The Palace - Christopher Reich

Chapter 1

Cannes

Côte d’Azur, France

Set the timer,” said Simon Riske.

“How long?” asked Lucy Brown.

“Four minutes.” Simon moved across the spacious bedroom, eyes fixed on the painting.

“Why four?”

“The security system monitors activate all locks every two minutes. I figure we have another two on top of that in case they decide to send someone to check. I don’t want to be here to find out if I’m right.”

“In case? I thought you stole the key. Why would they check?”

Simon looked at Lucy. Enough questions. “Set it. Now. And make it three minutes thirty seconds.”

Simon took the phone from his pocket and approached the painting. Activating the camera, he stepped back to ensure the entire canvas was in the frame and snapped a photograph. He examined the result. Satisfied that it was in focus and that the artist’s signature was visible, he sent it to an office on the eleventh floor of a modern steel-and-glass skyscraper in the heart of the City, the one-square-mile section of London that was home to many of the world’s financial juggernauts. The reply came back like a bullet.

Confirmed. Proceed.

Simon lifted the painting off the wall and set it on an onyx coffee table in the center of the bedroom. The canvas measured forty-two inches by thirty. It showed the façade of Rouen Cathedral at sunset and had been painted by Claude Monet in 1894. Estimates of its value ranged from thirty to fifty million dollars. Twenty-five years ago, it had been stolen from the famed Rijksmuseum of art in Amsterdam.

Simon Riske had come to steal it back.

“May I?” He extended his hand. Lucy placed a tube of lipstick in his palm. Simon removed the cover and spun the bottom, releasing a razor-sharp blade. “Time?”

“Three minutes.” Lucy bounced up and down on her toes, not an easy feat given her four-inch heels. She was dressed in a black designer cocktail dress with a plunging neckline and high heels with fire-engine-red soles. Simon didn’t care much about fashion. Prior to this assignment he’d thought “mules” were animals, not shoes. He’d accompanied Lucy to Harvey Nichols to buy her outfit and was still in shock at the price of feminine couture. He’d been sure to keep the receipt for his expense report.

During daylight hours, Lucy worked as an apprentice mechanic in his automotive repair shop in southwest London, a stone’s throw from Wimbledon, better known as the All England Lawn and Tennis Club. Instead of a three-thousand-dollar dress and fancy high heels, she wore a gray coverall and work boots, and kept her blond hair tucked beneath a baseball cap. Simon’s relationship with her was strictly platonic, somewhere between friend and father. In a sense, she was his own restoration project. But that was another story.

As for Simon, he was dressed befitting the occasion, a black-tie dinner dance and auction to benefit an international charity held on the first night of the Cannes Film Festival. He was a compact man, markedly fit in a peaked-lapel dinner jacket, his bow tie hardly perfect, but his own doing. His hair was dark and thick, receding violently at the temples and cut to a nub with a number two razor. He had his father’s dark complexion and brooding good looks and his mother’s beryl-green eyes. People mistook him for a European—Italian, Slavic, something Mediterranean. His nose was too bold, too chiseled. His chin, too strong. Take off the tux, add a day’s stubble, and he’d fit in hooking bales of Egyptian cotton across a dock in Naples.

Simon had a second profession besides restoring old cars. It involved remedying thorny, often unorthodox problems for an array of clientele: corporations, governments, wealthy individuals. Or, in this case, an insurance company—Lloyd’s of London—and, by extension, the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam.

Back to work.

With care, he punctured the canvas at the uppermost corner and drew the blade firmly and steadily along its perimeter—down, across, up, across—wincing at the rip of tearing linen twill. Removing the canvas from the frame in this manner would reduce its size by only an inch on its borders, or so he’d been told. Still, it was hard not to feel as if he were desecrating something sacred.

From the floor below came the sound of applause and laughter, followed by a burst of music. The auction was over.

“Time?”

“Stop asking,” said Lucy. “You’re making me nervous.”

“Don’t be,” said Simon, giving her a smile to calm her down. “We’re almost out of here.”

A sharp knock on the door erased the smile.

“Mr. Sun? It’s Pierrot from security.” English with

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