by Jeff Lindsay
“They’re deploying now,” Szabo said.
“The Iranians are in position on the roof,” Shurgin said. “And also at key points on the second floor.”
Shurgin made no further comment and didn’t move on; he just stood there looking thoughtful.
Szabo looked at him, and his doubts grew. His gut told him something was off about this guy. Tremaine thought so, too. Szabo was not a subtle man, and he needed to know if Shurgin was legit. So if he was going to find out, he would just come out with it, face-to-face.
Now or never, Szabo thought. “Special Agent Shurgin,” Szabo said carefully.
“You don’t trust me,” Shurgin said abruptly. “Your men don’t, either.”
Szabo hesitated, taken aback. But then he nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “We don’t.”
Shurgin looked right, down the hall toward the back of the museum. “I tell you what, Lieutenant,” he said. “Pretend you do trust me, just for a little longer. Until midnight.”
“Why should I?”
“Because then you’ll have proof,” Shurgin said. He turned his hugely magnified eyes on Szabo. “If a thief comes at midnight,” he said, “and he’s French, I am legit and you were right to follow my lead. If a French thief doesn’t come, I’m something else. And then . . . ?” The ghost of a smile flitted across Shurgin’s face, then vanished. “I’m right here.” He blinked. “Deal?”
Szabo thought about it. The man made sense. And it was only a little longer. If midnight came and went with no French thief, no deal, and Shurgin would have some very serious questions to answer. In the meantime, Szabo was right here with his eyes on the guy and his team around him. No risk.
Szabo nodded. “Deal,” he said.
Shurgin rubbed his mustache with a thumb. Then he nodded, too, and looked up and down the hallway. “He could even come in the front door. So remind your men to watch all points, not just the tricky ones.”
“They know,” Szabo said.
“It’s half-past eleven,” Shurgin said, glancing at his wristwatch. “Coulomb will cut the power at midnight. But he’s a devious bastard—be ready at all times.”
“We’re ready,” Szabo said.
Shurgin looked at Szabo for a long moment, then nodded. “Good,” he said. “Is the battery system off-line yet?”
“I’ll do that right now,” Szabo said. He went into the exhibition hall, and Shurgin followed him. They walked in silence to the far end of the hall, and Szabo disconnected the backup system, pulling the cables off the battery array. He straightened. Shurgin was watching him. Szabo raised an eyebrow at the FBI man.
“Shouldn’t we have somebody at the control panel?” he said, nodding toward the command station at the far end of the room.
“No need, not with the whole system off-line,” Shurgin said. “It’s more important we have all eyes on the approaches—outside this hall.” He nodded. “But just to be certain, I will wait here, with the jewels.” Shurgin reached under his jacket and drew his pistol. “I’m the final backup,” he said. “Just in case.”
Szabo nodded. “He won’t get that far,” he said.
“You don’t know him like I do,” Shurgin said, showing a small and uncharacteristic smile.
“Maybe not,” Szabo said.
“All right, Lieutenant,” Shurgin said dismissively. “Take position and be ready.”
Szabo nodded. “We will,” he said. “Until midnight.” He looked hard at Shurgin for a long moment, apparently without any effect at all. He shrugged and left the hall. From the doorway, he glanced back over his shoulder. Shurgin, pistol in his hand, was standing in the center of the exhibit, right beside the case for the big jewel, the one they called the Ocean of Light.
Szabo hesitated. Having the guy right there, right by the jewels—it didn’t sit right. But what the hell, he was right outside the room, and his men were all around. There was no chance of anybody getting in or out, not without the Black Hat team seeing him. And it made sense for somebody to be right there. A central position, final backup, where he could see an approach from any direction. If he can see at all, Szabo thought, with those fucking freak show glasses. But if Coulomb made it this far, Shurgin had a clear field of fire in all directions. This was the right spot.
Satisfied that it was all as good as he could make it, Szabo left the hall. Until midnight. And then—all bets are off.
He glanced at his watch: twenty minutes ’til. He went down the hall to check on his men.
* * *
—
Katrina waited in the conference room, her heart pounding. Realistically, she knew she was safe here. All the action, and all the danger, was on the roof or in the vicinity of the crown jewels. And her rational mind was quite sure that one French thief, no matter how well he could scale walls, stood no chance against all those well-armed, well-trained men waiting for him in ambush.
But it’s almost never our rational minds that get scared. It’s the wild, untamable, irrational part, the part that believes in the monster under the bed—that’s what sends the unnecessary adrenaline pumping through our veins. It did that now to Katrina. She felt clammy, her hands sweated, and her mouth was dry.
For the four hundredth time, she glanced at her watch. It was seventeen minutes before midnight—exactly three minutes later than the last time she’d looked. Shurgin had said it would happen at midnight. And he seemed so sure of it. So not long now. It would all be over soon. If she didn’t burst from anxiety first.
She stood up abruptly. There was a coffee machine down at one end of the room, the kind that makes one cup at a time. She walked down and thrust a Styrofoam cup under the spout and pushed the button.
The machine seemed to take forever to get going, but finally it began to gurgle and hiss. Katrina waited, tapping her toe impatiently. When the coffee was ready, she took it back to her seat at the table. She called Randall for the four hundredth time. Straight to voicemail. So she sipped, put the cup down, glanced at her watch.
Twelve minutes until midnight.
* * *
—
It seemed to Lieutenant Szabo that he’d spent way too much of his life just standing around waiting for the shooting to start. On the plus side, the experience kept him from being really nervous right now—just a little revved up, like a racehorse waiting in the starting gate.
On the downside, this one was all out of his control. He couldn’t do a goddamn thing except wait for a chance that might or might not come. And he was stuck down here, away from the action, as backup. That was frustrating as hell. He had to find a way to get to this Coulomb and find out if he’d killed Chief Bledsoe. Absolutely, positively no fucking way around it—he HAD to. The chief hadn’t really been a close friend, and hadn’t been one to most of the Black Hat team, either. That didn’t matter. The chief had been one of them, and SEALs always balance the books. Nobody ever left behind, and nobody ever got whacked without an accounting. Whoever killed the chief would be paid in full, and Coulomb was the leading candidate. It was just that, so far, Szabo had no idea how he was going to get to the thief.
He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes to go if Shurgin was right. Szabo sighed and went to check each of his men.
* * *
—
Katrina lifted the Styrofoam cup to her lips for a sip of coffee. Nothing happened. She glanced into the cup—it was empty. She didn’t remember drinking it all. But she had to admit her mind was not really tracking at the moment.
She dropped the cup to the tabletop and closed her eyes. She told herself to take deep, calming breaths. Slowly in, slowly out. It didn’t work. She sounded like she was panting. And she hadn’t calmed down at all, either. When will this end? she thought unhappily. And the answer came right back: at midnight, of course.
And when was that? Katrina opened her eyes to look at her watch—or she thoug
ht she did. But she couldn’t see anything. Had she forgotten how to open her eyes? She blinked a few times; no, her eyes worked fine. But it was still as dark as if her eyes remained closed.
Her first thought, as rattled as she was, was that she had gone blind from the nervous strain. But then she heard a distant sound—br-r-r-r-r-r-rap!
Gunfire. Followed by voices shouting.
She wasn’t blind—instead, she was an idiot. The electricity had been cut. And she didn’t need to look at her watch, either. Because the sound of gunfire could only mean one thing.
It was midnight, and the thief had come.
* * *
—
Lieutenant Szabo was at the central point of his team’s deployment, his men spread out on both sides and combat-ready. Szabo stood near the entrance to the exhibition gallery, eyes moving from side to side, weapon held waist high.
Szabo had just begun the move to look at his watch when the lights went out. A moment later, he heard the shots. They were not close, but he was positive they came from the roof—Coulomb! “Fuck!” he said aloud. If the Iranians had killed the thief before Szabo got a crack at him—
“Snyder!” he yelled, waving to his left. Snyder looked his way. “You got lead!” And without waiting for a reply, Szabo ran for the roof.
He sped through the door, up the stairs to the second floor, still in darkness. As he ran across the second floor to the roof door, he couldn’t help but notice that there were no Iranians on guard anywhere—they had clearly all run to the roof when they heard the gunfire. Szabo felt a brief surge of pride; his men would never do anything of the kind. And then it occurred to him that it was exactly what he was doing right now, running from his post toward the first sound of gunfire.
Never mind; he reached the end of the hallway and ran through the access door, taking the stairs to the roof three at a time all the way up to the metal fire door. He slammed into it, shoved it open, and burst out into the cool night air of the roof.
After the darkness of the interior of the museum, the starlight was more than bright enough to light up the scene on the roof. The Revolutionary Guards stood in a loose circle, their AKM assault rifles pointed at a figure writhing on the ground at their feet.
Coulomb.
And he was alive—but obviously wounded.
Szabo hurried over and pushed through the circle of Iranians. The Iranians glared at him but let him through. He looked down at the figure on the roof. The Frenchman had been shot in the right thigh, and he was rolling around in pain, eyes shut. The wound was bleeding profusely, but it looked like Coulomb would live.
Shurgin had been right. The Fed was legit.
That meant the wounded man might be the chief’s killer. And this could be his only chance to find out.
Szabo knelt by the Frenchman’s side. “You’re going to be all right,” he said. “Parlez-vous anglais? Can you talk?”
Coulomb opened his eyes. “Talk!” he exclaimed. “Bloody fucking hell, mate, I’m fucking shot! They’ve buggered me leg!” he said in an accent that was pure Cockney.
Szabo blinked. “You’re not French . . . ?”
“Oh, fucking Christ, no—and I’m not a bloody radish, neither, mate. So I am bleeding to death—how about a fucking tourniquet?”
Szabo felt his jaw drop. For a second that seemed a great deal longer, he just squatted there, his mind whirling. Not Coulomb—not even French. But Shurgin had been positive—the thief would be French. What had he said? “If a French thief doesn’t come, I’m something else.”
A French thief had not come. That meant Shurgin was something else. But what? Why was he here, waiting downstairs, when he had to know Szabo would find out and come down to confront him? All Szabo had to do was go down to where Shurgin stood waiting—
Waiting all alone—with the jewels.
Son-of-a-bitch—!
A strong feeling of panic combined with dread and anger flooded through Szabo, and he jumped to his feet. “Shurgin—!” he bellowed. The Iranians stared at him, but he pushed them roughly aside and ran from the roof and down the stairs, twice as fast as he’d run up only a minute ago. He clattered out into the hallway on the main floor and sprinted for the exhibit, passing several of his men, who gave him startled looks as he galloped past.
Szabo slid to a halt at the door to the exhibit. One quick glance told him he was too late.
Shurgin was gone.
Szabo spun and raced toward the lobby, skidding to a stop when he saw Snyder. “Shurgin!” he bellowed. “Where the fuck is he?”
Snyder shook his head. “He left, like, two minutes ago,” he said. “Said he had to report, and he’d hook up again at the police station.”
Szabo ran as fast he could through the lobby and out the front door onto the street. The traffic was light at this hour, mostly cabs. Shurgin would have had no trouble grabbing one and escaping. Szabo looked up and down the street anyway, but it was hopeless. Shurgin was gone.
Szabo walked back to the exhibition room, knowing he was just plain fucked, him and his whole team and by extension even Black Hat—and, much worse, his country. Because the Iranians would blame him and call it a plot by the crime-infested society of the Great Satan. And he would just have to take it because the Iranians were right. He had fucked up. His gut had told him there was something wrong about Shurgin, and he hadn’t listened to it. And now he was thoroughly, totally fucked.
There was one remaining question before he made his report: What exactly had Shurgin taken? Szabo went into the hall, checking the cases one by one as he passed them. They were all apparently untouched, their contents still gleaming undisturbed in the glow of the emergency lighting. But that big jewel in the center, the one Shurgin had been “guarding”—that one was small enough to grab and conceal.
Szabo approached the central case with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, certain he would find that case empty. He reached it, looked down through the glass . . .
It was still there.
Bewildered, he looked around the room. And they were all still there, all the crown jewels, every fucking item.
The big, priceless, easily grabbed and concealed jewel was right there in its case. Shurgin hadn’t taken anything, not one fucking thing. But he was gone—and wait a minute, what the fuck was going on here? Because the guy on the roof was not French but a Brit—which meant Shurgin was not legit and the whole thing had been some kind of setup—and the only reason for any setup was to take the fucking jewels—except they were all there, nothing was missing—and that meant . . .
What, exactly?
Szabo stood there for several minutes, just breathing hard and thinking. He couldn’t think of anything that made sense of what had happened: A thief captured, but the wrong one. An FBI agent who wasn’t, or maybe not, except then what the fuck was he? And he’d engineered what should have been a successful attempt on the jewels except nothing was taken. An absolutely perfect setup that worked like a Swiss watch—but a setup for what?
Because no matter how many times he looked into the case, the big fucking jewel was right there where it was supposed to be. They all were.
The main lights came back on, and the big jewel really came to life, glowing like it was filled with a living fire. Szabo stared at it. He hadn’t really looked at it before, and it was worth a long look. Beautiful, completely filled with light. It was easy to understand why somebody would want to own this thing. It made the love of jewels reasonable, even inevitable. Its name, posted on the neatly lettered sign beside the case, was no exaggeration.
The Ocean of Light.
It really was just that, a deep pool of beauty that radiated a light so perfect you could almost swim in it.
And it was still right here. Untouched.
“What the fuck,” Szabo said at last. It was about all he could manage.
CHAPT
ER
32
When Special Agent Frank Delgado heard on the news that there had been a death at the Eberhardt Museum at the grand opening gala for the Iranian crown jewels, he knew right away what it meant.
Riley Wolfe.
But the news also said that the collection was intact and open to the public. So Delgado waited. And the next night, when reports came of a thief captured on the roof of the Eberhardt Museum, he moved—but not to the Eberhardt, and not to the police station.
An agent who did not know Riley Wolfe as Delgado did would almost certainly have gone to one or the other immediately, with all possible speed. Delgado did not. He knew with absolute certainty that it had not been Riley Wolfe who had been captured on the roof of the museum. So there was no point in checking with the police, or going to the Eberhardt. Instead, he got into his car and drove through the Holland Tunnel, all the way over to Newark.
This might seem like a strange reaction to the news that Riley Wolfe, the man he had devoted so much time and energy to finding, was on the job in Manhattan. It was not. Instead, it was the only possible reaction, and only Frank Delgado could know that. Only Frank Delgado knew what was there at this particular spot in Newark, and what it meant to Riley Wolfe. He had found this place after a week of careful and methodical search, and he had been watching it and waiting for this exact moment.
So Delgado drove through the Holland Tunnel and over to Newark and parked his car in the small and crowded parking lot of the Gentle Ease Long-Term Care and Rehabilitation Center. He had already been here, twice, but had not yet gone inside. This time, he did.
His destination was room 242, a private room on the second floor, one of the more expensive ones available, with guaranteed round-the-clock care from an RN and a doctor always on call.
The occupant of this room was one of seventeen in the New York area who was the right age and required all the appropriate prescription medications. But the woman in room 242 was the only one with a name that matched one of the names on the short list he had made of possible aliases.
