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T he formalities complete, Ingrid removed her overcoat and handbag from the forward storage closet and headed down the airstair.

Two S-Class Mercedes sedans waited on the tarmac, along with a courtesy van for the crew.

For some reason, Ingrid’s six passengers seemed in no hurry to leave the aircraft, so she stood outside in the cold blustery air and made small talk with the two French policemen.

She was looking forward to a couple hours of down time in the crew room at Signature Flight Support.

Bleary-eyed, she resolved to never again think an unkind thought about anyone who tended to the needs of the flying public.

It was, she thought, a dreadfully difficult way to earn a living.

Another minute went by before the first two security men clambered down the airstair with the hypervigilance of commandos preparing to make a dynamic entry into a den of terrorists.

Peter van de Velde, art transport case in hand, was next, followed by the other two security men.

Van de Velde ducked into the back seat of the first Mercedes as though he were evading enemy gunfire, and the security men set a four-cornered defensive perimeter.

The French border policemen rolled their eyes. It was all faintly ridiculous.

Franco Tedeschi, a phone to his ear, appeared last. His descent down the airstair was unhurried. When he reached the tarmac, he headed not for the Mercedes but for Ingrid.

He killed the phone call and said, “This is your lucky day, Rikke.”

“Why is that, Mr. Tedeschi?”

“Because you are about to witness a historic event.” The Italian banker took her by the arm. “Right this way, please. We mustn’t keep our buyer waiting.”

Before Ingrid could object, he was ushering her across the tarmac toward the first Mercedes.

She joined Peter van de Velde in the back seat, and Tedeschi squeezed into the space next to her.

The car sank as the larger of the two Italian security guards, a behemoth with a shaved head and a tattoo on the back of his thick neck, wedged himself into the passenger seat.

The other three security men hurled themselves into the second Mercedes.

Then the two cars shot forward in unison and raced past a line of parked private aircraft.

Franco Tedeschi, CFO of Camorra Inc., calmly lit a cigarette. “Why did that French policeman photograph my Leonardo, Rikke? Why today of all days?”

“How should I know?” replied Ingrid.

“I was wondering the same thing.”

***

Gabriel and his three-officer escort had put ten kilometers behind them by the time his phone rang. It was Jacques Ménard calling to say that all had not gone according to plan at the airport.

“Where is she?”

“On her way to Antibes.”

Gabriel killed the call and ordered the driver to reverse course. Then he looked at the officer seated next to him and asked if he and his colleagues were carrying firearms.

“ Oui , Monsieur Allon. Big ones.”

***

“Your passport, please,” said Franco Tedeschi.

“Why do you want to see my passport?”

“Don’t make me ask again.”

Ingrid unzipped her handbag.

“Prada,” observed Tedeschi.

“It’s fake.”

Which wasn’t the case. Ingrid had acquired the bag free of charge during a visit to Courchevel. Her passport had been provided to her by the director of the Danish intelligence service. Tedeschi opened it to the first page.

“Rikke Jorgensen?”

“That’s me,” said Ingrid.

“Do you happen to remember your date of birth?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Humor me.”

Ingrid sighed and recited the birth date listed in the passport.

“Where were you born, Rikke Jorgensen?”

“A little town west of Copenhagen.”

“What’s it called, this town?”

“It’s quite unpronounceable.”

“Are you married?”

“Happily.”

“Children?”

“A boy and a girl. They’re five and three, in case you were wondering. ”

“And what does Mr. Jorgensen do?”

“His last name is Nielsen, and he works on a drilling platform in the North Sea.”

“Fossil fuels are bad for the planet.”

“Rubbish.”

“You’re not worried about global warming?”

“I support it, if you must know. It’s very cold in Denmark.” Ingrid plucked the passport from Tedeschi’s grasp. “Where are you taking me?”

“To the home of our buyer. He lives not far from here in Antibes.”

“Lucky him.”

“You’ve been?”

“My husband and I went on holiday in Cannes recently.”

“It’s changed, Cannes. And not for the better.”

“I’ll have to take your word for it,” remarked Ingrid, and returned the passport to her handbag.

“It’s real, by the way,” said Franco Tedeschi.

“The passport? Of course it’s real.”

Tedeschi gazed out his window. “I was referring to your Prada handbag, Rikke Jorgensen.”

***

The villa stood on the highest point of the cape, shielded from view by towering hedgerows and protected by security measures worthy of the Palais de l’élysée.

There were twelve bedrooms, sixteen bathrooms, eight assorted drawing rooms and parlors, two professional kitchens, a library and adjoining office suite, a wine cellar, a cinema, a discotheque, a game room, a hotel-sized spa and fitness center, a Turkish bath and sauna, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a red clay tennis court, a caretaker’s villa, a ten-car garage, and a man-made lake patrolled by a flotilla of snow-white mute swans.

Upon its many walls hung a portion of the owner’s collection of fine art.

Some of his best pictures, however, adorned his mansion in Highgate, which had been seized, along with its contents, by the British government.

He had more than a hundred paintings stashed in the Geneva Freeport and a dozen more hidden aboard Anastasia , his eighty-five-meter superyacht.

At present the vessel was moored in Golfe-Juan, which he could see from the window of his private study on the second floor.

It was never the life Alexander Prokhorov could have imagined for himself when he was a boy in the Soviet Union, but he had come to believe it was the life he deserved.

He had worked harder and been more resourceful, he assured himself, had seen opportunity where others saw only collapse and ruin.

And he had become rich as a tsar in the process, a billionaire many times over.

Had he cut corners and broken laws? Yes, of course.

He had also resorted to violence on occasion.

But so had many other men like him, men who had dared to stake their claim in the Wild East. He had nothing but contempt for those who were too stupid or lazy to make their mark in the brave new world of Russia’s gangster capitalism—or in the supposedly rules-based economies in the West, for that matter.

There were winners and losers in life, and Alexander Prokhorov was a winner.

The needs of the homeless and the hungry, the disabled and the mentally ill, were of no concern to him.

His own bottomless needs were all that mattered.

What Alexander Prokhorov craved most was respect.

He wanted to be known not as a man who had made his fortune manufacturing industrial pipe but as a modern-day Medici.

It was the reason he had invested more than a billion dollars in paintings—because nothing conferred a patina of elegance and sophistication faster than fine art, even upon those who possessed neither.

Once word leaked that he was the owner of a newly discovered portrait by the greatest artist who ever lived, the rich and the famous would be beating down his door to have a look at it.

All his many sins would soon be forgotten, absolved by the sfumato brushwork of a long-dead painter from the tiny Tuscan hamlet of Vinci.

But elegance and sophistication would not come cheap.

For Alexander Prokhorov the price was $500 million.

It was far more than he had wanted to spend for the painting, but the price had soared during the final days of the frenzied secret auction.

Prokhorov’s man at Société Générale was awaiting his order to initiate the wire transfer.

With the press of a button, the money would flow to SBL PrivatBank, and the Leonardo would be his.

Pending the results of one final examination, of course.

The viewing would take place downstairs in the Gatsbyesque library.

Stéphane Tremblay was waiting there now, magnifying glass and ultraviolet torch at the ready.

Prokhorov, for his part, was enjoying a few moments alone upstairs in his private study.

He looked down at the single sheet of stationery—from Smythson of Bond Street—lying on the desk.

On it, he had written out the number, with all its many zeros.

It was, by any reckoning, an extraordinary amount of money.

Still, it represented only a fraction of his immense personal wealth.

Yes, he had lost the house in Highgate, and there were two hundred million or so at Barclays and HSBC that he would never see again.

But when all was said and done, he had emerged from his scrape with the British in remarkably good shape.

By his own calculation he was closing in on a net worth of $30 billion.

For a man like Alexander Prokhorov, $500 million was pocket change.

The phone on his desk purred softly. It was the security guard at the front gate, informing him that his guests had arrived.

He went to the window and glimpsed a pair of matching S-Class Mercedes sedans making their way up the long drive.

They rolled to a stop in the circular forecourt and six men emerged, one of whom was in possession of the painting that soon would be Prokhorov’s.

Only four of the men headed toward the entrance of the villa.

The remaining two—security guards, presumably—lowered themselves into the back seat of the first car and closed the doors.

Alexander Prokhorov cast a final glance at the number written on the piece of stationery lying on his desk, then headed downstairs to meet his destiny.

It was, he assured himself, exactly what he deserved.