The Painted Messiah (14 page)
To Cornelius he said, 'See to it that the
imago
standard is removed from Jerusalem with all haste, Centurion, and then show our visitors the road. If I must smell them for another morning, I will change my orders!'
With that said Pilate turned his horse and rode from the great stadium.
October 7, 2006.
A couple of days after the break-in Julian Corbeau had begun watching the surveillance tapes in earnest. At first he was barely conscious of what he witnessed. Jeffrey Bremmer guided him through it. He watched in amazement as the two figures crossed his lawn - a virtual impossibility with his security cameras, except that his guards had been distracted for the two seconds it had taken. Room by room the male swept his house. The female climbed his tower with a rope. He did not see her again until she stepped into the library - there was no technology in the tower - but once she entered the library, the microphone recorded her whispers. She was English. Bremmer's consultants suggested that she was possibly an expatriate, as the accent had faded and had influences of Italian and German pronunciation. Her accomplice was American, quite possibly from Tennessee or Kentucky, but he had lived in a German speaking country for a number of years. The one called Girl was the leader, but Boy knew what they were looking for. The print Oscar Wilde had brought on his visit in 1899 registered with them both as proof the painting was in Corbeau's possession - which was exceedingly strange.
Violence has the extraordinary quality of seeming quite ordinary on surveillance film. A man in a tuxedo enters a room. Shots are fired. A second passes. The man is dead. Slow motion makes no more sense of it. Three shots fired in less than half-a-second. Two people down. One stands up again. The other rests in the corner of the screen, his chest and neck torn apart by two forty-five caliber bullets. Watching the tapes again the following week, every investigation stalled, Corbeau finally saw something. More accurately he saw what one rarely witnesses: Girl's physical perfection.
Corbeau's man entered the room and shot her. This was the point of interest. As she fell, Girl's weapon, including a lengthy silencer, cleared its holster. Before she hit the floor she fired the gun. Watching Boy, because the camera caught only his figure as Girl dropped behind Corbeau's desk, Corbeau and Jeffrey Bremmer had originally believed their man had missed with his second shot. In fact, the woman's bullet had struck Corbeau's bodyguard as he was attempting to shoot Boy. One could not tell for sure from the sound or the blood. The weapons of the thieves were silenced and all three shots seemed to occur simultaneously, but the smoke from Girl's gun preceded his bodyguard's second shot by a fraction of a second, meaning the bullet had struck him as he was pulling the trigger. Running the tape several times, it was clear Girl had reacted instinctively. She had not even been able to aim. Corbeau had inspected the wound himself. The bullet she fired had struck his man's heart. 'Could you have done that?' he asked Bremmer. Corbeau's chief of security was in fact the only man in the world Corbeau considered his friend. He liked to joke with the uninitiated that he and Mr Bremmer had been though fire together. It was, of course, hardly a matter to joke about inside the Order.
Bremmer smiled at Corbeau's question. He had been hit wearing a vest that evening. The force of impact, he said, was overpowering. To be honest,' he said, 'I wouldn't have thought it possible - especially with such accuracy.'
'It was pure reflex, Mr Bremmer.'
'What are you saying? Special Forces? CIA? SAS?'
'One cannot train those kinds of reflexes. I think she's a professional athlete.'
Jeffrey Bremmer smiled. 'A British expatriate ... and a world class athlete. We might be able to do something with that.'
'I want a list: any public mention of a female athlete roughly fitting Girl's description within the past five - make it seven years. We start with the media in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. If that doesn't give us a pool of names we can do something with, we'll include Italy and England. After that we'll go to all Europe if we have to, but we don't stop until we find her.'
Bremmer looked at his employer incredulously. 'That could take a great deal of time.'
'No. I want it done quickly. I don't care how many people it takes or how much money, Mr Bremmer. Hire a thousand, hire ten thousand! Our lives depend on this - or have you forgotten?'
'I have not forgotten.'
Three days later Bremmer appeared in Corbeau's office with a list of three hundred names, but there were ten he liked better than the rest. Corbeau examined the top ten names and tapped Lady Kenyon's name at the very top of the list. 'I want a full dossier on her in forty eight hours.'
By the week's end Corbeau had his thieves: Lady Katherine Kenyon and Ethan Brand, the owner of a bookshop in Zürich. He knew that Kenyon's father, Roland Wheeler, fenced the art they stole and he knew the bank Wheeler liked to use for exchanges. Tracking Wheeler's phone calls and flights out of the country, he knew the identity of the people preparing to purchase his painting, as well as the fact that they had employed Thomas Malloy and Bob Whitefield to transport Corbeau's painting to the States in a diplomatic pouch.
A knock at his library door interrupted Corbeau's reveries.
He called out in French, 'Enter, please!'
Xeno stepped into the room. When in the presence of Corbeau for the first time Xeno had touched his knee to the floor and kissed the grandmaster's ring. Now they ran things without the formalities that had once characterized the Order. Times change, as Corbeau liked to remark, and a man did well to change with them. Still, he missed the show of reverence that had once been a constant part of his rule. These days he had only his title to mark him out from others, and despite his outward show of accepting the ways of modern life, it left a bit of emptiness in his ancient soul.
'Your Eminence! The American couriers have just finished their meeting. Our names came up.'
Corbeau, who had long ago mastered his emotions, expressed nothing beyond mild interest at this news by simply lifting his chin and cocking a single eyebrow. Xeno reported the meeting in its entirety. Whitefield knew about the break-in at Corbeau's villa. That was to be expected. Since Bremmer's trip to Hamburg, Whitefield had become more than a passing concern. He was in fact a danger. Corbeau's friendship with the Swiss was still intact, but the rumours bf his connection to alleged neo-Nazis had begun to erode his once-unanimous support. 'Forget what they know and what they think they know. Tuesday it is finished for them, and make sure you arrange matters so that there is no danger for the painting.'
'I will take care of it myself.'
'You are known, Xeno. You cannot go near Whitefield. Besides, I want you to lead the team taking Lady Kenyon.'
At Xeno's apparent disappointment, Corbeau added. 'Give her to me without a mark on her and I will add a million dollars to your personal bank account.' 'You are too generous, Your Eminence.' Corbeau smiled. 'You may want to survive Lady Kenyon before you speak of my generosity.'
Zürich
, Switzerland
October 7, 2006.
Kate entered Ethan's bookshop a couple of minutes before closing. Sean Burri, at the register, called out to her as he finished taking care of an elderly man's purchases. Coming to the railing, Ethan watched Kate from the second floor as she ascended the open stairway.
The original design of the 16th century building had placed the living quarters over a butcher shop. The third storey had been used for sleeping. Renovating it when he had bought the building seven years ago
through a dummy corporation Kate's father had helped him to establish, Ethan had ripped out the centre of the second floor and entirely abolished the attic except for the enormous oak beams that had served as floor joists. He had then installed skylights and a wrought iron railing around the opening on the second floor. The effect was to integrate the first and second floors and to bring natural light down to the ground floor, making it one of the most beautiful shops in a city of beautiful shops. The downside of the design was privacy. To compensate, Ethan had constructed a tiny office on the second floor. That was where they headed as soon as Kate joined him.
Behind closed doors, she said to him, 'Drs North and Starr are flying in tomorrow morning. They want to talk to you about the painting tomorrow evening, then go to the bank Monday and have a look at it.'
'Talk to
me
? That's Roland's job. Remember? We steal it, he sells it.'
'They aren't buying Roland's story. They know it's stolen. That's not the problem. Dr Starr wants the provenance.'
'We told him. It's a Templar artifact. What else does he need to know?'
'The evidence you used to connect it to the Templars, I take it. Tell them everything up to Corbeau. That part they don't get, even for twenty-five million.'
'You think they're getting cold feet?'
'I expect they just want to know everything we know. My read on Dr Starr is once he's sure what we have is genuine, he'd kill to have it.'
'He's not alone, is he?'
Kate's face went brittle. 'Let's not go there again.'
'People are dead because we wanted that painting, Kate.'
'Bad people.'
'I don't care what they were. They were alive up to the point that you and I decided we should appropriate Corbeau's painting.'
'This one was yours, Ethan. Remember?'
'I'm just saying we have enough now.'
'Enough?'
'I'm finished with jobs.'
'I knew this was coming. I read you, Ethan. I know how you think.'
Ethan didn't answer. He could see the effect of his decision in Kate's eyes. They were finished once the deal closed Tuesday.
'You can't change what you are, Ethan. You're a thief and a good one. Why don't you just accept it?'
'What I am is in love with you. Everything else I can change.'
'If you love me, you had better love what I do, because it doesn't work any other way.'
'When is it over for you?'
'Who says it has to be over?'
'You're not going to be happy until you get yourself killed.'
'Is that what you think I'm trying to do?'
'I want a normal life, Kate.'
'Then find a normal woman.'
'Come on! I didn't mean—'
'I'm serious. If that's what you want, find someone else.'
'Would you try it straight? We can travel, climb, ski, skydive, take Polar expeditions ... I don't care! Whatever you want to do. Wherever you want to go. Just no guns and no more break-ins. I still see that man in the library.'
'The one who shot me without a word of warning?'
'Yeah . . . that one.'
'And if I don't want to stop?'
There was challenge in her eyes, but he was ready, or as ready as one can get for something like that. 'Then maybe I need to think about things.'
'What does that mean?'
'We go straight ... or I leave.'
'You don't mean it.' Her smiled had lost its steadiness, but her eyes were still confident.
'If you don't think I mean it, you don't know me as well as you think you do.'
For a long, tense moment Kate stared at him. She was ready to say something that would not be easy to take back. Finally she settled herself. There was work left to do, and she still needed him, like it or not. That was how he read it, at any rate.
'I'll call you after the exchange and let you know what I decide. Meanwhile, don't forget. The Savoy Hotel, eight o'clock tomorrow evening, Dr North's suite.'
'Kate—' Ethan tried to take her hand.
Her hands shot up, palms out. She did not want to be touched. 'I'll think about it. Just don't push me.'
She left the door open on the way out.
Ethan watched her leave, knowing it might be the last time he ever saw her. The thought sickened him, but at least it was out. He had finally said what he needed to say. His share for the job, almost eight million dollars after expenses, was the leprechaun's pot-of-gold, the happily-ever-after of fairy tales, but it had come at a terrible cost. At thirty-one years of age Ethan should have known it would. Nothing is free, and no one knows this better than a thief. It had always been out there. They had practiced using weapons. They went in armed on every job, knowing it might be the only way out. Because it hadn't happened before, Ethan had convinced himself it was never going to happen. Kate planned things too well.
Or so he had wanted to believe. He could live with what he had done - they were bad people, no question about that - but he didn't like it, and he was not going to risk having to do it again. It was only fair that he tell Kate the truth. There were no tomorrows in Kate's world, no long-term commitments. He knew that going in. You took her for what she was. You didn't change her. You didn't delude yourself by imagining she would ever settle down and live a normal life. She came from wealth. She had a title. She had everything anyone dreams of, a world of privilege that most women could not even imagine, but the only satisfaction Kate had ever found was in risking it all. She was good. That wasn't the question. It was possible she would never be caught, but that wasn't really the point. The point was Ethan had lost his taste for it when he had seen the man in the library shot to death. He had once imagined he would do anything for Kate. Anything! But there was a limit after all.
