Chasing the White Lion

by James R. Hannibal

  Eddie stuffed the hanky away. “Sorry. I have some lingering sniffles. Your appointment this evening is with Taner Atan—alleged mob ties, a few dead bodies, but nothing proven. This guy is the Bernie Madoff of Central Europe. Plus he dabbles in black-market commodities like arms and pharmaceuticals. He makes roughly twenty-five million a year for the syndicate with Ponzi schemes, insider trading, and penny-stock shell games, mostly based in the Far East markets. And according to Dark Web chatter, he nearly doubles that figure at the annual Frenzy.”

  Tyler joined them, pulling off a respirator that matched Darcy’s. “Atan is the Jungle’s Hyena, the lowest ranking of the top five, and one of only two top players we’ve been able to identify with near certainty.”

  “Who else have you identified?” Talia asked.

  “Orien Jafet, the Maltese Tiger. He’s a Greek underworld boss. We’ll get to him in Stage Two.”

  “Tell me again why you can’t ID the others, Eddie.” Val sat on a couch Mac had brought down from the lodge and crossed her legs. “I thought you could move whole planets with those computers.”

  “Satellites. Not planets.” Eddie shot the grifter a get it right frown. “The other two bigwigs—the Clouded Leopard and the Snow Leopard—are hard to nail down. All the top positions are fluid, up for grabs each year. Atan and Jafet fended off the competition the last three Frenzies, making them easier to track.”

  The grifter bobbled her head and looked away, as if grudgingly accepting the excuse.

  Talia watched the interaction. Clearly she had missed a great deal of discussion. She was playing catch-up. She hated playing catch-up. “I’m having trouble connecting the dots between Atan and the German Silver gag.”

  Tyler had the answer, not a very helpful one. “Our mark is an avid numismatist.”

  “A what?” Talia asked.

  “A numismatist,” called Finn from a table laid out with an odd collection of items—a bowl of ice, a miniature slide, a radar gun. He beckoned them over. “A coin nerd. Or . . . coin geek, right, Eddie?”

  A sniffle and a wiggling hanky muffled Eddie’s reply. “Nope. Nerd is correct. Trust me.”

  Darcy brought Finn a tray of freshly minted gold coins, and the Aussie lifted one from the tray. “Geek, nerd, whatever. We’re running a coin scam on a coin expert. No easy task. He’s going to test our fake Bavarian Thalers. We’re prepared for everything he can throw at us.”

  Tyler shook his head. “Never say that, Finn. It’s unnecessary hubris. The mark can always throw you a curveball.”

  “Right. Okay.” The burglar’s cheeks reddened. Talia could see he wanted to argue, but he didn’t and simply moved on. Finn rubbed the coin between his palms and set it on the bowl of ice. It sank like a hot stone. “Test one. Gold has a high thermal conductivity, so it melts through ice quickly, drawing heat from the air.”

  “But that’s not gold,” Talia said.

  Darcy gave her a lips-parted abracadabra wink. “You are correct. But your chemist is exceptionnel, no?” She picked up a vial marked NITRIC ACID. “Test two—acid. Pure gold is corrosion proof, so most acids won’t affect it. Other metals are not so fortunate.” Using an eyedropper, she placed a dab of the acid on a copper penny. Fizz bubbled up and the acid turned green. She placed the next drop on one of her coins.

  The acid remained clear. Talia let out a mystified huff. “Nothing.” Again, the coin performed like gold.

  “Wait, please.” A few seconds later, the drop began to fizz, taking on the same green color as before. “The acid is a persistent foe, yes? A thin layer of epoxy protects these coins, but it will eventually fail. You must keep the mark moving if he tries an acid test.”

  “He won’t. He’ll love the idea of the thalers too much.” A hint of a Brooklyn accent invaded Val’s words. It grew stronger as she continued. “Not many men have the guts to pour acid on a two-million dollah coin. Know what I’m sayin’?”

  The team turned to look at her. Even Tyler looked disturbed.

  “What? You people got a problem?”

  They all turned back to Darcy.

  The chemist moved down the table to Finn’s miniature slide. “Test three. A much less destructive test involving the magnetic properties of the gold.”

  Mac raised a hand. “Gold isn’t magnetic.”

  “Exactement.” Darcy held a magnetic cube over the tray of coins, and none of them moved. “However, gold is diamagnetic, interacting in opposition to a magnetic field.” She laid the coin on the miniature slide, and it slowly moved to the bottom, held back by an invisible force.

  Talia had seen a similar effect a few days earlier when Tyler played with the magnetic disk and copper tube at Wolf Manor. And Darcy’s coin had reacted to the acid with the same color change as the penny. “Copper,” she said with a quiet chuckle. “You’re using copper to mimic the conductive properties of the gold.”

  Darcy touched her nose. “You are like the Sherlock Holmes, no? But copper is much lighter than gold. Any dime-store scale will expose a copper alloy fake like ours. Yet . . .” She placed the coin on one plate of a balance scale and a lead cube marked 1 OZ on the other. The two teetered for a few heartbeats, then settled, perfectly level. Darcy grinned. “Voilà. A tungsten core brings us back into balance.”

  While Darcy worked the slide and scales, Finn had been playing with the radar gun at the end of the table. He waggled it in the air, and Darcy nodded. “This brings us to the last and most dangerous test—the XRF, or X-ray fluorescence, gun. Any wealthy numismatist worth his salt will own one.”

  “In fact,” Eddie said, walking around the table to stand next to his girlfriend, “Atan’s online purchases confirm he owns this particular make and model.” He ended with a sniffle.

  Darcy slid a half step away. “Are you going to do this snuffling, snotty thing the entire job?”

  “It’s a cold. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Keep it away from me, yes?”

  Finn whistled to get their attention and held the gun over the tray of coins. “Copper alloys. Tungsten cores. This baby can detect them all at the atomic level. No fake coin can beat it. True blue. No exceptions.” He pressed the scanner’s trigger. The device hummed and issued a pronounced boop. He showed Talia the readout.

  GOLD 97.1%.

  Talia scrunched up her nose. “But you said . . .”

  Darcy gave her another abracadabra wink. “There are two variables in this equation, yes? The coin and the XRF gun. If you cannot fake the coin . . .”

  “Fake the gun.” Talia laughed. “I love it. Okay. We’re meeting Atan in a couple of hours. How do we get the fake gun into his hands?”

  Finn cracked his knuckles. “Leave that to me.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-

  SIX

  ST. VITUS CATHEDRAL

  PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

  THE KNIGHT’S EYES WERE ALL WRONG.

  Finn cocked his head, hoping a change of angle might make a difference. It didn’t.

  The life-size statue of St. Wenceslas hovered above a tomb in St. Vitus Cathedral, stepping out from a fresco as if stepping out of the past. He wore a knight’s armor and carried a spear and shield, but his eyes did not match such warlike adornments.

  A knight, in Finn’s book, ought to be confident and hard. The eyes of this ancient Bohemian king were neither. The artist had given him a soulful look, generous and conciliatory, almost tearful. Those eyes said, What’s mine is yours. By all means, stab me in the heart and pillage my castle at your leisure. According to a pamphlet, the king’s brother had done exactly that.

  Finn shook his head and dropped the pamphlet on the stack. A little past the table, however, his eyes fell on something more to his liking—a dark hall guarded by an iron-bar gate with a tempting sign.

  THIS WAY TO THE BOHEMIAN CROWN JEWELS

  An invitation if ever Finn had seen one. Near closing time, few security personnel lingered in the cathedral. Most were out policing the surrounding com
pound—Prague Castle, among the largest hilltop fortresses in the world. Sure, the gate was locked, and Lexan cases and cameras would protect the jewels. Nothing he couldn’t handle. He clenched and unclenched his fists. “Hmm.”

  “Finn.” Tyler came in clear over the SATCOM link. “Your GPS tracker is stationary. What’s the holdup?”

  “Just . . . taking in the sights.”

  “I see. Since you’ve got time to kill, pick me up a few souvenirs.”

  “I was just thinking about that.” Finn took one last look at the Crown Jewel sign and walked off. “But you’d only give ’em away, like that dewy-eyed King Wenceslas.”

  “Say again?”

  “Nothing.”

  A thigh-crippling two hundred eighty-seven steps brought Finn to the top of the cathedral’s southern bell tower, where the giant Zikmund Bell and its lesser cousins looked out over Prague. A young boy pressed himself back against the wall beneath one of the windows as Finn arrived.

  Children never shrank away from Finn. But he remembered the business suit he wore—not among his usual fashion choices. To a kid in jeans too short for growing legs and a grease-stained flannel shirt, a guy in an expensive suit must look like a mobster or a stockbroker. In Prague the two were interchangeable.

  “Relax, kid. The suit’s just a costume.” He glanced around. “You lose your parents or something?”

  The boy gave him a blank stare.

  “Where is your papa?” Finn held up a hand, palm down, even with his own head. “You know. Papa?” He moved the hand a little lower. “Mama?”

  The kid shook his head.

  “Right. You went walkabout on your own. I get that. My mom preferred it when I made myself scarce during the day, too, especially when her boyfriends came around.”

  The kid seemed to accept this, or at least the idea that Finn was not some authority figure there to drag him out of the cathedral. He turned to the window, trying—and failing—to pull himself up by the limestone sill.

  “You want to see out?”

  That question got through loud and clear. The kid nodded and held up his arms. He was light, even for his size. Finn set him on the sill and guarded his waist. “Nice view, huh?”

  The kid said nothing, eyes roaming the fortress below and the city of Prague beyond.

  “Finn.” It was Tyler again. “The girls are approaching the dock. Time to move.”

  “Yeah. I see them.”

  The Vltava River split the city. Val and Talia had taken the runabout rather than brave the traffic on the winding, medieval streets. A municipal dock put them within walking distance of Atan’s brokerage, occupying the top floor of a seventeenth-century building at the base of the fortress hill. The building’s red tile roof looked a little close for Finn’s comfort.

  “Darcy, are you sure about this jump?”

  “Naturellement. The tower is fifty meters above the courtyard—almost two hundred above Atan’s office, yes? That is six times higher than Russell Powell’s jump from the dome of Paul’s.” After a pause, she added, “And Powell was inside the church.”

  “But Powell didn’t have to cover a hundred fifty meters of horizontal distance.” Finn lifted the kid down from the sill and pulled a matte gray wingsuit from his backpack. The kid watched him put it on with mild interest. “Darcy, you didn’t answer the question. Am I going to make this?”

  “You will accelerate at nine point eight meters per second, reaching a velocity of thirty-one meters per second in the first fifty meters, generating enough lift to glide and enough force to properly open the chute.”

  “I give you a yes or no question, and you spout a bunch of maths. Thanks.”

  Finn climbed up into the window, which bought him a great deal more interest from the kid than the wingsuit had. He mustered his sternest schoolmarm look. “Don’t try this at home, kid. Don’t try it here, either. Especially here.”

  As he began scaling the aged copper roof to the tower’s peak, Darcy interrupted. “You did not lie to me about your weight, did you?”

  “Guys don’t lie about bodyweight.”

  “Good. Okay. Safe flight.”

  Bodyweight. A chill went down his spine. Finn never lied about his weight. Why would he? His abs were like a riverbed. But he did have a habit of removing the contents of his pockets whenever he stepped on a scale.

  Finn crawled back down to the window. Using the Velcro access panels in the legs of his wingsuit, he dug every bit of spare change out of his pockets and slapped two fistfuls down on the sill. “Hey, kid. These are for you.”

  The kid scooped up the money and scampered off before the strange suicidal man changed his mind.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-

  SEVEN

  ST. VITUS CATHEDRAL

  PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

  FINN MUTTERED A QUICK PRAYER to the God Tyler claimed was watching over them all and jumped.

  The fortress courtyard came on fast.

  Years of daredevil stunts for big shows and burglaries had acclimated Finn to the terror of ground rush. This stunt, however, came with the unsettling knowledge that he would have to generate enough forward velocity to clear the battlements.

  He snapped into the spread-eagle position and arched, begging the air to grant him lift. The toes of his Italian wing tips came so close to the battlements, they drew dust from the bricks. The worst was over. Beyond the wall, the steep descent of the fortress hill gave him an additional hundred twenty-five meters of free fall to play with. Finn breathed a sigh of relief and adjusted his path for a late-opening landing on the roof.

  TALIA HEARD FINN’S JUMP CALL through her earpiece, but she didn’t look. The last thing she wanted was to draw some pedestrian’s attention to Finn’s covert entrance. The gray wingsuit against the gray dusk sky made him nearly invisible, but she knew better than to take chances.

  As a doorman waved them through the entrance, Val whispered in Talia’s ear. “Your name on this one is Natalia Macciano. In character, I’ll call you Nat.”

  “I hate that nickname. Call me Natalie.”

  “I wasn’t giving you a choice.”

  Talia had put a stop to the Nat thing on day one in kindergarten. Why would anyone think a little girl wanted a nickname homonymous with an annoying bug? “Do it, and I’ll make you pay.”

  “Go ahead. I have lots of money.” Val fell into her Brooklyn accent, signaling the desk guard. “Hellooo-ooo. We’re Nat and Val Macciano, here to see Mr. Taner Atan.”

  A deer-in-the-headlights response told them all they needed to know about the guard’s command of English.

  Val tried again. “Ma-see-ah-no. Here to see Mr. Atan. Capiche?”

  The guard held up a finger and flicked a switch below a panel of monitors. They showed the main hallways and the elevators, but not the interior offices. Good news for Finn. A moment later, the guard touched the headset cup at his ear, murmured a response in Czech, and nodded to Val. “Šesté patro. In English, eh . . . Floor 6.”

  Three-foot copper letters, illuminated by warm spotlights and spelling out ATAN INVESTMENTS, greeted Talia and Val as they stepped off the elevator. As if that much copper wasn’t striking enough, Atan’s receptionist sat dwarfed behind an oversize copper reception desk, lacquered with clear coat to make it shine. Eddie had mentioned their mark had a thing for the stuff. Funny, given the true content of their fake Bavarian Thalers.

  “Copper is the lowest of the currency metals,” Atan explained when he came out to meet them. “It reminds me of where I started—the son of a penniless mechanic in an Albanian slum. As you can see, I have come up in the world. How may I help you ladies to do the same?”

  Tyler coached them through the comm link. “Keep him away from his office. It sits too close to the coin vault where he keeps the XRF gun. Get him to the conference room.”

  Val kept her Brooklyn accent running at full steam. “Don’t ask what you can do for us, Mr. Atan. Ask what we can do for you.” She pressed her thumb
and forefinger together. “A unique opportunity has popped up in your little neck of the woods. We’re here to give you first crack.”

  “Crack?” Atan’s smile flattened. “If I understand correctly, you are here with a proposal. But I am a busy man. You have thirty seconds to pique my interest.”

  Val flung a hand over her shoulder. “I’ll do it in five. You’re a coin collector, right?”

  “The term is numismatist.”

  “Sure, honey. Whatever. Then maybe you’ve heard of the Bavarian Thalers.”

  The sudden shift in Atan’s expression told Talia the hook was in.

  “You see, Nat.” Val smacked Talia’s arm. “We came to the right man.”

  To the right. Talia recognized the method in Val’s Brooklyn madness. The flamboyant accent kept Atan’s conscious mind distracted while key words and hand signals told his subconscious where to go—the conference room, to the right.

  Val finished her play with a more obvious push. She ran a finger along the reception desk. “I’ve never seen so much copper. So gorgeous. I bet your conference table is made of the same stuff too, yeah? It’s gotta be ’uge.”

  “Enormous.” The smile returned to Atan’s face. “Let me show you.”

  “They’ve got him, Finn,” Tyler said through the comm link. “You’re on.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-

  EIGHT

  ATAN INVESTMENTS

  PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

  A RED TILE CRACKED under the press of Finn’s knee as he low-crawled across the roof. A piece slid away, threatening to bounce over the gutters and crash onto the street below. He caught it with a toe and held it steady until he was sure it would stay put.

  If they had come a day earlier—skipped princess Talia’s church service and Sunday lunch—Finn could have done the job at night, properly. Instead, the rushed timing had made it an evening swap, still during business hours.