The Looters

by Harold Robbins

  I also understood that now he was through with me. He had his answers. He’d either kill me or leave me as some sort of macabre bait to lure the SEALs and set off his surprise.

  Chapter 54

  Nunes leaned back in the passenger seat as he rode to the Brooklyn warehouse area in a Bureau SUV with emergency lights flashing. Special Agent Sarah Jones, his partner for the moment, was driving. He got another call from tech support.

  “We’ve been studying satellite pictures of the location,” the tech said. “We’ve pinned down the car we believe the phone is in. It’s parked in front of a self-storage complex near the Brooklyn waterline. How would that fit into your estimation of where your suspect could be?”

  “It fits perfectly. Are you certain it’s the right car?”

  “Satellite imaging shows the car parked in front of the storage complex. There are no other cars parked close enough to be candidates for the signal. And there are no pedestrians. It’s after hours on the weekend and there’s not much vehicle traffic. Factor in that the signal is not moving and neither is the car and it makes us pretty certain the phone’s in the car, a late-model silver BMW.”

  “No pedestrians. Any imaging of people at all in the area?”

  “No warm bodies, just an occasional car passing by. We haven’t picked up any foot traffic at all around the storage facility.”

  Nunes broadcast that the mission was a “go” to other units who were converging on the location. He had a chopper standing by, but it wasn’t time to call it in yet. The same went for other ground units. They would approach the area but stay a couple blocks away until Nunes gave the signal.

  The fact that a storage facility might be involved made perfect sense. It was common practice for thieves and drug traffickers to rent self-storage units because of the privacy they provided.

  He was excited. Putting in a call to his superior, he set the stage for issuance of a warrant. Once they secured the facility and anyone in it, they would need a piece of paper from a judge to start searching.

  “Won’t be long before we’ll be kicking in a storeroom full of antiquities,” Nunes said. He loved art. Recovering it from thieves was like rescuing babies to him.

  Chapter 55

  When we got to the bottom of the stairwell, I hesitated. A metal door at the top showing rust and ages-old residue of green paint was open a crack. Once that door closed behind me, I’d be a prisoner with no chance of escape.

  He shoved me. “Get your ass moving.”

  I took the steps one at a time, my knees ready to fold, my heart pounding as waves of panic rose from my stomach and up my throat. If I had to die, I wanted to make him kill me in the open, where someone might hear or see it. When that door closed with just the two of us behind brick walls, God only knew what this crazy bastard would do.

  I had my own weapon that was good for one long shot—the pepper spray ring that I wore on my right forefinger. I’d worn it so long, I’d forgotten about it. It looked like a ring but had a charge of highly potent defense spray. When a safety lock was released and a button pushed, the spray came out. If it hit the assailant in the eye, it was very debilitating. At least that’s what the brochure claimed.

  I’d have to spray him in the eyes to have any effect. If it didn’t hit perfectly, he’d grab me and hang on, even if he was hurting. Or shoot me in the back before I reached the door at the top of the stairs. No way could I go back down the stairs even if I got lucky with the spray. He was too big to get by.

  “Move it, bitch.” He gave me another shove.

  I fell forward and he grabbed me again by the back of my shirt and jerked me up. As I came erect, my right hand flew up and back. I released the safety catch on the pepper spray with my thumb and pressed the button. A spray hit him in the face, and he gave a startled cry. He released his hold on me, and my feet flew up the steps two at a time. Behind me he howled with pain and rage. I heard the pop of the pistol firing as bullets smacked the railing and building. I didn’t look behind to see if he was aiming at me or firing blindly. I focused on the door that was cracked open.

  “I’m going to kill you, you fuckin’ whore!”

  The door had been propped open by a small piece of wood. I slipped in and kicked the wood away and shut the door.

  I was in total darkness except for a slit of light coming through a tiny window in the corner. It appeared to be some sort of storage room. I moved away from the metal door slowly, using my hand to guide me along the wall, feeling for any obstacles in my way.

  I didn’t know if his bullets would breach the door or even if the door was locked from the outside. I just assumed it would lock when shut because he had it propped open. Now he pounded on the door. I moved farther away from the door as bullets impacted it. More banging, like he was kicking it and throwing his shoulder against it with all that thug weight. The big bastard was sure to break through.

  I dead-ended against a corner and felt another door frame. I found the handle. It turned. I slipped through just as Stocker smashed the other door open. Slamming the door behind me, I found myself in a mezzanine-like area. Below me was an open loading area. The rental truck I’d seen from the outside was there. Above was another floor. Like the one I was on, it wasn’t a full floor. The ceiling was glass, some of it broken, all of it dirty, but letting in enough light from the full moon outside for me to run as fast as I could down the corridor.

  I stepped through an open doorway and into another room. I leaned up against the wall just inside the doorway and tried to control my breathing.

  “I’m coming for you, bitch. You can’t hide from me.”

  His voice didn’t sound as threatening as it had before. I hoped I had blinded the bastard and scorched his lungs. The spray was guaranteed to be powerful enough to put a man down for half an hour, but the manufacturers didn’t have two-legged beasts in mind when they provided its assurance.

  His footsteps were going the other direction. I was sure of it. But I still wanted to poke my head out and see. For that I had to reach deep down and grab a handful of courage.

  I knelt and edged closer to the doorway. Why I thought I would be less visible if I was kneeling when I peeked around the corner was a mystery even to me.

  Damn!

  I had been wrong about his direction. His back was to me and he spun around the moment I stuck my head out. His face was red, his eyes puffy. His features were crazed. Really crazed. Mad dog demented.

  I wasn’t sure if he actually saw me or like a bloodthirsty primeval beast he just instinctively knew I was there. He immediately started jabbering and pulled the trigger on his pistol as I pulled my head back. Instead of the familiar popping of the gun, this time I heard a more mechanical sound. Was his gun empty?

  The room I was crouching in didn’t have enough light for me to see if there was another exit, so I took the only other option—I dashed into the hallway and ran for a stairway down that was only four or five steps away.

  They were the longest steps of my life.

  I didn’t know if he was busy reloading or what. I wasn’t about to look back. I just ran like hell and flew down the steps, nearly taking a headfirst tumble.

  I was on the same level as the rental truck. I jumped onto the running board on the passenger side to see if the keys were in the ignition. As I looked through the open window, my heart fell. No keys. I jumped back off.

  Stocker was lumbering down the steps. His face was bloodred and swollen, but I knew he could see me now because he looked in my direction. He had his gun in his hand but didn’t aim at me. He has to be out of bullets. It didn’t matter. He could rip me to pieces with his hands.

  I ran for the closest open door and into a room that was lighted.

  Sonofabitch!

  I stared in disbelief at a small room with a sleeping bag and some personal effects. And no way out.

  Next to an open duffel bag that was beside the sleeping bag was a gun, a pistol that looked like the one that Stocker had been
firing. I grabbed the gun and also swooped up a set of keys with the truck rental tag on the ring. I squeezed the keys in my left palm as I got one hand and half the key-holding hand around the gun handle.

  Stocker came up to the door. I had a closer look at him now. His face was a stinking mess. It looked like he’d stuck it in a meat grinder. Half-blind, he tried to bring me into focus. He didn’t have a gun in his hand. He must have discarded it, empty.

  “Leave me alone!” I screamed.

  I pointed the gun point-blank at his chest.

  “Fucking stupid bitch. You have to turn off the safety latch.”

  I knew zero about guns. I stared at the gun in my hands in horror. During that second he lunged at me.

  I staggered back and threw the gun at him. It bounced off his chest. As he reached down to get it, I shot by him and ran for the truck.

  I heard his sobbing rage as he came out of the room.

  “Die, bitch!”

  The familiar shots popped again. Luckily, no bullets ripped into my back. I jumped up on the driver’s side running board and didn’t look back until I had grabbed the handle. The shots I heard weren’t aimed at me. Stocker was crouched down and firing his pistol in the other direction.

  “Throw it down; we’ve got you covered,” I heard Coby shout.

  I jerked open the truck door and climbed inside.

  Stocker made a reply, but I didn’t hear it. Fumbling with the keys, I finally managed to get the right key into the ignition and turn on the engine.

  Shit. The truck had a stick shift. One of those old-fashioned gear-shifting things that came out of the floor. And a clutch. I hadn’t driven a clutch since I ran my junior high boyfriend’s VW Bug into the rear of my dad’s car.

  I pushed the clutch to the floor and jerked around the long gearshift stick and let out the clutch to the sound of grinding gears. The truck suddenly shot forward. Thank God.

  A loud bang came from the passenger side. I saw the hand first and then the gun. Stocker had pulled himself up until he could stare at me through the open window. His left eye was swollen closed, and he glared insanely at me like a crazed Cyclops.

  He leveled the gun at my face.

  I stared in stunned awe—not at the gun but at the gates coming up. Something about my face must have triggered an automatic response by him, because instead of shooting me he turned his head and saw the big metal gates.

  The truck burst through the gates with a bang I was sure could be heard all the way to Jersey. Stocker disappeared. He wasn’t there after the truck swept through, smashing the gates aside.

  The building across the street suddenly loomed in front of me. I twisted the wheel with both hands, turning the truck, feeling the weight shift and the truck lean as if it was going over.

  My foot left the gas to hit the brake. I pressed hard on it and the truck started sputtering and jerking toward a stop. I instinctively pushed the clutch back in and hit the gas and popped the clutch. The truck lurched forward and I pushed the pedal to the floor, heading in the direction of where I had parked my car.

  I glanced out the side window, wondering what had happened to the one-eyed beast.

  Chapter 56

  Special Agent Sarah Jones turned the agency sedan onto the street paralleling the wharfs. She turned off the emergency lights. Nunes, riding shotgun, had been deep in thought and humming for several minutes.

  Nunes stopped humming. “I remember this area when I was a kid,” he said. “My old man worked at a machine shop that made parts for subway cars. In those days they called this street the Red Brick Road. You know, after the Yellow Brick Road.”

  “Because of all the brick warehouses?”

  “Clever deduction Watson. You should have been a detective.”

  “Yeah. And did you know that you always hum when you’re deep in thought?”

  “Did you know that you’re about the hundredth person to tell me that?”

  “You’re thinking about the Dupre woman. Let’s see, she left behind a mess in London and one in Spain. You’re wondering what kind of mess we’re going to run into now. She’s not very lucky, is she?”

  “I’m thinking about how unpredictable she is. You never know when or where she’ll show up. And you’re right—I have to wonder what surprise she’ll have in store for us today. So far she’s been batting a thousand for leaving chaos wherever she goes.”

  He looked at the GPS monitor on the dashboard. “We’re coming up to the car with the cell phone in it. Let’s just do a pass and cruise by first.”

  They went by the car, both of them pretending not to look but both giving it a quick once-over.

  Agent Jones kept a steady speed as she passed by the car. Trying to get a sideways look at the car, she wasn’t paying attention to the road in front of them. She didn’t see the truck coming around the corner until it was almost upon them.

  “Whaaaa—,” was all Nunes got out before the two vehicles met head-on and an air bag exploded in his face.

  LOW-TECH MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR ART THEFTS

  (WHY IT’S EASIER TO ROB MUSEUMS THAN BANKS)

  The $55 million Cellini Salt Cellar was stolen in Vienna in 2003 by a thief who broke in through a first floor window and smashed the glass display case housing the piece. The museum had over a hundred security cameras, but none were able to record at night. The thief tripped sound and motion detectors, but security guards turned off the alarm under the belief that it was a false alarm.

  Klimt’s Portrait of a Woman was stolen in Italy in 1997 by a thief who got in through a skylight, then used a fishing rod to hook and reel up the picture. The picture was valued at $20 million.

  Thieves with a ladder, large piece of cloth, and rope broke into Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and made off with two Van Goghs that ranked with the most valuable and carefully guarded art pieces on earth. In the 2002 theft, the thieves got by cameras, alarms, motion sensors, and twenty-four-hour security guards by leaning a ladder against the back of the museum and getting in from the roof. They lifted the two small paintings off the wall, broke a side window, and scaled down the wall with a rope.

  In 1999, thieves cut a hole in a skylight, dropped a smoke bomb to cloud the cameras, and took a Cezanne painting from an Oxford, England, museum.

  Munch’s The Scream, valued at over $50 million, was stolen in 1994 from the National Gallery in Oslo in less than a minute. The thieves used a ladder to break a window, stole the painting, and left. Video cameras recorded the theft. The thieves left a note thanking the museum for its poor security.

  The biggest art theft in history (besides the looting of the Iraqi museum) was extremely low-tech. The $300 million robbery of the Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 occurred when two thieves dressed as police officers came to the museum door and convinced a security guard to let them enter.

  Chapter 57

  The FBI interrogation room was a step above in decor from the NYPD room where I had been questioned. The paint was fresher, the table less stained from God-knows-what, the chairs more comfortable. I’m sure the hidden cameras were even more focused. And, of course, the interrogation was no less intimidating.

  Twenty-four hours had passed since I escaped from the warehouse and ran into an FBI car. Literally. I’d gotten little sleep since then and was too worn-out to be nervous. I was just plain dead tired. Beat. Mentally trashed.

  Having the bigger vehicle, I survived the accident with just a powder dusting from an exploding air bag and wide-eyed fright. But FBI Special Agent Nunes was in a particularly foul mood. Not that I blamed him. He looked like he’d been punched in the face—his nose was red and swollen, his eyes black. Well… he had been punched in the face.

  I was lucky that serious injuries from air bags were rare. As it was, he wasn’t happy with the near-death experience. He had interrupted his questioning of me earlier to comment on the accident.

  “I’ve shot it out with killers on the street without fear. But I saw my own death when you came aroun
d the corner in that big truck.”

  I almost laughed at his melodramatics yet managed to keep my humor suppressed and my facial expression completely sympathetic. My father would’ve told me never to annoy an angry man who had a badge and a gun.

  Special Agent Jones, to my surprise, had escaped unscathed. As she glared at me with sleepy eyes, I realized that she wasn’t overly happy with me, either. I suppose a wrecked federal agency car entailed preparing a mountain of paperwork.

  Having recovered a truckload of Iraqi museum pieces in the process had not completely endeared me to them. When I asked for some credit, Nunes said, “You’ve left a trail of death and destruction on two continents. The fact that I’m listed only as wounded on the casualty list is nothing short of a miracle.”

  I needed a miracle, too. It occurred to me that just maybe he would have been in a better mood if the FBI had recovered the hoard rather than a 125-pound—give or take a few—woman with no gun.

  “Why won’t you believe me when I tell you that I am completely innocent?” I asked.

  “Why won’t you tell the truth?”

  Good question. Actually, I had told him the truth. More or less. I left out a few details… like standing around while Neal got castrated. Nunes never asked me about Neal, so it was a certainty that Neal never reported it, at least not to the police. That was a relief, but I wondered what Neal told the ER people about how he lost a testicle. Not that it was hard to imagine why Neal wouldn’t tell the authorities that he had been tortured to reveal where his partner in crime had millions of dollars in stolen antiquities stashed. And had left a few dead bodies lying about. As Coby pointed out, that kind of candor would put Neal in a prison cell really singing soprano.

  Also, I had lied about one or two other things, particularly when I told Nunes that Stocker’s partner, the man I had encountered in Malaga and who had helped me track Stocker to the New York warehouse, was Viktor Milan of Zurich. That fit with what I had told Nunes on the telephone from Malaga when I’d thought that Coby really was Milan. And I claimed complete ignorance about how this mysterious Swiss knew where the antiquities were hidden.