I knew from the plans that only two doors existed on the second floor. One led out to a veranda overlooking the front lawn and the water. The other led to a narrow stairway in the back. All the lights were off in the kitchen, so I let myself in there. I was prepared to disable an alarm and pick the lock, but the alarm wasn’t on, and the door wasn’t locked. Country folk. All the security was in place, but obviously on a day-to-day basis, people didn’t bother. Nothing had ever occurred to make the inhabitants security conscious. The focus was all on the outskirts of the property.
Hugging the walls and moving slowly, with my form blurred and wearing night-vision goggles, I knew the chances of me being detected were very low. I moved from room to room, checking out the impressive furniture and art works.
The dining room displayed some of the original impressionist paintings whose copies sat in the Gallery in Vancouver. In what I could only describe as the most stereotypical study-library-mancave I’d ever seen, Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee proudly held a place of honor. I had to chuckle. Surely the Robertsons had paid a small fortune for their version of the painting, but I wasn’t taking any bets as to which was the genuine article. Susanna and the Elders hung on the opposite wall.
A sideboard held an enviable set of lead crystal decanters and glasses. I checked inside and found half a case of fifty-year-old rare Irish whiskey. Using some napkins I found there, I wrapped two bottles so they wouldn’t clink against each other and put them in my pack.
Further inspection of the house revealed art—expensive art—in almost every room.
On the south side of the house, a room with a wall of windows was set up as an artist’s studio. Van Gogh’s A Wheatfield with Cypresses sat on an easel. Another easel in front of it held a half-completed copy. An artist’s palette and brushes lay on the nearby table. I checked the unfinished forgery and saw the same telltale brushstroke angles Martel had shown me.
Sneaking upstairs, I heard the unmistakable sounds of two people having sex behind one closed door. I listened for a while, and then a woman said something and laughed. Satisfied, I moved down the hall toward the only room with light showing around the door.
The door was ajar a couple of inches, so I took the chance of pushing it farther open so I could see into the room. Gavin O’Bannon lay on a bed. An IV bag hung from a pole next to the bed, along with a couple of electronic monitors. O’Bannon’s left shoulder was heavily bandaged, and his chest was wrapped.
A woman stepped into my line of sight. She checked on the IV, checked the monitors, then drifted back out of the picture. A nurse, I assumed. I briefly considered finishing the job, but decided it would be tricky enough escaping the compound without dodging Reagan’s thugs.
Slipping out of the house the same way as I had entered, I made my way back to the dock. I briefly considered going back to Victoria in the equipment locker, but that didn’t sound like much fun. It would also be pushing my luck.
To add to my problems, a squall had blown in while I was in the house. The wind rustling through the trees provided a prelude to the rain. A flash of lightning out over the water gave me an idea.
In my survey of the property, I had found a large propane tank next to a shed halfway between the back of the house and the wall. Making my way around the house to the shed, I disabled the electronic keypad and opened the door. The generator that supplied electricity for the house was inside.
Pulling out my phone, I called Karen. “Pick me up in half an hour at the place where you dropped me off the other day.”
“It’s starting to rain, and the waves are picking up.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m hoping the storm will mask my escape.”
The next time lightning flashed, I placed my hand on the control box, sent an electromagnetic surge into it, and shorted it out. All of the lights all over the compound went out. Backing out of the shed, I headed for the wall.
As I snuck between two of the out buildings, a man opened the door and stepped out into the rain. He turned and shouted back into the house. I couldn’t hear it all, but I did catch the phrase, “…that bloody generator…”
I froze in place, hoping he would walk by without noticing me. Instead, he walked directly toward me. To top it off, a flash of lightning highlighted my shape.
When I blurred my form, I blended into the background around me, but I wasn’t truly invisible. Light didn’t pass through me. As a result, I always avoided having light behind me. The lightning didn’t cooperate.
“Who’s there?” he called.
I morphed into the form of one of the men I’d seen on the boat in Victoria.
“It’s me,” I called. “Damned generator’s out.”
Sometimes your luck is good, and sometimes it’s not. He turned on a flashlight and shined it in my face. The man whose form I had copied stepped forward.
“What the hell?” He stared at me with his mouth hanging open.
I kicked him in the stomach. He bent over, and I clubbed him in the back of the head with a two-handed fist. Either I wasn’t strong enough, or his head was too hard, but the blow didn’t knock him out. He dropped to one knee, and his hand holding the flashlight struck out and caught me in the side. The blow spun me around, and I stumbled and fell.
My father’s voice screamed in my mind, Get up! Get up! Get up! He had drilled into me over and over that the last place you wanted to be in a fight was on the ground. I rolled away and regained my feet. The sky opened up, and rain fell in a deluge.
My adversary struggled to his feet, but before he could gain his balance, I rushed him again, dropping at the last moment to sweep my leg into his knees. He flew into the air and landed hard on his back and his head. I kicked him in the head, and when his eyes stayed open, I kicked him again.
He lay there, still breathing but not moving. I took off running before anyone else came along. As I ran, I dropped his form and blurred again, trusting to the darkness to hide me.
I had to slow down when I reached the trees. I found a footpath and followed it even as I heard shouting from far behind me. I kept moving, but kept an eye out for any kind of obstacle, such as the tripwire I had found outside the wall. It probably wouldn’t have power with the generator down, but if I tripped and broke my skull, it wouldn’t matter.
And then the wall loomed in front of me, as smooth and high on the inside as it had appeared from the outside. Shrugging out of my backpack, I fished around inside for my rope and grappling hook.
Luckily, they had trimmed the trees back when they built the wall, but even so, I barely had enough room to swing the hook. It sailed up and over the wall, and I pulled it back slowly. When the rope offered its first resistance, I carefully pulled the hook against the wall and put my weight on it. The hook held.
I climbed up the wall until I reached the top. Turning the hook around, I dropped the rope down the other side and rappelled down, then shook the hook free and retrieved it. I stuffed the rope back in my pack, keeping an eye out for the tripwire. Even so, I almost tripped on it.
Reaching the chain-link fence, I pulled a set of heavy-duty bolt cutters out of my pack and set to work. It would have been easier to climb the fence, but I had no desire to deal with the razor wire. As I worked, I heard voices behind me on the other side of the wall. They sounded confused.
As soon as I cut a hole large enough for me to slip through, I crawled to the other side, then bent the cut section of fence back together. I used a couple of slip-ties to hold it, hoping it would pass a casual inspection. I really didn’t want Reagan thinking he’d had an intruder, but that hope was probably dead.
Even though I was fifteen minutes late, Karen was waiting for me, wearing night-vision goggles and cradling a semi-automatic rifle in her arms. I pushed the boat off from the shore and hopped in. I sat there shaking with cold, and she draped a dry blanket over me. We let the boat drift for half an hour, and didn’t start the engine until we were well away from Reagan’s compound.
Wh
en we got back to Victoria, we took showers and changed into dry clothes. I was too exhausted to go out, so we ordered from room service. With the help of Reagan’s thousand-credit-a-bottle whiskey, it tasted great.
Chapter 16
“All of your paintings are there,” I said. I had called Martel, Chung, and Wil together for a meeting. Boyle’s office at the Gallery had an alcove with comfortable chairs and two couches overlooking the bay. Fenton was purposely left off the guest list. Cops tend to be so literal about the law.
“What do you mean, ‘all of our paintings’?” Chung asked.
“A Wheatfield with Cypresses, Susanna and the Elders, Storm on the Sea of Galilee, and the originals of all the forgeries Mr. Martel has identified here at the Gallery.”
Chung and Martel simply blinked at me. Wil sat back in his chair, brow wrinkled, and took a sip of his coffee.
“Wait,” Martel said, “I thought Storm on the Sea of Galilee was at another place here in Vancouver. Has it been stolen again?”
“I’m pretty sure the original is at Reagan’s, and the one the Robertsons bought from him is a fake.”
“Oh, dear God,” Myron breathed. “Fake Rembrandts, too?”
“Just a guess on my part,” I said. “But I saw the same painting hanging in two different houses in the past month. Fake Van Goghs, too. The forger is in the process of copying A Wheatfield with Cypresses.”
Chung and Martel both groaned.
“You know the odd angle of the brushstrokes you showed me?” I asked Martel. He nodded. “I figured that out. The forger is left handed.”
Wil gave me a wry smile and said, “I assume this forger has a name.”
I nodded. “Kieran Murphy.”
His eyebrows shot up.
“I also found Langston Boyle’s killer,” I said. “Gavin O’Bannon is at Reagan’s, recovering from a gunshot wound.” I looked straight at Wil. “Is that enough to get you and Fenton off your asses to search the place?”
“How do we prove he’s the killer?”
“Because I saw him do it. If you can recover the bullet I put in O’Bannon, that’s added credence to my story.”
Chung said, “Director Wilberforce, if you need any backing to hit Reagan’s place, we’re talking well over a billion credits in insured stolen merchandise. I guarantee he doesn’t have that much clout.”
My meeting with Wil and Inspector Fenton didn’t go quite as well, but in the end Fenton agreed to working with the Chamber. Forty-eight hours later, I boarded a helicopter in the rain, along with Wil, Fenton, Karen, and eight Chamber SWAT soldiers.
Six helicopters and a coastal guard ship that usually patrolled against piracy comprised quite an operation. But as we flew across the Georgia Strait, we received a radio message from observers stationed on the island across from Reagan’s place that his yacht had set sail. Ten minutes later, word came that his jetcopter had taken off.
“Of course, that’s probably just coincidence,” I shouted to Wil over the roar of the helicopter engine. “There couldn’t have been a leak anywhere.”
I shut up after that because of the look he gave me, and the distance to the water below. I knew he wouldn’t throw me out, but he was angry enough I didn’t want to chance it. The rain pounded on us, and I didn’t envy the pilot, who constantly fought the controls as the copter bounced around like a pinball.
I had briefed the commanders and pilots on my observations of the security setup. Karen added her thoughts. The overriding weakness, everyone agreed, was the generator.
A jetcopter carrying an assault team of twelve men dropped into the compound and landed on the abandoned helipad. Men streamed out of the copter just as men streamed out of the mansion and surrounding houses. The Chamber men were better armed, better armored, and better trained. A short, sharp firefight ended with Wil’s men capturing the generator and shutting it down.
“Going in,” our pilot told us over the intercom. We skimmed over the beach and the front lawn, stopping and hovering directly in front of the house. I checked my pistol as the SWAT guys jumped out of the aircraft, then followed them.
In the face of overwhelming force, Reagan’s security guards quickly surrendered. I found the security center in the basement of the mansion and shut it all down.
“Wil, tell your guys to turn the generator back on,” I said as I unplugged the last of the equipment.
Once that was done, I cautiously climbed the stairs to the upper level and then to the bedroom wing. With three SWAT team members, we leapfrogged down the hallway checking the bedrooms. It was rather anticlimactic when I found O’Bannon’s room empty.
The IV poles and monitors still stood by the bed, but no IV bag hung there. Doing a quick check of the room, I didn’t find any IV bags, or drugs, syringes, bandaging materials, or anything else I expected.
Interrogation of the staff confirmed that Reagan, Kieran, and O’Bannon, along with a doctor and O’Bannon’s nurse, had been on the jetcopter. To make matters worse, the storm interfered with radar, and we had no idea where they had gone.
The pirate-hunter ship headed south after Reagan’s yacht, which had its own helipad. A seaplane dispatched to find the yacht reported such terrible weather and fog that it turned back to Victoria.
“We lost them, didn’t we?” I asked Wil.
“Looks like it.”
I led him into the study and showed him the Rembrandts. “At least they didn’t make off with these,” I said.
The dining room was another matter. Half a dozen of the stolen impressionist paintings I had seen a few nights before were gone. The Van Gogh in Kieran’s studio was also gone, as was the unfinished copy. Some of the staff Reagan left behind said that his security guards carried paintings to the boat until about an hour before we arrived, then left in a hurry.
After a prolonged search, I found the safe in Reagan’s study. He didn’t believe in electronic locks, so it took me about twenty minutes to crack it. Other than for curiosity’s sake, I shouldn’t have bothered. It was as empty as a banker’s conscience.
Martel and Chung flew out to Reagan’s estate the following morning. Along with their staffs, they cataloged all of the artwork they found. The final inventory included more than two dozen stolen paintings, including the Rembrandts, plus statuary, tapestries, and rare books. Reagan had legitimately purchased some of the art in the house, but he would have a hard time proving ownership of the majority of it.
I was in the study checking out the books when Myron found me.
“Libby, nice work. Thank you.”
With a shrug, I said, “We only recovered one of your paintings.”
“The most valuable one. You also recovered another Rembrandt. It’s a lot more than anyone expected.”
I had to smile at that. “Didn’t you have faith in me, Myron?”
He poured himself some of Reagan’s liquor, sat in an overstuffed chair and said, “I did. My superiors were, shall we say, highly skeptical.”
“You stuck your neck out?”
“A little, perhaps.”
I decided to join him and poured myself a glass.
“Wil says that Reagan’s probably headed back to Ireland,” I said. “I assume he’ll rendezvous with his yacht at some point. Beyond that, who knows?”
“It will take him a long time to sail that far,” Myron said.
“He’ll probably hop a plane somewhere. Hell, maybe he’ll just sit in Japan for a year, then come back here as though nothing has happened.”
Myron snorted, then started coughing. When he finished, he said, “Wait until I finish swallowing before you say things like that.”
I spent that night at Wil’s hotel. The next morning as we enjoyed a leisurely room-service breakfast, he asked, “So, when do you plan to be back in Toronto?”
“A couple of weeks,” I said. I still had to crate up the paintings I’d taken from Abramowitz’s flat so I could ship them. I planned on letting Dad market them for me.
“Oh? W
hat have you got going here?”
“I need to pack everything up and make arrangements to ship it. I would also love to see Sheila Robertson’s face when she finds out her Rembrandt is a fake. And then the train trip is seven days.”
“Aw, come on, Libby. You’d really rather spend seven days on a train when you can fly home in an afternoon?”
“Yep. Safer that way. Prettier, too.” A storm had downed an airplane near Atlanta the previous week. Not to mention that airports got far too excited about weapons, explosives, and certain electronic gear. “Come with me. We can spend the whole time in bed.”
“Tempting as that is, I need to get back to work,” he said.
“Your loss. Well, maybe we’ll both be in Toronto at the same time.”
“What do you mean?” he asked in a very cautious way.
“I don’t plan to stay in Toronto for too long. I’m going to Ireland.”
“And why are you going there?”
“Because I have unfinished business with Michael Reagan, Kieran Murphy, and especially Gavin O’Bannon.”
“Do you plan to take the train?”
Chapter 17
During the train ride back to Toronto, I asked my father to do some in-depth research on Michael Reagan.
Upon my arrival, Dad picked me and the paintings up, and we drove to his house. I carried the artwork into the house and showed it to him, then carried it all down to the vault in the subbasement.
While he cooked dinner, he told me about Reagan.
“You know he’s the head of the organized crime family in Ireland, right? His father and grandfather were in the business. His father also was an amateur painter with some talent, and Michael gained an appreciation for art.”
He turned on a blender and made a lot of noise for a little while, poking at whatever he was blending with a long wooden spoon and then blending it again. He nodded and pored the contents into a bowl.
“Michael was considerably more ambitious than his father, and when he inherited the business, he consolidated the other Irish gangs. Word on the street is that after observing his methods of consolidating his main rival, the rest of the gangs were only too glad to join him.”
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