The Looters (37 page)

In my current circumstance, it didn’t seem advisable to remind him that he was going to welsh on the agreement and keep the antiquities. But no one had ever accused me of keeping my mouth shut.

“We agreed the pieces were going back to the Iraqis. Coby, I want us to be free, you, me, your friends. Free of crimes, free of guilt, free of the police and that murdering bastard Stocker. The only way to do it was to see that the stolen pieces went home.”

From the sour expression on his face I could see that truth, honor, justice, and the American Way weren’t going to fly with him.

“We went into Baghdad with a war going on and risked our lives to steal antiquities worth tens of millions of dollars—”

“Preserve,” I reminded him. “You were preserving them for humanity.”

“I oughta kick your ass for what you did.”

He didn’t want to walk away empty-handed. So I threw him a bone. A big juicy one.

“There’s just one more piece that has to be liberated.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The biggest one of all. A small golden mask worth fifty-five million dollars. It’s worth more than everything in that warehouse put together. And we can get it.”

His breathing became more even. “How? The Piedmont has it.”

“I know more about the museum than anyone. Hiram Piedmont is a pussycat compared to your pal Stocker. Getting the Semiramis from the museum will be child’s play for the SEALs.” I kissed him sweetly on the lips. “I also know the security system at the museum. I designed it.”

He was starting to relax now.

“Naturally,” I said, “our objective would be to, uh, recover the Semiramis in the name of the people of Iraq and return it to them.”

His lips slowly spread into a smile. “Naturally.”

Of course I didn’t believe him. But that didn’t matter, not at the moment, though it was inevitable the SEALs and I would lock horns over the Semiramis when I insisted it go back to Baghdad. By now I was more thoroughly convinced that the mask actually carried the curse it was reputed to have. The real question was whether that evil whore of Babylon would cut me off at the knees before I was able to return her.

Considering the history of that region for the past five or six thousand years, I had to wonder whether they even wanted the mask back.

Chapter 60

I had guessed right that the bathroom was in a store that specialized in Middle Eastern foods. The owner, who turned out to be the man who had pulled me out of the taxi, had also been involved in the Iraqi museum heist with the SEALs.

“He’d prefer not to have an introduction,” Coby told me as he led me out of the bathroom and back outside to a taxi.

The taxi driver, the same man who had helped kidnap me earlier, simply raised his eyebrows and gave a “I was just following orders” shrug when I got inside the cab. He showed zero remorse for aiding and abetting my kidnapping.

“No tip for you,” I said.

He gave me a smug, cocky, I-put-one-over-on-you-bitch grin in the rearview mirror. If he had kept his glee to himself I wouldn’t have opened my mouth, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to get even with him.

As he pulled out onto the main street, I leaned forward and spoke in a confidential stage whisper. “Drive carefully. I’m being followed by FBI agents.”

He slammed on his brakes. Brakes and tires screeched behind us.

Coby and I braced ourselves for the impact behind us.

It never came.

We both got our breathing back with a gasp.

“That was pretty stupid,” Coby said, not amused at my little stunt.

Stupid or not, the smug taxi driver was no longer grinning.

***

Only Gwyn seemed totally forgiving when Coby brought me to their new hideout: the home of Gwyn’s parents on Staten Island.

The unsuspecting parents of the Navy officer turned tomb raider were off sunning in Florida, unaware that their daughter was using their house to plan a museum heist.

The house had some unusual furnishings.

“My parents are retired schoolteachers,” she told me. “They both have a long love of magic. In fact, they met at a show at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. When they retired from teaching, they launched a second career doing magic at birthday parties for people with too much money.”

Their interest in magic was obvious: The house was loaded with stage props, including a black coffin used as a coffee table.

Gwyn patted the coffin. “An old friend. I got cut in half in it when I was nine. At eleven they buried me alive.”

The scary part is that I believed her.

Maybe it was better that her parents weren’t home.

At the house of magic, I showered and slept for ten hours. When I came into the kitchen where the group was gathered at the table, I got a cool greeting. Only Gwyn was pleasant. Coby had earlier vacillated between forgiveness and homicidal tendencies toward me. Mostly the latter.

I was almost tempted to remind them that we had all agreed the Iraqi loot was to go back to the museum and I had accomplished the task without risking their lives… yet we all knew they never intended to go through with their promise. They were lying to me, and I was lying that I believed them. But I knew how to keep my mouth shut, at least most of the time. I was seriously pissed that they were the injured parties when I was the one who was nearly murdered, not to mention almost getting killed in a head-on collision, being arrested, and having my passport locked up in the federal jail.

These were the bastards who started the whole mess by robbing a museum. I deserved a little sympathy from them. Not to mention an apology for completely screwing up my life.

As I poured cream in my coffee, the more I thought about their attitude, the more aggravated I got. I said, “Isn’t it wonderful that the Iraqis will be getting back their priceless cultural treasures?”

Bad move. I could see they had no sense of humor about the loss of priceless antiquities from the biggest museum heist since Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun or whoever sacked nations.

“You did it behind our backs,” Rob said.

You bet, you jerk. That was the only way I could do it and walk away with the pieces and my head intact.

I kept those retorts silent and leaned against the wall as I sipped my coffee and smiled at them. I would’ve loved to turn the whole bunch of them in to the authorities. Except for Gwyn, who seemed to be nice to me, and Coby, whom I had mixed feelings about.

I forced a smile at the bastards who had ruined my life. “Can’t trust anyone today, can you? No honor among thieves, eh?”

My humor fell flat. Again.

A dark look from Coby told me to put a lid on it. “Tell us about the security at the Piedmont,” he said.

A laptop was up and running in front of him.

“Security is state-of-the-art because the museum’s new. It’s also not very large, so security doesn’t have to be too complicated or heavily staffed. There’s only one guard on at night, but that’s all they need. All windows and doors are hardwired to the system. Motion detectors are in every hallway. The area that has the mask displayed is especially monitored. All significant pieces, like the mask, have RFID tags that trigger an alarm if they are moved outside a certain range, which is usually just a few feet. A hidden camera is directly above the mask, and its image is displayed on a separate monitor in the security room. Motion detectors crisscross each other all around the display.”

Gwyn whistled. “Tight security.”

I shook my head. “You don’t display a fifty-five-million-dollar item small enough to fit into a purse without security backup. The rest of the museum is pretty well covered, too. Surveillance cameras watch every square foot of the display areas. The cameras have high-quality night resolution even though the display areas are illuminated with low light during the night. Naturally there’s a backup battery system for everything and anti-tampering devices that go off if you mess with the alarm. You can’t cut security system wires or turn off power without setting off the alarm. Breathing too hard in the museum at night would probably set off the alarms.”

“But there’s only one guard at night?” Coby asked.

“Only one, but he has camera and sound monitoring for the entire museum. He can have a hundred cops there in minutes. He sits in a heavy-armored, impregnable room. He doesn’t have to keep an eye on every monitor because once the museum is shut down for the night a signal goes off in the security room if any change occurs in the image a camera is on.”

I was proud of the museum’s sophisticated security. But right now I wished I had been a little more wishy-washy about protecting the collection.

“What about the basement?”

That one threw me. I raised my eyebrows. “It’s big. It covers the entire footprint of the museum, but there’s nothing down there except storage shelves and a workshop for cleaning and repairing museum pieces.”

“Any security devices?”

“No, it doesn’t need it. There’s no outside access to the basement. The only way you can get down there is from the stairway and elevator on the main floor.”

“What’s the security for the elevator?” Gwyn asked.

“There are two. The one that serves the public goes from the main floor to the second floor. It has a security camera and attic access only with a card key. The elevator shaft also has a security camera and a motion detector that’s turned on in the evening after the museum closes.”

“The other elevator? Down to the basement?” Coby asked.

“Only goes between the first floor and the basement. There’s no public access to it.”

“And no security,” Gwyn said.

“No. Like I said, there’s no outside basement access. And there’s nothing of value down there unless someone working on a piece has left it down there overnight. It’s the safest part of the museum.”

“Not if you’re a mole,” Coby said.

It took me a second to remember what a mole was: a little creature that burrowed in gardens. “I’m afraid your hairy little friends don’t have teeth or claws sharp enough to go through concrete walls that are a foot thick.”

“I wasn’t talking about that kind of mole but the mechanical ones that dig tunnels.”

I got his drift. “You’re thinking about coming in through the basement?”

“The thought has occurred to us.”

I shook my head in wonder. These people were amazing. And tech crazy. “I don’t know what good it would do. Or how you would manage it. But even if you did, the Semiramis is on the first floor.”

Gwyn said, “The basement elevator shaft isn’t secured. That makes it a no-brainer to get to the first floor without detection. Then all we have to worry about is getting from the elevator to the Semiramis display.”

“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.”