Checkmate in Amber Read Online Free PDF

ANOTHER WORD UNTIL I TELL YOU TO DO SO,’ Roi cut in, sick and tired of the veteran hacker’s messing around. ‘I apologize, Peón. It won’t happen again. Now let’s get back to business, please.’ He keyed in various lines of white space, to give us all time to cool down, and then resumed: ‘I will track down all the relevant documentation on the painting and Läufer will do the research on Helmut Hübner. Any problem producing the counterfeit copy, Donna?’
    ‘None at all, but this time send me the reproductions with the highest possible resolution. I need to make the enlargements very big and very precise. You know the deal: find out everything you can about the stretcher, the materials used and Krylov’s particular painting techniques and idiosyncrasies. I also need the canvas’s complete history - everywhere it has been, how long it was in each place and under what conditions. And Krylov’s life story too, with all the details, however insignificant.’
    ‘I’m happy to take that on,’ Cavalo volunteered.
    ‘Right - that’s yours then,’ agreed Roi. ‘And don’t you worry, Donna, you will have everything within three days at the most. So that’s that. Läufer, have you got the backing track ready?’
    Immediately, a circus-style drum roll filled my study. It always struck me as strange to imagine the same electronic fanfare emerging from six different computers in different cities in six different European countries.
    ‘Ladies and gentleman, today marks the official launch of Operation Krylov. As you know, from this moment on, all and any direct communication and personal encounters between Group members are strictly forbidden. All and any relevant news, information or comment must be passed through me and me alone, always using the Group encoder and the exclusively personal cipher and password with which I will provide each one of you, and which you are forbidden to share with anyone else. Bear in mind that apprehending the Chess Group would be the absolute highlight of any Interpol officer’s career. And don’t forget: maximum security is our best possible insurance. If one of us goes down, we all go down.’

CHAPTER THREE
    I devoted the next few days to dealing with routine shop-related business: paying the cleaning lady what I owed her, responding in exhaustive detail to queries from my catalog clientele and registering for various auctions in November and December. And as usual, I took good care to spread the word around that I was due to be called away on another trip some day soon and at very short notice.
    I’ve always been something of a loner, but I was getting dangerously close to that age when you start to wonder who on earth is going to be taking care of you when you get older. Every sudden change in perspective tends to begin with a deep sense of personal dissatisfaction. It certainly did in my case - I was starting to long for the friends I’d never made, the children I probably would never have and a love affair that would last just a little bit longer than a couple of nights in some hotel on the other side of the world. I was desperate for a sexual relationship that involved something more than just sex, a romance like the ones I saw in the TV movies. I was thirty-three years old, and the sum total of my emotional baggage amounted to my aunt, my old nanny and my father’s friend Roi - all of whom had turned fifty well before the end of the twentieth century.
    But what else could I let myself get into, given the crazy life I was leading? Yet again, just like I always did, I decided that Day One of a new operation was not a good time to get into all this, so I put my heart on hold in the hope that one day, some day, I would be able to deal with it all without messing up my whole way of life.
    It was September 10th, the Thursday afternoon that the first reports sent on by Roi began to arrive, and on Friday, after closing the store, I holed up in the study, ready to spend the