House of Spies by Daniel Silva

Author:Daniel Silva [Silva, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780062354341
Amazon: 0062354345
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2017-07-11T04:00:00+00:00

35

Marseilles, France

At 11:45 the following morning, the sum of fifty million euros appeared in the account of Galerie Olivia Watson, 9 Place de l’Ormeau, Saint-Tropez, France. The money did not have to travel far, as both sender and recipient did their banking at HSBC on the boulevard Haussmann in Paris. By midafternoon it was resting comfortably in a renowned Swiss bank in Geneva, in an account controlled by JLM Enterprises. And at five o’clock, two paintings—one by Guston, the other by Basquiat—were delivered by unmarked van to Villa Soleil. Olivia Watson followed in her black Range Rover. In the entrance hall she passed Christopher Keller, who was on his way out. He kissed her lavishly on both cheeks, commented on her appearance, which was dazzling, and then climbed onto his Peugeot Satelis motorbike. A moment later he was racing westward along the shore of the Mediterranean.

It was nearly dusk by the time he reached the outskirts of Marseilles. The violent drug gangs thrived in the city’s northern banlieues, especially in the housing projects of Bassens and Paternelle, but Keller approached through the more tranquil suburbs to the east. The Tunnel Prado-Carénage delivered him to the Old Port, and from there he made his way to the rue Grignan. Slender and straight as a ruler, it was lined with the likes of Boss, Vuitton, and Armani. There was even a JLM jewelry boutique. Keller swore he could detect the sour odor of hashish as he passed.

As he continued across the city center, into the quartier of Marseilles known as Le Camas, the streets turned dirty and mean, and the shops and cafés catered to a decidedly immigrant and working-class clientele. One such enterprise, located on the ground floor of a graffiti-splattered building overlooking the Place Jean Jaurès, peddled discount electronic goods and mobile phones to a largely Moroccan and Algerian customer base. Its proprietor, however, was a Frenchman named René Devereaux. Devereaux owned a number of other small businesses in Marseilles—all of which were cash-oriented, some in the category loosely defined as adult entertainment—but the electronics shop served as something like his operational headquarters. His office was on the second floor of the building. The room contained no telephone or electronic devices of any kind, a curious set of circumstances for a man who purportedly sold such modern conveniences for a living. René Devereaux didn’t care much for the telephone, and it was said that he had never once personally sent an e-mail or text message. He communicated with his business associates and subordinates only in person, oftentimes in the gritty square or at a streetside table at Au Petit Nice, a reasonably pleasant café located a few paces from his shop.

Keller knew all this because René Devereaux was a prominent figure in the world he had once inhabited. Everyone in the French criminal underground knew that Devereaux’s real business was drug trafficking. Not just street-level trafficking, but trafficking on a continent-wide scale. The French police were likely aware of it, too, but Devereaux, unlike many of his competitors, had never spent a single day behind bars.

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