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The Musée du Louvre has in fact hired a renowned expert on the wartime French art market to purge its collection of looted paintings, but I’m confident she would have declined Gabriel’s request to create six fabricated provenances for six forgeries. There are indeed art galleries operating inside the Geneva Freeport, but none bear the name Galerie Edmond Ricard SA. I granted myself a certain amount of license regarding some of the Freeport’s more arcane rules and regulations, but on matters of importance I adhered to the truth. There are an estimated 1.2 million paintings stored in the Freeport, including more than a thousand works by Picasso. Nearly all of the Freeport’s clients rent their vaults using anonymous shell companies to conceal their identities. A collector can purchase a painting at auction in New York and avoid all taxation simply by shipping the work into the Freeport. If the collector elects to sell his painting within the Freeport, he will face no tax liability. Typically, the money changes hands offshore, anonymous shell company to anonymous shell company, making the transactions largely invisible to tax authorities and law enforcement. The paintings themselves are then moved to a new vault.

Many of the Freeport’s superrich customers undoubtedly reside in Monaco, regarded by many European governments as a haven for tax evaders and money launderers. Visitors to the tiny principality can dine at Le Louis XV or play English roulette at the famed Casino de Monte-Carlo, but they will search in vain for a law firm called Harris Weber & Company, for no such entity exists. There are countless firms like it, though, including Mossack Fonseca & Company, the now defunct offshore services provider at the center of the 2016 Panama Papers scandal.

Like my fictitious Harris Weber, Mossack Fonseca created and administered thousands of anonymous shell companies to help its clients avoid taxation and conceal their wealth and possessions. It did so, in many cases, at the behest of banks, more than five hundred in all. They included Credit Suisse, Société Générale, and HSBC, which, according to Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Jake Bernstein, purchased dormant shell companies from Mossack Fonseca in bulk. It was because of the banks’ previous association with the firm that I felt free to mention their names in the same breath as my fictitious Harris Weber. Furthermore, none of the three institutions are exactly pillars of the global financial community. US regulators fined HSBC a record $1.9 billion in 2012 for laundering more than $881 million for the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. Société Générale, for its part, reached an $860 million settlement with the Justice Department in 2018 for bribing Libyan officials and manipulating the benchmark LIBOR interbank lending rate. And Credit Suisse? Well, what more needs to be said?

Five years after the Panama Papers scandal, the same group of reporters—the remarkable International Consortium of Investigative Journalists—released an even larger trove of documents they dubbed the Pandora Papers. Obtained from fourteen separate offshore providers, the paper trail revealed that 130 individuals regarded as billionaires by Forbes magazine had offshore accounts. So, too, did some 330 government officials and heads of state. They included Jordan’s King Abdullah, who used an extensive network of shell companies and bank accounts to secretly purchase $80 million worth of luxury real estate in Malibu and Georgetown—glittering additions to an international property portfolio that already included extensive holdings in the United Kingdom. Never mind that, according to a recent regional survey, His Majesty’s people are among the poorest in the Arab world.

The Pandora Papers also raised uncomfortable questions about the source of several large contributions made to Britain’s Conservative Party. It was not the first time the Tories’ fundraising had faced public scrutiny. As the New York Times reported in May 2022: “It is no secret that wealthy Russian industrialists have given heavily to the Conservative Party over the years.” Nor is it a secret that politicians from both of Britain’s two main parties welcomed the flood of tainted Russian money that poured into London after the fall of the Soviet Union. The bankers, wealth managers, lawyers, accountants, and estate agents welcomed the Russian money, too. And why wouldn’t they? Many grew enormously rich as a result.

Only recently has the British government acknowledged that it was unwise to open London’s door to organized criminals and robber barons from a corrupt petrostate ruled by the likes of Vladimir Putin. In a stunning report released in July 2020, the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament found that Russia had engaged in a prolonged and sophisticated campaign to undermine Britain’s democracy and corrode its institutions. The Kremlin’s weapon of choice, of course, was money. Among the report’s more alarming findings was that several members of the House of Lords were in business with pro-Kremlin Russian oligarchs. The names of the lords were redacted from the public version of the report, as were the names of the British politicians who had accepted contributions from Russian sources.

The report also used the unflattering word laundromat to refer to London’s financial services industry, long regarded as the money laundering capital of the world. Britain’s own National Crime Agency declared recently: “Although there are no exact figures there is a realistic possibility that the scale of money laundering impacting the UK annually is in the hundreds of billions of pounds.” So pervasive is the problem, concluded the NCA, that it “has the potential to threaten the UK’s national security, national prosperity and international reputation.” Financial journalist Nicholas Shaxson, in his 2018 book The Financial Curse, described the UK’s reputation as follows: “Britain is the country of first choice for every kleptocrat and dictator in the world.” But the so-called London Laundromat could not function, as Shaxson documents in painstaking detail, without the archipelago of tax havens that sprung up in the remnants of the British Empire—tiny island territories with limited financial controls that effectively “hoover up” the world’s dirty money. The Pandora Papers linked 956 offshore companies to government officials, but two-thirds of those entities were registered in the same offshore financial center: the British Virgin Islands.

In February 2022, days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduced legislation to impose transparency on Britain’s opaque property market, declaring, “There is no place for dirty money in the UK.” The journalist and corruption specialist Misha Glenny compared the proposed reforms to “shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.” Six months later, with the London Laundromat still open for business, Johnson announced his resignation, bringing to a close a turbulent premiership plagued by personal and financial scandals too numerous to mention. His successor, Liz Truss, survived for all of forty-four days before being forced out of Downing Street in a revolt that one Cabinet minister likened to a coup d’état. In all, there have been five Conservative prime ministers since Labour surrendered power in May 2010. During the previous period of Tory dominance, which lasted a remarkable eighteen years, there were two: Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

During a testy confrontation with an executive from my fictitious Harris Weber & Company, Gabriel Allon dryly suggests that the firm should donate a billion pounds to British charitable organizations to atone for helping the wealthy avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Sadly, the figure, while substantial, would represent little more than a rounding error to the estimated total of uncollected taxes globally. The truth is, no one really knows how much money is flowing through the invisible offshore world—or how much money has been unethically or criminally diverted from national treasuries.

The growing disparity between rich and poor, however, is plain to see. The richest 1 percent now control more than half the world’s privately held wealth, which in 2024 was estimated to be $454.4 trillion. The World Bank estimates that 9.2 percent of Earth’s inhabitants, or 719 million human beings, live on just $2 a day, the measure of extreme poverty. In the United States, the world’s richest country, 11.6 percent of the population, or 38 million people, are poor. In the United Kingdom the figure is a shocking 20 percent.

But how to explain the superrich multibillionaire who hires a firm like Mossack Fonseca to shave a few million from his tax bill? Or the kleptocratic thug who stashes his money in an offshore bank account, or in a piece of posh London real estate, while his impoverished people struggle to feed their children? “Perhaps what drives them all,” wrote British investigative reporter Tom Burgis in his 2020 book Kleptopia, “is fear: the fear that soon there will not be enough to go round, that on a simmering planet the time is approaching for those who have gathered all they can unto themselves to cut free from the many, from the others. There’s only one side to be on if you wish to avoid destruction: theirs. You are with the Kleptopians or you are against them. The Earth cannot sustain us all.”

But the planet, simmering a few years ago, is now burning, and millions of desperate people are on the move in search of a better life. In developed countries, they are straining resources and exacerbating political tensions. Many businesses welcome them, though, for they are a source of cheap and exploitable labor—human capital, in the lexicon of the wealth extractors, willing to do punishing and dangerous work that native-born citizens are not. They pick fruit and vegetables in the blazing sun, they toil in blood-drenched slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants, they wash dishes and clean rooms in luxury hotels, they care for the sick and the dying.

In many cases, the migrants have fled a country ruled by a kleptocrat with offshore bank accounts created for him by the London Laundromat—the same machine that has helped countless billionaires, the richest of the rich, conceal their immense wealth and evade taxation. Hidden by shell companies and layered trusts, these members of an increasingly powerful global plutocracy dwell in a parallel universe, accessible to only a select few. Fine art confers upon the superrich a patina of instant sophistication and respectability, even if they have neither. Which might explain why so many of their ilk have chosen to stash their multimillion-dollar paintings in the Geneva Freeport so as to deny the tax collector his due. What more needs to be said?

Acknowledgments

I am eternally grateful to my wife, Jamie Gangel, who listened patiently while I worked out the plot of A Death in Cornwall and then skillfully edited my first draft. My debt to her is immeasurable, as is my love.

David Bull, whose name appears in the third chapter of the novel, was once again an invaluable source of information on all matters related to art and restoration. Maxwell L. Anderson, who has five times served as the director of a North American art museum, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, provided me with a window on some of the more unsavory aspects of the business of art.

My Los Angeles superlawyer Michael Gendler was, as always, a source of wise counsel. My dear friend Louis Toscano made countless improvements to my typescript, as did my eagle-eyed personal copy editor, Kathy Crosby. Any typographical errors that slipped through their formidable gauntlet are my responsibility, not theirs.

Harper president and publisher, Jonathan Burnham, who has the misfortune of also serving as my editor, provided me with an insightful and erudite set of notes on topics ranging from classical music to Venetian cuisine. A heartfelt thanks to the rest of my remarkable team at HarperCollins, especially Brian Murray, Leah Wasielewski, Doug Jones, Leslie Cohen, David Koral, and Jackie Quaranto.

Like the fictitious Gabriel Allon, I am the father of twins. Mine are named Lily and Nicholas, and as always they were a source of love and inspiration throughout the writing year. They have much in common with Irene and Raphael, especially their intelligence, their innate kindness, and their senses of humor. At the time of this writing, however, neither had adopted an animal from the World Wildlife Fund or fallen into hopeless despair over the prospect of melting ice caps and submerged cities. In the Silva family, those characteristics have been assigned to the figure of late middle age who toils behind a locked door, listening to music that annoys those around him.

About the Author

DANIEL SILVA is the award-winning, number-one New York Times bestselling author of The Unlikely Spy, The Mark of the Assassin, The Marching Season, The Kill Artist, The English Assassin, The Confessor, A Death in Vienna, Prince of Fire, The Messenger, The Secret Servant, Moscow Rules, The Defector, The Rembrandt Affair, Portrait of a Spy, The Fallen Angel, The English Girl, The Heist, The English Spy, The Black Widow, House of Spies, The Other Woman, The New Girl, The Order, and The Collector. He is best known for his long-running thriller series starring spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon. Silva’s books are critically acclaimed bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than thirty languages.