The Gilded Seal (27 page)

tion project currently underway in this section of the Louvre.

“Apparently they’re thinking of changing the entire Phase

Two design. We need to rework all our measure ments. As if

we didn’t have enough on our plate!”

The guard studied the documents carefully, then nodded at

the site foreman who was slouched over his paper, Gauloise in

hand, to indicate they checked out.

“I’m on a break. You know your way around?” he asked

hopefully.

“Straight up and don’t get too close to the edge,” said Eva.

“Don’t worry, we know the drill.”

“Just watch out for the bird shit,” the foreman warned

them with a grin. “It’s like a bloody ice-rink up there.”

A bright yellow elevator had been temporarily erected

up the front of the building to ferry people and supplies be-

tween the floors. Stepping into it, Milo shut the safety gate

behind them and then hit the button for the roof.

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t w i n i n g

“Can you see us?” he radioed a few moments later as they

stepped on to the gently sloping galvanized zinc surface un-

der a video camera’s watchful gaze.

“Yeah, I got you,” Axel radioed back. “Love the hard hats.”

“Ready?” Milo asked Eva.

She stretched up and kissed him.

“Ready.” She smiled.

“Let’s go.”

They set off, Axel killing the feed for a few seconds until

they reached the base of a large chimney that he had identi-

fied as being concealed from both the camera they were run-

ning away from and the one they were running toward.

“We’re there,” Milo panted.

“Okay. First camera’s back up. Next one’s down. Go.”

Guided by Axel’s barked instructions, they repeated this

process six or seven times, sprinting in zig-zagging bursts

from one camera blind spot to another, until they eventually

reached the top of the elevator shaft on the other side of the

building.

“You’re clear,” Axel reassured them. “Security have just

radioed through a possible electrical fault. But no one saw

you.”

They stripped off their civilian clothes to reveal the black

combat fatigues and bulletproof vests that they had been

wearing underneath. Then they armed themselves with weap-

ons, ammunition and night-vision goggles. Finally they packed

everything they weren’t now wearing or carrying back into

their packs. The less clues they left for the police to work on,

the better.

Milo approached the steel door that opened into the top of

the elevator shaft and sprung it open.

“Now what?” Axel radioed uncertainly as first Milo, then

Eva, stepped inside.

“Now we wait.”

C H A P T E R F O R T Y

CONTROL ROOM, BASEMENT, DENON WING,

MUSÉE DU LOUVRE, PARIS

22nd April— 4:32 p.m.

She had to admit it was an impressive set- up. Camera feeds

from all over the museum displayed on a wall of moni-

tors, eight across and five high. Six full- time operators in

constant radio contact with hundreds of security personnel.

A detailed schematic of the entire complex that showed the

status of all the security devices on each floor. A bank of

computers to control lighting, heating, the elevators, and the

doors. Little, if anything, had been left to chance. She swal-

lowed hard. Tom had no idea what he was up against.

“You did the right thing,” Cécile Levy, standing to her left,

reassured her with a smile.

Jennifer nodded but said nothing. If she was doing the

right thing, why did it feel so wrong?

She glanced at the other people in the room, the lack of

windows and dimmed lighting dappling their features with a

thin gauze of shadow. As well as Levy she had been intro-

duced to Philippe Troussard, the museum’s head of security,

Antoine Ledoux, the Museum Director and Serge Ferrat, the

police liaison officer who was coordinating the extra cover

that had been drafted in to help.

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She herself had been introduced as a special agent from

the FBI. As far as she knew, this was still an accurate title,

despite the previous eve ning’s conversation with Green. Not

that she’d been able to confirm this with him, as he’d proved

strangely elusive all day. In the end she had been forced to

dictate a message to a switchboard operator up at Quantico,

detailing what she had discovered and the steps she was

proposing to take.

“I still don’t understand how they think they’re going to

get away with this,” Ledoux sniffed.

He was at least sixty, Jennifer guessed, although he had

done what he could to make himself appear younger by crop-

ping his thinning white hair and opting for a pair of bright

red rectangular-framed glasses that matched his socks. His

black suit, too, was an ultra-fashionable cut, a dark gray shirt

and tie combination making it difficult to see where one item

of clothing ended and the next began. But there was no dis-

guising the loose skin on the back of his hands or the fi ssures

that lined his cheeks like the cracked mud of a river that had

run dry, despite the pale glow of bronze foundation which

had left scuff marks on his collar.

“You say you saw this man Kirk in a Lacombe van, Agent

Browne?” he continued. “But they’re not due here for months.

I don’t see how that will help him.”

As if on cue, a small section of the museum displayed on

the wall flashed yellow and a warning message popped up on

one of the computer screens.

“There’s a fault with the air-conditioning unit inside the

case,” Troussard breathed, staring incredulously at the screen

and then glancing up at the others. “He must have hacked

into Lacombe’s system.”

Jennifer shook her head and allowed herself a grudging

smile. Tom’s ingenuity was impressive if nothing else.

One of the phones in the control room rang. Troussard

nodded at the operative on his right to answer it.

“Contrôle . . . Oui on l’a vu aussi . . . Vingt minutes?”
He

looked questioningly at Troussard who nodded. “
Okay. Je pre-

viendrai les gars en bas de vous attendre.”

“They’ll have someone here in twenty minutes,” Troussard

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explained for her benefit, although that was probably the one

part of the conversation she had understood.

“He must have patched into the phone system to make that

call.” Ferrat, a short, grossly overweight man with a curly

mass of lacquered black hair that had an almost synthetic

sheen, gave a firm nod. “Clever. But nothing to worry about.”

He sketched a grand sweep with his pudgy hand. “I’ve got fi fty

armed men positioned around the building. Another thirty in

reserve who can be deployed in forty-five seconds. Once he’s

in, he won’t be getting out.” He beamed confidently, his small

eyes bulging like a bullfrog’s, a ruff of loose skin spilling

over his collar.

“We’re not worried,” sniffed Troussard, his tone suggest-

ing that, far from being reassured by Ferrat’s presence, he

rather resented it. Then again, the look he had given Jennifer

when she had been introduced suggested that he resented

anyone straying into his territory. “If your men fail to deal

with him, we have our own contingency plan.”

“Oh, they’ll deal with him,” Ferrat huffed, fi ddling with

the silver buttons on his uniform so that they all pointed the

same way up. “They’ll deal with all of them.”

“What contingency plan?” Jennifer queried.

“Hopefully, we won’t need it,” said Troussard curtly, re-

fusing to volunteer anything further.

Ten, then twenty minutes went by, filled mainly by false

sightings of Tom wandering around the museum and an ani-

mated account by Ledoux of the previous, successful attempt

on the
Mona Lisa
by Valfierno’s gang in 1911. Eventually,

however, Troussard jabbed his finger triumphantly against

the screen.

“Here they come.”

It was the same van that Jennifer had seen Tom get out of

earlier, or at least it looked the same: dark blue with white

lettering down the side. She followed it as it made its way

down the road that ran between the Louvre and the Seine,

disappearing off the left-hand edge of one screen only to re-

appear on the right-hand side of the one below as another

camera picked it up.

As it drew closer, Jennifer was filled with a growing sense

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of dread. She had been so sure of herself earlier; that she was

doing the right thing; that Tom had left her no choice. But

now, with the van drawing inexorably closer, the faces next

to her straining hungrily toward the screen like a pack of

hyenas circling a wounded gazelle, the doubts she had previ-

ously so deliberately ignored came crashing against the

crumbling cliff of her conscience.

Rightly or wrongly, she’d delivered Tom straight into a

trap. And now it was too late to do anything about it. Too late

to do anything other than watch as the animals prepared to

feast.

C H A P T E R F O R T Y- O N E

22nd April— 4:49 p.m.

They’ve stopped,” Ledoux pointed at the screen. The van

had pulled up about two hundred yards short of where it

should have turned into the museum.

Troussard stepped closer, frowning.

“What are they doing?”

“Checking their equipment?” Ledoux suggested.

“Maybe.” He sounded unconvinced.

“What do we do?” Asked Levy.

“We wait.” Ferrat was firm. “Whatever they’re doing, it

won’t last long. Besides, so far all they’ve done is steal a van.

They need to be inside before we can arrest them.”

The minutes ticked by. Five, then ten. Still no movement.

Nothing apart from the occasional sway of the van as the

traffic swooshed past.

“
C’est ridicule
,” Ledoux spluttered, removing his glasses,

furiously polishing them on the end of his tie, and then jab-

bing them back on to his nose. “How long are we going to

stand here? We need to do something.”

“Not while they’re in that van, we don’t,” Ferrat coun-

tered.

Jennifer stared at the screen, her lips pursed as she pon-

dered what Tom was playing at. She knew him. He never left

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anything to chance. If he’d stopped there, it was for a reason.

The question was what? She ran back through their discus-

sion that morning to see if there had been any clue there. She

thought back to their dinner the previous eve ning. She tried

to picture what she’d seen in his briefcase—alarm systems,

floor plans, maps.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed as one map in partic ular sud-

denly leaped to the front of her mind. “They’re not in the van.”

“Of course they’re in the van,” Ferrat snorted. “We’ve

been watching them the whole time.”

“They’re in the sewers,” she insisted, “He had a map show-

ing the layout of all the sewers under the museum. I saw it.”

“The sewers lead right inside the building,” Ledoux said

fearfully.

“I’m going up,” Troussard announced.

“I’ll come with you,” said Jennifer, falling in behind him.

He punched the exit switch and the door slid open. She

could hear Ferrat frantically radioing for back- up as the door

closed behind them. They sprinted up the stairs and into one

of the large internal courtyards. Two police vans gunned past

them as they ran out onto the street through a set of heavy

iron gates and slewed to a halt on either side of the blue van,

blocking its path in both directions. Eight armed men jumped

out of each one, their sub-machine guns drawn. They wore

the blue uniform of the CRS, the French riot police, and full

body armor.

Jennifer and Troussard held back. Ferrat suddenly appeared

at her shoulder, gasping for breath as he signaled for the men

to move in. The first team threw the front doors open, jabbing

their guns inside the cabin. It was empty. Simultaneously the

second team wrenched the rear doors apart, two men jumping

inside with a shout. A few moments passed. Then three men,

bound at the wrists and naked except for their socks and un-

derwear, emerged blinking into the sunlight, visibly terrifi ed.

“Is that them?” Ferrat turned hopefully to Jennifer, chest

heaving, all his buttons askew.

“No.” She shook her head, a grim expression on her face.

“I expect you’ll find they work for the air- conditioning com-

pany.”

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“Then where are they?” Troussard sounded slightly hys-

terical.

Ferrat led them over to the rear of the van and they all

climbed inside.

“Look,” he pointed.

A neat hole had been cut in the vehicle’s fl oor. Peering

through it, Jennifer was able to make out the gaping throat of

an open manhole and a rudimentary ladder that disappeared

into the gloom. For a second, she was sure she could hear the