Chapter 1
The Man Who Wasn't There
"Commander Prata will see you now, Mr. Ashby," said the young man at the garden door.
"Thank you," said David Morgan. "I won't take long."
It was 9:14 at night. A cold wind blew off the river and shook the lanterns on the garden wall. Behind the door stood the Palácio de Santa Aldonza, lit gold in every window. Three hundred guests were inside. In the Hall of Mirrors, a pink diamond the size of a plum sat under glass. And a hundred and forty cameras were watching for one man: the man in the black hat.
Commander Ilídio Prata waited in the passage. He was fifty-six, heavy, with a grey moustache. He looked like a man who had not slept for three days.
"Mr. Ashby. Is something wrong?"
"Nothing wrong. Something I'd rather tell you than say on the radio." In David's ear, Nell whispered, "Gently." He ignored her. "My head office in London got a call. Everyone here is looking for a man in a hat. But a clever thief has read the newspapers too. He won't come in the hat. He'll come as someone you have no reason to watch. A waiter. A musician. Or," he paused politely, "me."
"You?"
"I'm an auditor. I carry a tablet. I can go anywhere and nobody wants to talk to me. If I were the thief, I'd be me. So if a man turns up tonight and says he is Edmund Ashby, be difficult. Don't believe his passport. Hold him somewhere comfortable and call me. I'd rather be insulted by the real man than robbed by a fake one."
Prata stared at him. Then he laughed, short and surprised.
"In nineteen years, I have been warned about the thief by the minister, the police, the newspapers, and my wife. You are the first to warn me about you. I think I like you."
"Most people don't, at first."
Walking away, David heard Ravi Menon in his ear. "For the record, the plan is that the Commander thinks you're a nice man."
"That's most of the plan."
The plan was simple to say. It was hard to do.
The palace was a fortress. Every door had a camera. Every guest had been checked against a list. And the diamond wasn't what David wanted. The diamond was bait. Everyone had been told to guard it.
What he wanted was in a quiet study in the north wing, in a locked cabinet nobody had been told to guard. It was a black leather case. Inside it was a book.
The Minister of Infrastructure, Teodoro Salgueiro, had told nobody that the book existed. But Nell had read the palace's fire rules, Annex Seven, page forty-one. They said that if there was a fire in the north wing, the Minister's black case must be carried out by his chief of staff to his second car in the courtyard.
A fire was all they needed.
At 9:30, smoke poured from the kitchen. It was only a small canister behind a sack of flour, and the extractor fan blew it through the building. The north wing alarm rang. A calm voice told everyone to stay where they were.
David was already walking. He never hurried. He moved like a good doctor going to an injured man, fast but never looking fast. The guards in the corridor looked at him and saw someone who knew what to do.
"Smoke in the kitchen," he said. "Stay at your posts. Annex Seven. Where's the Chief of Staff?"
"In the study, sir."
He went in. The room was long and panelled, with a lacquered cabinet on the far wall. A sergeant was already opening it. Beside him stood Dona Leonor Vaz, sixty-two, in a grey silk dress, straight as a pencil. She had served the Minister for twenty-three years. She was not a dishonest woman, and that was exactly why she was useful to a man who was.
The sergeant took out the black case. Dona Leonor took the handle and would not let go. David had known she wouldn't. It was the one thing he was counting on.
In the cold courtyard, the Minister's car stood waiting under a lamp.
"Not the car yet," said David. He held up his tablet. "I'm sorry. Insurance rule. A case that leaves the building in an evacuation has to be logged with the name of the person holding it. If it's not in my log, officially it was never here."
Dona Leonor frowned, but she stopped.
A woman in a green paramedic jacket came running up with a first-aid bag. It was Camille, speaking perfect Portuguese. "Senhora, you've been in the smoke. Please sit." Before Dona Leonor could object, Camille had her on a stone bench, an oxygen mask in her hand and a silver foil blanket over her knees and the case.
"Sign here," said David, holding out the tablet. "Just the box."
Dona Leonor signed. She watched the box the whole time, because she watched everything she signed. Under the crinkling blanket, a gloved hand slid in and out.
When she looked up, the case on her knees had not moved. It weighed exactly the same. Camille had spent four days finding the right paper to fill it.
"Thank you," said David. "That's all I need."
He walked away across the courtyard. The Minister's real book was now in a paramedic's bag two steps behind him.
Then Ravi said, in a strange voice, "Oh. The real Ashby is at the gate."
It was early. He had landed eleven minutes before his plane was due. Out of the garden door came Commander Prata, with a radio at his mouth.
"Mr. Ashby. There is a man at the gate. English, sixty, cheap raincoat. He says he is Edmund Ashby. He says he has been robbed in four countries."
David let a silence fall. Then he laughed softly, like a man who has just been proved right by an idiot.
"Commander, do you remember what I told you at the garden door?"
Prata's face slowly changed.
"Hold him," he said.
"Somewhere comfortable. Be polite. I'll stay out of the way. If he says I'm the impostor, you'll want to say you never spoke to me again."
The Commander clapped him on the shoulder and strode away, shouting for his men.
At 9:58, the lights in the Hall of Mirrors went out.
Three hundred people gasped. When the chandeliers came back, a man stood beside the diamond in a long black coat, black gloves and a black felt hat pulled low. A hundred of him stared back from the mirrors.
On the glass over the Estrela do Tejo lay a single white card.
"David Morgan," somebody whispered. The name ran through the room like wind through grass.
The Hat raised two fingers to his brim. Then he stepped through a tall mirror and was gone. It was only a door, a service door the staff knew about. The staff had been given the night off by a polite woman from an events agency. The Hat was Joaquim, a street performer, who had been paid to stand there and stay quiet. To three hundred people, it looked like magic.
The palace went wild. Guards ran. Real alarms screamed. The Commander's voice shouted "Chapéu!" on every radio. They searched the roof, the cellars and every guest. They found a second black coat in a laundry basket and three black hats, none the right one.
The diamond sat untouched under its glass. A blank card rested on it like a joke.
What they did not find was a man in a grey suit.
It was after midnight when Commander Prata, in a guardroom, faced the furious Englishman in the cheap raincoat.
"Mr. Ashby, when did you arrive?"
"Ten to ten! You know that! A lunatic with a moustache arrested me!"
"Then the man who told me at 9:14 to arrest you—"
The Commander stopped. On the monitor, the garden-door camera showed a mild man in a grey suit walking down the main steps at 9:49, saying good night to the doorman. He climbed into a car. He wasn't wearing a hat. As he sat down, he looked straight into the camera and smiled.
"He left," said Prata, "before you arrived."
Three miles away, in the back of a car that smelled of ginger, a man was peeling a stranger's face off, strip by strip. In the front seat, Anselm Boateng drove calmly. The earpiece crackled with a Yorkshire voice.
Well done, Mr. Morgan. Your tea's on.
"Thank you, Nell." On his lap, in a first-aid bag, lay a black leather case. He did not open it. He knew exactly what it weighed.
He looked out at the lights on the river.
"I want it noted," he said, "that I was extremely polite to everyone."