Read Online The Geneva Deception by James Twining - Free Book Online

even knew she was saying them.
    His smile faded. Salvatore looked faint.
    ‘What can you tell me about this place?’ he snapped, motioning at her to follow him over to the altar.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘The Pantheon. Is there anything I should know about it? Anything that might tie it to where we found Ricci’s body last night?’
    She ran her hand through her hair, desperately trying to dredge up the highlights of some longforgotten lecture or text book.
    ‘It was built by Hadrian in about 125 AD, so there’s no obvious connection to Caesar, if that’s what you mean?’ she began with a shrug. ‘Then again, although it’s been a church since the seventh century, the Pantheon did used to be a pagan temple, just like the ones in the Area Sacra.’
    ‘Hardly conclusive,’ Gallo sniffed, patting his jacket down as if he was looking for cigarettes and eventually finding a packet of boiled sweets. ‘I’m trying to give up,’ he admitted as he popped one into his mouth. She noticed that he didn’t offer her one.
    ‘No,’ she agreed with a firm shake of her head.
    ‘Then what do you make of this?’
    At a flick of his wrist, two forensic officers rolled away the screens. A body was lying on the altar, naked from the waist up. His bearded face wasturned towards them, eyes gaping open with shock. Two gleaming white shop mannequins were standing at his head - one small and hunched, the other taller - staring down at the corpse with cold, vacant expressions. Both were unclothed, with moulded blank features and no hair, although the smooth hump of their breasts marked them out as female.
    The taller mannequin had been carefully arranged so that her left hand was gripping the man’s hair and the right holding a short sword. The sword itself was embedded in a deep gash in the victim’s neck that had almost decapitated him. The blood had gushed from his wound, covering the altar and cascading to the floor where it had pooled and solidified into a brackish lake.
    It was a carefully arranged, almost ritualistic scene. And one that, for a reason Allegra couldn’t quite put her finger on, seemed strangely familiar to her.
    ‘Who is it?’
    ‘Don’t you recognise him?’ Salvatore, looking surprised, had ventured forward to her side. ‘His brother’s always on TV. He looks just like him.’
    ‘Why, who’s his brother?’ she asked, wanting to look away and study the man’s tortured features at the same time.
    ‘Annibale Argento,’ Salvatore explained. ‘The Sicilian deputy. The stiff is his twin brother Gio, otherwise known as Giulio.’
    ‘Hannibal and Julius,’ Gallo nodded. ‘There’s your damn Caesar connection.’
    ‘What’s any of this got to do with me?’ she interrupted, wondering if she still had time to untangle herself from this mess before the media got wind of it.
    ‘We found this in his mouth -’
    Gallo held up a clear plastic evidence bag. She knew, almost without looking, what it contained.

ELEVEN
    Amalfi Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas
    17th March - 11.02 p.m.
    Kezman’s private elevator opened on to a tennis court-sized room, rainbows cloaking the lush tropical gardens that could be glimpsed through the open windows where the floodlights shimmered through a permanent cooling mist.
    Glancing up, Tom could see that the soaring ceilings had been draped in what looked like black satin, three huge chandeliers flowering from within their luxuriant folds as if they were leaking glass. The only furniture, if you could call it that, was a 1926 Hispano-Suiza H6. Parked about twothirds of the way down, it was a mass of gleaming chrome and polished black metal, the wheel arches soaring up over the front wheels and then swooping gracefully down towards the running boards, two dinner plate-sized headlights perched at the end of a massive bonnet like dragon’s eyes.
    ‘You’re here. Good.’
    A man had come in off the balcony, a radio in one hand, a mobile phone in the other. Short and wiry, his