LITMIR.BIZ

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      Back in his father’s office, which he’d now taken for his own, he let out a long, slow breath and raked his hands through his hair as he considered that vault. He’d spent the last week trying to familiarise himself with his father’s many assets, and then attempt to determine just how illegal they were. The vault and its contents was yet another complication in this sprawling mess.

      Outside, the Mediterranean Sea sparkled jewel-bright under a lemon sun, but the island felt far from a paradise to Khalis. It had been his childhood home, but it now felt like a prison. It wasn’t the high walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass that entrapped him, but his memories. The disillusionment and despair he’d felt corroding his own soul, forcing him to leave. If he closed his eyes, he could picture Jamilah on the beach, her dark hair whipping around her face as she watched him leave for the last time, her aching heart reflected in her dark eyes.

       Don’t leave me here, Khalis.

       I’ll come back. I’ll come back and save you from this place, Jamilah. I promise.

      He pushed the memory away, as he had been doing for the last fifteen years. Don’t look back. Don’t regret or even remember. He’d made the only choice he could; he just hadn’t foreseen the consequences.

      ‘Khalis?’

      Eric shut the door and waited for instructions. In his board shorts and T-shirt, he looked every inch the California beach bum, even here on Alhaja. His relaxed outfit and attitude hid a razor-sharp mind and an expertise in computers that rivalled Khalis’s own.

      ‘We need to fly an art appraiser out here as soon as possible,’ Khalis said. ‘Only the best, preferably someone with a specialisation in Renaissance paintings.’

      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.

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