The Double Eagle Read Online Free Page B

filing cabinet, Jennifer noticing now that he seemingly kept his pockets empty of change and keys or anything else that might give away his position, like a cat who had the bell on its collar removed so that it might be better able to stalk its unsuspecting prey. She continued to leaf through the file.

    “From what we know, Ranieri trained as a Catholic priest and then worked at the Vatican Institute for Religious Works.”

    Jennifer looked up in surprise.

    “The Vatican Bank?”

    “As it’s also known, yes.” Corbett raised his eyebrows, clearly impressed now. “He was there for about ten years before going missing about three years ago, along with a couple of million dollars from one of their Cayman Island accounts.”

    Jennifer swiveled her chair toward him, her forehead wrinkled in anticipation. She could see that Corbett was building up to something. Tucker sat enthralled with his arms crossed and resting on his belly, his mouth slack and half open. Corbett ran his finger along the top of the filing cabinet as if checking for dust. She knew there wouldn’t be any. Not in her office.

    “He must have spent all the cash though, because he turned up in Paris last year. The French say he set himself up as a low-level fence. Nothing big. A painting here, a necklace there, but he was making a living; a good living, judging from the size of him.”

    All three of them laughed and the tingle that Jennifer had felt slowly building inside her chest vanished like steam rising into warm air. Corbett moved back round to the chair and sat down again, Jennifer just getting a glimpse of the top of his shoes, where over the years the constant rubbing of his suit trousers had buffed the leather to a slightly deeper shade of black than the rest of them.

    “I don’t get it.” Jennifer replaced the file on the desk and sat back in her chair, confused. “Sounds to me like he got whacked by someone he ripped off. Or maybe he had some sort of deal go sour. Either way, it’s got nothing to do with us.”

    Corbett locked eyes with her and the tingle reappeared and instantly sublimated into a cold, hard knot.

    “Our angle, Agent Browne—and you won’t find this in the autopsy report—is that when they opened him up, they found something in his stomach. Something he’d swallowed just before he died. Something he clearly didn’t want his killers to find.”

    Corbett reached into his pocket and, leaning forward, slid something carefully sealed inside a small, clear plastic bag across the desk toward her. Against the desk’s veneered expanse an eagle soared proudly, its majestic flight etched in solid gold.
     
    It was a coin.

CHAPTER THREE
    CLERKENWELL, LONDON
18 July—4:30 P.M.
     
    O utside, the afternoon rush-hour traffic rumbled past, a never-ending river of rubber and steel that surged and stalled in tidy blocks to the beat of the traffic lights.
    Inside, the shop windows glowed yellow as the sunlight fought to shine though their whitewashed panes. In a few places, the paint had been scratched off and here narrow shafts of light pierced the gloom, the dust dancing through their pale beams like raindrops falling across car headlights.
     
    The room itself was a mess. The orange walls were blistered, the rough wooden floor suffocating in a thick down of old newspapers and junk food wrappers, while bare wires hung down menacingly from the cracked ceiling like tentacles.

    At the back of the room, almost lost in the shadows, two tea chests rested on the uneven floor. Hunched forward on one of them, Tom Kirk was lost deep in thought, his chin in his hands. Although he was just thirty-five years old, a few gray hairs flecked the sides of his head and were more noticeable in the several days of rough stubble that covered his face, the hair slightly darker in the shallow cleft of his square chin.
     
    He reminded everyone of his father, or so everyone told him, much to his annoyance. Certainly he shared his delicately