The Darkest of Secrets

Eric raised his eyebrows, looking both intrigued and impressed. ‘What are you saying? The vault had paintings?’

‘Yes. A lot of paintings. Paintings I think could be worth millions.’ He sank into the chair behind his father’s desk, gazed unseeingly at the list of assets he’d been going through. Real estate, technology, finance, politics. Tannous Enterprises had a dirty finger in every pie. How, Khalis wondered, not for the first time, did you take the reins of a company that was more feared than revered, and turn it into something honest? Something good?

You couldn’t. He didn’t even want to.

‘Khalis?’ Eric prompted.

‘Contact an appraiser, fly him out here. Discreetly.’

‘No problem. What are you going to do with the paintings once they’re appraised?’

Khalis smiled grimly. ‘Get rid of them.’ He didn’t want anything of his father’s, and certainly not some priceless artwork that was undoubtedly stolen. ‘And inform the law once we know what we’re dealing with,’ he added. ‘Before we have Interpol crawling all over this place.’

Eric whistled softly. ‘This is one hell of a mess, isn’t it?’

Khalis pulled a sheaf of papers towards him. ‘That,’ he told his assistant and best friend, ‘is a complete understatement.’

‘I’ll get on to the appraiser.’

‘Good. The sooner the better—that open vault presents too much risk.’

‘You don’t actually think someone is going to steal something?’ Eric asked, eyebrows raised. ‘Where would they go?’

Khalis shrugged. ‘People can be sly and deceptive. And I don’t trust anyone.’

Eric gazed at him for a moment, his blue eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘This place really did a number on you, didn’t it?’

Khalis just shrugged again. ‘It was home,’ he said, and turned back to his work. A few seconds later he heard the door click shut.

‘Special project for La Gioconda.’

‘So amusing,’ Grace Turner said dryly. She swivelled in her chair to glance at David Sparling, her colleague at Axis Art Insurers and one of the world’s top experts on Picasso forgeries. ‘What is it?’ she asked as he dangled a piece of paper in front of her eyes. She refused to attempt to snatch it. She smiled coolly instead, eyebrows raised.

‘Ah, there’s the smile,’ David said, grinning himself. Grace had been dubbed La Gioconda—the Mona Lisa—when she’d first started at Axis, both for her cool smile and her expertise in Renaissance art. ‘Urgent request came in to appraise a private collection. They want a specialist in Renaissance.’

‘Really?’ Her curiosity was piqued in spite of her determination to remain unmoved, or at least appear so.

‘Really,’ David said. He dangled the paper a bit closer. ‘Aren’t you just a teeny bit curious, Grace?’

Grace swivelled back to her computer and stared at the appraisal she’d been working on for a client’s seventeenth century copy of a Caravaggio. It was good, but not that good. It wouldn’t sell for as much as he’d hoped. ‘No.’

David chuckled. ‘Even when I tell you they’ll fly the appraiser out to some private island in the Mediterranean, all expenses paid?’

‘Naturally.’ Private collections couldn’t be moved easily. And most people were very private about their art. She paused, her fingers hovering over the keys of her computer. ‘Do you know the collector?’ There were only a handful of people in the entire world who owned significant collections of Renaissance paintings of real value, and most of them were extremely discreet … so discreet they didn’t want appraisers or insurers looking in and seeing just what kind of art they had on their walls.

David shook his head. ‘Too top secret for me. The boss wants to see you about it ASAP.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked, and David just grinned. Pressing her lips together, she grabbed the printout he’d been teasing her with and strode towards the office of Michel Latour, the CEO of Axis Art Insurers, her father’s oldest friend and one of the most powerful men in the art world.

‘You wanted to see me?’

Michel turned from the window that overlooked the Rue St Honoré in the 1st arrondissement of Paris. ‘Close the door.’ Grace obeyed and waited. ‘You received the message?’

‘A private collection with significant art from the Renaissance period to be appraised.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘I can think of less than half a dozen collectors who fit that description.’

‘This is different.’

‘How?’

Michel gave her a thin-lipped smile. ‘Tannous.’

‘Tannous?’ She stared at him, disbelieving, her jaw dropping before she thought to snap it shut. ‘Balkri Tannous?’ Immoral—or perhaps amoral—businessman, and thought to be an obsessive art collector. No one knew what his art collection contained, or if it even existed. No one had ever seen it or even spoke of it. And yet the rumours flew every time a museum experienced a theft: a Klimt disappeared from a gallery in Boston, a Monet from the Louvre. Shocking, inexplicable, and yet the name Tannous was always darkly whispered around such heists. ‘Wait,’ Grace said slowly. ‘Isn’t he dead?’

‘He died last week in a helicopter crash,’ Michel confirmed. ‘Suspicious, apparently. His son is making the enquiry.’

‘I thought his son died in the crash.’

‘His other son.’

Grace was silent. She had not known there was another son. ‘Do you think he wants to sell the collection?’ she finally asked.

‘I’m not sure what he wants.’ Michel moved to his desk, where a file folder lay open. He flipped through a few papers; Grace saw some scrawled notes about various heists. Tannous suspected behind every one, though no one could prove it.

‘If he wanted to sell on the black market, he wouldn’t have come to us.’ There were plenty of shady appraisers who dealt in stolen goods and Axis was most assuredly not one of them.

‘No,’ Michel agreed thoughtfully. ‘I do not think he intends to sell the collection on the black market.’

‘You think he’s going to donate it?’ Grace heard the disbelief in her voice. ‘The whole collection could be worth millions. Maybe even a billion dollars.’

‘I don’t think he needs money.’

‘It doesn’t have to be about need.’ Michel just cocked his head, his lips curving in a half-smile. ‘Who is he? I didn’t even know Tannous had a second son.’

‘You wouldn’t. He left the Tannous fold when he was only twenty-one, after graduating from Cambridge with a First in mathematics. Started his own IT business in the States, and never looked back.’

‘And his business in the U.S.? It’s legitimate?’

‘It appears to be.’ He paused. ‘The request is fairly urgent. He wishes the collection to be dealt with as soon as possible.’

‘Why?’

‘I can certainly appreciate why an honest businessman would want to legally off-load a whole lot of stolen art quite quickly.’

‘If he is honest.’

Michel shook his head, although there was a flicker of sympathy in his shrewd grey eyes. ‘Cynicism doesn’t suit you, Grace.’

‘Neither did innocence.’ She turned away, her mind roiling from Michel’s revelations.