The Night Cafe

by Taylor Smith

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Teagarden said.

  “But wouldn’t that destroy the van Gogh?” Russo asked.

  “Not at all. Van Gogh painted in oils. If the overpainting was done in acrylics, then it would be removable with solvents that wouldn’t damage the oils beneath. It’s specialized work, but a man with Moises Gladding’s resources would have no difficulty finding a restorer with the right set of skills, an anemic bank account and a broken moral compass. What was the size of the painting you carried to Mexico, Ms. Nicks?”

  “Maybe two, two-and-a-half feet by three?”

  Teagarden nodded. “Roughly seventy-two by ninety-two, a French size thirty canvas.”

  Agent Ito glanced around the gallery. “When Mr. Teagarden told us this dealer was involved, we wondered how deep the art dealer was into the art fraud business.”

  “No way,” Hannah said. “This was the first commission like this she’d ever taken.”

  “Are you sure? Did you see any other paintings when you were here the other day that aren’t here now?”

  Hannah glanced around the walls. She’d looked this stuff over while Rebecca was on the phone the other day, but she hadn’t memorized what was here. Except…

  She nodded at a hanger in the wall where a painting should have hung. “There was a piece over there, a beach scene. Rebecca said it was a California artist. I don’t know who painted it. The same guy who did that one of the Mission at San Juan Capistrano, I think.”

  Teagarden nodded. “California Impressionism. It’s an offshoot of the French Impressionist style. Not surprising, since the light here is the same as in the south of France. Excellent for painting outdoors, plein air style. Perhaps she sold the piece after Ms. Nicks saw it,” he told Towle and Ito. “I doubt if there’s a connection to any recent stolen art, but you never know. We can look into it.”

  “And the piece you carried to Mexico?” Towle asked. “What—”

  Just then, the sheriff’s deputy returned with a couple of cardboard trays of coffee and a greasy looking bag with a Krispy Kreme logo.

  “Whoa! Hold it,” Russo said. “I think we need to take this outside before we muck up the crime scene.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry, Detective,” the young cop said.

  “Not your fault. Come on, folks, out on the deck, please.”

  He herded them all outside like so many geese, the federal agents with ties firmly knotted, the tall older Brit a little rumpled in tweed, Detective Lindsay Towle all spit and polish, like the ambitious eager beaver she seemed to be. Well, fair enough, Hannah thought. Under other circumstances, that might have been her.

  They regrouped around an area of benches and tables at one end of the wooden deck, and the deputy passed around coffee, milk and sugar. While everyone busied themselves with their cups and with eyeing the contents of the doughnut bag, Hannah’s brain was racing, trying to think if Rebecca could have deliberately gotten mixed up with art theft. It didn’t seem possible, but she was in pretty dire straits, and desperation can make a person do things they might otherwise never dream of.

  “Mr. Teagarden, how did you connect Rebecca Powell to this missing van Gogh?” she asked.

  “I worked backward from what I know about the market for stolen art. There are only so many thieves with the skills required to carry out a heist like the one at the Arlen Hunter, and only so many buyers for their ill-gotten gains. I’ve been tracking The Night Café since a few days after the theft, been halfway around the world and back. The information I was able to glean from my sources led me to Puerto Vallarta, where I learned that Moises Gladding had recently ordered a canvas through the owner of this gallery. That brought me to Los Angeles, and when I called on Agent Towle this morning, it turned out he was already aware of Miss Powell’s dealings with Gladding.”

  “Our field office works closely with the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department,” Towle said. “That’s how we got word about her murder.”

  “Hannah, when you arrived and found us here,” Russo said, “you said ‘not Rebecca, too.’ What did you mean, ‘too.’ Who else?”

  Hannah sipped at her coffee, stalling while she tried to decide how much these guys needed to know.

  “I expect she was referring to a spot of bother at Gladding’s villa in Puerto Vallarta,” Teagarden said.

  Hannah looked up in surprise at Teagarden. Had he been there, too? All eyes were on her, and she sighed. It was going to be another really long day.

  Nineteen

  Airborne, 30,000 feet over Northern Mexico

  Moises Gladding traveled first class with just a carry-on garment bag. The Argentine passport in his inside pocket identified him as James Dunning. His pasted-on dark goatee and clean-shaven head matched the passport photo of the sixty-year-old banker from Buenos Aires, a member of one of those British families scattered around the world since the days of the Empire—people who can never see themselves going back to living in Her Majesty’s damp old kingdom.

  Gladding shifted in the wide leather seat and ordered up a double shot of Glenlivet single malt. His mind and gut were churning, although no one would ever guess it to look at him. He had spent decades refining his stoicism. Only Sylvia, his wife of nearly forty years, could read his moods and divine his secrets, and she was much too wise to ever take advantage of it. She was a good wife, a traditional woman who knew her place and knew that place was secure, however many mistresses he might take. She raised their children, kept his home—now outside Geneva, since he’d cut his ties to America—and she trusted him to do what was best. He was a lucky man.

  At the moment, he took little comfort in his good fortune. Two developments in the past forty-eight hours had him troubled.

  One was anger at having had to unleash Kyle Liggett on his old colleague, Donald Ackerman. He and the barkeep had had a longstanding relationship based on mutual respect and compatibility. A man in Gladding’s business could not allow himself the luxury of many friends, but over the years, Ackerman had become the closest thing that he’d had in decades. Ackerman had shown courage and dignity to the last, and if his death couldn’t be helped, Gladding had taken no pleasure in watching Liggett torture the man and then dispatch him in the trunk of his old car. But Ackerman had helped the courier escape Mexico before she could deliver his painting. He had pleaded that he was an innocent pawn. Well, perhaps, perhaps not.

  His anger at Ackerman, Gladding knew, was also fueled by his disillusionment with the barkeep’s masters at Langley. After using Gladding for years as a conduit for information and the delivery of weapons to their arm’s-length friends around the world, the bureaucrats at Langley had suddenly decided he was expendable. Gladding had been instrumental in preventing several terrorist attacks on American soil. In return for his services, his friends in Washington had for years turned a blind eye to his private business dealings.

  But one by one, as his old associates retired or died off, new people took their places and decided to make their mark by disavowing the practices of their predecessors. Suddenly, Gladding found he had no one in Washington to defend him when some ambitious young pup wanted to take him to task for business dealings with Cuba, Venezuela, a Colombian drug lord or whatever other villain of the week they decided to name.

  Before he knew it, he was a wanted man. When his youngest daughter graduated from Yale, Gladding hadn’t been able to attend the ceremony. Worse than that, federal agents had actually manhandled his wife and son. It was the last straw. Gladding had had enough of America. It might be the land of his birth, but he didn’t belong there anymore. He couldn’t stomach a country that used and then discarded its friends that way.

  And so, Donald Ackerman had paid the price for Langley’s sins. Too bad it had been necessary, Gladding thought, but there it was.

  Ackerman had been a better man by far than the instrument of Gladding’s revenge. Kyle Liggett was back in the economy section even now. The mere thought of him was distasteful. The boy called himse
lf a patriot, but Gladding knew his type all too well. Patriotism had nothing to do with what really motivated men like that.

  Liggett was ordinary looking, almost invisible—a not unhandsome, boyish fellow, clean-cut, outwardly charming. But he was a sociopath, pure and simple. A useful sociopath at the moment, admittedly, but his utility would soon come to an end. Gladding had always known that Liggett would have to die sooner or later. Working with him was like handling a rattlesnake. Sooner or later it was going to bite. It had to be stomped into the ground before it got the chance.

  “Mr. Dunning? Are you all right?”

  Gladding looking up at the pretty, redheaded flight attendant. “Yes, I’m fine. Why?”

  She smiled and pointed to his fists, clenched on his tray table. “I thought you might be a nervous flyer.”

  He relaxed his hands and forced himself to chuckle. “Well, a little, maybe.”

  “Can I refresh your drink?”

  “That would be nice, thank you. Just a single this time, I think. Got to keep a clear head, you know.”

  She nodded and took his glass, returning in a moment with another shot of the double malt. “There you go.”

  “Thank you, my dear.”

  She nodded and moved on down the cabin. Gladding took a sip of the Scotch. It wasn’t the flying that had him tense. It was Liggett, and the unending cycle of questions about the attack on his villa.

  He was wanted in the States on federal warrants in response to FBI, DEA and ATF charges over his various dealings. Even Homeland Security had been getting in on the act lately. But the CIA, no matter how much it had distanced itself from him, had no interest in having him come to trial. They would rather see him dead than stand up in open court and start talking about deals he had struck on the Agency’s behalf over the years. Ackerman had insisted that the attack on his villa wasn’t a CIA assassination effort. That kind of messy job wasn’t their style, he’d argued, not when a sniper’s bullet or a poison dart was so much quieter and more reliable.

  Then who? Gladding wondered. The bomb-maker, trying to do an end run? Get his hands on the painting and then renege on his end of the deal? Had he been feeling heat coming down on him, too? If so, he had made an enemy of the wrong man. If Gladding found out he’d been double-crossed, the man would have far bigger things than the authorities to worry about.

  He had already put his extensive information network to work to find some of the answers he sought. If the CIA’s resources had been anywhere near as good as his own, Gladding mused, they would be unstoppable. As it was, they were forever playing catch-up these days, running behind adversaries who’d grown stronger, smarter, faster than they were. That was why the American Age was over, and why a once-great power was sliding inexorably into a state of permanent humiliation.

  At the back of the plane, Kyle Liggett was jammed in a center seat. Overweight tourists crowded him from either side, and his legs were cramped by the duffel bag under his seat that he’d been too late to fit into the overhead bins.

  He was working on his Zen calm, eyes closed, zoned out on the music blasting through his ear buds. Tanned and fit, his hair sun streaked, he looked like the Midwestern boy he was, coming home from a few days on the beach, passport worn and curved from riding in his rear hip pocket. He carried none of the tools of his trade. He could improvise when he reached his destination.

  He thought about Donald Ackerman, acknowledging a grudging respect. If it ever came down to it, he hoped he could do as well in the hands of a skilled interrogator. After this operation, they’d all want a piece of him. He was about to enter the history books.

  The road to here had been hard, but he’d earned his place. Kicked out of his last foster home the day he turned eighteen, he’d dropped out of high school and gone out to Colorado, where he got work in a mine. It was there that he’d come to appreciate the power and beauty of a well-handled explosion. He loved to blow things apart.

  He’d joined the military, hoping to become a top munitions expert, but after only a couple of months, the army had released him. “Mentally unfit for duty,” they said. Who the hell were those bureaucrats to tag him with crap like that? Weren’t they scraping the bottom of the barrel these days, trying to make their recruitment targets? And then they turn him away, a man disciplined enough to study on his own time, train himself to do the most difficult jobs there were? Unfit? Him?

  He’d studied everything he could get his hands on, learning what and how much explosive to use, where and how deep to place the charge, how to time the fuse to the split second. He’d never handled a nuke before, but this would be the biggest moment of his life. He was determined to get this right.

  While in Los Angeles for the art heist, and again last week, he’d taken time out to run down to San Diego County to study the layout of the San Onofre power plant. The facility was located on eighty-four acres surrounded by San Onofre State Beach. As he scouted the oceanfront site, he wished he’d gone into the navy instead of the army. The Seals would have appreciated his talents and it would have been even better training for this operation.

  His fingers drummed his knees, keeping time with the music in his ears.

  It was pretty funny, when you thought about it, that the most grim institutions in California occupied some of the most scenic spots on its coastline. In the northern part of the state, the San Quentin maximum security prison sat on a magnificent point overlooking the Pacific. And south of Los Angeles, a glorious piece of beach property belonged to the U.S. Marine Corps’ Camp Pendleton and the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station—SONGS. (That abbreviation was pretty funny, too.) Camp Pendleton was the Marines’ primary amphibious training facility. If most of the corps hadn’t been over in Iraq, this op might have been harder to pull off. But thanks to the idiots in Washington wasting American money and lives in some foreign bog hole, the place was wide open. The San Onofre nuclear plant, meantime, provided power to fifteen million Southern California homes.

  To reconnoiter the target, Liggett had picked up a young divorcée in San Clemente and taken her and her two kids to San Onofre State Beach, which ran practically right up to the door of the power plant. There they were, just another family out for a day on the beach. There was something really whack about all those little kids building sand castles under the shadow of the nuclear plant’s twin domes, which looked like tits, Kyle thought, grinning, right down to their erect nipples. He’d taken plenty of pictures, pretending to capture every cute thing those kids did. Their mom had been so grateful, it was pathetic. The scouting trip had a good payoff—a home-cooked meal, a Disney movie on the DVR, then a romp in the sack with Mom after the kiddies went off to bed.

  Of course, he’d used an alias and told the woman he’d call her. Wouldn’t she be surprised when she saw his picture on the front pages of all the newspapers in a couple of days? He might even make the cover of Time and Newsweek. She’d probably call the authorities, but what the hell. It wasn’t like he was trying to hide. Once this was over, he wanted all the publicity he could get—even, if it couldn’t be avoided, a big show trial and the national audience it would give him to deliver his message. Lazy-minded couch potatoes might disapprove of what he’d done, but thousands would answer his call to arms, rising up to take back the country from the bureaucrats and U.N.-loving one-worlders who were dragging America through the muck, destroying everything that was noble and good about his country.

  He ran through the plan again. From the outside, the nuclear plant didn’t look all that well secured, but he wasn’t kidding himself. The place had security up the wazoo, especially since 9/11. Not only that, but he’d studied enough about power plant construction to know there were layers of protection designed in. The Chernobyl disaster would never have happened if the Russians had been smart enough to use American engineering.

  It didn’t really matter that the dirty bomb Gladding was getting him probably wouldn’t destroy the power plant. This was psy-ops, after all, a psychological ope
ration designed to instill terror and uncertainty into the vast majority of people. That was the main reason it wasn’t taking place in autumn, when Santa Ana winds would blow the radioactive fallout from the dirty bomb harmlessly out to the ocean. At this time of year, if the prevailing winds blowing in off the ocean were just right, the bomb would pollute the Marine base and much of San Diego County. If they were lucky, the wind might even carry radiation north into Orange and Los Angeles Counties. The whole country would be freaked out.

  The Fasten Seat Belt sign came on and the plane began to bank. Kyle removed his earbuds and wrapped the cord around his iPod. The trick for him, he reflected, would be to make the old man believe he had died in the blast. With this in mind, he’d hidden money and fake ID in two locations, one in Dana Point, the other in Oceanside. Gladding had paid him one-third of his fee up front for this job, another third when they’d met up in Puerto Vallarta. He was scheduled to deliver the final third, plus a bonus, at their last planned meet-up in the Dominican Republic.

  But Kyle had done his homework on Moises Gladding. The old man hadn’t gotten where he was by being a nice guy. People who did wet work for him had a habit of turning up dead or disappearing altogether. If Kyle blew off their final rendezvous, it might be enough to convince Gladding he was dead.