Italy
October 1986
The old woman was alone that night, just as she had lived alone in her rambling country house near Cesena for many years. She’d spent the evening in her studio, as she did most evenings, surrounded by her precious paintings and her beautiful things, putting the final touches to a piece of artwork she believed to be the finest she had produced in a long while.
The work that was to be her last.
It was just after ten, and the old woman was thinking about going to bed,when she heard the crash of breaking glass and the six armed men stormed into her home. They grabbed her roughly, forced her down into a chair, held guns to her head. Their leader was a big, burly man with a nose that had been broken more than once. He wore a suit and his greying hair was cropped like a brush.
The last time she had heard an accent like his had been a lifetime ago. She’d been young and beautiful then.
‘Where is it?’ he shouted at her, over and over, with his face so close to hers she could feel the heat of his fury when she said she didn’t know, that she didn’t have it. She’d never had it, never even laid eyes on it.
They let her go then, and she collapsed gasping to the floor. As she lay there shuddering with terror and clutching her racing heart, the six men tore apart her home with a violence she hadn’t seen in all her seventy-eight years.
By the time the men had realised they wouldn’t find what they’d come so far to obtain, the old woman’s heart had given out and she was dead.
What they found instead was a cracked old diary that she had kept close to her for over six decades. The leader of the men flipped hungrily through its pages, running his eye down the faded lines of the old woman’s elegant handwriting.
His long search was only just beginning.
Western Georgia
250 kilometres from the Russian border
The present day
A warm September breeze rippled softly through the conifers in the mountain ravine. The air was sweet with the scent of pine, and the late morning sunlight twinkled off the faraway snowy peaks. The mother lynx had come padding down from the forest to quench her thirst from a stream, keeping a watchful eye on her cubs as they played and wrestled in the long grass by the bank.
As she bent to lap at the cool water, her body went suddenly