“Home sweet home,” I said to Kieran as the plane came to a stop.
She gave me a sour look and said, “There are reasons why so many Irish people move abroad.”
“You don’t get that many hurricanes in Ireland,” Wil said. His voice sounded a bit funny due to the filter plugs he wore in his nose to fend off Kieran’s pheromones. She hadn’t tried anything since I broke her nose, but we didn’t trust her.
“So, are you putting me up in The Dublin?” she asked. The Dublin was a five-star luxury hotel.
Wil chuckled. “Even better. You’ll have a suite on the fifteenth floor of Chamber headquarters. It has a lovely view of the bay.”
We walked through a tunnel from the hangar into the airport terminal, then took a Chamber car to the headquarters building. The driver detoured around flooded streets several times. When we arrived, he stopped in front of the building.
“Have to let you off here,” he said. “The parking garage under the building is sealed off to keep it from flooding.”
It was only a short dash up thirty steps to the entrance door, but we were soaked by the time we got inside. A squad of female guards whisked Kieran away to her new digs, while Wil and I stood in the foyer and dripped.
“So, where are we going?” I asked. “All my clothes are at the townhouse, but I have no idea whether we can get there, or if it’s dry.”
He winked at me. “We are going to the hotel across the street. It’s not The Dublin, but it is very nice, with a great restaurant and room service.”
There was a tunnel, so I didn’t have to get wet again. And he didn’t lie about the quality of the food, which was delivered about the time I finished soaking in a nice, hot bath.
The following morning, while I waited for Wil to shower, I checked the news. To my surprise, the Vancouver art scandal was still on the front page, but for an unexpected reason. As soon as I heard the shower turn off, I called out to Wil.
He came into the main room of our suite, and I pointed to the screen. The day after Kieran ran, Michael Reagan had marched into Chamber headquarters in Dublin and filed charges against her for theft.
A quick search found the vid of the interview he had given the media shortly afterward. I about choked on the interviewer’s introduction.
A blonde bimbo with a microphone said, “Michael Reagan, world famous art collector and philanthropist, has revealed an event almost as shocking as the revelations out of Canada last week. A conspiracy at the world-famous Vancouver Art Gallery may have an Irish connection. Kieran Murphy, who is being sought for masterminding the thefts in Vancouver, once worked here in Dublin, according to Mr. Reagan.”
The camera switched to Reagan. “I recently hired Miss Murphy to catalog my collection,” he said. “Of course, I was as shocked as everyone else when the charges against her in Canada came to light. I checked and discovered several paintings, very valuable paintings I might add, are missing, as is Miss Murphy. I will be contacting the authorities in Canada as well. She spent considerable time at my Vancouver Island house, where she was supposed to catalog the portion of my collection that I keep there.”
Wil shook his head. “There’s no honor among thieves, is there?”
“Hey! Watch your tongue, mister. Just because those people are a bunch of lowlifes, it doesn’t mean we all are.”
He looked startled for a moment, then laughed. “I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. I promise never again to disparage the honor and customs of the illustrious Thieves Guild.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But you need to watch your stereotyping,” I grumbled.
He kissed me on the top of the head and began to get dressed. “What do you want to do about breakfast?” he asked.
“Room service.” I gestured to the window and the rain blowing sideways outside. “I’m waiting on some clothes to be delivered, but who knows when they’ll get here with all of this going on.”
“Who’s bringing you clothes?”
“The store. I ordered them online. I can’t go around dressed in a cat suit all the time. Some of your burglary boys might wonder.”
“Can’t you just, you know…” He wiggled his fingers.
I morphed into the image of Danielle Kincaid wearing a designer dress with pearls.
“Yes, I can do this, but I’d still be wearing a cat suit that needs washing and yesterday’s undies. I’d rather be comfortable.”
My clothes were delivered along with breakfast. We ate, then took the tunnel back to Chamber headquarters. I waited outside while Wil had a long meeting with his Irish counterpart. While the Chamber of Commerce was a world-wide organization, each main jurisdiction acted independently in local matters. Since charges had now been made against Kieran both in North America and in Ireland, Wil was afraid things might get tricky.
He came out of the meeting and smiled at me. “Not a problem,” he said. “Let’s go talk with Kieran.”
Kieran’s flat was much nicer than our hotel room. Obviously, it was kept for visiting Chamber executives who didn’t want to lower themselves to staying in a five-star hotel. Wil handed her a list.
She glanced at it, then up at Wil. “What’s this?”
“The list of paintings Michael Reagan said you stole from him.”
She looked back at the list. “That sorry bastard.” She closed her eyes, and for the first time I saw what I thought was genuine emotion on her face.
“Director Wilberforce,” she said, “this is a list he made up to pull an insurance scam. Michael told me that at one time or another, all of these had been owned by the various owners of Castletown House. They were either stolen before The Fall, were damaged or destroyed in some way, or they were quietly sold by previous owners to pay their bills. He had me sign authentication documents so he could insure them, then he planned to stage a burglary.”
I looked over her shoulder and saw there were seven paintings on the list. None of them were world famous, though most were by recognizable artists. Reagan was smart, and he hadn’t tried to do too much, but the scheme would probably pay him millions.
“And has he insured them?” Wil asked.
“Oh, hell yes. That was before I moved to Vancouver. Michael is a planner. It doesn’t bother him to wait years for a payoff. He told the insurance company that the paintings were found in the attic.”
“So, the paintings don’t exist?”
“No, not a single one of them. At least not to my knowledge.”
“But it does a hell of a good job of discrediting her,” I said.
Wil nodded. “It certainly complicates things.”
I sat down. “Kieran, are there any stolen or forged paintings at Castletown?”
“Unless he’s moved them, there were when I left. At least a dozen that are on the Art Loss Database. Van Gogh’s A Wheatfield with Cypresses—both the original and the forgery were there.”
“If he did move them, where would he move them to?”
She thought for a while. “I guess it depends on what he’s trying to do. I have a flat here in Dublin that he owns. If he wanted to implicate me, he could move them there.” She got up, walked across the room, and poured herself a cup of coffee. Turning back to us, she said, “There’s the house here in Dublin, and he has a house north of Galway. Not too many people know about it.”
“What about O’Bannon’s house near Cork?” I asked.
“I didn’t know Gavin had a place near Cork.”
“Okay,” I said. “Now, you got out of the compound without any problem. What kind of security measures are in place?”
“The guards all know me, and they know the car I took. I just wave, and they open the gate for me.” Further questioning about the estate’s security revealed only that Kieran hadn’t paid any attention at all to the systems or guards.
We left her rooms, so we could discuss what to do next.
“We can check all those other locations fairly easily,” I said.
Wil shook his head. “Just beca
use we have been out of town doesn’t mean his estate wasn’t covered. There hasn’t been a truck large enough to carry a bunch of paintings leave his place since she did.”
“So, they’re still there.”
“If she’s telling the truth.”
“We’re back to sneaking me in there so I can verify there’s a reason to go after him.”
Wil didn’t look happy, but he slowly nodded. “That might be our only option.”
The Irish Museum of Modern Art was originally built as an English royal hospital in western part of the old city of Dublin. It was an impressive building, with an inner courtyard and surrounded by beautiful gardens. The Irish government had renovated it as a museum in the late twentieth century. As luck would have it, it was built on a hilltop, and after the oceans rose, it survived as an island.
The museum had a large fundraiser scheduled the following week. Wil set up an appointment with Madison McCrory, the director. Our goal was to talk her into inviting Reagan to give him an award for his generous support through the years. Chung promised a donation to fund the award.
“Flirt with her,” I told him as I sent him out the door. I had checked, and the director was late forties, divorced, and good looking.
“Libby, I can’t do that. I have to maintain my professionalism.”
“Bullshit. Flirt with her. Don’t ask her out or do anything you’ll regret, but there’s nothing wrong with being friendly.”
He came back three hours later, smiling from ear to ear. “We’re on,” he said, holding up his thumb.
We knew when Reagan would be out of the house, and for about how long. With three to five hours, I could search the place completely. The problem remained as to how I would get in.
“Set me up with a car exactly like his,” I told Wil, “and I’ll go in as his chauffeur.”
He shook his head. “Too risky.”
“No, as soon as I park the car, I blend into the background. No one will see me.”
Stubborn damned man. He called in some Irish operatives to brainstorm.
“Have you ever done any skydiving?” one guy asked me.
“You mean jumping out of a perfectly good airplane hoping a piece of silk handkerchief will save my ass?”
Several of the people in the room chuckled, and the guy who made the suggestion said, “I’ll take that as a no.”
A woman asked, “Are you afraid of heights?”
Wil chuckled. “No, she isn’t.”
The woman got excited. “We could drop her on the roof with a glider.”
“I could just bounce over the fence with a jet pack,” I countered. “Look, I don’t need any video science fiction stuff. When they open the gates for Reagan, a good distraction will do. I just slip in before they close the gates.”
“Someone will see you and blow the whole operation.”
They argued for a couple of hours. Eventually, I leaned back in my chair, crossed my arms over my chest, and gave Wil a look he should have been familiar with. He was. He thanked everyone and ushered them out of the room.
When he turned to me, I said, “Occam’s razor. Create a distraction, and I’ll use the front gate. Another distraction when he comes home. It’s a no brainer.”
“What kind of distraction?”
“I don’t know. Something mundane that doesn’t make them suspicious. Set off some firecrackers in the woods. Hire some local kids to do it. You can’t tell me that Reagan doesn’t have problems with the local kids pulling pranks. That fancy house almost demands it.”
Chapter 25
The assassination attempt on Kieran Murphy shook the Irish Chamber’s security division to its core. We had to piece together what happened after the fact, since everyone involved died.
As I kept telling Wil, no policing agency was totally clean. A man with Michael Reagan’s wealth could always find someone to bribe, and there was a leak. In spite of classifying Kieran’s presence at Chamber headquarters as ‘need to know’, too many people knew. The people who cooked her food and did her laundry might not have known her name, but they knew someone was sequestered away on the fifteenth floor. And people will gossip because other people will listen. I think it’s baked into our genes. Without curiosity, we’d probably still be sleeping in caves and eating raw grubs.
Two men, dressed in security guard uniforms, made their way to the fifteenth floor. They could have taken either the elevator or the stairs, since they had legitimate key cards. Once there, they shot the guard stationed outside Kieran’s door.
They next placed plastic explosive on the door and blew the lock. Then they tossed two fragmentation grenades through the open door. After the explosions, they entered the room and shot the two guards and the maid inside. That was probably unnecessary, but I guess the assassins wanted to make sure they didn’t leave any witnesses.
At that point, they realized they had a problem. Faulty intelligence. Kieran wasn’t there. She was down at the gym on the fourth floor with her other two guards.
Since they had been rather noisy, alarms sounded throughout the building, and I guess they panicked.
After the hurricane passed, the weather settled down, and the floodwaters receded. Wil and I had gone back to staying at my townhouse. We were walking down the street toward the Chamber building after a late breakfast when we heard the alarms go off.
I hesitated, but Wil started to run toward the building. Grabbing his arm, I dragged him to a stop after a few feet and stepped in front of him.
“What is the matter with you?” I shouted with my face less than a foot from his. “You don’t know what that’s about. Use your bloody head.” In some remote cranny of my mind I noted how different he and I were. My first reaction to an alarm was to get as far away as possible.
He craned his neck to look past me, and while he was distracted, I took the opportunity to pull him across the street.
“We can see better from here,” I said. “Just hang on for a minute and let’s see what’s going on. If it’s a fire or a bomb scare, you’re not going to help anything by running in there.”
People poured out of the building, primarily office workers and others wearing civilian clothes. No security personnel. That worried me. It meant something was going on inside.
Then two men in security uniforms emerged and struggled through the crowd of people. They gave the impression of being in a hurry, but they didn’t seem to be chasing anyone.
“Wil.” I grabbed his arm and pointed with my other hand. “Those two.”
I took off running, and felt him beside me. The men broke free of the milling crowd just as I reached the one of them in the lead. I stuck out my leg and tripped him. He went down, and his buddy stumbled over him and sprawled onto the street, too.
One of them tangled my legs, and I went down hard, landing on my shoulder and biting my tongue. I saw stars as white pain lanced through me. I swallowed air, gritting my teeth and tasting blood, until the moment passed. Raising my head, I saw the man I had tripped roll over and point at me. I found myself staring at the business end of a pistol.
“Hey, man, I’m sorry. Okay? I’m just kind of clumsy,” I said, scooting away from him on my butt.
He didn’t shoot me. Instead, he took a look at his friend and started to scramble to his feet. My right arm was all pins and needles, so I drew a knife with my left hand. Even though I was at an awkward angle, I threw the knife, and it buried itself in the back of his thigh. He cried out and went down again.
The other man leaped to his feet. He raised his pistol toward me as I fought to get mine out of my bag. A shot rang out, and he jerked backward, his gun flying out of his hand, and fell to the street.
The man I had knifed raised his pistol toward Wil. I managed to free my pistol and shot the guy. I wanted to capture at least one of them, but as he slumped to the ground, I knew that plan had failed.
Wil and I both looked around, standing back-to-back. No one else appeared threatening, and at first, I didn’t se
e any other security uniforms. A couple of minutes later, a phalanx of armed and uniformed personnel rushed from the building. Their behavior was completely different from the men who had just died. The security men fanned out, looking about and bracing for trouble.
Wil held his identification card above his head in one hand, his pistol raised in the other, the muzzle pointed up. I raised my hands the same way. The last thing I wanted to do was get shot by my own side.
Several members of the security force approached us, took our guns, then checked our IDs. A couple checked on the two men we had shot. In both cases, I saw the guards shake their heads.
“Did you throw that knife left handed?” Wil asked as he helped me to my feet.
“Lucky throw. I was aiming for his back. I’m surprised I even hit him, let alone with the point.”
After a thorough search of the building and vetting of everyone outside and inside, no other intruders were found.
“You’ve got a leak,” I said when Wil and I were alone with the Irish security director and three of his top staff. “Reagan has someone inside who’s paid to feed him information.”
No one argued with me. They just looked unhappy.
In the discussion that followed, someone said, “It’s too damned bad that O’Bannon escaped.”
I let that one go, but when Wil and I were alone again, I told him, “O’Bannon didn’t have anything to do with this. He has a reputation as the consummate professional, and this was the amateur hour from the word go.”
“Maybe he still isn’t completely recovered from his wound,” Wil said.
“May be, but whoever planned this was an idiot. This operation was all brawn and no brains. Explosives, collateral casualties, no escape plan, and acting on faulty intelligence instead of scoping things out to make sure the situation was right. If O’Bannon wanted Kieran dead, she’d be dead.”
Kieran wasn’t happy, either. “You said you would protect me! Some protection. It’s sheer luck that I’m still alive.”
I agreed with her, but didn’t say so.
She railed and ranted, throwing a tantrum worthy of a three-year-old or a diva. Having had no practice with the former, but a lot of practice with the latter, I walked out and let someone else deal with her. That someone else was the head of the women’s jail. When I saw Kieran the next day, she was much calmer. I figured the new black eye probably had something to do with her change in attitude.
Chameleon's Death Dance (Chameleon Assassin Book 4) Page 18
