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Sutton Place

Leonard Silk was well acquainted with the dark side of human nature. His clients, all of whom were sufficiently wealthy to afford his services, were a rogues’ gallery of fraudsters, schemers, scammers, larcenists, embezzlers, insider traders, philanderers, and sexual deviants of every stripe. Silk never sat in judgment of them, for Silk was not without sin himself. He dwelled in a proverbial house of glass. He did not make a habit of throwing stones.

Silk’s fall from grace had occurred in the late 1980s while he was serving in the CIA’s station in Bogotá. Recently divorced, his personal finances under duress, he had entered into a lucrative partnership with the Medellín cocaine cartel. Silk had supplied the drug lords with valuable intelligence on DEA and Colombian efforts to penetrate their organization. In return, the drug lords had supplied Silk with money—$20 million in cash, all of it derived from selling cocaine in the country he was sworn to defend.

Somehow Silk managed to extricate himself from the relationship with both his ill-gotten fortune and his life, and retired from the Agency just days before the attacks of 9/11. He used a portion of the funds to purchase a luxury Sutton Place apartment. And inthe winter of 2002, while his old colleagues were fighting the opening battle of the global war on terrorism, Silk went into business as a security consultant and private investigator. In a deliberate play on words, he called his one-man firm Integrity Security Solutions.

Silk offered his clients the usual array of advisory services but derived most of his income through illicit activities such as corporate espionage, computer hacking, blackmail, sabotage, and a product he euphemistically referred to as “reputational defense.” He was renowned for his ability to make problems go away, or, whenever possible, to prevent problems from arising in the first place. He also possessed the capability, as a last resort, to make “problems” suffer fatal auto accidents or drug overdoses, or vanish without a trace. He had no operatives on his payroll. Instead, he hired freelance professionals as needed. Two recent operations had taken place in France, where Silk was well connected. Both had been carried out at the behest of the same client.

At 9:42 that morning, the client had asked Silk to ascertain why several investors had requested multimillion-dollar redemptions from his art-based hedge fund. With a few phone calls to his network of paid or coerced informants, Silk had discovered a possible explanation. It was not the sort of matter he liked to discuss over the phone, so he summoned his driver and headed uptown. Arriving at the client’s residence on East Seventy-Fourth Street, Silk saw two workmen maneuvering a crated painting into the back of a delivery truck. A security man named Tyler Briggs was observing their efforts from the open doorway.

“Where’s your boss?” asked Silk.

“Upstairs in his office.”

“Is he alone?”

“He is now. He had company earlier.”

“Anyone interesting?”

Briggs ushered Silk into the mansion’s security control room. Theart-filled residence was protected by an array of high-resolution cameras. At present, one was trained on Silk’s client. He was sitting at his desk, a phone to his ear. He looked unwell.

Briggs sat down at a computer and wordlessly entered a few keystrokes. A moment later a tall, dark-haired woman appeared on one of the video screens. She was standing before a painting in the gallery. A Gentileschi, thought Silk. Quite stunning, but almost certainly a forgery.

“Why is she photographing it?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Where did she go next?”

The security man played the recording.

“That’s quite enough,” said Silk after a moment.

The image froze.

“Walk upstairs to Mr. Somerset’s office and quietly tell him to meet me in the garden.”

The security man rose and started toward the door.

“One more thing, Tyler.”

“Yes, Mr. Silk?”

“Tell Mr. Somerset to leave his phone behind.”

Silk followed a corridor toward the back of the town house—past the wine cellar, the movie theater, and the yoga studio—and emerged into the walled garden. It was shaded by a large tree in midsummer leaf and overlooked on the north and east by elderly apartment buildings. Decorator outdoor furnishings stood forlornly on the spotless stonework. The splashing of the Italianate fountain silenced the rush of afternoon traffic on Fifth Avenue.

Five minutes elapsed before Phillip Somerset finally appeared. As usual, he was nautically attired. They sat down in a pair of low-slung wicker chairs. Silk delivered his findings without preamble orpleasantries. He was a busy man, and Phillip Somerset was in serious trouble.

“How bad is it going to be?”

“My sources haven’t been able to uncover anything regarding the content.”

“Isn’t that exactly the sort of information I pay you for, Leonard?”