Chapter 4 #2
Floating concrete treads, no riser, no railing. The kind of staircase that exists to prove that the person who walks on it isn't afraid of falling.
I take the stairs. Each step feels like a held breath.
The upper floor is a single corridor with three doors. Two are open---a bathroom, a room that appears to be a study. The third is closed. The handle is brushed steel. Below it, set flush into the door frame, is a card reader. A small rectangle of black glass with a single red LED.
The keycard I failed to steal.
I kneel in front of the reader and pull the flat pry bar from my waistband.
I'm not going to hack it. I'm going to bypass it.
Card readers in residential installations are almost always wired independently of the main security system, because no homeowner wants to be locked out of his own office by a system failure.
The power runs through a low-voltage line that connects the reader to a magnetic lock in the door frame.
If I can interrupt the power, the magnet releases.
I wedge the pry bar between the frame and the wall, feeling for the cable channel. The wood gives slightly. I push harder. My fingers find a rubber-coated wire, thin, running vertically behind the frame.
I pull the electrical tape from my bag. I wrap the pry bar's tip to insulate it, then use it to lever the wire away from its contact point.
A soft click. The red LED dies.
The door drifts open on its own weight. Silent. Magnetic lock disengaged.
I stand up. My heart is slamming. My mouth is dry.
I push the door wide and step through.
It is not an office.
The red light from my torch hits the first painting and I stop breathing.
It is a gallery. A private gallery. The room is long and narrow, the proportions of a chapel, with a ceiling high enough to disappear into shadow.
The walls are hung with paintings spaced at intervals that any museum curator would recognise---generous, deliberate, each work given enough empty space to command its own weight.
The lighting is recessed. As I step forward, motion sensors trigger a low, warm glow---gallery lighting, designed by people who understand that the correct illumination of a painting is an act of devotion. The room comes alive in slow increments, and each increment is a revelation.
A Richter. Abstraktes Bild, the red and blue series. I recognise it from a catalogue I memorised when I was seventeen, lying on my stomach in the Kavanagh kitchen while Killian cleaned a gun at the table and told me to do something useful.
Beside it, a Basquiat. Skull. The real one, not the prints that hang in restaurants where people who own Teslas eat sushi.
A Francis Bacon triptych. Small. Intimate. Figures that writhe against a flat orange ground, their faces smeared into screams that the paint has frozen mid-sound.
I walk the length of the gallery with my mouth open like a child in a cathedral.
Each painting is a name I know, a history I've studied, a technique I've spent hundreds of hours trying to replicate in a squat in Shoreditch with cheap brushes and stolen pigments.
These are originals. Every single one. The brushstrokes have the weight and texture of first intention, the specific density of paint applied once and never corrected. No forger's caution. No dead strokes.
The collection is worth hundreds of millions. None of it is on any registry. None of it has been exhibited. These paintings have been removed from the world and placed here, in a room that one man enters alone, for no audience but himself.
He doesn't own art. He hoards it. He has built a private reliquary for beauty, and the door has a lock because beauty, for him, is something that must be controlled.
I hate him for it. The feeling is immediate, chemical, a heat in my chest that has nothing to do with the climb or the rain or the adrenaline.
And then I reach the end of the gallery.
And the painting on the far wall stops me cold.
It is a Rothko.
No. 14, 1960.
The real one.
Crimson dissolving into bruised amber. The colour field is alive in a way that my forgery will never be---the pigments glow from within, layered and luminous, the reds shifting in the gallery light like something breathing. The edges blur into the canvas in gradients so fine they look like smoke.
The signature in the lower right corner is tired and heavy, the R collapsing in on itself. I know this signature because I spent twenty minutes trying to replicate it in my studio, and I got it perfect, and it was still dead.
This is the painting I forged.
The painting the collector in Monaco is paying fifty thousand for. The painting I based on auction records and high-resolution scans and a catalogue raisonné I stole from a university library. I thought the original was in a climate-controlled vault, owned by an estate, untouchable.
It's here. In this room. In his room.
Kazimir Volkov owns the Rothko I copied.
And he acquired it through a collector in Monaco who didn't appreciate what he had. The transaction makes sickening sense the moment I think of it. Someone off the radar. Someone who never showed a face.
The coincidence hits my system like a physical blow.
Except it isn't a coincidence. I forged a painting by a man who turns out to be the exact target of the mission Killian sent me on.
The collector in Monaco---who arranged the purchase through intermediaries, who never spoke on the phone---could easily be a front.
A test. A thread in a web I didn't know I was tangled in.
Kazimir set up the Monaco job. He hired me to forge his own painting to test my skills before I ever walked into his gallery.
I stare at the Rothko. The real Rothko stares back. The crimson breathes.
Behind me, the door clicks shut.
The sound is small. Precise. The soft engagement of a magnetic lock re-seating itself, which is impossible because I severed the power line. Which means someone re-engaged it from a secondary circuit. Which means---
I spin.
The door is closed. The LED on the reader has changed. It is green now, pulsing with a slow, steady rhythm, and it is on the wrong side of the door.
Locked. From the outside.
The gallery lights hold their warm, devoted glow. The paintings hang in their generous silence. The Rothko bleeds crimson behind me.
And somewhere in the dark penthouse beyond the door, I hear the sound of a man settling into a chair.