Chapter 18 #3
“God help you,” Liam said. “Ping us if anything springs up.”
“Will do. But hey, since you’re closer to town, could you do me a favor? Could you look up Tor’s comm and see how he’s doing? Everybody wants to know how the painting caper’s going, and he’s the last piece of the puzzle.”
“Will do. Let me ping him. Will get back to you.”
“Fair. Out.”
TOR WAS not happy with being left behind. But he was okay, and as he told Liam, the caper had gone like a dream.
“I recorded the bit,” Tor said. “Marco came out of the kitchen to hold the camera—he’s very proud.
They discovered the switch, and Marco made a fuss about the closet being opened.
It was brilliant.” Tor dropped his voice.
“I did spot a jeweled egg in there. I pocketed it in case there was a reason we took it. Do you know anything about that?”
Hunter, who had been listening with Liam, scowled. “I know my kleptomaniac boyfriend had a moment of nerves,” he said into the shared mic, and Tor made a wheezing sound in his throat.
“You mean… you mean I helped with an actual art theft?”
Tor had always been their front man—reporting the good they’d done and leaving their methods to them.
“You okay there, boy?” Liam asked kindly. Well, he’d learned long ago that sometimes a thief’s measure was greater than the sum of a man’s conscience.
“No,” Tor said. “I mean… yes! I’m a thief too!”
Liam and Hunter both chuckled, and for a moment, Liam felt a burst of hope, but it was Hunter who came up with the big idea.
“Hey, since you’re, you know, resting on your laurels and all,” Hunter said, “we’re currently heading up into the Greater Bohemian Mountains. We think Kadjic’s place is there, now that we know a general direction. Do you think you could….”
“Make computer magic,” Liam said. “Stirling seemed to think I’d do what he did on comms, but with him and Josh out of action, we need a real hacker.”
“It is a perk of the job,” Tor conceded smoothly. Then in complete seriousness, “I’ll try to have you plans and a deed of some sort in the next half hour.”
Liam grunted. “You are a miracle worker,” he said frankly, and then, in case Chuck drove them off a cliff between now and then, “I’m sending you my lieutenant’s email—and my clearance code.
Once you have the details, please send them to him.
Tell them I told you he’d want the information.
” He paused. “Is that okay with everybody?”
“God yes,” Chuck said from the front.
“Wasn’t that our endgame?” Michael asked.
Hunter sighed. “If you insist.”
“I don’t,” Liam told him sincerely. “You lot have done a lot of good in the last two months. There’s no shame in wanting to finish this.”
“Well, how soon will your goons, I mean guys, get there?” Hunter asked. “Because, you know, if things come up….”
“The nearest office is in Prague,” Liam said frankly. “But they’ve got helicopters.”
“Maybe give us a margin, Tor?” Hunter said. “We want to get our boys out of there without entanglements, right?”
“I hear you,” Tor said seriously. “Let me get your destination, and I’ll tip them off after you get there.”
That decided, they signed off, and after a question to see if Chuck was okay—and some fumbling of ibuprofen so he would be—they settled into watching the mountain road unwind.
“JOSH,” GRACE whispered. “Man, you’ve got to wake up. We’re here.”
Josh groaned and shivered and then stretched, part of him registering that he was much warmer than he had been, and another part gratefully acknowledging that the movement had stopped.
“Where are they?” he mumbled.
“Kadjic hauled Danny into the house. The driver just closed down the garage. We’re clear.”
“Good,” Josh said. “You’re going to need to haul me out of here and let me get my legs under me.”
His blood had started to move sluggishly through his veins again, and while still exhausted, he could feel his adrenaline, finally, propelling him forward. Kadjic had Danny. They needed to find him. It was really that simple.
It took some doing—and they weren’t as quiet as they should have been—but Grace finally had him out of the trunk, his limbs stinging enough to steal his breath.
“What now?” Grace asked, shivering. The garage was warmer than outside, but not by much.
“Stirling?” Josh muttered, tapping his comm. “Stirling, did we lose you?”
Stirling’s reply was broken but still reassuring. “Ten min… here… out… getting… wait for us….”
“Finding Danny,” Josh replied tersely, not sure Stirling could hear him any better than he’d heard Stirling. “Find us.”
And then he tapped the comm again and signed off so the static didn’t kill him.
Determinedly he took a few steps forward, relieved when he didn’t stumble. In a moment Grace’s hand was under his elbow, steadying him as they neared the steps from the garage to what was probably the first floor.
As they walked up the steps—lushly carpeted—Josh tried to put a finger on where they were.
“Cold,” he said. “Damp. And what is that sound?”
“Rain?” Grace asked, puzzled.
“Too high up for rain,” Josh said. “But it’s water.”
“Fountain?” Grace said, and Josh considered one of those indoor water sculptures and just as quickly rejected it.
“He’s not here that often,” he said. “Those mold and rust. And if he’s got art here, it would damage the art.”
As they moved up the stairs, one painstaking step at a time, Josh said, “And it’s getting drier. He’s got humidity control up here, but still—what do you think?”
“Waterfall,” Grace said promptly. “Like Batman. It’s the Batcave, but this is the bad guy.”
Josh grunted. “I want to tell you that’s stupid,” he muttered, “but we’re up here in the hills of Bohemia—”
“That is a made-up word,” Grace told him indignantly. “Like buzzenteen.”
“Swear to Gru it’s not,” Josh told him. “It was a place. It got conquered and then disappeared, but there’s still the Greater Bohemian Mountains. And I think we’re there.”
“How can you know more passed out than I can know awake?” Grace asked grumpily. “And you’re the one who’s stupid, Mr. Can’t Walk in Bohemia.”
“I haven’t been able to steal anything,” Josh told him. “I’ve had to study maps. It’s really frickin’ boring unless you’re grabbing weird shit from museums, so I hope I get better soon.”
“You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” Grace whispered, his whisper indicating that they’d reached the landing and had to watch for people now.
The water sound was louder here—and in the distance, closer to the water, farther from the stairs from the garage—they could hear voices raised in anger, one of them Danny’s.
“Follow that argument,” Josh mouthed, and Grace nodded.
The floor under their delicate rubber-soled jazz slippers was a rich, burnished hardwood, with silk-and-wool runners that were probably worth as much as the carpet Josh had almost bled on in Stuttgart.
Reds, blacks, purples, the walls were painted in the same sumptuous, baroque colors, but that wasn’t what caught Josh’s attention.
“Oh my God,” he whispered, rounding a corner and coming face-to-face with half a wall holding Rembrandt’s missing painting Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee.
“Isn’t that…?” Grace asked, sounding stunned.
Famous? Yes. Stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston in one of the most famous art heists in history? Hell yes. Thought to be missing forever? Oh my fucking God!
“Holy shit,” Josh whispered.
And there was a series of Monets that had thought to have been lost during the bombing at Giverny.
And there, in a glass case, was….
“Is that from that big jewel heist at the Louvre?” Grace asked, staring at the circlet of emeralds framed in diamonds, with a tiara to match.
“And that is the third David,” Josh said blankly, gazing at the case next to it, where a twelve-inch bronze casting of Michelangelo’s David stood. There were two accounted for, and the third one was thought to be a myth.
“It exists,” Grace said, sounding equally as blank. “Holy fuckballs. This place is the holy grail of thieves.”
They kept going, keeping silent now, their footfalls almost inaudible under the sound of the waterfall that must surely be outside, or overhead, or sliding them down the goddamned mountain.
Then they rounded a corner and, like sunrise over a valley at their feet, the house—which had seemed to be close and labyrinthine thanks to the baroque walls, mahogany flooring, and jewel-toned rugs—blossomed into a spectacle of lights.
The sitting room, because that’s what it must have been, was spacious, and it opened out into a view unparalleled by any Josh had ever seen.
Lit by spotlights, a giant window that must have been made of pressurized glass overlooked a veil of water, the falls that had permeated the house with sound.
They weren’t crashing on the house, but rather, the house was recessed in the rocks underneath.
The garage entry was behind the mountain, and then the house itself burrowed through, coming out here.
It was glorious, but Josh, who had never experienced a moment of vertigo in his life, wanted to cling to something with fear that the whole thing would hammer down on his head and they’d go sliding down the mountain at any time.
There were five people in the room: the chauffeur, the muscle, and a man who must have been the butler.
Those three were obviously trying to make themselves invisible.
They stood in various positions, subservient and expressionless, ranged around the other two people, who were obviously the stars of the show.
Danny was leaning insouciantly against that spectacular bay window overlooking the waterfall. The window was up on a rise of about six inches, surrounded by a platform, the better to give the people sitting on the chairs and couches ranged around the room a chance to appreciate the view.
Kadjic was pacing this platform, swearing at Danny, raging at him, trying to wipe that all-knowing, unpleasant smirk off his face.