The Chase (25 page)

They weren’t the only ones in the neighborhood getting an early start. Another moving truck was parked right in front of them, and three more were across the street. People were already out loading and unloading furniture and boxes and piling them on the sidewalks while they worked. Willie was pleased to see lots of IKEA boxes in play. The chaos was slowly building, which could only help them if things went tits up, as her mother used to say.

There were also lots of families walking down the cross streets on their way to get good seats for the Canada Day Parade. The parade was to begin at 11
A.M.
and run along Rue Sainte-Catherine, parallel to Avenue Lincoln. The festivities would create a long wall of humanity, cars, and barricades that would slow any police cars attempting to respond to an alarm at the Musée de Florentiny.

At 8:30, Ralph Dennis walked past Willie and Joe’s stolen moving truck on his way to the museum’s employee entrance on Rue Saint-Marc to begin his shift.

“Go,” Joe said, feeding his voice into everyone’s earpiece.

The rear door of the stolen truck slid open, and Nick and Kate emerged, also in matching mover’s overalls. Kate carried several unassembled IKEA boxes under her arms and against her sides. Nick carried a gym bag. They walked down Avenue Lincoln a few steps behind Ralph.

Joe lifted the top of his MacBook, and his screen lit up with a dozen live video feeds from the museum’s security cameras.

“I’m in,” he said to Nick and Kate.

Ralph turned the corner onto Rue Saint-Marc and walked up to the museum’s side door, smiled at the cameras, and ran his security card over the reader on the wall. The door unlocked and he went inside. The instant the door closed, Joe tapped into the camera feed and replaced the live image with one he’d recorded moments before Ralph walked up. The replay showed nobody at the door.

“You’re clear,” Joe said to Nick and Kate.

They went up to the door. Nick took a white plastic card out of his pocket, wiped it over the reader, and unlocked the door. Nick opened the door, and he and Kate stepped into a corridor. The alarms in that section of the building had been deactivated for Ralph and
wouldn’t be turned on again until the officer he was replacing on the shift walked out. They had maybe one minute to act.

Kate set the boxes down, and Nick opened the gym bag. They took ski masks out of the bag, pulled them over their faces, and each picked up a Glock. The guns weren’t loaded, but Kate’s stomach still rolled. She’d sworn to uphold the law, and here she was all dressed up like a criminal, getting ready to rob a museum. It would be satisfying to take down Carter Grove, but truth is, she probably wouldn’t be doing this if her family’s safety wasn’t at stake.

Nick grabbed the gym bag and Kate led the way down the corridor to the security station, stepping into the windowless room in a firing stance. There were six flat-screen surveillance monitors on the far wall, mounted over a broad alarm console, an array of switches, dials, and keyboards. Two guards, about the same age as Ralph, sat at the console, facing the screens. Ralph stood beside the men, talking about a soccer game. None of them were aware of Kate and Nick until Kate spoke up.

“Good morning,” she said.

The startled men whirled around and went wide-eyed when they saw the two hooded figures standing in the doorway, holding guns.

“Please do as you’re told because we really don’t want to hurt you. We’d like this to be a relaxed, stress-free robbery for everyone. Sound good?” she asked.

The guards nodded.

“Great. What we’d like you to do is get up very slowly, face the wall, and assume the position of someone under arrest.”

The guards did as they were told, put their hands against the walls, and spread their legs.

“Perfect. Now we’re going to search you for weapons and zip-tie your hands behind your backs,” she said. “Nothing to worry about.”

Nick put his gun in his pocket, went up to the men, and patted them down, taking their wallets and cell phones, which he placed in his gym bag. He bound their hands behind their backs with zip ties, stepped back beside Kate, and drew his weapon again.

“Don’t worry about your stuff,” Kate said. “We’ll leave your things at the door before we leave. Now turn around, put your backs against the wall, and slide down into a seated position on the floor with your ankles crossed. What’s going to happen now is that we’re going to bind your ankles with zip ties, cover your mouths with duct tape, and then steal some paintings.”

Once Nick was finished taping and tying the guards, he went to the console and switched off the alarm system throughout the museum.

The employee restrooms weren’t protected by any alarm systems, and as all the guards were men, no one ever went into the women’s bathroom when the museum was closed. That mundane fact, combined with an obscure bit of Montreal criminal history, was the key element of Huck Moseby’s elaborately conceived plot to rob the Musée de Florentiny.

Twenty-two years ago, a team of thieves had plotted to break into the basement cash room of the Bank of Montreal by tunneling in from the city’s sewer system. They’d spent months digging tunnels and were only seven centimeters away from breaking through the bank’s floor when, the day before the heist was to go down, a huge tree fell onto the street. The tree collapsed the tunnel and exposed their work. The would-be thieves were never caught, and if not for the fallen tree they might have succeeded in pulling off the crime of the century.

Huck had thought often about that failed robbery during his ten-year career as a Montreal sewer worker. His fascination with the crime eventually evolved into a plan of his own to steal the Rembrandt collection from the Musée de Florentiny. His plot was so ingenious that he considered himself a criminal mastermind in the same league as Professor Moriarty, Auric Goldfinger, or the Penguin. This secret knowledge of his own incredible brilliance gave forty-one-year-old Huck the strength to go to work and slog through the day.

He had assembled his crack team with the same careful consideration as George Clooney had in
Ocean’s Eleven
, had Clooney’s circle of contacts been only people he’d met in the sewers and subway tunnels under Montreal. Huck’s first recruits were two unemployed construction workers experienced with digging and demolishing tunnels.

Since Huck knew nothing about properly handling paintings or fencing Rembrandts in the international black market, he needed to find a professional thief, and he wasn’t going to find one in the sewers. So he browsed through back issues of Canadian newspapers for stories about thieves convicted of committing art robberies and found one who’d recently been released from prison.

Two months ago, the men began digging a tunnel from the sewer collector line to a spot directly below the museum’s employee women’s restroom. They were on a tight deadline because Huck’s plan was to break into the restroom, overpower the guards, turn off the alarms, and leisurely pillage the museum on July 1, national moving day. That way they could simply walk out the back door carrying their Rembrandts in moving boxes to the truck they’d parked behind the museum. No one would notice. They would
blend in with everybody else on the street loading and unloading trucks and then quietly drive off into infamy.

At 9
A.M.
, Huck’s team cut a hole through the floor of the women’s bathroom with a thermal lance, and the four men, their faces hidden by ski masks, quietly climbed out of the tunnel. They brought with them guns, packing tape, and several flattened moving boxes that IKEA had given away in the neighborhood.

As the criminal mastermind of the group, Huck Moseby was the first one to step out of the women’s bathroom into the corridor. He’d barely emerged from the doorway when he felt something cold and hard pressed against his left ear.

“I’ve got a Glock pointed at your head,” Kate said. “If my finger twitches, your head will explode like a water balloon, so you don’t want to startle me.”

He didn’t know what surprised him more, that there was a gun pointed at his head or that somehow he’d missed that there was a female guard on the museum’s payroll.

“Does she really have a gun?” Huck asked. The question was directed at the three men behind him in the restroom, because he was afraid to turn his head and see for himself. But none of the men answered. They were already scrambling back to their hole in the floor.

Kate took Huck’s gun from him and, keeping her Glock against his ear, peered into the restroom just in time to see the last man jump into the hole. They left behind their guns, boxes, and packing tape. She was glad to see them go. It made things a lot easier.

It wasn’t a coincidence that she’d been standing there when they arrived. She’d been expecting them ever since she and Nick had walked by the Hydro-Québec truck on the street yesterday.
Nick got suspicious when he saw a worker sitting on the back of the truck texting on his smartphone. Guys who spend most of their time working underground don’t have blisters on their hands unless they’re new hires. That made Nick study the man more closely, and when he did he recognized him as Michel Montoute, a mediocre thief who’d recently been released from prison. Montoute might have recognized Nick too, if he’d just once looked up from his tweeting.

Kate turned back to Huck and put his gun in her pocket. “This is your lucky day.”

“It is?” He risked a look at her and was stunned to see that she wasn’t a guard and that she was wearing a ski mask just like his own.

“Yes, because you were caught by another thief and not the law. You get to go free. But we’re taking the Rembrandts.”

“Couldn’t I have just one?”

“No, you can’t.”

“That doesn’t seem very fair. I put a lot of work into this.”

“You certainly did,” she said, glancing back at the hole. “Way more than was necessary.”

“How did you get in?”

“Trade secret,” she said, and whistled for Nick. He came over a few moments later.

“Where are the others?” Nick asked.

She took a step back from Huck and handed Nick two zip ties. “They scurried away like rats into their hole.”

“That was considerate of them.”

“Not as far as I’m concerned,” Huck said.

“They thought you’d been captured by a museum guard,” Nick said. “They knew the heist was blown. You can’t blame them for
taking advantage of their one opportunity for escape. I have to congratulate you on your plan, though. Very clever.”

“Thanks,” Huck said. “Since you clearly respect my skills, what do you say we band together on this?”

“The only thing we’re going to band together are your wrists,” Kate said, keeping her weapon trained on him. “Hold your arms out.”

“That’s cold,” Huck said, but he complied. “C’mon, give a guy a break.”

“We will.” Nick pulled the zip tie tight around Huck’s wrists. “We’ll cut you free before we go. The guards will never know you were here.”

“You sure I couldn’t have a Matisse or a Renoir as a consolation prize?”

That question was actually the subject of an argument Nick and Kate had had the previous night. Nick was in favor of letting the thieves take whatever they wanted from the museum, but the FBI agent in Kate couldn’t let that happen. The only way she felt comfortable stealing the Rembrandts was because she was fairly certain the museum would be getting them back.

“We’ll make sure you leave with a souvenir,” Nick said.

They sat Huck down, zip-tied his ankles, and returned to the Rembrandt gallery.

“I can’t believe another crew tried to rob this place on the same day as us,” Kate said.

“At least I spotted them ahead of time.”

Nick removed the three paintings from the wall and wrapped them in plastic. He continued his work while Kate assembled the boxes. They then put the paintings into the boxes and sealed them
with packing tape. Nick stepped out of the gallery and returned a few minutes later, pushing two of the museum’s handtrucks. They loaded the boxes onto the handtrucks, then each took one and wheeled it to the back door. On the way, Kate stopped beside Huck, bent down, and cut his ties.

“I want to see you go back into your hole before we leave,” Kate said.

Huck stood up and faced Nick. “You told me I’d get to take something with me.”

Nick reached into the box on the top of his handtruck and pulled out a Musée de Florentiny T-shirt with Rembrandt’s
Old Man Eating Bread by Candlelight
on the back. “Wear it in good health.”

“I was expecting something more valuable.”

“What could be more valuable than your freedom?” Kate said. “Go before we change our mind, tie you back up, and leave you here for the police.”

Huck stuffed the T-shirt into his jumpsuit so it wouldn’t get dirty in the sewer and reluctantly returned to the women’s room. The sad notion wasn’t lost on him that his tunnel robbery was as big a failure, and as doomed by bad luck, as the one attempted at the Bank of Montreal twenty-two years ago. At least he was getting away free and clear, just like those other would-be thieves did. But unlike them, he had something to show for it, even if it was only a lousy T-shirt.