“Tens of millions?” Vinnie looked up from the small chest of drawers he was searching through. “That’s a shitload of money.”
“Actually, it’s reported that the largest terrorist group has made upwards of eight hundred and fifty million euros for their kitty.” Daniel walked into the room and his eyes widened as he looked around. Pink followed Daniel in and immediately reached for his phone and started taking photos.
“That amount has not been verified.” Colin looked at the photos again. “The players in the black market for these antiquities have learned how to cover their tracks well enough that all we have is a lot of speculation.”
But I could see that Colin believed there was a level of truth in it.
“Well, shit!” Colin put on his driving gloves and moved one of the photos. “The Roubaud.”
“What are you talking about now, Frey?” Manny elbowed Colin out of the way to look at the photo.
Colin lifted the photo away from the pinboard. “This is Roubaud’s The Battle of Elisavetpol.”
“The painting we found under Jace’s bed? Why would she have a photo of it?”
“Good question, Millard.”
“Well, ask it to your Johan Klein.” Manny lowered his chin to glare at Colin. “Soon.”
“I’ve left him another message. Now I have to wait.” Colin took a step back, his eyes not leaving the photo. “What was so important about this painting?”
“And what the hell have we walked into?” Manny looked around, his brow furrowed. “What do you think about all this, Doc?”
Now that there was more space in front of the chart, I moved closer and studied it. Colin was silent next to me as he looked at photos of the artefacts that were to the right of the chart. Above the chart, lines from the squares connected to photos of documents. I squinted as I looked at the documents, but couldn’t make out exactly what kind of documents these were.
Next to two photos of a set of documents was one of a few handwritten notes and a photo of a man walking past a café. A twine linked that photo to two more photos of the same man, one where he was sitting in a restaurant, the other of him talking on his smartphone while waiting at a pedestrian crossing. His face was either turned away or somehow obscured in all the photos. Clearly, he was important in Adèle’s business model. We needed to know who this was. It was going to be a challenge since we wouldn’t be able to use facial recognition software on these photos.
There was an overwhelming wealth of information here and my mind was rushing to process as much as possible. But everything stilled in me when I looked at the photos to the left of the chart. I pointed. “These wine bottles are from the same winery as those Jace took.”
“What on God’s green earth?” Manny stepped closer and I moved away. He looked at the three photos, each a full image of a wine bottle. He turned to Colin. “Since when did Iran become a wine-making country?”
“Iran?” Colin’s eyes widened and stepped closer to look at the photos. “My God, this wine was imported from Iran. And these artefacts were stolen from a private collection in Iran. And look at the photos of the people next to the artefacts. See this man?” He pointed at what looked like a security video screenshot of an overweight, middle-aged man. “He’s Pascal Mayer and well known in black-market art circles for his collection of stolen masterpieces.” He pointed at three other photos. “The same with Fabien Riner, Benjamin Picon and Damian Leveaux. These people have fences, dealers and criminal defence lawyers on speed-dial.”
“Look what I found.” Vinnie smiled when we all turned around. He raised the wine bottle he held in his gloved hand. “Shall we make a toast?”
Colin frowned. “Are there more bottles?”
“Not wine bottles.” He tilted the bottle and looked at the label. “Only this one. It comes from that cupboard.”
As one, we looked at the other cupboard, three of the four sliding doors pushed aside. Unlike the cupboard with the organisational chart, that one had many shelves and drawers. Manny grunted. “We’re going to have to log all of this and go through everything.”
“Better get your pencil sharpened, old man.” Vinnie pointed his thumb at the shelves behind him. “There are millions of perfume bottles.”
“That’s impossible. There is not enough space for—” I frowned and gave Vinnie an irritated look. “You were exaggerating.”
“Only by a bit.” Vinnie showed no sign of contrition. “There are seriously loads of perfume bottles.”
“Not all of them have perfume.” Pink frowned as he opened another box and took out an empty bottle. “Weird.”
I stared from the empty bottle in Pink’s hand to the wine bottle in Vinnie’s and made a decision. The empty perfume bottles were an oddity that had to wait.
I reached into my handbag and took one of the three sets of latex gloves I always had with me. Once both my hands were covered, I took the wine bottle from Vinnie. The screenshots I’d been able to get from Jace’s glasses hadn’t been good enough to give any details of the labels. On that footage the label had appeared to have a solid background, but looking at it now, I was intrigued by the many lines crossing the olive-green background.
It was only a shade or two darker, which gave it a watermark quality. Persia Winery was written in flowing letters above a solid dark green silhouette of a basket of grapes. Colin stood next to me, also staring at the bottle. “I think the wine should be tested.”
“Now we’re talking.” Vinnie smiled. “Let me go get the glasses.”
“Not like that, Vin.” Colin looked at Daniel. “Did you guys find any wine bottles like this one upstairs?”
Daniel shook his head. “We were talking about the lack of alcohol in the house. We looked through all the cupboards and there’s not one single bottle of any kind of liquor up there. Not even a beer in the fridge.”
The expression on Colin’s face caught my attention. “What are you thinking?”
“A few years ago, there was a case in Italy where a Brazilian man was caught at Fiumicino airport trying to smuggle liquid cocaine in his running shoes.”
“His shoes?” Manny’s frown deepened. “How?”
“He’d injected it into the soles of the shoes to look like shock-absorbing gel.”
“How did they catch him?” Pink asked.
“Stupidity.” Colin huffed. “He packed six pairs of running shoes in his suitcase and nothing else.”
“Idiot.” Vinnie rolled his eyes. “He deserved to be caught.”
Colin lifted his index finger. “Those six pairs of shoes contained a street value of more than two million euros.”
“Wow.” Pink looked suspiciously at the bottle in my hands. “That’s a lot of money.”
Colin was also looking at the bottle. “These bottles come from Iran. It’s right next to Afghanistan, which produces opium that goes into ninety percent of the world’s heroin at the moment. This bottle could contain liquid heroin or cocaine.”
“Bloody hell.”
I tilted the bottle, but the green glass didn’t reveal anything about the colour of the content. “How much heroin could be in this bottle?”
“I would reckon around two hundred grams.” Vinnie smiled when I jerked. “With a street value of around sixty to seventy thousand euros. Per bottle. And if this is quality heroin, it can be diluted and sold for much, much more.”
I handed the bottle to Vinnie and glared at it. “It could kill so many people.”
“Two that we know about already.” Pink shook out an evidence bag and held it out to Vinnie. “I’ll get this to the lab as soon as we’re done here. It won’t take long to test for illegal substances.”
“So where the bloody hell are the other bottles? Jace said Adèle had taken four crates. And he took the other eight.”
“Which are now in a basement somewhere,” Vinnie added.
Manny nodded, walked to the desk and rested his hip against it. “Doc, how many bottles in one of those crates?”
“Twelve bottles.” It had been clear from Jace’s video. “That means Adèle took forty-eight bottles.”