“I’d tell him to have a safe trip.”
“Then please do so. And you might want to mention that you have a fifty-million-euro surprise for him. That should brighten his mood. But don’t give away too much. We wouldn’t want to spoil it.”
Olivia thumbed a response into the text box and held it up for him to see.
“Nicely done.”
She tapped it into the ether.
“Time for you to be leaving,” said the Israeli. “We wouldn’t want your carriage to turn into a pumpkin, would we?”
Outside, a few windblown clouds were moving swiftly across the evening sky. Nicolas Carnot spoke only French during the drive south to the Baie de Cavalaire, and only of Monsieur Antonov and the paintings. They were to be delivered to Villa Soleil immediately upon receipt of the money. Madame Sophie, he said, had already chosen the spot where they would hang.
“She loathes me,” said Olivia.
“She’s not so bad once you get to know her.”
“Is she French?”
“What else would she be?”
The Antonovs lived on the western side of the bay, Jean-Luc and Olivia in the east. As they were nearing the little Spar market on the corner of the boulevard Saint-Michel, Monsieur Carnot instructed her to stop. He squeezed her hand tightly and in English assured her that she had nothing to fear, that she was doing the right thing. Then he bade her a pleasant evening and, smiling as though nothing unusual had occurred that afternoon, climbed out. When she saw him last it was in the rearview mirror, speeding in the opposite direction atop a small motorcycle. Fleeing the scene of a crime, she thought.
Olivia continued eastward along the rim of the bay and a few minutes later entered the luxurious villa she shared with the man whom she had just betrayed. In the kitchen she poured herself a large glass of rosé and carried it outside onto the terrace. Through the sharp glare of the setting sun she could make out the faint outlines of Monsieur Antonov’s monstrous villa. Presently, her mobile phone trembled. She stared at the screen. home in five . . . what’s the surprise? “The surprise,” she said aloud, “is that your Russian friend and his bitch of a wife just wrote me a check for fifty million euros.” She said it again and again, until even she believed it was true.
35
Marseilles, France
At 11:45 the following morning, the sum of fifty million euros appeared in the account of Galerie Olivia Watson, 9 Place de l’Ormeau, Saint-Tropez, France. The money did not have to travel far, as both sender and recipient did their banking at HSBC on the boulevard Haussmann in Paris. By midafternoon it was resting comfortably in a renowned Swiss bank in Geneva, in an account controlled by JLM Enterprises. And at five o’clock, two paintings—one by Guston, the other by Basquiat—were delivered by unmarked van to Villa Soleil. Olivia Watson followed in her black Range Rover. In the entrance hall she passed Christopher Keller, who was on his way out. He kissed her lavishly on both cheeks, commented on her appearance, which was dazzling, and then climbed onto his Peugeot Satelis motorbike. A moment later he was racing westward along the shore of the Mediterranean.
It was nearly dusk by the time he reached the outskirts of Marseilles. The violent drug gangs thrived in the city’s northern banlieues, especially in the housing projects of Bassens and Paternelle, but Keller approached through the more tranquil suburbs to the east. The Tunnel Prado-Carénage delivered him to the Old Port, and from there he made his way to the rue Grignan. Slender and straight as a ruler, it was lined with the likes of Boss, Vuitton, and Armani. There was even a JLM jewelry boutique. Keller swore he could detect the sour odor of hashish as he passed.
As he continued across the city center, into the quartier of Marseilles known as Le Camas, the streets turned dirty and mean, and the shops and cafés catered to a decidedly immigrant and working-class clientele. One such enterprise, located on the ground floor of a graffiti-splattered building overlooking the Place Jean Jaurès, peddled discount electronic goods and mobile phones to a largely Moroccan and Algerian customer base. Its proprietor, however, was a Frenchman named René Devereaux. Devereaux owned a number of other small businesses in Marseilles—all of which were cash-oriented, some in the category loosely defined as adult entertainment—but the electronics shop served as something like his operational headquarters. His office was on the second floor of the building. The room contained no telephone or electronic devices of any kind, a curious set of circumstances for a man who purportedly sold such modern conveniences for a living. René Devereaux didn’t care much for the telephone, and it was said that he had never once personally sent an e-mail or text message. He communicated with his business associates and subordinates only in person, oftentimes in the gritty square or at a streetside table at Au Petit Nice, a reasonably pleasant café located a few paces from his shop.
Keller knew all this because René Devereaux was a prominent figure in the world he had once inhabited. Everyone in the French criminal underground knew that Devereaux’s real business was drug trafficking. Not just street-level trafficking, but trafficking on a continent-wide scale. The French police were likely aware of it, too, but Devereaux, unlike many of his competitors, had never spent a single day behind bars. He was a made man, an untouchable. Until tonight, thought Keller. For it was René Devereaux’s name that Olivia Watson had spoken in the safe house outside Ramatuelle. Devereaux was the one who made the trains run on time, the one who moved the hashish from the docks of southern Europe to the streets of Paris and Amsterdam and Brussels. The one, thought Keller, who knew all of Jean-Luc Martel’s secrets. They would have only one chance to get him cleanly. Fortunately, they had at their disposal some of the best field operatives in the business.
Keller left the motorbike at the edge of the Place Jean Jaurès and walked to Devereaux’s shop. Peering at the merchandise in the cluttered display window he saw two men, both French in appearance, observing him from their outpost behind the counter. On the second floor, light burned behind the shuttered French door that gave onto the crumbling balcony.
Keller turned away and continued along the street for about fifty meters before stopping next to a parked van. Giancomo, Don Orsati’s errand boy, sat behind the wheel. Two other Orsati operatives were crouched in the rear cargo compartment, smoking nervously. Giancomo, however, appeared outwardly calm. Keller suspected it was for his benefit.
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“About twenty minutes ago. He stepped onto the balcony to have a cigarette.”
“Are you sure he’s still in there?”
“We have a man watching the back of the building.”