by David Wood
Karcher crossed the lounge and headed directly for the exit doors. He carried an attaché case, easily large enough to conceal the Spear. Greg gathered his papers together and moved toward the reception desk, but as soon as Karcher was through the door, he reversed course and made for the exit. He got there just in time to see Karcher disappear into a limousine. As the car pulled away, he memorized the license plate and continued to the parking lot and his own rental car.
“He’s not wasting any time,” Greg said into his sleeve. “Black limo. He’s riding in style.” He rattled off the license number.
“Roger,” came the reply, not Avery but Tam, who was waiting in another car closer to the edge of the lot. “I see him.”
Greg started his own vehicle and pulled out, but made no effort to close the gap.
After a few minutes, Tam reported that the limousine was pulling onto the E58, the main highway leading into the heart of Vienna. No surprise there.
Greg slid into the flow of traffic departing the airport, driving assertively but not aggressively, while Tam reported on the hired car’s movements. When he got the chance, Greg accelerated forward, leapfrogging ahead of both Tam and Karcher. They would tag team Karcher all the way to his destination, never lingering in the limo’s rearview mirror long enough to arouse suspicion. The odds of being discovered were slim. At night, particularly on this night, with a scattering of snowflakes blowing across the busy highway, one pair of headlights looked very much like another. Ideally, they should have had at least four cars for the surveillance to minimize the chances of being made, but with Avery still tracking Karcher’s phone from the safety of the hotel room, they did not need to actually maintain constant visual contact. Still, sometimes the eyes saw what the GPS satellites did not. Karcher might pull off the road unexpectedly, and hand the Spear off to someone else, and that would put the entire operation at risk.
If Karcher’s driver suspected he was being tailed, it was not evident in the way he drove. The driver kept a brisk pace but changed lanes only when encountering slower traffic. They followed the highway to its terminus, and then continued on, following a route that was almost exactly the reverse of the course Tam and Greg had used to reach the airport. The limo did not stop until it reached the Heldenplatz, right outside the front entrance to the Hofburg Neue Burg. The Neue Burg, which literally meant “new castle,” was the youngest part of the palace, though it was well over a century old.
Tam pulled in right behind him but drove past the limousine without stopping. “I’ve got eyes on. He still has the package.”
Greg turned into the parking area a moment later, just in time to catch a glimpse of their quarry as he moved through the arched gate into the inner courtyard.
“I’m going to follow on foot,” he said. He left the car at the edge of the nearly empty lot and strode as inconspicuously as his haste would allow, across the snow-covered ground toward the entrance, where the limousine was just pulling away. He spotted Karcher and his retinue heading up the staircase to the doors. A moment later, they disappeared inside. Greg broke into a sprint, reaching the steps a few seconds thereafter, but the door was locked.
“Lost him. He’s inside. Avery, you have the ball.”
Avery studied the image on the computer screen, a live feed from the security cameras inside the Hofburg. Karcher, still carrying the attaché case, moved through the frame, crossing through a reception lobby before vanishing from view. A moment later, the picture changed, showing a corridor that Avery had not seen in her earlier explorations of the museum. Karcher was now accompanied by an older man whom she recognized from the photo in his personnel file: Emil Zanger. The pair appeared to be engaged in conversation as they moved at a casual pace down the hallway, and then Karcher once again left the camera’s coverage zone. A few seconds later, the screen refreshed with yet another camera’s feed.
Before leaving, Stone had hacked into the museum security system and tapped the close circuit cameras. He had also synced the cameras to Karcher’s phone so that Avery would be able to track his progress through the museum without having to manually switch between cameras. Stone had been confident that the Heilig Herrschaft operative would keep the Spear in his possession as long as possible, but on the off chance that he handed it off to Zanger or someone else, Avery was ready to disengage the program and track the Spear’s movement the hard way. With over two thousand rooms, spread out across several enormous buildings which included not only the museums and the library, but also the seat of the Austrian government, and no way of knowing exactly where the Spear would be taken, that would have been an extraordinary challenge. Fortunately, it appeared that Stone had been right on the money.
She was not sure how she felt about that. She had felt a strange attraction to him during their conversation over coffee that morning. It wasn’t exactly physical desire, though aside from being about twenty pounds underweight, the result of ten months’ confinement, he was by no means unattractive. Her initial reaction however had been something else. Stone’s intelligence and confidence reminded her of her father—the man she had loved from afar even though much of his life was a mystery to her—and her half-brother. Perhaps that was why she had reacted so viscerally to the revelation that he was nothing more than a common criminal. Her objection was not to the illicit nature of his profession per se, but rather the fact that he was squandering his profound gifts. It was, she imagined, a little like discovering that Superman used his X-ray vision to cheat at cards.
At least for the moment, Stone was using his powers for good. He had made breaking into the Hofburg security look as easy as checking his Facebook status, not only accessing the closed circuit television cameras, but also locating complete blueprints of the museum, including a sub-basement level that Avery had not known of, despite several days of exploring the palace and researching its mysteries in the library. Stone surmised that the subterranean levels probably dated back at least a thousand years, to a time when cities like Vienna and palaces like the Hofburg were built to withstand long sieges. Indeed, Vienna had twice been besieged by Ottoman Turks in the 16th and 17th centuries, both times successfully staving off destruction, no doubt in part because of provisions hidden away beneath the palace. The blueprints indicated that the sub-basement had been upgraded in the 1940s, transformed from a mere storehouse into a bunker and bomb shelter. If further modifications had been made since, the plans on file did not show them.
The image on the display changed again. Karcher and Zanger, trailed by the two hulking bodyguards, entered yet another sparsely decorated corridor, one of the dozens that existed only for staff members to move quickly between sections of the sprawling palace complex. At the midpoint of the passage, they passed through an unmarked metal door and disappeared again. Avery waited for the screen to change, but after fifteen seconds, she minimized the window with the camera feed and checked the blueprints which had also been synched to the GPS tracker. The door through which the men had gone led to a stairwell that descended into the sub-basement. There were no cameras in the stairwell, or in any of the underground portion network beneath the Hofburg. After a few more seconds of waiting, Avery realized that dot marking Karcher’s location had stopped moving.
“Stone, I’ve lost Karcher’s signal. I guess there’s no cell reception down there. He’s coming your way.”
Stone’s voice sounded in her ear bud, the transmissions scratchy with static. “The concrete foundations are blocking the signal. That’s going to be a problem for us too. I set up a repeater, but it can’t handle too much data.”
There was a pause, and then he added. “I see him. We’ll take care of the rest. Stone out.”
Kasey Kim looked over Stone’s shoulder at the seven-inch screen of an iPad mini tablet computer. The glow from the screen was the only light in the musty storeroom where they had been hiding for the last ninety minutes, patiently waiting for their quarry to arrive with the Spear of Destiny. Now it seemed, both the moment and the m
an had arrived.
Aside from a few exchanges relating to the mission, the time had passed in silence. Kasey was not chatty by nature, and Stone seemed like a lone wolf-type personality.
Probably not used to working with an accomplice, Kasey thought mordantly. There certainly wasn’t much for her to do, but when given his choice of partners for the mission, Stone had chosen her. Not only was Kasey fully schooled in a range of skills useful for making covert entry into hardened military and industrial facilities—the museum was a cakewalk by comparison—she was also small, which meant that she could move quickly through tight spaces, like ventilation ducts and wet walls. Her size had been the reason that she had flown the H-4 out of the black site, even though both Greg and Tam were better pilots. She had been able to hide in one of the cargo containers. The ultra-light helicopter, disassembled for transport, had been in another.
She was curious about what made Stone tick, but tagging along with him had sufficiently answered any questions about why Tam had recruited him. The guy knew his stuff.
After a wild shopping spree at an electronics store, followed by a stop at a home hardware store and then lastly a department store where they both picked up some working apparel—all black—they had headed for the palace complex, arriving half an hour before closing time. They mingled with all the other tourists, and then when no one was looking, ducked into one of the restricted hallways and hid in a maintenance closet where they changed into their newly acquired clothes. There was little danger of being spotted; Stone had used his access to the security net to check that the hall was empty and had then looped the feed to conceal their presence. When the palace was empty of visitors, they headed for the sub-basement.
Stone dodged security cameras, bypassed alarms and picked locks so swiftly that Kasey wondered if this was perhaps not the first time he had broken into the Hofburg. She didn’t ask.
Security in the sub-basement was a different story. The place was a maze of corridors, the walls concrete in some places, old crumbling brick or bare bedrock in others. Old incandescent light bulbs were mounted in the ceiling, but none burned. Stone and Kasey used night vision goggles and infrared flashlights to navigate. There were no alarms, just doors. Some were ordinary hollow metal doors, of the kind used in most institutional and commercial buildings, but others were secured with heavy-duty vault doors like a bank. Stone inspected several of the latter but made no attempt to breach them. Instead, he busied himself with placing several miniature webcams at strategic locations and then found a hiding place in the storeroom to await Karcher’s arrival.
Kasey had made a cursory investigation of the room, but there wasn’t much of interest. Just banker boxes full of old records in a language that she couldn’t read. No priceless artifacts here. She had shut off her night vision, and waited in near total silence. For an hour and a half, Stone’s webcams had shown only darkness. Then the lights had come on and the screen of the iPad had lit up.
The tablet showed a grid of static images from the webcams, except for one that showed a quartet of men ambling down one of the corridors, only to disappear for a moment and reappear in another screen. After a few minutes, they stopped at one of the vault doors and the older man in the group—Zanger—produced a pair of keys which he used to open the heavy door.
“Old school,” Stone commented in a low voice. “Museums are the worst…Or for our purposes, the best, when it comes to security. They spend so much just to keep the lights on, they can’t afford state of the art.”
“Even to protect something as valuable as the Spear?”
“The Spear is only valuable to a certain kind of collector. There are a lot more valuable pieces in this collection from a monetary standpoint. But the short answer is ‘yes.’ Their one concession to security is the switcheroo with the reproduction in the main case, but that means they have to go low-tech down here. Otherwise, people would figure it out.”
Kasey nodded but said nothing more. Stone’s confidence was reassuring; she just hoped it wasn’t misplaced.
The vault opened, and Zanger and Karcher disappeared inside. “Not a combo?” Kasey asked.
“There are at least a dozen vaults down here. Hard enough to remember one combination. No, keys are better. Two locks per door ensure that no one makes unauthorized visits.”
“Looks like Zanger found a workaround.”
Stone just nodded. A few minutes later, the men exited the vault. Karcher still carried his attaché, but his demeanor had changed. Where his body language had been confident going in, he now seemed apprehensive, as if being separated from the cherished Spear was causing him physical distress.
Placebo effect, Kasey thought. But then she remembered some of the legends Avery had related to them about the Spear of Destiny, how anyone who held the Spear but then lost it would die soon afterward. Probably better to let Stone handle it. Just in case.
As he watched Zanger lead the men out of the sub-basement, Stone was plagued by the feeling that he was missing something. Thus far, the scenario had played out exactly as Stone had predicted, but there were too many unknown variables, too many unanswered questions, for Stone to believe that he was seeing the pattern correctly. It was like walking into the middle of a movie and trying to figure out who the main characters were and what they wanted? He wasn’t even sure what kind of movie it was. Drama? Science fiction? Comedy?
There had been no tangible clues to suggest that he was reading the situation wrong. The Heilig Herrschaft had surreptitiously stolen the Spear of Destiny, and they evidently were not willing to risk letting that crime come to light. They were acting like a teenager, borrowing his father’s car for the night, and then trying to return it without anyone being the wiser. That reinforced the idea that they saw the relic as a symbol of power, and not a supernatural talisman. But if the Spear was critical to some plot for world domination, why would they care about covering their tracks?
The most likely answer was that their plan was at a critical stage where the discovery of the theft might derail the endeavor. Perhaps they were not quite ready to execute the plan. Perhaps zero hour was yet a few days or even weeks off.
And yet, the message they had intercepted clearly indicated the time for “Destiny” had arrived. There had been a sense of urgency about the request to procure the Spear.
What am I missing?
He knew the answer. Too much. But if the Dominion plan hinged on possessing this relic, then depriving them of it was the only logical course of action.
Only when the lights in the corridor went out did they leave their hiding place. They used flashlights instead of night vision technology now. Stone was relying on his iPad to guide him through the maze to the correct vault door, collecting the miniature cameras as he went.
When they at last arrived at the door, he donned a head mounted flashlight and a pair of glasses with jeweler’s loupes attached for additional magnification. The locks on the vaults were at least fifty years old. The design of the doors made replacing, or even maintaining the lock mechanisms virtually impossible. The security of the sub-basement relied primarily on secrecy—only a handful of personnel would even know of its existence—and replacing the vault doors with current technology would expose that secret. That did not however mean that the locks were going to be easy to get past.
He took out his tools, a slim diamond-tipped probe and a homemade tension wrench—a small standard head screwdriver with the tip carefully bent over at a ninety degree angle—and went to work on the left-hand lock. He raked the probe down the length of the cylinder, counting the pins, six in all. They moved smoothly, but he could tell that some of the springs were almost imperceptibly softer than others. He applied slight pressure to the tension wrench and then began teasing the pins one at a time until the lock yielded, and the cylinder began to rotate.
“Need a hand here,” he said.
“So you’re going to actually let me do something?” Kasey said.
“I didn’t bring
you along for the stimulating conversation. Hold this tension wrench in place while I pick the second lock.”
“Oh. Is that all?” Kasey sounded a little disappointed. She took hold of the screwdriver and held it steady.
“For now.” He repeated the process with the lock on the right-hand side. “Okay, on three, rotate the cylinder.” He gave the requisite count, and then at the prescribed signal they turned the locks together. There was a click from inside the heavy metal door and a firm pull on the handle was all the effort required to open it.
Stone swept the interior of the vault with his headlamp, revealing a narrow room, lined with spacious shelves which contained wooden packing crates of varying sizes. The boxes were marked with an alphanumeric sequence, but there was no other way to determine the content of each.
“Look for packing material or wood splinters,” Stone told Kasey. “They would have had to open the crate and—”
“Found it,” Kasey sang out. Stone turned just in time to see her pry the lid off an oblong container about two feet in length, a foot wide and six inches deep. Stone looked inside and saw an exact duplicate of the item he had viewed in the Imperial Treasury earlier in the day. Or more precisely, the original from which that duplicate had been made.
Stone reached for it without hesitation. The real Spear of Destiny—to the extent that a seventh-century artifact purporting to be from the first century could be called “real”—meant nothing more to him than the reproduction. It had no special religious significance to him and possessed no particular aesthetic value…except for the gold band which reflected the beam of his light like sunlight on the surface of a pool.
Despite himself, he found the dazzling display of brilliance to be hypnotic. The inscription—he recalled Avery’s translation from earlier, something about the Nail and the Lance—shimmered beneath his outstretched fingertips.
