LITMIR.BIZ

      Prague, Czech Republic

      March 18

      9:13 a.m.

      Galina Krause kept her hand inside her coat, where a compact Beretta Storm lay holstered against her ribs. Its barrel, specially filed to obscure its ballistics, was still warm. She would be gone long before the police discovered the body of the Guardian’s courier, Jaroslav Hájek, or the single untraceable bullet in his head.

      She disliked killing old men, but the courier had refused to reveal his Italian contact, although his flat did contain a collection of antique hand clocks, which was likely a clue to how the message had been transferred. In any case, a dead courier working with the Guardians was never a bad thing, and one obstacle less in her overall journey.

      As Galina walked the winding, snow-dusted streets of Prague’s Old Town, she passed through deserted alleys and passages barely wider than a sidewalk. Finally, she entered into the somber “antiquarian district.” This section of Prague deserved its designation. A neighborhood forlorn, yet rich in history and the smell of a past carelessly abandoned by modernity. For that reason alone, she adored it.

      She halted three doors down from a tiny low-awninged shopfront on Bĕlehradská Street. Antikvariát Gerrenhausen appeared as it must have generations ago: crumbling, forever in shadow, hauntingly like those sad, cluttered storefronts in old photographs of a forgotten, bygone era.

      A man entered the street from the far end. He was tall. His close-cropped white hair cut a severe contrast with the stark black of his knee-length leather coat.

      Markus Wolff had recently returned from the United States.

      She moved toward him, though their eyes would not meet until the standard subterfuge was completed. Wolff approached her, passed by, and then, after scanning the street and its neighboring windows for prying eyes, doubled back to her.

      “Miss Krause.” He greeted her in a deep baritone, a voice that was, if possible, icier than her own. He unslung a black leather satchel from his shoulder and set it on the sidewalk at her feet. “The remains of the shattered jade scorpion from Mission Dolores. The Madrid servers can perhaps make sense of them.”

      “Excellent,” she replied. “Do you have the video I asked you to take in San Francisco?”

      “I do.” He pressed the screen of his phone.

      A moment later, a file appeared on hers. She opened it. A boy, seven and three-quarters years of age, ran awkwardly across a field of green grass, kicking a soccer ball. The camera zoomed in on his face. The tender smile, the pink cheeks, the lazy blond curls flying in the wind. She paused it. The boy was oblivious to his own mortality.

      “Splendid,” she said sullenly. “Wolff, take note of this street. This shop.”

      “I have.”

      “You may be asked to return here in the weeks to come,” she said. “For now, I want you to look into the Somosierra incident. Ease my mind.”

      “The stranded bus driver and student,” he said. “I will search for physical evidence.”

      She felt suddenly nauseated and wanted the conversation to end. “In six days’ time I will be in Istanbul. We will meet there.”

      Markus Wolff nodded once and left.

      Man of few words, Galina thought. How refreshing. Shouldering the leather satchel and drawing a cold breath, she entered the shop. A cadaverous gentleman, the seventh generation of Gerrenhausens, stood hunched and motionless behind a counter cluttered with books and rolled maps, yellowed file folders, and an assortment of wooden boxes. He listened as a gramophone on the shelf behind him emitted a scratchy yet plaintive string quartet movement. She recognized it as Haydn. The D-minor andante.

      “You have the item I requested?” she asked. The sound of her voice was nearly swallowed by the yearning violins and the thick, paper-muffled air in the old shop.

      The slender hands of the emaciated proprietor twitched, while his lips formed a smile as thin as a razor blade. “It has just arrived, miss.” He reached under the counter and withdrew a small oak box, burnished nearly black with age. He opened the lid.

      Nestled deeply in maroon velvet was a delicate miniature portrait of a kind common in the sixteenth century.

      The framed circular painting, two inches in diameter, was a product of Hans Holbein the Younger. “Incorrectly dated 1541, it was created actually between 1533 and 1535, during the painter’s years in England at the court of King Henry the Eighth, as you know,” the proprietor said.

      The portrait featured the face and shoulders of its sitter, a brilliant bloom of flesh in a setting of velvety black and midnight blue. It was a three-quarter view, in which the sitter, aged somewhere between seventeen and nineteen, gazed off, a sorrowful expression on the face, eyes dark, lips pursed, almost trembling. It was not a peaceful portrait, and Galina found herself shuddering at the sight of it. She closed the box.

      “The fee is one hundred seventy-five thousand euros,” the proprietor said softly, as if only slightly embarrassed by the number. “Its former home, a boutique museum in Edinburgh, will not soon realize it is displaying a forgery. Such workmanship is costly.”

      To Galina the miniature was worth ten times as much, a hundred times. It was not the money that mattered in this instance. She had become aware over the last years that she required the strictest loyalty and silence from an antiquarian such as Herr Gerrenhausen and knew how pitifully easy it was to gain such loyalty and silence when a loved one was threatened. Smiling at the old proprietor, she swiped her phone open to the frozen video. “Do you recognize this young boy?”

      The man squinted at the phone and beamed. “Why, yes! That is my grandson, Adrian. He lives with my youngest daughter and her husband in California. But why … how … why do you have a video of Adrian …?” He trailed off. His face turned the color of white wax.

      Galina slid a list of several items across the counter to him. “This is what I need. You will acquire the items for me. There will be no end to our relationship until I say there is. Currently the boy is safe. But he is within our grasp at any moment. You do understand me.”

      Rapid nodding preceded a long string of garbled words, which the man punctuated finally with “I understand.”

      She felt her expression ease. “I am wiring the purchase fee for the miniature to your Munich account. The first item on the list is to be auctioned at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes in June. You will acquire it anonymously.”

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