Chapter 2
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Still dressed in black tactical gear, Flint moved through the gallery while Gaspar’s looping video concealed him from guards monitoring the camera views. Laughter, music, and anniversary dinner sounds faded behind him as he moved deeper into the bunker.
He passed the dark library and a darker conference room. Without artificial light, the entire bunker existed in complete underground darkness.
Night vision alone was useless here. Night vision amplified light. It didn’t create light where none existed. But Flint’s fusion device could overlay thermal imaging onto the night vision picture. He flipped the switch and quickly scanned both rooms from the open doorway.
Next, a lounge where a single lamp glowed over leather furniture and a half-finished glass of red wine sat on a side table. The lamp and unfinished drink suggested someone could have been here recently.
“See anyone wandering around in there?” he murmured into his comms.
“Not on the camera angles I can access,” Gaspar replied.
Flint stepped inside for a quick sweep of the room behind the bar and around the chairs. No one was here now. But whoever left that glass had left the party at some point.
He flipped the device off to avoid the blinding amplification of the bunker’s recessed lighting and moved on, faster now.
The gallery stretched another sixty feet.
Hardwood floors gleamed under the recessed lights.
Warm pools of amber lit the artwork at regular intervals, and between them the gallery dimmed to a soft twilight.
The doors to Kessler’s private rooms sat in those darker stretches, designed to blend into the walls.
He passed the midpoint of the gallery, where a wide staircase descended to the lower level. The pool, the gym, and the mechanical systems that kept the bunker alive were all down there.
Flint glanced down the stairs. The wine drinking lounge lizard, whoever he was, hadn’t made it this far afield. Maybe he’d returned to the party.
One more door on his left. The dining room where the party was in full swing. He could make out individual voices, the scrape of chairs on the floor, a cork being pulled from a bottle. Twenty guests enjoying Kessler’s hospitality ten feet from where Flint was standing.
Beyond the dining room, a short corridor branched off the main gallery and led to the west wing. Kessler’s private territory. The corridor was about six feet wide. Same hardwood floors and smooth plaster walls painted a warm ivory.
Two doors at the far end. On the left, the master suite. On the right, Kessler’s study.
The study door was closed. Flint tried the handle. Surprisingly, it was unlocked. He eased the door open, stepped inside, and closed it softly behind him.
The study was thirty-by-twenty feet, at least. Bookshelves lined three walls from the floor to the sixteen-foot ceiling, requiring a rolling brass ladder to reach the upper shelves.
Behind one glass panel, Flint spotted a large folio he recognized immediately. A Shakespeare First Folio, published in 1623. Fewer than 235 copies were in existence.
Flint had recovered one three years ago from a collector in S?o Paulo who had bought it from the thieves who stole it from a British university. That one was worth eight million dollars. The last one sold at auction fetched nearly ten.
Kessler had his shelved behind glass. Not the most valuable object on display. Not even close.
A massive desk faced the door, its surface bare. The leather chair behind it had molded itself to one man’s body over years of use. The bookshelves, the First Folio, the display case glowing in the center of the room. This was where Werner Kessler came to enjoy his treasures.
Between the desk and the bookshelves, a display case stood on a polished stone pedestal. Frameless glass on all four sides so clear it almost vanished. Lit from above by a single focused beam. The case looked simple. A glass box on a pedestal with a single object inside.
Exactly where Flint had expected to find it.
But cases like this were custom built for museums. Simple on the outside. Fortress on the inside.
The glass was laminated security glass, thick enough to stop a hammer.
The climate control was hidden in the pedestal base, holding temperature and humidity at precise levels indefinitely.
The biometric reader was set into the top of the pedestal, keyed to the vein pattern on the back of Kessler’s hand.
Flint crossed the room for a closer look. Until now, he’d seen it only in photographs. He’d dispassionately memorized every detail. But images couldn’t capture what forty-four years of detail work by the greatest watchmaker who ever lived looked like under glass, three feet from his face.
The pocket watch was larger than a silver dollar, with an open face that revealed the most complex mechanism the Breguet workshop had ever produced.
Pink gold plates and bridges, polished to a mirror finish.
Blued steel screws. Sapphire bearings that caught the light and threw tiny points of blue fire across the velvet.
Eight hundred and twenty-three components, assembled by hand over more than four decades.
Abraham-Louis Breguet had begun building his famous Marie Antoinette watch in 1783, commissioned for the doomed Queen of France. He died before it was finished. His son completed it four years later, forty-four years after the work began.
The entire world knew the Breguet No. 160. The watch was displayed in a museum in Jerusalem at this very moment.
What the world did not know was that Breguet had begun a second watch at the same time as the first. A private commission, kept out of the company’s official archives. His son completed that one too, for a client whose family had guarded it forever.
Serious collectors had debated the existence of a second No. 160 for generations. The owner’s family had never confirmed nor denied the rumors.
Until it was stolen from the man who had trusted another with the secret.
Flint’s client was the direct descendant of the original owner.
Old European money. Old European title. A family that had guarded secrets for generations and intended to guard this one.
Going to the police meant proving the watch existed, which meant exposing their secret to the world.
Followed by lawyers and journalists and auction houses. Unacceptable.
So the client had found Flint. Paid the fee without hesitation. And asked for one thing above all else. Discretion.
Flint was happy to oblige. “I’m at the case.”
“Party’s still going,” Gaspar replied. “Guard’s in the kitchen helping the staff. You’ve got time.”
Flint reached into his pack and removed a thin silicone prosthetic.
It was flesh-colored, almost transparent, designed to fit over the back of his right hand like a second skin.
Embedded in the silicone was a precise map of Werner Kessler’s dorsal vein pattern, reproduced from infrared photographs Flint had taken himself, ten days ago, in the private gaming salon at the Casino de Monte-Carlo.
Flint had spent two days getting himself invited to the right table. Kessler played baccarat on Thursday evenings, always in the Salle Privée, always for high stakes. Flint bought his way in with a wire transfer that made the casino’s membership office very accommodating.
He sat across from Kessler for three hours.
They barely spoke. Kessler was focused on his cards, his hands flat on the green baize between deals, the backs of his fingers and knuckles catching the warm light of the chandeliers overhead.
Flint played conservatively and lost a carefully calculated amount.
The modified camera was built into the face of his wristwatch.
Invisible infrared LEDs illuminated the vein patterns beneath Kessler’s skin while the lens captured image after image from eighteen inches away.
Kessler never looked at him twice. Just another wealthy man losing money at baccarat. Exactly what Flint wanted him to think.
Flint had the prosthetic made from the best of the six hundred images he brought home from Monte Carlo. The vein map was accurate to a fraction of a millimeter.
He pressed his prosthetic-covered hand against the biometric reader on the display case pedestal. The reader scanned the vein pattern through the silicone.
A green light. A soft click. The lock released.
The glass vitrine lifted on silent hydraulic hinges, rising six inches above the pedestal base. Enough room for Flint to reach inside.
He slid his hand through the gap and lifted the watch from its velvet bed.
The watch settled into his palm. Heavier than he expected. He could feel a faint vibration through the gold case. The movement was running. Still keeping time.
He allowed himself one moment. He held the watch close and studied the open face.
The perpetual calendar. The equation of time display.
The power reserve indicator. The minute repeater’s hammers poised above their gongs like a pianist’s fingers hovering over the keys.
Every surface was finished to a standard that modern machines could only approximate.
The moment passed. Flint wrapped the watch in a soft cloth, placed it in a padded case, and secured the case in the pack he’d commissioned to hold it.
“Mission accomplished.”
“Not quite. Get moving,” Gaspar replied.
“Copy that.” Flint opened the study door and checked the short corridor. Clear in both directions. He stepped out and turned east toward the service corridor.
Laughter, music, and the murmur of conversation carried through from the dining room. His boots were silent along the hardwood all the way to the service corridor door.
Soon, he’d reach the tunnel. Then the hillside. Then he’d be gone.
He was halfway there when a man stepped out of the lounge.
Perhaps the man with the red wine.
He carried a tumbler of something amber now and he wore a silk robe and leather slippers. He must have come from the guest apartments on the east end of the gallery. He had tilted his head to study one of the paintings on the wall as he sipped slowly from his glass.
Flint stopped.
The man turned.
They were twenty feet apart. The man froze. His glass stopped halfway to his lips. His eyes went wide.
Flint held perfectly still. Black tactical gear. Pack on his belt. Standing in one of the dim stretches between the spotlights. There was no way to explain his presence. He looked exactly like what he was.
The man’s face was fully illuminated by the spotlight above the painting he had been admiring. Flint recognized him instantly.
So would anyone on earth who had watched the news two years ago. That face had been everywhere. Front page of every newspaper. Lead story on every broadcast. For weeks.
Prince Maximilian of Hohenberg. Third in line to one of Europe’s oldest surviving royal dynasties.
Disgraced by allegations involving young women and financial crimes that would have sent anyone without a title to prison for decades.
His death in a skiing accident in the Swiss Alps had been mourned publicly by heads of state and celebrated privately by the family that had spent a fortune trying to contain the scandal.
The prince was alive. Living in a bunker in the Czech Republic. Drinking whiskey in a silk robe and leather slippers, looking healthy and rested and thoroughly content with his new life as a dead man.
The two men stared at each other across the gallery. The distant sound of the anniversary party filled the silence between them.
Then the prince raised his tumbler in a small, deliberate salute. He turned and walked back toward the guest apartments. His slippers shuffled softly as he rounded the corner and disappeared.
Briefly, Flint considered the situation. Then he shrugged.
A dead man understood one thing perfectly well. Drawing attention to a stranger meant drawing attention to himself. And attention was the one thing a dead man could never afford.
The prince was not Flint’s concern tonight.
He turned toward the service corridor door and headed toward the tunnel. He took only six steps before the lights came on.
Overhead fluorescents. Bright, flat, and white. The warm amber glow of the gallery vanished. Every shadow in the corridor disappeared. The artwork on the walls looked garish and overexposed under the harsh emergency lighting.
An alarm began to pulse. A deep, rhythmic tone that vibrated through the walls and the floor beneath his feet. The tone repeated every two seconds, steady and insistent, carrying through the bunker from every direction at once.
“What happened?” Flint said as he hustled toward the service corridor.
“The display case had a second alarm system,” Gaspar said. “Completely separate from the main security network. Battery powered. Standalone. It doesn’t communicate with anything until it’s triggered. Invisible until it goes off.”
“Are the guards coming?”
“Yep. Moving fast. Headed for the study.”
Flint ran.