The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (20 page)

Chapter Eighteen

No question about it, Christina was caught in a twisted repeat of one of her stepdad’s classic Frank Sinatra heist movies. Riding shotgun with Stig driving, Luc, Thomas and a miniature dachshund in the back, the setup even sounded like a Hollywood farce. Worse if she let the phrase
Luc and Locke
slip into her head.

This morning she’d walked into the kitchen and faced three men wired on coffee, brandy, suitcases—
plural
—full of cash and plans to pretend to rob a museum. One night’s sleep, then caffeine, was all she’d wanted, but when she’d interrupted Stig’s argument with Luc, she should have realized nothing that involved Stig, Luc and the man who’d driven them home last night was going to be simple.

“I’ve waited ninety-four years to rob the Germans on their own turf instead of mine!”

“As I said, we’re not actually stealing anything,” Stig had almost shouted at Luc. “The heist is a ruse, a red herring, a play within a play. The relic isn’t there and hasn’t been for a century.”

“Don’t see why we can’t take a little souvenir while we’re inside.”

“You’re not going inside, mate. And we don’t want the Germans after us. We just intend to misdirect whoever might be watching.”

That had sobered the men at the table. “Who exactly is that?” Thomas had asked.

“Germans.” Luc had swigged out of a mug that smelled suspiciously like it was brandy with coffee, not the other way.

“Not Germans. Men like me, perhaps.” Stig’s comment had made Luc cough, Thomas frown and her mind immediately flash to Wend and Skafe.

Now as they drove, large drops of rain spattered on the car windshield, followed by an immediate sheet of water that almost obscured a sign for Aachen in one hundred kilometers.

This morning she’d been confused about why they would rob the Charlemagne treasury if the item Ivar wanted wasn’t in it.

Stig had explained while he’d made her French toast from a leftover baguette. “The real relic is hidden where I’d rather not have any of Ivar’s enemies, or his friends for that matter, find it. I don’t want any chance that a disaster like what happened to the museum in Denmark will happen there.” He’d clamped up after that, and loosening his mouth took a long story from Luc with a punch line about a flatulent goat and a milkmaid.

Three hours after that conversation, they’d double-checked their supplies in the trunk of Thomas’s car, counted noses—four dry, one wet—and rolled away. Tomorrow they’d do the job, Noah-like deluge or not.

“Before we go over the plan one more time,” Stig said, “you never did say what you intend to do with your money.”

She might as well tell them. “I want to buy a vineyard of my own. I studied viticulture and enology, and I want to use that to create my own wines. I want to build a winery that celebrates the people who contribute to the wine, the field workers and the pickers, all the people forgotten by the celebrity wine culture.”

“The due-to-be-deceased Geoffrey Morrison might want to invest in such a noble endeavor.”

“See why I didn’t tell you? I knew you’d tease me.”

“I wasn’t. But there won’t be any money at all if we fail tomorrow, so walk me through the plan.”

In the alternate world she’d inhabited since she stepped into Bodeby’s, describing the pseudo-heist seemed natural, even logical. “The treasury opens at ten. Thomas goes first and deposits the bag holding the decoy bone at the coat check, and leaves the ticket in the last toilet stall. You and I go in separately after ten. I go straight to the exhibit, you collect Thomas’s claim check, and then head to the room with the golden arm.”

“Perfect so far,” Stig said.

“How will I know which one it is?” Christina asked. Luc didn’t have an internet connection, so they hadn’t been able to find museum details this morning.

“The golden hand and forearm is half your size. You can’t miss it. When there are at least three other people in the room, create a diversion at the far end from where I’m positioned. Something loud and exciting, but not criminal. Maybe trip over a display.”

“Flash ‘em,” Luc offered. “Like it’s a beach.”

She looked at the old man in the back seat with her eyebrows raised. “My chest wouldn’t cause much of a riot.”

Stig coughed. “I beg to differ.”

“This is why great plans fall apart,” Christina chided. “Men get sidetracked by breasts.”

“Never.” Stig glanced over at her, grinning. “That would mean we’d been thinking about something besides thrupenny bits in the first place.”

The car interior was too warm. At least that was what she told herself to explain how hot her cheeks felt.

Attention back on the highway, Stig continued. “While people are looking at Christina, I’ll place the tubes of flash paper we made this morning with the delayed matches, then stick a screwdriver in a socket. It should blow the lights, although there will be emergency ones at the exits. Start counting. The first flame should pop on the five-count. It’ll appear to be coming out of the wall.” He glanced at her, as if checking that she was paying attention.

They’d been over the plan several times, had even done a walk-through at Luc’s before they loaded the car. She knew her role and let her expression tell him so. Creating a slight diversion and then yelling
fire
hardly sounded worthy of an action movie. Stig had the challenging part with the flash paper.

“Should I stumble into the case?” she asked.

“No, you lead the charge out. Go to the car while I retrieve the bag with the decoy from the check and go around the block the other way.”

Four people kept the vehicle cozy, so Christina lowered the setting for her heated seat. “This is the best car yet on this trip. Has Stig told either of you about our previous three?”

“Helped him put the dented one in the quarry,” Luc said.

“Too bad, I had wonderful memories of that car.” Stig’s comment gave a shiver to her spine, remembering the wild sex on the hood.

“Then there was the one we stole from the insurance investigators.” She rushed into speech to try to control the heat filling her cheeks. The last three days had turned her into a different woman, not the buttoned-down businesswoman who’d spent her nights with double-entry accounting and spreadsheets. “And another car we left on the tunnel train. That’s the one we had to run off the road.”

“Don’t forget Skafe’s car, the one that was booted by the bobbies in London,” Stig said.

“Hope your run of bad luck has ended,” Thomas said from the back seat. “I like my car.”

“I consider it an extended streak of good luck,” Stig replied. “Got away each time.”

“You would.” Luc coughed into a red handkerchief. “Remember when the case of Panzer shells we stole popped off early? That was bad luck.” He shook the red fabric like a flag, and she was unsure if the vibrations were his method of emphasis or tremors in his knobby-knuckled hands. “Swear the cart and horse covered a hectare, but you, you strolled out of the forest without a scratch. After that we called you Monsieur Truc de Merde because you should be all bits and pieces of crap, but no.”

“Monsieur Truc de Merde?” She choked on a combination of amazement at the complexity of Luc and Stig’s fantasy life and disbelief that she was having this absurd conversation in this car with this group of reprobates and geezers. “Where have I heard that before? Maybe you ought to forge a passport for Monsieur Merde.”

Distance flew by as the warmth and the storm and the soft leather seat lulled her eyelids to close. She woke in the middle of a three-way discussion of European economic reforms from Luc’s unique perspective. “Eh, Germans conquered Europe with loans this time. Got the Portuguese, Spaniards and Greeks, didn’t they? But not us.” He pounded his fist into his chest. “Belgian government’s got too big a boot in its ass to sign a loan, so they won’t get us this time.”

“If you wish to change the subject away from twentieth-century geopolitical animosity, you can always ask about his daughter-in-law,” Thomas offered. “Or football, if you have armored protection.”

She closed her eyes and let the voices wash over her. Sort of like listening to Big Frank and his friends when they’d played cards downstairs and she’d sat at the top of the steps to pretend she was a grownup. Her mother had spoken English well but not well enough to follow all of the fast back-and-forth talk around the poker table, so she’d cuddled with Christina and asked for words here and there. And if Frank was winning.

“My son’s wife—
mon dieu
, sixty-seven herself but treats me like I’m three, not like I’m her father-in-law. Won’t buy me cigarettes anymore.”

“She’s right. They’ll kill you.” That was Stig, setting Luc up for a rant.

“I’ll be cursed to live to see another World Cup tournament at least.” The old man made a raspberry noise, or maybe it was Porkchop.

“Belgium needs a striker to be competitive next round, true.” The reasonable voice belonged to Thomas. They were playing Luc like a piano.

“What I always say. If we ever want to beat the Germans, we need a striker.”

Just like Big Frank and his friends.

* * *

So far, so good. Ten thirty-five, and the coat check ticket was tucked in Stig’s pocket. Christina was across the room reading the English-language tourist brochure, no different in her new raincoat than any other sightseer. Last night he’d worried that the storm would translate to no visitors, making their diversion harder, but this morning the rain had lessened enough that a good dozen other people had braved the elements to see Aachen’s religious treasures.

Neither gold nor jewels distracted him. All he wanted was a big splash in the same room as Charlemagne’s arm reliquary, big enough to be reported in the media, hopefully exaggerated by eyewitnesses.

Christina held the brochure in front of her face, reading while she wove a path between the cases, seemingly as oblivious as a person crossing a street while texting. Good. She bumped into a college-age man who was also reading a brochure and snapped at him loudly. He apologized.

She wouldn’t have any of it. “Hey! You tried to grab my purse!” She vibrated with outrage, one hand holding her bag across her body and the other shaking the tourist pamphlet at his chest.

A young family nearby edged away, and an older woman stared, lips in a tight line.

“Please, I don’t understand—” the man began.

Stig crouched and pulled three different length matches out of his sock while pretending to tie his shoe.

“You think tourists are easy marks, don’t you?” Christina yelled in the poor bloke’s face, following as he backed away.

None of the people in the room were watching him as Stig spaced three rolls of flash paper, each with a different length wooden matchstick wedged into a slot, along the baseboard. Using sandpaper taped to the sole of his shoe, he struck a fourth match. The cheery flame ignited each phosphorous tip.

He dropped Luc’s small screwdriver out of his sleeve and, at the moment he started counting
one,
jammed the tool into the electric socket. The jolt shocked the air out of his lungs harder than a horse’s kick in his chest, but it did the trick. The lights flickered off at the same time Christina yelled, “Hey!”

He skipped to three because he suspected he’d lost a second recovering from the zap to his heart. He stood.

On four, the alarm sounded. People’s calm murmurs about the dark became elevated voices of concern.

Five. He was already three paces from the socket.

There was a single bright flash, nothing else, and Christina screamed
fire.

“Where? Where?” No one smelled smoke, of course. Flash paper was quite safe, despite its theatrics.

“Over there! Fire!” The second flame popped as Christina pointed toward the vitrine nearest where he’d stood a moment ago. The effect had the instant dazzle of a magician’s trick, because that was all flash paper was. More people repeated her call of fire. They pointed in several directions but scurried in one: the exit.

He headed deliberately across the room on a tangent that would intersect the arm reliquary case.

The third flash started them running like a herd of loud, afraid bovines.

He ran too, calling in French, “We have to get out! It’s a fire!”

The giant golden arm faced him, the giant hand raised like a crossing guard signaling him to halt, but he disobeyed and ran straight into the case. The box was built to be immovable. It shuddered from the weight of an adult male but stayed upright. The contact alarms were on a separate power circuit, exactly as he’d hoped. Their shrieks added to the chaos.

Goals achieved, he followed the guard’s orders and left the room behind Christina and the other visitors. With no smoke and no further signs of fire, the guards were trying to settle the crowd and announce the building’s closure. Most visitors queued in an orderly fashion at the coat room. Only the young man who Christina had yelled at stood off warily.

Five people in front of Stig, Christina gathered her coat and umbrella. She cleared the door and left without being stopped or questioned.

He exchanged his claim ticket for the shopping bag Locke had checked earlier, knowing that any watchers would have seen him enter the museum empty-handed and leave with a wrapped item sticking out of a canvas tote. On a rainy March day, people could have been forgiven for wondering why a man left a brolly in paper instead of using it. They would have wondered more if they’d known the cylindrical parcel was a beef femur, boiled at Luc’s, then dyed with tea and turmeric to give it an aged yellow-brown patina.

Two red fire trucks pulled to a stop on Johannes-Paul-II Strasse as he emerged from the gothically pointed arch of the Cathedral Treasury.

Christina and her pink-and-black polka-dotted brolly had crossed the street and hustled left toward Locke’s parked car.

He turned right without crossing, planning to meet the others in the car on the far side of the historic Rathaus.

A large black sedan drove slowly toward him. The speed would have been appropriate for looking at the firefighters in their black-and-yellow
feuerwehr
jackets, but not for a driver focused on the empty road. Stig felt the neck prickle that all good thieves know, the one that said time to go, even if no one was home and the alarm seemed to be off.