Cold War (2001)

by Tom - Power Plays 05 Clancy

  "Mmmm, yes," Morgan said, continuing to gaze at the water. He had spent considerable resources examining the possibility that the paintings were indeed valid. The governing rumor was that they had been given by Picasso to a friend of Dora's soon after the exhibit closed; the reason was obscure and varied according to the teller, although the favorite was that they were used to buy the freedom of fourteen Jews--a romantic tale that Morgan necessarily discounted. In any event, all agreed the works had been spirited off to Bavaria by an art-loving colonel, then sold in 1945 to a Russian general, who met with an unfortunate accident in Hungary during the 1950's. At that point, the rumors ceased completely.

  Morgan had hired a private detective from Bonn with certain heartfelt beliefs that solidified important connections to the past. After considerable effort, the detective produced two letters mentioning the paintings. A historical consultant had found hints in other documentary evidence, including two unpublished photos that seemed to show portions of them at the sides of Guernica as it was being completed. The consultant had also supplied certain hints that could be used to authenticate them, including the letter found in the Musee Picasso in Paris. But even if this sketchy evidence, taken together, convinced him that the paintings had indeed been done, nothing he had found so far meant that the works in the Italian's possession were the paintings. Even if the Italian was not known to deal in forgeries, even he could be fooled.

  Two art historians had been retained for their opinion. They would examine the works before any deal was consummated. Elata would be the piece de resistance--the master forger's eye looking for signs of his craft.

  But first, a price had to be settled on. Morgan reached into his pocket and took out his reading glasses, fitting them deliberately around his ears as a sign that he was now negotiating.

  "The price," he told the Italian gently.

  "The figure fifty million has been suggested."

  Morgan folded his arms and sat back in his seat. The Swiss waiter, as discreet as any in the breed, caught his eye across the tables and ducked back into the restaurant for another bottle of mineral water.

  "But of course, thirty might be more realistic," said the Italian.

  At an open auction, with documentation proving they were real, it was conceivable that bidding on each work alone would begin at ten million and quickly escalate; as a set their worth was simply incalculable. But there would be no open auction, at least not in Morgan's lifetime.

  He almost didn't want to buy them, for if he did he would inevitably have to part with them; he was a businessman, after all.

  He could indulge himself. He might indulge himself. If he sold them off individually, he could keep one or two.

  The bull?

  Perhaps the infant. The light blue streak underlying the eyes--pure innocence.

  Did it exist anywhere in the world outside of art?

  The waiter appeared. There was no one else outside on this cold day, and he walked quickly to his customers. As the man poured the water into the glass, Morgan glanced toward his bodyguard at the edge of the railing in front of the lake. He looked a little bored, which Morgan took as a good sign.

  "The works will be impossible to sell," said Morgan after the waiter had gone.

  "Not for a man of great reach."

  He must make a bid, and yet he did not wish to. It was sacrilege, an insult.

  He had not thought that when he put a number on the Renoir ink. A ridiculously low number--ten thousand American dollars. He had ended buying it from the Russian mafya official for fifteen, then selling it for half a million three months later.

  But the child's innocence could not be bought. The bull's fear--what price?

  A dollar, a billion.

  "One million per painting, the usual method, upon verification," said Morgan.

  "An insult," said the Italian. "Pazzo. Pazzo."

  Pazzo meant "crazy" and was among the mildest epithets available. They were very close.

  Morgan resisted the temptation to pull the photocopies from his pocket. Instead, he turned back toward the lake. The white swan had been joined by a black one. He watched for quite a while before the Italian spoke.

  "Twenty for all."

  "Fifteen," said Morgan, deciding on his price. He rose, removing his glasses and placing them back in his breast pocket. "Make the arrangements. A single word in the usual manner when you are ready; use 'innocent.' It has a nice ring."

  He rose swiftly, giving his companion no chance to protest.

  Paris, France

  Nessa studied the carrot stick before biting into it. Since joining Interpol, she had gained nearly five pounds. She couldn't be called overweight, but if this pace continued her body would soon resemble one of those delightful rum cakes that seemed to lie in wait at every corner. At least the food was contributing to her language skills; "Chateaubriand" fairly rolled off her tongue.

  She turned her attention back to the transcript of the interrogation of Mme. Diles, the low-level research assistant at the Musee Picasso who had passed the letter to Elata. The woman claimed she did not know why she had been offered ten thousand dollars for that particular document, nor by whom, nor why only the original would do.

  Because his works were so well known, Picasso was not a good candidate for high-level forgery. Stolen pieces of his were somewhat common on the black market, but Elata could probably do far better mimicking other artists.

  Jairdain pressed his forefinger to his lips, holding the tip against his nose.

  "Most likely he's still in Paris," said the French investigator.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Perhaps he wants to forge letters now."

  "It's the daub of paint, I think," said Nessa, glancing at the photocopy on her desk. "It's the only thing unique about the letter."

  "The ink."

  "Could have asked for any letter. They wanted this one specifically. June 3, 1937. He wrote it while he was working on Guernica."

  Nessa's concentration in art history was the Renaissance, but she had taken several courses on modern art, including one that combined the study of Picasso with Matisse. Guernica had taken up about a week's worth of lectures, thanks largely to the photos that had been taken of its evolution. She remembered an afternoon's discussion of studies for the painting; there had been six at the very beginning, a rush of ideas the first day. Possibilities had evolved on the canvas itself. One of the students--Karl, long hair, glasses--had suggested Picasso was considering companion pieces or even variations. The professor said there had been rumors of such pieces, but none had surfaced after the war.

  Was Elata seeking to create those pieces? It was the sort of grand, bold artistic gesture he was known for--Doigts was unintimidated in the face of genius. He was, after all, a genius himself.

  "Why the paint, though?" she asked aloud. "To get the color right? One color?"

  And then she realized they had looked at things backwards.

  "He has a Picasso," she told her partner. "From this period. He's trying to authenticate it."

  "C'e?"

  "Who else but a master forger would know all the tricks? It must be." She jumped up from her desk. "An unknown Picasso, painted around the time of Guernica--perhaps even intended as a companion. It would be worth millions. Many millions."

  "Magnifique," said Jairdain. "Now all we have to do is find the bastard, and we will both be the most famous Interpol detectives of all time."

  Nessa frowned and picked up another carrot.

  Bull Pass, Antarctica

  She had been alone in the blackness for hours, or what seemed like hours, before she heard the scream.

  Her hands cuffed in front of her, she'd sunk down in a corner after they took him, her knees pulled to her chest, welded rivets pressing into her spine. Hunkered in that angle between two walls, she'd listened numbly to the pounding of machinery somewhere outside the cage. The noise and blackness seemed one, merged. A grinding, shapeless thing wrapped around her, confin
ing her as surely as the walls of the cage itself.

  After a while she had slipped into a faded, bottomed-out semblance of sleep, only to be awakened by the scream, startling as a rocket flare inside her head. But when she came back to full alertness, she heard nothing. Nothing but the machines grating away out there.

  Out there in the black.

  She felt her heart bumping in her chest now, felt her temples throbbing, pulled in a breath of stale air. It helped a little, but not much. God, God. That single, piercing scream. Maybe she'd imagined it. She'd been woozy with fatigue before she nodded off. Very possibly she'd imagined it.

  She thought about the beatings they'd given him, tears swelling into her eyes. She didn't want to think about the beatings, hated to think about the beatings, but couldn't keep her mind from turning back to them. He was a strong man. Physically and mentally. Stronger than she ever could be. But it was hard to see how anyone would be able to withstand much more of their vicious, unforgiving abuse.

  She sat there gathered into a ball. The blackness was absolute. She could have held her hand directly in front of her face and not seen the vaguest hint of its outline. Absolute. Only the noises beyond the cage had variation.

  She listened to them, trying to take note of the changes.

  Time passed.

  The drumming rhythms quickened and slowed. There were periods when everything switched off. Beneath the sound of the machines, and in the occasional lulls, she could hear the quiet susurrus of air blowing through unseen ventilation grilles.

  She prayed to God the scream had been something she'd imagined, dreamed, whatever.

  She listened intently to the machine noises. She wasn't sure what compelled her. Perhaps it was ingrained habit, a mind used to filing and sorting information. Perhaps it was only to give her moments shape, definition, a sense of onward movement. Or perhaps the reason was simpler, and she just needed to try and focus on something besides what those men had done to him. What they might be doing to him right now.

  She hoped she hadn't actually heard that scream.

  The beatings had been awful.

  He couldn't take much more.

  Alone, trapped, the cuffs digging into her wrists, she slumped against the walls of the cage. The air hissing in from the shaft was not exactly warm, but it had raised the temperature enough to keep her from freezing, keep her alive down here, keep both of them alive before they took him away.

  She wished she knew where he was, how he was.

  The beatings.

  Her thoughts insisted on doubling back to the beatings.

  Like those that came afterward, the first assault had been sudden and brutal. The men who'd burst into the cage wore hard-shell helmets with lamp assemblies, and she'd flinched from their piercing bright beams, blinded for several horrible seconds. But when her eyes recovered from their shock, the part of her that was trained at observation had amazingly kicked in. She'd noticed their coveralls, and their safety vests with luminous yellow stripes, and the card-shaped dosimeter badges on their chests, a type worn in laboratories where ionizing radiation hazards were present. Laboratories in which she herself had worked. She'd noticed that the lights rapidly intensified without manual adjustment, and that each was composed of multiple lenses, like the compound eyes of an insect . . . state-of-the-art, probably white LEDs controlled by a microcomputer. All six or seven of them were carrying firearms. Submachine guns, she believed, although such weapons were beyond her realm of experience. Or had been. Her training and background were in science, but recent events had dealt her a harshly different kind of education.

  It had felt planned out to her, almost staged. The men went silently about their appalling work, a couple of them grabbing her arms, pushing her back against the wall, restraining her. Two others pointed their weapons at him, gestured him toward the middle of the cage. When he refused, scuffled with them, the rest of them closed in around him. They pounded him mercilessly. They used their fists, kicked him with steel-reinforced boots. They made no attempt at interrogation. They did not respond when she begged to know what they wanted. They just kept hitting him, the beams of their helmet lights jostling from the furious motion, leaping about the walls of the cage.

  She screamed for them to stop, pleaded with them to stop, but they continued to ignore her. And during it all the man with the strange birthmark on his left cheek--it was melanocytic, a perfect crescent, like the shadow of a sliver moon--had watched from off to the side, looking frequently in her direction. If the whole torturous episode was indeed choreographed, she had no doubt in her head that he'd been the one to arrange its lockstep savagery.

  The beating had seemed to go on endlessly before they were finished. And then he was writhing on the floor in agony, gasping for breath, his lips cut and swollen, his nose bleeding, his face a mass of bruises. The man who had been watching from the side turned toward her, strode to where the others held her pinned to the wall, and stood there regarding her with eyes that showed neither hostility nor conscience. They were like camera lenses in their level objectivity. In a way that was his most frightening aspect. He was as lacking in malice as pity. A man doing his job. His quiet dispassion had unbraced her.

  She'd shuddered through her entire body as the others held her immobile against the wall.

  He waited a moment, leaned close.

  "Later," he had said softly.

  Nothing else.

  And then he'd turned, and his men had released their grip on her, and followed him out the solid metal door of the cage, passing into the black.

  That was the first visit.

  They had come back often since. Sometimes it was to measure out more violence against him. Sometimes they left trays of bland, greasy stew and water. When they brought the food, it was always without the man she'd assumed to be their leader. He would just arrive for the beatings. None of them ever asked any questions. None of them spoke. It was always the same.

  They ate their tasteless food in the blackness, ate to stay alive for however much longer they could. Two prisoners holed away without explanation, without knowing when their sentence would reach its end, or what would happen to them afterward. It was difficult for him to chew or swallow. She'd had to help him take down the unsavory mush, slip little clots of it past his swollen lips with her fingers. After the third round of severe punishment he'd vomited, been unable to hold the food in his stomach for quite a while. Talk of escape arose between them, but neither had any idea how it might be accomplished. They had wondered aloud why they were being held, could only guess that sooner or later their captors meant to question them about the base. There was no way to be sure what they expected to learn, what motives they might have, it was all so baffling. But he told her he'd promised himself not to give anything up to them. Not unless they began to direct their violence at her would he give anything up.

  She wasn't surprised. He was a brave man. She wished she felt that kind of courage on her own.

  The beatings continued to alternate with the crude, bare-sustenance meals.

  Time after time it was the same.

  Until the last time.

  That last time they returned, it was to take him away. By then he'd been in desperate shape and could barely stay up on his legs. She remembered panicking as they dragged him off the floor, into the blackness beyond the cage. She had verged on crying out that she'd tell them whatever they needed to know, anything, if they only let him be. But then she'd thought of his vow to defy interrogation, his resolute, unsubmitting heart, and checked herself. She hadn't wanted to fail him, to fall short, and had bitten down on the words, watching them take him away, watching the door of the cage slam shut behind him--

  Another scream suddenly bayoneted her thoughts now, and she jerked bolt upright as if slapped, the chain of her handcuffs clinking coldly between her trapped, chafed wrists.

  The screaming continued to slash the blackness; shrill, tormented. There was no wishing it away anymore. No telling herself i
t wasn't real. That wouldn't work, wouldn't help, not now. . . .

  She heard footsteps outside the cage, several sets of them, approaching with that familiar martial cadence. Then the cage door opened, lights glaring inside, dazzling her. She cowered back, squinting, shielding her eyes with both hands as they adjusted to the brightness.

  The marked man entered, the rest of her jailers hanging behind him, positioned to either side of the entrance with their weapons at their hips. He crossed the floor of the cage, stood very still before her, framed in that terrible blaze of light.

  Shevaun Bradley waited.

  Trembling, cringing against the cage's metal wall, she waited.

  At last the marked man bent low over her.

  "Now," he said, "we talk."

  And outside in the black, Scarborough's screams strung on and on above the heavy clashing roar of great machines.

  ELEVEN

  PARIS, FRANCE MARCH 12, 2002

  HAVING WORKED OUT THE SOLUTION TO A SEEMINGLY insoluble problem, the mind longs for verification. It is not simply enough to know intuitively that something is correct; humans desire external confirmation. A math student wants the proof to be convincing and communicable. A police officer making an arrest wants the satisfaction of a conviction in a court of law.

  Nessa wanted the Picasso, or more likely, the series of Picassos. She had consulted experts on her theory of a painting from the time of Guernica; there had been no firm consensus, but to her mind that made it even more convincing. Even more convincing was the buzz from certain quarters that she was not the first to make such inquiries. A Japanese collector had approached a professor in Barcelona, a curator in Los Angeles had been queried by a Belgian entrepreneur--there were questions in the air.

  If she could find Elata, Nessa figured she would know within a half hour if she was right or not. She would charge him with theft and threaten him with a jail term of several years for stealing the letter from the museum. She would find out about the Picassos--as well as many other paintings. For he was a nervous man, haughty but on the edge and easily broken; she'd seen it in his eyes on the platform.