“Lina,” he said quietly. “Problem.”
Viktor’s hand drifted toward the small pistol in his jacket pocket. Dante smiled.
Novak stood still for a moment. Then he unclipped the painting from the wall, removed the fake from its padded case, and hung the forgery in its place. The swap took ninety seconds.
“You’re blackmailing me,” Viktor said.
It sounded clean. It was not clean. Phase one took three months. Lina spent two weeks in Rome, posing as a graduate student researching Baroque architecture, and managed to get a tour of the palazzo’s public rooms. She counted cameras, noted the patrol patterns, and discovered that the third night guard—a man named Enzo—had a weakness for a particular bar in Trastevere where the grappa was cheap and the bartender asked no questions.
“Then what do you want?”
“What about it?”