Black Rain

by Matthew B. J. Delaney

  She continued to move quietly and efficiently through the Egyptian wing. Here was the party’s central area, where more waiters courteously plied the chattering crowd with canapés. Nearby, a chamber ensemble played, their music filling in the spaces of the general din.

  Along one length of the room stretched a giant wall of glass, the abandoned section of Central Park visible beyond. Night Comfort surveyed the scene before proceeding toward the Asian galleries.

  Her purse had been filled with caps. By the time she reached the top floor and the Impressionist Hall, it was almost empty. She paused before a colorful work by Gauguin, then walked past Monet’s 1905 Water Lilies before she stopped at her destination, Renoir’s Dance at Bougival. An hour had passed since she’d entered the museum and she’d managed to cover most of the floors. She still had a few minutes to admire the objective of her efforts. She studied the painting. One of the artist’s more ambitious works, oil on canvas, painted in 1883.

  Night Comfort had stared at a reproduction of it for hours while she prepped for tonight. She had felt a compulsion to reproduce the painting in her pod on Governors Island. But she had never seen the work like this. In person, close enough to admire each brushstroke, the colors, the engraving on the frame itself. The work was breathtaking.

  And she was going to steal it. The thought thrilled her.

  Around her the gallery was crowded, but still no one seemed to notice her. From her purse she retrieved a plastic tube the size of a ChapStick container. Inside was an iron-and-salt compound combined with petroleum, a faintly gray mixture the consistency of lip balm. She pulled off the top and a few moments later felt the tube grow warm, the iron oxidizing in the air and producing a low heat. Tube in hand, she bent down and made a small, four-inch streak along the wall just below the Renoir’s frame, outlining the bottom left corner.

  Then she stood, capped the tube, and slid it back into her bag as a tan-suited guard walked briskly toward her, telling her to, please, keep clear of the exhibits. She apologized and thanked him. Satisfied, he turned and returned to his post.

  One of the natural guards stared at her, then smiled flirtatiously when she made eye contact with him. She smiled back. Inside she felt nothing but disgust. God, she hated them. She dialed Jack on her sync.

  “See you soon.”

  Night Comfort left the museum, walked along Fifth Avenue and entered the lobby of their new rented honeycomb. Upstairs, Jack stood in the living room, pulling on a tan jumpsuit over his tuxedo.

  “How’d you do?” Night Comfort asked.

  “We’re set,” Jack responded.

  Hearing this, Night Comfort took a second tan jumpsuit from Jack’s hand and reached for the zipper of her dress. As she was about to drop the dress, she looked at him. He returned her stare, and she shrugged, letting it fall from her body. Standing there, she met Jack’s eyes, then slowly pulled the jumpsuit on. She tossed a radio transmitter to Jack. “Don’t get too distracted.”

  They walked down the back stairwell to the parking garage beneath the building. At its edge stood a large metal cart, the words “Carlotta Ice Design” printed on its side. Together, they began to push the cart along Fifth Avenue.

  Ahead of them, the museum was outlined sharply against the night sky, lit by two dozen or so halogen lamps along the base of its walls. The crowd at the front doors had thinned considerably, with the party inside now in full swing.

  The duo moved to the rear service entrance. The oil-stained, concrete loading dock was empty except for two natural security guards who burned smoke sticks at the top of the ramp. As Night Comfort and Jack drew closer, the guards turned their attention toward the cart heading in their direction. Night Comfort was designed too beautifully to ever be from the Domestic line. She kept her eyes to the ground, trying to conceal her face beneath her hair.

  As they drew close, one of the guards flicked away his smoke stick in a long, burning arc.

  The guards stepped forward and blocked their path to the service door.

  “For the banquet,” Night Comfort said.

  “Late.” The guard stepped aside, neither of the guards noticing that both Jack and Night Comfort wore latex gloves.

  “Little bit,” she replied.

  Past the service entrance was a wide storage area with a blue metal door labeled “Electrical Closet.”

  Moving quickly, Night Comfort opened the blue door and stepped into a small room lined with silver metal circuit breakers. At its far end was a ladder leading up to a trapdoor in the ceiling. From beneath the cart, she retrieved a blowtorch and then climbed the electrical closet ladder. She twisted the torch on and put the hissing blue flame to the padlock securing the trapdoor. Quickly the lock fell open and Night Comfort pushed the door upward.

  “All set,” she said.

  Jack pulled a black duffel bag from beneath the cart and handed it up to her. Holding the bag, she climbed up through the hole in the ceiling and shut the trapdoor behind her. The space above the electrical closet was dark and cramped. A metal I-beam stretched out ahead of her, bundles of thick wire reaching along it like vines as they threaded their way out through the museum and powered the exhibit lighting. She was now between the first and second floor, and, according to the architectural plans, the space ran directly over the Impressionist exhibit.

  Night Comfort retrieved a small headlamp. She switched it on and a dim arc of light penetrated the darkness of the crawl space ahead of her. Fitting it over her forehead, she removed four metal poles, each an inch thick. They opened to form a rectangular sled of black mesh three feet long and two feet wide. The sled had titanium wheels, which she affixed on the far side of the I-beam, allowing the unit to slide along.

  Slipping the bag over her shoulders, she lay down onto the sled, the mesh shape extending from her chest to just below her knees. As she began to pull herself forward, the wheels rolled silently along the ridge of the I-beam. A small digital odometer affixed to the sled ticked off numbers as she advanced.

  The Impressionist gallery began one hundred and eleven feet from the electrical closet. The gallery extended for one hundred and eighty additional feet, with the Renoir being hung at approximately the ninety-third foot, or a total of two hundred and four feet from her starting point.

  She turned on the sled’s small electric motor, its low whir barely audible as it powered the strange vehicle. The ride continued smoothly, and a dusty breeze spilled against Night Comfort’s face as she traveled above the coat room, the Exhibition shop, the American wing, the Frank Lloyd Wright room, and two 17th-century Dutch galleries before she finally felt herself begin to slow. The odometer counted past two hundred feet as she passed silently over the Impressionist gallery.

  She slowed as the sound of the motor died off until finally she bumped to a stop. Below her, through the plaster ceiling, she could hear the faint murmur of conversation and the even fainter sound of music.

  It was time.

  She took a small electric winch and nylon rope from the duffel and attached the mechanism with four screw bolts to the I-beam. When it was secure, she used a hand-powered drill to bore a hole into the plaster ceiling below her.

  She turned off her headlamp. The immediate area went dark except for a small circle of light that radiated up through the hole below her, illuminating swirling white plaster dust.

  Next to emerge from the duffel was a handheld LCD monitor the size of a paperback book. A thin fiber optic cable snaked out from the end, and Night Comfort fitted the cable down through the hole in the ceiling. When she turned on the monitor, a black-and-white image of the gallery below flickered into view.

  The view the screen relayed was of the milling crowd ninety feet below. She moved the camera in a slow swivel, inspecting the gallery. Two security guards were visible as they lounged against doorframes, lazily eyeing the assembled twenty or so people. Then she turned to the paintings. The Renoirs hung on the far wall nearest the door. Next to them, was the Van Gogh. And there, in
the center of the gallery, was Monet’s Water Lilies.

  She had always thought Dance at Bougival was Renoir’s finest work. Tonight, though, what was most important to her was this exemplar’s weight.

  Weight of the paint. Weight of the canvas. Weight of the frame.

  The canvas itself was double-primed Belgian linen, 78 5/8 inches tall, 38 5/8 inches wide. Moderate in thickness, Belgian linen weighed just over one ounce per one thousand square inches, making the Renoir canvas itself, free of paint, approximately 2.9 ounces, or just under one-fifth of a pound.

  The canvas’s four stretcher bars were made of maritime pine, a light wood found in the Landes de Gascogne region of France. The stretcher bars would contribute more of the canvas’s weight, adding another eight pounds.

  Night Comfort’s true fascination with art had always been about color. Color created with paint. The master’s paint, heavy by today’s standards, would have been made by boiling linseed oil, then adding ingredients such as yellow ochre, red and white lead, and pulverized cochineal, a type of insect dried and ground into a fine powder. Based on the specifics of Renoir’s style, anywhere from five to six hundred milliliters of paint, about eight ounces, would be required to fill the canvas with color.

  The bulk of the weight of the masterpiece, however, had to do with the frame. It was made from two-inch-thick gilded white oak, with a five-inch molding of applied ornament. A dense wood, white oak weighed 4.2 pounds per board foot, making the total weight of the frame alone approximately 74.2 pounds.

  She checked her watch. Twenty minutes remained. She looked back at the monitor and passed her hand over the surface, over the image of the Renoir, readying herself to touch it for the first time.

  Still where she had left him, Jack laid a linen tablecloth across the cart’s top and let it drape over the sides. He then placed two trays of hors d’oeuvres on the white fabric. Pushing the cart from the electrical closet, he crossed through the service area and out into the Great Hall.

  The Synthate named Grand Bleu stood on the other side of the doorway regarding a Max Ernst. He wore a well-tailored tuxedo, a cloth napkin over his arm. His body was athletic, not quite the pure bulk strength of one of the Games warriors, but conditioned to be in the Guard class. His face was handsome and unmarked by scars, a Synthate designed to blend in with the naturals, a product for those who wanted their security to be discreet. Nodding wordlessly to Jack, Grand Bleu took the cart. Jack watched Grand Bleu push it down the straight gallery hallway, past the chattering partygoers as he headed toward the musical instrument gallery.

  Up in her hidden perch, Night Comfort felt her watch vibrate silently against her wrist. Five minutes to midnight. She inched forward and clipped a metal carabiner to a harness around her belt, then snapped the other end to a loop in the winch’s nylon rope. The winch whirred one complete revolution and released a foot of loose rope that coiled on the sled next to her. The wireless operator on her harness controlled the winch and allowed her to regulate the desired speed.

  She adjusted an infrared spotting scope over her eyes, the lithium battery power supply humming quietly inside the unit. From the bag came a rounded metal handle, jagged points on both ends. She pressed it into the plaster ceiling below her and turned the handle, locking it in. Taking a small handsaw, she slowly began cutting a five-foot-long rectangular section out of the ceiling around the handle. The saw was slightly sticky on its side and bits of plaster dust adhered to it before they could fall to the gallery floor below.

  The handle gripped the plaster as she cut away the rectangular piece. Carefully she lifted up the section of the exhibit ceiling and placed it to the side.

  Through the opening, the gallery lights illuminated the small crawl space in which Night Comfort hung, yet no one sensed her presence, nor did any alarms sound. She checked her watch again. Thirty seconds.

  She slid a pneumatic dart pistol from the holster strapped to her leg, each dart loaded with 5cc of the powerful tranquilizer Telazol, used in the Games to operate on the wounded and more than enough to immobilize anyone. Keeping the pistol in her left hand, she checked her watch once more and gripped the side of the sled. She imagined the small detonator charge that Jack, then in his Con Edison uniform, had planted on the museum’s power tubes beneath Fifth Avenue. There was no way to cut the museum’s power entirely, only disrupt it momentarily. But that was all Night Comfort required.

  Her watch ticked down to midnight. Underneath the street outside, the charge detonated, destroying the conduit tubes. Below her, the lights in the gallery went dark. Abrupt cries of surprise from the assembled New Yorkers filled the darkness. A moment later the emergency lighting came on. The guards moved quickly to the center of the room, talking into their radios and looking unsure how to respond. Night Comfort still waited, watching the confusion below her.

  CHAPTER 46

  An entire wing away and up one level, Grand Bleu pushed the linen-covered cart quickly down the long open hallway overlooking the Grecian marble statuary. Reaching the musical instruments gallery, he glanced at his watch and saw he was now twenty-five seconds behind schedule. He could see Outback waiting, a glass of champagne in her hand. She wore a black cocktail dress that accentuated her slim figure as she looked down at a West African balo xylophone.

  Just beyond Outback was a single guard.

  Grand Bleu pushed the cart against the wall, next to a fifteenth-century Irish harp. Walking swiftly up to the guard, he pressed his right palm hard against the man’s face and pushed him backward. Holding the fellow down, he injected the guard’s shoulder with Telazol, waiting until he was unconscious. When Grand Bleu felt the guard go limp, he dragged his body across the floor, opened a supply closet door, and pushed him inside.

  Outback was there to greet him when he turned around. She kissed him on the cheek.

  “Problem?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  She straightened his bow tie. “You look very handsome in your tuxedo.”

  He checked his watch again. There was time.

  Invisible now to the disrupted cameras, he took a step toward his prize: an eighteenth-century Guarneri del Gesù violin, in mint condition with its red-gold varnish still shining. Night Comfort had already briefed him on its history. Most critics acknowledged that the sound quality of Bartolomeo Guarneri was superior to the work of his Italian peer, Antonio Stradivari. This particular violin had been long held in a private collection in Warsaw before becoming a Nazi prize, seized during the invasion of Poland.

  From beneath the cart, he removed a roll of clear plastic, eighteen inches square and sticky on one side. Outback helped him apply its adhesive surface to the display case glass, the plastic adhering tightly to the protective casing. The case was wired with a shatter alarm that would sound the instant the glass was broken. This alarm would send a signal to the security desk, alerting guards throughout the museum that the Guarneri violin had been compromised.

  The response: A team of shotgun-toting guards would be heading straight for Grand Bleu.

  That is, unless the security system had reason to believe more than just the violin was being stolen.

  Grand Bleu gripped the wireless detonator in his hand, keeping a close eye on his watch, the seconds ticking by. The detonator would trigger the sixty small flash-bang explosives that Night Comfort had planted around the museum. All the units had been molded inside generic bottle caps, and as each went off, they would cause no damage to the museum or any artwork. Yet the result would be a concussion wave large enough to trigger any vibration alarms within a twenty-yard vicinity. So instead of the security system registering just the danger to the violin, it now had the chaos and confusion of many compromised areas.

  The real target, then, could be any one of thousands of different pieces. The security system would light up each one, leaving the guards having to track down the single priceless needle in the haystack.

  In the largest museum in the Western Hemisphere.

/>   Grand Bleu wasn’t going to circumvent the alarm system; he was going to use it.

  He depressed the trigger with his thumb. Immediately the floor vibrated as the detonations were felt throughout the museum. There was an instant of quiet, and then the alarms sounded.

  Grand Bleu took a ball-peen hammer from the cart and shattered the glass case with short, even strokes. He followed a path around the edges of the clear plastic, which held the shattered glass in place and ensured none of the fragments fell backward and damaged the delicate instrument.

  When he’d carefully broken a complete square, Outback took hold of one edge of the plastic, quickly pulling down and away from the case. The entire square section of plastic came free, the shattered sections of glass still clinging to it, creating an eighteen-by-eighteen-inch opening. Grand Bleu reached in and removed the violin from its stand, holding it gently but firmly in his gloved hand.

  He retrieved a black case from its hiding spot beneath the cart and placed the purloined treasure inside its velvet interior. He locked the case and handed it to Outback.

  “You’re sure you want this?” Grand Bleu asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “I always wanted to play the violin.”

  From above the Impressionist Galley, Night Comfort continued to watch the disturbance below. The area was protected by a SmokeOut alarm, a system that produced an enveloping and visually impenetrable cloud of harmless smoke designed to confuse intruders and prevent theft and escape. The mist was pumped out by four jets and infused with helium, giving it buoyancy and allowing it to spread more easily through the room.

  She saw the white smoke billow out to each corner of the gallery and quickly envelop the surprised crowd. From inside the thick whiteness came frightened shouts as people lost in the smoke tried to find their way out. The jets continued to work, and quickly the fog rose up the wall of the gallery and headed toward the ceiling.