Scorpia

and opened directly onto a modern conference room with no carpet, no pictures on the walls, no ornamentationof any sort. Stranger still, although it should have offered some of the most beautiful views in the world, the room had been built without a single window. But if no one could look out, nor could anyone look in. It was safer that way. The lighting came from halogen lamps built into the walls, and the only furniture in the room was a long glass table surrounded by leather chairs. There was a door opposite the lift but it was locked. Two guards were standing on the other side, armed and ready to kill anyone who so much as approached in the next half-hour.
    There were eight men waiting for her around the table. One was in his seventies, bald and wheezy with sore eyes, wearing a crumpled grey suit. The man sitting next to him was Chinese, while the man opposite, fair-haired, wearing an open-necked shirt, was from Australia. It was clear that the people congregated in this place came from many different parts of the world, but they had one thing in common: a stillness, a coldness even, that made the room as cheerful as a morgue. Not one of them greeted Mrs Rothman as she took her seat at the head of the table. Nor did they bother looking at the time. If she had arrived, it must be exactly one o’clock. That was when the meeting was meant to begin.
    “Good afternoon,” Mrs Rothman said.
    A few heads nodded but nobody spoke. Greetings were a waste of words.
    The nine people sitting around the table on the third floor of the Widow’s Palace made up the executive board of one of the most ruthless and successful criminal organizations in the world. The old man’s name was Max Grendel; the Chinese man was Dr Three. The Australian had no name at all. They had come to this room without windows to go over the final details of an operation that would, in just a few weeks, make them richer by the sum of one hundred million pounds.
    The organization was called Scorpia.
    It was a fanciful name, they all knew it, invented by someone who had probably read too much James Bond. But they had to call themselves something, and in the end they had chosen a name drawn from their four main fields of activity.
    Sabotage. Corruption. Intelligence. Assassination.
    Scorpia. A name which worked in a surprising number of languages and which rolled off the tongue of anyone who might wish to employ them. Scorpia. Seven letters that were now on the database of every police force and security agency in the world.
    The organization was formed in the early eighties, during the so-called Cold War, the secret war that had been fought for decades between the Soviet Union, China, America and Europe. Every government in the world had its own army of spies and assassins, all of them prepared to killor to die for their country. What they weren’t prepared for, though, was to find themselves out of work; and twelve of them, seeing that the Cold War would soon be over, realized that was exactly what they would be. They wouldn’t be needed any more. It was time to go into business for themselves.
    They came together one Sunday morning in Paris. Their first meeting took place at the Maison Berthillon, a famous ice-cream parlour on the Ile St-Louis, not far from Notre-Dame. They were all acquainted: they had tried to kill each other often enough. But now, in the pretty, wood-panelled room with its antique mirrors and lace curtains, and over twelve dishes of Berthillon’s famous wild strawberry ice cream, they discussed how they might work together and make themselves rich. At this meeting, Scorpia was born.
    Since then it had flourished. Scorpia was all over the world. It had brought down two governments and arranged for a third to be unfairly elected. It had destroyed dozens of businesses, corrupted politicians and civil servants, engineered several major ecological disasters, and killed anyone who got in its way. It was now responsible for a tenth of the world’s terrorism, which it undertook on a contract basis. Scorpia liked to think of itself as the IBM of crime – but in fact, compared to Scorpia, IBM was strictly small-time.
    Of the original twelve, only nine were left. Onehad died of cancer; two had been murdered. But that wasn’t a bad record after twenty years of violent crime. There had never been a single leader of Scorpia. All nine were equal partners but one executive was always assigned to each new project, working in alphabetical