“I can’t shuffle cards like that,” she said. “That was like a magician or something.”
“Not magic — I just spend a lot of time around cards. Just shuffle them.”
She gave them another shuffle.
“And now cut them wherever you want,” he said. He saw some life in her eyes for the first time tonight, and was happy her mind had been taken off the subject of Pablo Reyes.
Lucia did as he said and cut the deck roughly in half and now two small piles of cards were sitting on the table face down.
“All right,” he said quietly, and tapped his finger on one of the piles. “Just by looking at the fourth card down in this pile, I can tell you what the fourth card down in the other pile is.”
“Impossible.”
Harry counted four cards off the top of the first pile. Without touching the other pile, he looked at the card and placed it back down. “The fourth card down in the other pile is the Queen of Hearts.”
“Show me.”
Harry counted four cards off the second, untouched pile and flipped over the fourth card to reveal the Queen of Hearts.
Lucia smiled. “How did you do that?”
Harry felt good when he saw the smile. “When you spend as much time with cards as I do, you learn all their secrets.”
“It was luck — do it again.”
“Luck? What are the chances of that?”
“1.92 percent,” she said immediately.
She noticed the look on his face and explained. “One in fifty-two — simple. I’m a physicist, remember.”
Marta returned from the shower and watched as Harry repeated the trick, having Lucia shuffle the cards and then he correctly guessed the fourth card down was the Ace of Diamonds.
“Tell me how you do it!” Marta said.
“Maybe later.”
Lucia sighed. “At least I tell you how I do my tricks!”
“It’s called the power of four.”
“It’s called too late for silly tricks,” Marta said. “I’m going to bed. You can stay if you want. There’s a spare room and a couch.”
She left the room and Lucia got up and walked to the other side of the small kitchen. Harry watched her as she finished her wine and sighed before raiding the fridge for a beer. She opened one for him and walked it over to him. Watching the way she moved whisked his memory back to when they had first met. He closed his eyes and his mind drifted back.
It had been a long time since they had broken up and separated. So long, in fact, that he couldn’t really remember how it had all gone so wrong. When they’d met at Oxford as undergrads everything had seemed so perfect — sharing wine on the banks of the Cherwell in Christ Church Meadow, laughing at jokes as tourists drifted past on punts… watching the cricket on the other side of the river just a stone’s throw from where Roger Bannister made history with his four minute mile. It all felt so distant, it was as if he was recalling someone else’s life.
But it was his life all right, and a damned good chapter of it. They had quickly grown close and his memories of those days were among his happiest, and yet something had gone wrong, something intangible that both of them felt, and before their time in the city was over they had drifted apart. She stayed in Oxford to work on her doctorate, while Harry’s recruitment to the army meant a move to Sandhurst. After that, they rarely spoke and then one day she called him to say it was over.
He snapped out of the memory. “I always liked Mahou,” he said, giving the condensation running down the beer bottle an appreciative glance.
“I see your small-talk hasn’t improved over the years.”
He let out a sad laugh and lowered his head for a moment. His head still bowed slightly, he glanced up at her through his eyebrows. “I always struggled with that.”
She was silent for a while, and pretended to watch the muted news. Then she spoke, her voice low in the silence. “We should look at Pablo’s book.”
They ate as they looked through the little book again, sitting side by side in a strange kitchen in an unknown apartment. Pulled back together after nearly two decades apart in the grimmest of circumstances.
As they ate, Harry felt himself slowly recovering from the chase, and the beer was helping to dull the ache in his arm from the knife wound. As they relaxed, they were able to increase their focus on the discovery they had made back in Pablo’s apartment.
“Is something bothering you, Harry?” Lucia asked, her face a gentle orange in the low light.
“Is it that obvious?” he asked.
She smiled. “Sorry, have I insulted your poker face?”
“I was just thinking that there were six numbers in our little clue, weren’t there?”
She nodded and took another sip of the wine. “Yes, six. So what?”
“This might be me barking up the wrong tree, but traditionally six numbers are used to create grid references in maps.”
“Maps?”
“Exactly.”
“Of course!” she said, and for the second time that evening the hint of a smile appeared on her face. Harry saw his idea had awoken something inside her. “Locations on maps are pinpointed using Cartesian coordinates. It was first used in the way we know it today by the French philosopher Descartes in the mid 17th Century. Without it Newton couldn’t have done his work in calculus — it’s extremely…” she began to trail off.
“Lucia?”
“It’s an extremely important development in our society and the most common form of these coordinates today is the six number system, although eight or more can be used. Let me have another look at the numbers.” She set down her fork and looked at the numbers again.
After a few moments, she ate more of the omelette and turned to Harry, who was now waiting expectant as he nonchalantly chewed his dinner. “Have you got an iPhone?” she said. “Mine is back at the apartment.”
“Of course.”
“Get Google Maps up and type in exactly what I tell you.”
Harry fumbled through his pocket and pulled Google Maps up on his phone. “Ready.”
“Okay — so here are the numbers converted into coordinates — 40 24 49N, 3 41 31W. Got it?”
“Uh-huh.” He pushed the enter button and then smiled in recognition of something.
“What is it?”
“You were right — I think — look!”
He handed her the phone and Lucia nodded her head and smiled. The little red balloon on Google Maps was planted firmly in the middle of the Museo del Prado — the Prado Museum — just a couple of kilometres south of Reyes’s apartment.
Lucia pushed her plate away and got up from the table. “We have to get there at once. We can use Marta’s scooter.”
Harry nodded in agreement. “What are waiting for?”
And with that they were gone.
TEN
Zalan Szabo sipped his milkless darjeeling as he watched Hungary turn into Austria outside the train’s window. He was sitting in a private cabin on board the Venice Simplon-Orient Express as it made its way west toward his home in Vienna, a substantial townhouse in Unter Sankt Veit. The sophisticated Art Deco surroundings did nothing to calm his rising anger as he turned to look at his iPad one more time.
He was watching the CCTV footage from the casino. In the short clip, a well-built man in his late thirties was drinking at the bar when the floor manager interrupted him. After a short conversation the traitor’s girlfriend arrived, visibly distressed and covered in blood. Then they left together.
Szabo returned to his telephone call and sighed. “Name?”
“We don’t know,” Steiner replied. “But English.”
“I’m certain you mean to say, you don’t know yet.”
A few seconds of tense silence followed, then Steiner spoke up. “Yes, sir. Of course.”