The Looters

by Harold Robbins

  “Why go upstairs for it?” Rob asked. “Let’s have them bring the mask down to the basement.”

  I smiled tolerantly. “Ah, great idea. We can call them and tell them to take the Semiramis down to the basement so we can steal it.”

  “Very funny,” he sneered. “You said they take things to the basement to clean or repair. Attacks on art by nutcases are getting more and more common. One of us goes in dressed as a derelict, hits the mask with some spray paint, and presto! Next thing you know the mask is in the basement, waiting for us to eat through the wall.”

  “Where we can get it without tripping alarms,” Coby said. “Sounds like a plan to me.”

  “I’m still lost,” I said to Coby. “How do you plan to get into the basement?”

  “You probably don’t realize that Manhattan and the rest of the city have thousands of miles of tunnels under them. Unless you’re going down the stairs to a subway or the basement in a building, you never go below street level. But the subways and basements are just part of a big world beneath the city.”

  “I never even thought about that.”

  “Every building has water, electricity, and telephone in and sewage out. Where do you think all those pipes and wires come from? They come to you through tunnels under the city. And much of it has to be big enough so crews can go down and do repairs. Water and sewer pipes especially require a big capacity. There are water and sewer tunnels down there you can drive cars through.

  “Hell, hundreds of feet down they’re building a water tunnel large enough to drive a big rig through. It’s being dug by a huge machine, a big, round cylinder with a cutter in front that cuts through rock and dirt and feeds the stuff through itself to the rear where it’s hauled out. They call it the Mole and the guys who work down there are sandhogs. It’s the same kind of machine that bored the tunnel under the English Channel.”

  “You’re planning to do… what? Hijack this giant machine and bore your way into the museum?”

  “We won’t use the Mole this time; that was an idea we just played around with. This time we’ll use something smaller.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “There are boring machines that can cut a tunnel a couple feet wide. When we planned a heist of the Met, we were going to use a tunnel borer not much bigger than a torpedo. It makes a hole big enough for a man to squirm down.”

  I gaped. “You were going to rob the Met? The country’s premier museum? Are you all completely insane? Can you imagine the worldwide manhunt that would be launched—”

  Coby shook his head, grinning. “Hell no, we just played with the idea. After the Iraq museum job, we toyed with a heist of the Louvre, the Met, and the British Museum. Like playing a war game. We even worked out a method of stealing the Mona Lisa. It’s been done before, you know.”

  “I know. But that was around a hundred years ago. I’m sure the French have instituted a bit more security for it since then.”

  The painting had been taken by Vicenzo Perugia, who claimed to be an Italian patriot. He simply took it off the wall, stuck it under his coat, and walked out. That was in 1911. Despite a giant reputation, it’s actually a small painting done on wood rather than canvas. Two years later, he was caught trying to sell it in Italy.

  “Don’t be surprised if it’s not that well protected,” Gwyn said. “You’d be amazed at how low-tech the biggest museum robberies in history were.”

  Rob howled. “Yeah, all we did was pull a truck up to the back door and load it up in Baghdad.”

  “Stop your boasting,” Coby said. “And Maddy, don’t be surprised if that’s not the real Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre. There’s good evidence that the thief destroyed the painting rather than let the French have it back. To keep a war from breaking out between France and Italy over the incident, the two governments had a reproduction made.”

  “And that’s what’s hanging in the Louvre? The fake?”

  He gave me the Boy Scout sign. “The truth and nothing but.”

  Yeah, in a pig’s eye. “Great conspiracy theory. Save it for when you get to Hollywood. Maybe you can connect up the JFK assassination and the murder of Marilyn Monroe.”

  “I’ll put the sarcasm down to your ignorance. Anyway, we figured the best way to hit any of those museums was an entry underground. They all have high-tech security and human guards up the yin-yang, but it’s mostly to protect against intruders at entry points. They’re exposed below the surface because no one thinks of it. And when they do, they don’t realize how easy it would be to get in that way.”

  He turned his laptop so she could see the screen. “We’ve downloaded the subterranean specs from all the water, sewage, and utility companies. This one is for the water system that goes by the Met and Piedmont.”

  “They just let you have these things?”

  “They’re not secret. Construction outfits need the charts when they’re doing work.” He grinned. “But we did pay a hacker to get them all, along with the location of every manhole in Manhattan. Do you know why manhole covers are always round?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “So they can’t fall into the hole. Square ones could slip in.”

  “That’s very clever.”

  “You’d appreciate it more after you stepped into an open one.” Using his pen, he pointed at a picture on the screen. “There are thousands of manholes. They usually lead down to a room below where the utilities can be accessed. This plan shows a water main called a trunk near the Piedmont. You open a manhole cover and climb down a ladder into the room where the main’s located.”

  “A main is a big water pipe?”

  “Basically. These trunk mains are two to seven feet in diameter. This one is easily big enough for us to crawl in.”

  “In what? Your frogman gear, wet suit?”

  “Not without some work. These things are under pressure. We have to shut the flow off and release the pressure. We’d do that in the middle of the night so there aren’t a hundred calls from people whose water’s been shut off. We cut in with lasers and follow the pipe to where it runs along the basement of the museum. From there we cut into the basement. If it was the Met, it would be even easier, because there are so many tunnels passing next to and under the lowest level of the museum.”

  I was a bit skeptical about his motives for having gathered all this data. “You went through all this planning and data gathering so you guys could just play at a museum heist… like a computer game?”

  “Ever since I read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in high school, I was fascinated by Jean Valjean and the way he used the sewers of Paris to avoid the police.”

  “Why doesn’t it surprise me that your favorite book hero would be an ex-convict?”

  I doubted it was just an accident that this motley crew had a fascination for underground tunnels that passed under museums. Now I knew why the SEALs had a ready supply of weapons and equipment on hand. They actually had been planning a heist of the Metropolitan, one of the premier museums in the world.

  Coby read my mind. “You don’t think we’d be crazy enough to pull a heist on the Met, do you?”

  “Of course not.” The scary part was, I did. So far, he had lied about everything he ever told me and reneged on every promise he made. “Have you acquired one of those torpedo-size boring machines?”

  He gave me a guilty grin. That certainly explained everything. What was next? The gold at Fort Knox?

  I saw a problem with their plan to drill into the basement.

  “What about all the noise when you’re drilling through the solid concrete? Doesn’t that stuff have lots of steel in it?”

  “We’re working on noise suppression.”

  “What if the drilling caused the building to tremble? The guard might feel it, and it might even set off motion detectors.”

  “We’re—”

  “Yeah, I know, you’re working on it. I get the idea. I think I need some air.”

  “Don’t get any crazy ideas,�
� Coby said.

  “You think I’m going out to pull the heist by myself?” Good idea. But this one I needed help on.

  I left them throwing ideas back and forth and went for a walk.

  Boys with toys, was what I thought of the high-tech, imaginative caper that the SEALs were planning.

  Chapter 61

  Staten Island is across Upper New York Bay, south of the island of Manhattan. My favorite cheap treat when I was a struggling student was to buy a ticket on the Staten Island Ferry and ride it over and back, starting at the southern tip of Manhattan and going by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. As we sailed away for a quarter in those days, the most famous skyline in the world—Manhattan—would be seen from the stern of the ferry.

  In a brown study, oblivious to everything but my own thoughts, I walked two blocks down to a view of the choppy gunmetal gray water of the bay.

  The SEALs’ plan bothered me. And failure wasn’t acceptable. Our freedom and—if Stocker entered the picture—our lives were on the line. As I stared blankly out at the waters, my brain cells finally broke loose and I knew what bothered me about the plan: too high-tech. That was it. The SEALs were cooking up a robbery that required not only meticulous planning and execution but also complex machinery. That torpedo-size mole probably had ten thousand things about it that could go absolutely wrong at any moment. So did the plan.

  At the very least, I was reasonably certain that cutting through the steel-reinforced concrete in the basement would trigger the vibration sensors in the floors above. The sensors were put into the floors since it was impossible to cover the whole interior with motion detectors because of walls and furnishings. The floor sensors sent an alarm signal to the security room when they picked up the impact of footsteps after hours.

  I also didn’t like the idea of the spray paint. The mask was metal and could be cleaned quickly and returned to its display. But once the spray paint incident occurred, there would be heightened security, even to the point of calling in extra guard staff for a while.

  No doubt by the time I came back they would have Moby, the thieving million-dollar robot, written into their script. It could knock down the front door of the Piedmont, walk to the display, grab the mask, and walk out, with bullets bouncing off it.

  One thing about complicated plans like the one the SEALs were cooking up: If something could go wrong, it would. And the more complicated and sophisticated the plan, the more chances of something going wrong. NASA with its many failed space probes was a classic example of the fact that overcomplicating everything is a recipe for disaster.

  Turning my back to the cold, cutting wind coming off the water, I walked up a street of small stores that were still surviving in an age of malls.

  I certainly didn’t want to end up in prison because a torpedo blew a computer chip, or whatever happened when they went haywire. I regretted the impulse that had gotten me into another situation that came with prison stripes in case of failure.

  As I went past the display window of a TV store, two familiar faces appeared on one of the screens: Cassie the empty talking head was interviewing Angela St. John. I rushed inside the store to hear the interview.

  “Angela, tell us this exciting news about you and the Semiramis!”

  Cassie ended the sentence with a resounding verbal exclamation point.

  Angela flapped her long phony sexy eyelashes in an attempt of modesty. “I’ve been so busy building one of the premier museums in the world, I’ve ignored my career and my fans.”

  Bullshit! I wanted to barf. Her contribution to the museum had been to pose for pictures that her PR firm planted in film trade magazines in the hopes of stirring interest in her career.

  Cassie clapped her hands. “So you’ve decided to move away from ancient culture and back into the movie culture limelight.”

  “Really a combination of both. A project is in development for me to play the role of Semiramis in a period piece about old Babylon.”

  Cassie leaned forward with the expression children get when they’re awed. “Now tell the audience the exclusive secret you told me just moments before we went on the air.”

  Give me a break. The “secret” was something probably cooked up at Angela’s PR firm and approved by the show’s staff before the appearance was even scheduled.

  “Regression hypnosis revealed that in a past life I was actually Semiramis herself, the great warrior-queen of Babylon.”

  Cassie screeched out loud. The sound grated on my raw nerves like long, sharp fingernails. “How exciting! Will you end up getting bit by a snake?”

  “That was Cleopatra, you dumb bitch,” I said out loud.

  “May I help you?” a salesman behind me asked.

  “I’m beyond help.”

  I walked out of the store, steaming. The world was so damn unfair. I’d had to struggle my whole life while Angela St. John, not only born with beauty, also married great wealth and got fame thrown in. When luck was distributed in this world, some of us got shortchanged on our quota. And who made a rule of life that people like Cassie and Angela could be airheads and still get rich and famous? I just didn’t get it.

  I know there are all kinds of proverbs about being grateful for what you have, like the old saying “Don’t complain about having no shoes when there are people who have no feet,” but right at the moment I didn’t give a damn. My feet were bloody stumps. I had a right to feel sorry for myself.

  The thing that grated on me the most was Angela’s taking credit for the Piedmont’s success. She contributed nothing, and her husband’s sole contribution had been inherited wealth.

  And that nonsense about her playing Semiramis. Angela played bitches perfectly, but the ancient queen hadn’t been one. Semiramis was a smart, dynamic woman who rose to power in a brutal world where might was right and disputes were settled by the sword.

  “Bullshit,” I said, as I walked hurriedly down the street. That’s what these people all sowed. Bullshit. They were neck-, not knee-, deep in it.

  Angela’s project in development meant her PR firm was putting out publicity feelers to see if anyone would be interested in doing the movie.

  What a crock of—I stopped in my tracks. Wait a minute.

  Semiramis. Movie. Publicity.

  I walked slowly and stared straight ahead, an idea illuminating my brain cells as if a cartoon lightbulb had gone off in my head.

  Angela was desperate to get back into the movies. She saw the publicity surrounding the Semiramis as her way to do it. Maybe it was the way for us to do our caper, too.

  I wanted a low-tech heist. If the security system was too complex to deal with, a simple solution was available: Have the museum security turned off.

  I giggled aloud as I thought about the reaction of Coby and the others when I told them my idea.

  By this time, I was sure they had decided to hijack that big tunnel maker called the Mole to swallow the museum and carry the mask away.

  ***

  The group was still gathered at the kitchen table when I got back. I quickly found out they weren’t planning on hijacking the huge tunnel machine. Now they had themselves in full frogman gear swimming inside a large water sewer pipe near the museum’s basement.

  Disgusting. I shuddered at the thought of swimming through sewage. Even with protective gear, it would be the shits. Literally.

  Only Coby acknowledged my existence as I stood there ready to make my announcement. I cleared my throat. “Gentlemen, Gwyn.”

  “She has something to tell us,” Coby said. “Probably took a taxi over and grabbed the mask, right?”

  “I wish. I have an objection to your plan. In fact, I have an objection to any plan in which we have to cut through the basement concrete. Floor sensors are sure to go off from the vibrations created by sawing, drilling, whatever you plan to do to get through the cement and the steel supports. There are multiple primary and secondary security devices that we would have to get by after we get in.”

&nbs
p; Coby held up his hand to quiet the clamor of the group. “Maddy, dear,” he said, in a tone used to address a silly child, “we are not stupid. We’re working on these problems. If you don’t like our plan, why don’t you come up with something better.”

  He didn’t think I had a plan—so I dropped it on them without a preamble.

  “I have. The best way to get the Semiramis is to have security turn off the alarms.”

  They all stared at me. Then looked at one another. The message from around the table wasn’t hard to decipher: I was even more clueless about heists than they had imagined.

  “Give me a break,” Rob said.

  Coby asked, “What have you been smoking?”

  “I have a simple plan that will work. It revolves around Angela St. John, Hiram Piedmont’s wife.”

  “The movie star?” Gwyn asked.

  “The has-been, never-was-much, of a movie star.” I couldn’t help being catty about a woman who had everything. “She’s desperately trying to stir up interest in a movie in which she’ll play Semiramis. I saw her talking on TV about how she saw herself as the warrior-queen in a past life.”

  That got the appropriate hoots and howls from the guys.

  “Hey, don’t knock it,” Gwyn said seriously. “In an age when we rewrite biblical history every week and see conspiracies and secret codes in paintings and Bible passages, there’s nothing unusual about having been a queen three thousand years ago. I have a friend who swears she was at the grassy knoll the day JFK was assassinated… and she wasn’t even born yet.”

  “Angela St. John playing Semiramis. Sex, violence, chariot chases, bad acting,” Rob said. “Sounds like a winner.”

  “How does that translate into the museum turning off its security?” Coby asked.

  I didn’t have it all figured out yet, but at least I could them give the high points.

  “A photo shoot is what I had in mind. We contact Angela, say we’re with a European magazine and want to shoot her and the Semiramis together. If we tell her we’ve heard that she gets flashes of her past life when she puts on the queen’s death mask, she’ll really be revved up for a shoot with her wearing the mask.”