“BFD,” Zoe replied. “They can learn to live with it.” She took a long swallow of the soup, which cooled quickly in her cell. “So what do they really care?” Zoe dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin. “They’re selling stolen art to people who know it’s stolen. What are the buyers going to do? Complain to the police?”

“Remember that some of them are the police,” Thalia cautioned.

Zoe shook her head ruefully and finished her soup.

“They may be thieves,” Thalia continued, “but they want to continue selling art to these same collectors and curators. I understand that they have a pipeline into some of the back rooms of the Hermitage that contain a lot of art the Soviets looted but won’t acknowledge.”

“Figures,” Zoe said darkly, then took a bite from her sandwich. She chewed slowly for a long time as the room’s sonic drizzle filled the audible space around them. She swallowed and then said, “Well, the good news is that there don’t seem to be any fakes among the Impressionists and the other ‘decadent’ works.” She paused. “But then, you wouldn’t expect that the leading counterfeiters would turn out a lot of pieces the Nazis had outlawed. On the other hand, I’d say a good twenty-five percent of everything from the medieval through early nineteenth century is either a total fake or has been so extensively restored as to make it brand-new for all practical purposes.”

“They’ll flip,” Thalia said.

“Not if we don’t tell them.” Zoe smiled.

Thalia gave her a long puzzled look.

“I’ve let most of them through,” Zoe said. “I marked the fakes with a very tiny ‘f’ in the lower right-hand corner for paintings and on various places on the sculpture and reliquary. It’s in the database as well; just a solitary ‘f’ in the description field.”

“You’re wicked,” Thalia said as recognition dawned on her face. “If they become known for peddling fakes, then nobody buys from them anymore.”

“Bingo!” Zoe said. “Plus, they can’t blame you because I’m the fakebuster. All I have to do is survive and these guys are toast.”

Thalia’s face fell as Zoe raised the dark unspoken certainty that she would not live to see her plan executed. Gloom settled between them for a long moment

Thalia stayed in a nearby commercial hotel, escorted there and back by their captors, a walking prisoner held hostage and frozen into inaction by the threats against her father. They had been clear that Thalia and her father would suffer long and terribly before they died should anything unusual happen—Zoe’s escape, the arrival of the police, a smuggled message—even if it were not her fault

“Well! I’m sure looking forward to learning how you spot the fakes.” Thalia’s forced enthusiasm broke the deepening silence. She cleared a space and filled two teacups with the steaming liquid. “We’ll need to start that tomorrow so we can get those items out of the way.”

“It’ll be a good trade,” Zoe replied as she splashed milk into her tea and sipped at it “I really don’t know that much about the paleolithic and neolithic periods, and you know so much.”