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Läufer had supplied. His idea of what constituted useful information was completely cock-eyed. Any document that included the Hübner surname, even just in a footnote or as an afterthought, had been thrown onto my pile of homework. Seeing that there wasn’t a password protection or security cipher in the known universe that could stop Läufer from barging his way in, my desktop had started to fill up with interminable memoranda, internal company mail, cookie and bread production data, executive roll-calls, invoicing by subsidiaries, workforce reduction programs, old stock exchange listings and a whole lot more besides. In fact, that moron had almost choked up my entire hard disk.
    But every cloud has a silver lining, thankfully: a message from Läufer suddenly dropped into my in-box SHOUTING that the Trojan horse he had planted in Helmut Hübner’s personal computer had just gone live. It was a sophisticated Back Orifice malware program, which gave him free and undetected remote access to the tycoon’s computer - so long as it was switched on, of course. Given that Hübner never switched his system off, Läufer had no trouble at all laying his hands on the art collector’s most precious secrets.
    The Krylov painting was kept in Castle Kunst on the banks of Lake Constance, in the state of Baden-Württemberg in southwest Germany. A significant part of Hübner’s
Pinakothek
had been moved to the castle in 1985 to be hung in its galleries, shortly after the impresario’s ambitious reconstruction project was completed, transforming the fourteenth-century military fortress into a comfortable place to live. From then on, Hübner spent at least three months of the year there, usually in April, May and June, before moving south to his estate in Mallorca until Christmas.
    Läufer lost no time in sending me a series of excellent shots of the castle, taken with a telephoto lens from a range of vantage points. The first thing which struck me was that the castle was actually built
on
the lake itself and connected to the shore by a timber bridge, over thirty feet long. The medieval builder’s scheme was an imaginative and effective one, as the lake’s waters formed a natural protective moat and the bridge could be withdrawn or destroyed when under serious assault. The stone walls were built on a hexagonal plan, and incorporated two watchtowers and four circular flanking towers, projecting outwards and pierced with pointed arrow slits, which offered archers a good field of fire. The main defensive wall was just over 39 feet high and was topped by overhanging battlements to help defend against enemy attacks using scaling ladders.
    The detailed site plans and drawings arrived a little later, because it took Läufer a while to find out the name of the architect who had been in charge of the restoration works. The castle’s basic structure and primitive military feel had not been interfered with, apart from a small swimming pool looking out onto the lake and a parking area around the old well. Most of the construction work took place inside the central keep, which was restored to its original function as the living quarters of the lord and castellan. Built on a square floor plan with solid ten-foot-thick walls, the keep had a cellar and five storeys. The ground floor housed the kitchen and the servants’ accommodation, and the next three the main living quarters, with its bedrooms, dining rooms and living rooms. There was also a library and even a private chapel. The top floor served as Hübner’s art gallery, and was reached either by a spiral staircase which wound its way up around the inside of the tower’s main wall or by a small central lift which rose up through the wooden floors.
    As for Hübner’s staff at Kunst, Läufer had identified them by finding records of their wage slips in the bank account of one of Hübner’s many corporations. Herr and Frau Seitenberg - he the butler and she the housekeeper - looked after the