sent to the Technical University of Munich, where they had one of the giant spectrometers necessary for carbon dating. Artemis had a contact there. The radiocarbon test would confirm that the painting, or at least the paint, was as old as it was supposed to be.
He called to Butler, in the suites other room.
Butler, could you take this sample over to the university now? Remember, only give it to Christina, and remind her that speed is vital.
There was no answer for a moment, then Butler came charging through the door, his eyes wide. He did not look like a man coming to collect a paint sample.
Is there a problem? asked Artemis.
Two minutes earlier, Butler had been holding his hand to the window, lost in a rare moment of self-absorption. He glared at the hand, almost as if the combination of sunlight and staring would make the skin transparent. He knew that there was something different about him. Something hidden below the skin. He felt strange this past year. Older. Perhaps the decades of physical hardship were taking their toll on him. Though he was barely forty, his bones ached at night and his chest felt as though he was wearing a Kevlar vest all the time. He was certainly nowhere near as fast as he had been at thirty-five, and even his mind seemed less focused. More inclined to wander Just as it is doing now, the bodyguard scolded himself silently.
Butler flexed his fingers, straightened his tie and got back to work. He was not at all happy with the security of the hotel suite. Hotels were a bodyguards nightmare. Service lifts, isolated upper floors and totally inadequate escape routes made the principals safety almost impossible to guarantee. The Kronski was luxurious, certainly, and the staff efficient, but that was not what Butler looked for in a hotel. He looked for a ground-floor room, with no windows and a fifteen-centimetre-thick steel door. Needless to say, rooms like this were impossible to find, and even if he could find one, Master Artemis would undoubtedly turn up his nose at it. Butler would have to make do with this third-storey suite.
Artemis wasnt the only one with a case of instruments. Butler opened a chrome briefcase on the coffee table. It was one of a dozen such cases that he held in safety deposit boxes in some of the worlds capitals. Each case was full to bursting with surveillance equipment, counter-surveillance equipment and weaponry. Having one in each country meant that he did not have to break Customs laws on each overseas trip from Ireland.
He selected a bug sweeper and quickly ran it around the room, searching for listening devices. He concentrated on the electrical appliances: phone, television, fax machine. The electronic waffle from those items could often drown a bugs signal, but not with this particular sweeper. The Eye Spy was the most advanced sweeper on the market and could detect a pinhole mike half a mile away.