Checkmate in Amber (4 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

At the crack of dawn on Friday, September 25th, Cavalo boarded an Alitalia flight to Rome, had lunch with Donna at an elegant restaurant in the Piazza Farnese and then went straight back to Fiumicino airport - a carry tube slung over his shoulder containing a roll of assorted folios and some lithographed reproductions of Piranesi’s
Views of Rome
- to catch his return flight to Porto. He spent all day Saturday playing chess, a game he was just as devoted to as his father and grandfather had been. Very early on Sunday morning, he got behind the steering wheel, and set off to drive across the border with Spain at Fuentes de Oñoro and have lunch with me at the tavern in San Martos del Castañedo, in Salamanca province, roughly halfway between our two home towns.

Over the four long hours it took me to get there, I stayed glued to the radio news bulletins on the German general election which was taking place that day. I was really curious to see whether Kohl would be re-elected Chancellor or if the Social Democrat Schröder would manage to defeat him and form a coalition government with the Greens. ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ I thought to myself, ‘if Germany became the first major economic power to abandon nuclear energy?’ It would rock the nuclear power industry to its foundations and maybe help the world become a cleaner place. Would the German Greens have that much influence if Schröder won? I really hoped they would.

I parked my BMW in the town square and cut through a narrow alleyway which took me straight to the tavern. The old sixteenth-century building, its facade covered in scaffolding and still only half-restored, had always seemed to me to have a self-consciously beat-up look about it. The inside was fixed up from top to bottom in modern country style: beech and pinewood beams and furniture, wrought iron everywhere, stacks of clay pottery, bunches of dried flowers and linen and cotton fabric on all sides. I pushed open the heavy door and pulled up short to avoid bumping right into a scruffy character who just stood there, staring at me with the eyes of a religious fanatic. From previous experience, I knew that he wouldn’t utter a single word and that it was down to me to break the silence. So I gave him a friendly greeting and asked him to lead me to Señor José da Costa-Reis. He continued to stare at me for a good while, without even blinking or moving a muscle until, all of a sudden, he stepped aside so that I could see through into the restaurant. José was there at one of the back tables with a big smile on his face, chatting with a girl who was around twelve or thirteen years old, very dark, very skinny and with very big teeth. I guessed that it had to be the daughter that he always talked about whenever we met up in the tavern before a job. I groaned to myself in disappointment at our unexpected lunch companion, and then headed towards them down the three steps which separated the entrance hall from the small dining area.

I always enjoyed seeing Cavalo again. For me, he was one of those calm and wonderfully considerate men whose mere presence made you feel that everything made sense, even when it didn’t. His deep, dark eyes had a smile in them, he was tall and fit, always well-shaven and well-groomed with thick grey hair. I found him a very attractive man, but the Group’s rules put him strictly off-limits to me.

‘You’re looking wonderful, Ana,’ he told me in his musical Portuguese accent with those typical rounded vowel sounds, and kissed me on each cheek in greeting.

‘You too, José.’

A lovely open smile lit up his face as he put his hands on one of the two free chairs and pulled it back to offer me a seat. His daughter could not keep her eyes off me.

‘This is Amália, the most beautiful and intelligent girl in the whole world,’ he declared, brimming over with unconditional fatherly pride. ‘Amália, this is Ana - Ana Galdeano.’

‘Hello, Amália,’ I mumbled enthusiastically.

‘Hello,’ she replied, examining me as if she had X-ray eyes.

José had separated from his wife not long after the birth of their daughter. Seeing as divorce did not exist in Portugal at the time, they reached a civilized agreement together to make sure that their girl grew up without losing touch with her father. The days which Amália spent with José were so sacrosanct to him that he was perfectly capable of cancelling a meeting with me or even postponing a Group operation so as not to lose even a minute of the time he was scheduled to spend with Amália. This time, on the other hand, he had brought her with him without any warning at all.

‘So how’s the German business going?’ he asked me as he sat down.

My face froze into what I’m sure was the dumbest and most moronic smile of all time. What the hell was he doing, asking me this kind of question in front of his daughter? I took a deep breath and pulled myself together before answering.

‘I’ve got everything ready. Once you give me the … design, I’ll go home and pack my bags.’

‘Right, the design!’ he exclaimed. ‘Of course! We left it in the car, didn’t we, Amália?’

‘Yes, Papá.’

‘It’s just that we were chatting the whole time and … I’ll give it to you later, before we leave. The fact of the matter is that Donna has done a really outstanding job. There’s also a bag in the carry tube with two numbered nails in it.’

‘Wow, great!’ I replied, completely unable to wipe the shocked expression off my face. Would it stay like that from now until the hour of my death, all because of Cavalo’s repeated indiscretions? As soon as I got home to Ávila, I was going to have to have a serious word with Roi.

‘So - how are you going to do it?’ he asked me, as he lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nose and mouth at the same time. Why was he so damn good-looking? And why the hell did he keep asking me such indiscreet questions?

‘With my usual methods,’ I answered, swallowing a bit of toast and pâté. ‘The shortest, safest and most sensible route. It has always given me good results, as you know.’

‘Well, you really know your job, that’s for sure. But you seem a bit tired to me,’ he commented, looking me over with a worried expression on his face. ‘Haven’t you recovered from your Russian trip?’

‘I do find all the … negotiations very tiring, but Ezequiela’s stews usually get me back on my feet pretty quickly. It’s just that I haven’t had any time off since Russia. This one’s such a rush job.’

‘That’s for sure,’ he agreed, shaking his head regretfully.

Amália had been following our whole conversation with rapt attention, switching her gaze from José to me and back again. We carried on chatting all the way through the meal, but it was all pretty banal and superficial, given that there was no way we could talk about serious stuff with the girl there. I had never met a man more besotted with his daughter than Cavalo. On second thought, my father was in exactly the same division: he often took me along to meetings with Roi, where they talked about things which I didn’t get at all. My father behaved with me just like José did with Amália.

After we finished lunch, we left the tavern and went for a quiet stroll around the village, which was completely deserted - as tends to happen in Spain in the early afternoon. We looked like a small family out on a weekend trip. José had sensibly taken the precaution of parking his car well away from prying eyes, in a deserted part of town just by a small Roman bridge. As soon as we arrived, he opened the trunk, took out the carry tube and placed it in my hands as gently as a new-born baby. We exchanged a telling look, and I slung it over my shoulder - exactly where it would be when I carried out the job.

‘Amália and I need to ask you for a small favor, Ana,’ Cavalo said to me, a bit sheepishly.

‘You and Amália? Fine, fine - out with it then,’ I answered with a quick smile.

‘Would you mind picking up a small package for us when you’re in Germany? It’s something very special that I asked Heinz to get hold of,’ Heinz being Heinz Kemmler, which was our beloved Läufer’s real name and who I was going to see in just a few days’ time.

‘No problem at all,’ I blurted out enthusiastically - and began to regret it the second the words had left my mouth. What if it turned out to be really heavy? What if it attracted unwanted attention? José read my thoughts.

‘It’s a tiny little gadget, hardly weighs a thing and really won’t be a hassle for you. Amália and I are huge fans of vintage mechanical contraptions. We have a fantastic collection of mechanical toys: ballerinas, Ferris wheels, clowns and animals. Don’t we, honey?’

‘We sure do, Papá.’

‘An 1890
Märklin
came up for auction in Bonn a few weeks ago and I asked Heinz to get it for us. It’s absolutely wonderful. You just couldn’t put a price on it! It’s a small hand-painted tinplate figure, which slides along a snow-covered track. Just beautiful.’

Like every good watchmaker-jeweler, José had a passion for complex mechanisms and automata which he had inherited from his father and grandfather. As far as I knew, one of his favorite pastimes - apart from chess, of course - was restoring clocks and watches. Just imagining him working away with total concentration on a mechanism which relied on the faultless operation of hundreds of minuscule components in perfect synchronization put my hormones into overdrive. He was one of the most intelligent guys I had ever met.

Amália mumbled something in Portuguese.

‘What is she saying?’ I asked José, caught off-balance.

‘She just said that it’s spring-operated.’

Well, that was clear confirmation that Amália had inherited the family obsession, and probably the technical precision of three generations of renowned watchmakers that went with it too. I was beginning to understand why her father had said that she was the smartest girl in the world.

José turned towards his daughter with a stern expression on his face.

‘Amália, I already told you that you have to speak in Spanish when we’re with Ana.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled, reluctantly.

‘She speaks perfect Spanish, but she gets embarrassed.’

‘Fine - no problem,’ I said. ‘Listen, I’ll bring your toy back from Germany in mint condition, I promise. Then you can tell me how you want me to get it to you, José.’

‘Thanks, Ana. I owe you one. The best of luck to you. Seriously. And don’t forget to say hi for me to our crazy Heinz,’ he said to me with a smile, by way of a goodbye. This guy who could have been the man of my life. Suppressing a sigh, I put my hand on Amália’s shoulder and helped her into the car. All of a sudden I began to feel bitter and over the hill.

‘You’re putting us in unnecessary danger, Ana,’ Prince Philibert had pointed out to me years before, on his last visit to my finca. ‘Stop flirting with Cavalo every time we go on IRC. He’s not the only man in the world. The less contact we have with each other, the safer for all of us.’ He had given me such a fright that I could still picture his furious grey eyes glaring at me from under his frankly scary spiky salt-and-pepper eyebrows.

I watched José drive away, and headed back to my car on my own. Absolutely alone, because from now on Operation Krylov was completely down to me.

As I drove back through Ávila’s city walls later that evening, the radio announced that Schröder’s Social Democrats had won the general election, alongside the Greens. Germany was entering a brand new stage in its long and singular history.

CHAPTER FIVE

Despite its being in Switzerland, Zurich Airport is a lot closer to Baden-Württemberg than the airport in its own state capital, Stuttgart. So Roi had booked me a 4pm flight from Paris-Orly into the world’s wealthiest financial center. Barely an hour later, I was sitting in Läufer’s knock-out Mercedes and heading down the N1 highway at full speed towards Gossau and the border with Germany.

Läufer - Heinz - was the perfect combination of two conflicting personalities. It was as if there were two completely different people inside him. One was not far short of his fortieth birthday, good-looking, charming, dependable and smart. The other was still in full adolescent turmoil, reckless, provocative and permanently blessed with the illusion of eternal youth - disheveled long blond hair, black leather jacket, beat-up sneakers and faded jeans. He was seriously into conspicuous consumption - his classy Merc, his Iridium cell phone, the huge bunch of flowers he gave me when he met me off the plane, and so on - but was much more rough-and-ready when it came to his personal tastes.

‘
Möchten Sie etwas trinken?
’
⁴
asked the waiter in the bar where we stopped for dinner just after crossing the border. Dinner at
five-thirty in the afternoon!
A good four hours earlier than I was used to …

‘Ein Pils, bitte.’
⁵

The huge half-liter mug of beer disappeared down his throat in next to no time. Personally, I was having a hard time handling the bitter taste of the creamy-headed golden brew so popular with German truck drivers.

‘We should leave here at seven,’ said Heinz, checking his watch, ‘so that we can get to Friedrichshafen by seven-thirty. Is there anything you need to get? Did you forget anything? Do you want to smoke some weed to mellow out?’

‘What I really want is for
you
to mellow out,’ I answered with a smile. ‘But now you really have made me nervous. Let’s go over exactly what you have to do, just to make sure you don’t slip up somewhere.’

‘What are you on about? All I have to do is pick you up when you’re through and get you back to the airport.’

‘Fine - but just run through the schedule from start to finish so I can be sure that you’ve not forgotten something.’

I laughed my way through dinner with Läufer. At heart he was a lone genius, a Peter Pan misunderstood. A good part of his charm lay in the way that his thoughts and feelings were so rapidly reflected on his face, and in the sheer energy, enthusiasm and spontaneity of his conversation. The truth was that spending time with him was a real pleasure, a good timeout before the whistle blew for action.

At seven-thirty on the dot we were driving through the streets of Friedrichshafen. Its empty and deserted streets. It was like a ghost town - no bars, no nightclubs, nobody walking their dog. Not a thing. Not even any cops.

‘Germany’s not like Spain, Ana,’ Heinz explained, half-apologetic. ‘And Friedrichshafen’s not Mallorca, or Benidorm or Marbella.’

‘Sure - but not a single car on the road except for ours?’

‘Listen, that’s the way it is round here at this time of day. If we were in Stuttgart or Munich, there’d be plenty of people on the street. But this is a working town. A lot of folk are fishermen who get up really early.’

We left Friedrichshafen and headed northwest, following a winding road which led us up the steep slope of a small mountain. We were traveling through deep forest which had a slightly sinister feel to it in the darkness. When we reached the top, the view over Lake Constance was stunning, a perfect crescent moon reflected in its waters and, only five hundred yards away, the dramatic silhouette of Castle Kunst, fast asleep without a single light on. It was beautiful, and impressive: a medieval fortress built on a small island close to the shore and linked to it by a long bridge. Which I was on the point of crossing in next to no time.

Läufer switched off his headlights and moved ahead slowly to park the car behind a nearby clump of trees, making it invisible from the roadway. My now jumpy companion, hardly a veteran of nighttime raids, helped me get my small kitbag out of the trunk and then stood stock-still as he watched me go through my standard quick-change routine. First I took off my jacket and blouse, and then my pants, leaving just my light, tight-fitting leotard. Over that, I pulled on a black thermal protection suit, of the type used by sailors to prevent loss of body heat in case they had to abandon ship in freezing cold waters. The skintight suit was amazingly comfortable and covered my entire body except for my head and hands.

‘It had never even occurred to me,’ whispered Läufer through the darkness. ‘Do you always do this, Ana? I mean, do you always wear all this gear and stuff?’

‘Every time,’ I replied, carefully arranging my hair inside my black neoprene headgear. ‘The suit doesn’t just protect me from the cold. It prevents my body heat tripping any heat sensors there might be. Did you know that the human body emits the same level of radiation as a 500-watt lightbulb? If the sensor network around the main defensive wall detects any rise in temperature, the alarms will be triggered, and you and me will be spending the night in jail.’

‘You look really beautiful in that suit, Ana,’ he joked, ‘you really do. Don’t ever take it off.’

I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and put on my boots, making sure that the laces were good and tight. Läufer was dying of curiosity.

‘Go on, tell me. What’s so special about the boots?’

‘They’ve got stealth rubber soles that can handle a straight vertical climb up a sheet of glass. They lock on to ledges, cracks and incuts like cats’ claws. And - before you ask - what I’m sticking into my ears right now are miniature sound amplifiers which have just,’ I told him as my movements matched my words, ‘turned the noise that your lungs are making into the second cousin of a hurricane. Nobody can take me off guard and they help me control the noise that I make myself. So please keep it quiet now. Get back in the car and catch some sleep. I’ll be back in under an hour.’

I adjusted the strap of my night vision goggles over my headgear and fitted them firmly onto the bridge of my nose. Immediately, everything around me began to glow with that distinctive green light - including Läufer’s pale face.

‘And if you don’t return?’ the poor guy asked me, shaking like a leaf.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I told him, putting on my backpack and the carry tube with Donna’s fake in it. ‘You’ll be woken up by the police sirens.’

I quickly crossed the highway and stopped for a second, scanning the wooden bridge. I had my fingers crossed that it wouldn’t creak much as I crossed it, and fortunately my prayers were answered. Calm and balanced, I moved smoothly across it towards the island and, once on land again, silently circled the outer wall of the castle until I reached the west side which faced out onto the lake. My earphones confirmed that the watchdogs were still unaware of my presence. Their kennel was just on the other side of the castle wall. Carefully calculating the angle, force and trajectory of my throw, I lobbed the canister of tranquilizing gas and watched it as it arched over the battlements and disappeared from view. I heard the thud as it hit the ground, and then the startled bark of one of the two dogs. The other probably didn’t even have time to open its eyes before a heavy dose of clorazepate dipotassium and mivacurium chloride put them both to sleep in under a second. The gas didn’t do them any permanent damage: they would wake up the next day as happy as a pair of puppies after a good night’s sleep.

I pulled a small coil of rope out of my backpack, 45-feet long and less than half an inch thick, and fixed it to the clamp at one end of the three-pronged grappling hook which would anchor my ascent to the battlements at the top of the castle wall. I began to swing it in ever increasing circles, and when it reached the right speed, I released it like an Olympic hammer thrower. I had carefully calculated the rope length necessary to avoid the grapnel landing on the walkway behind the battlements and setting off the alarms, and it successfully hooked onto the parapet at the first attempt. Then I attached my two mechanical ascenders to the rope, took a firm hold of them and began to scale the wall at maximum speed. When I reached the top, I straddled the parapet and slowly scanned the walkway through my goggles to locate the pattern of infrared rays. And there they were, flickering weakly against the bright green background. In fact, they didn’t even cover the full distance from watchtower to flanking tower. Yet again, the slipshod incompetence of the White Knight Company was a joy to behold. How they got away with their huge price tags was a complete mystery to me.

I moved forward along the parapet until I was next to a section of the walkway which fell between two infrared fields and had been left completely unprotected. Quietly I dropped down onto it and strolled across to the inner wall, as cool as a cucumber. With the grappling hook securely set onto the inner battlement, I lowered myself smoothly down onto the well-kept lawn of the magnificent castle bailey. Now completely silent and deserted, it was strange to imagine that this very courtyard had witnessed the military training drills, the jousts, the tourneys, games and even feasts and dances, of a society and people now forever gone.

There they were, my two ferocious Rottweilers with their shiny black coats, as sound asleep as bears in hibernation. I gathered up the gas canister and put it in a bag which I hermetically sealed and stuck in my backpack. I had no time to lose, so I began to run towards the castle keep, taking out a new 100-foot length of rope, another small three-pronged grappling hook and a tiny Belgian-made hunting crossbow, which my father had bought me at an auction many years before. I reached the keep’s stone wall, and pressed myself flat up against it as I assembled what I needed. Once it was ready, I stepped about three or four yards out, cranked the bowstring tight, lodged it in the cocking mechanism, fitted the bolt with its grapnel into the groove, aimed at the roof parapet - and fired. A soft whistling sound pierced the silence - and almost deafened me through my earphones. No instrument is as accurate, as deadly and as silent as a well-made hunting crossbow.

I scaled the keep wall, and found myself on a flat roof. It was square-shaped and concrete-built, with the decking finished in tar paper around the elevator machine room and pierced by gas, heating and ventilation pipes, not to mention the chimney flue. Nothing very medieval about that. Luckily, there were no more sophisticated security measures to crack. All I had to do was get into the building through the roof door and I’d be standing in Hübner’s
Pinakothek
. The door was fitted with a fancy lock and anti-pick and anti-drill protection. Smiling quietly to myself, I heaved a sigh of relief. I’m sure it can’t be that difficult, but I actually didn’t have a clue about opening doors by picking or drilling locks. But I did know quite a lot about skeleton keys, and was the proud owner of a magnificent bump key with a fine set of bronze springs made for me by the German company Brühl Technik GmbH. I just slid it into the keyhole, turned it and bumped it until it raised the driver pins above the keyway and slipped the latch.

Voilà!
Castle Kunst was mine, all mine …

On the other side of the door, there was a beautiful polished timber staircase which led down to a wide passageway with fine carpets, Spanish tapestries, and Baccarat crystalware and Sèvres porcelain displayed on shelves between the windows. Purely out of habit, I headed down it on tiptoe, although I knew very well that there was no danger of my being heard, seeing as the sound of my steps was muffled by the soft carpeting and the Seitenberg couple lived four floors away. At the end of the passage, a carved oak door slid open with barely a sound and there I was in Hübner’s private gallery. Imagine my astonishment when I realized that, hanging on the walls and on the panels suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the room, were most of the major works stolen from Europe’s top museums over the last few years: Cézanne’s unfinished landscape
Le Cabanon de Jourdan
and the two Van Goghs -
L’Arlésienne
and
Le Jardinier
- taken from Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art; Camille Corot’s
Le Chemin de Sèvres
, Robert de Nanteuil’s
Self-Portrait
and Turpin de Crissé’s
Daims dans un paysage
hijacked from the Louvre; Monet’s
Falaises près de Dieppe
and Alfred Sisley’s
Allée des peupliers de Moret
, until recently happily hanging in Nice’s Musée des Beaux-Arts. And a whole range of other masterpieces which aroused my admiration - and my envy.

Clearly the Chess Group was not the only team of dedicated professionals involved in this lucrative line of business in Europe, one which had recently and massively expanded with the emergence of the post-Soviet Eastern European market. But we were still clearly the best when it came to modus operandi. Our rivals had a regrettable tendency to use military weapons when pulling a heist, whereas we just used our brains. So, it was crystal clear that it had been Helmut Hübner - the oh-so-respectable businessman, cookie magnate, philanthropist and former member of the Nazi Party - who had been behind the recent spate of major art thefts.

‘Jesus! I can hardly believe it!’ I whispered without thinking. The sound of my amplified voice in my ears almost gave me a heart attack and stopped my breathing. It was the first time that I had ever done this during an operation. Still, the sight before my eyes would have knocked out any self-respecting art collector.

The Krylov painting was hanging on the upper section of one of the central panels. I recognized the muzhiks’ familiar faces from seeing them so many times on the screen of my desktop, but this time as strange greenish images because of my goggles. Not allowing their ghostly suffering to distract me, I carefully unhooked the canvas and lowered it onto a length of silk I had laid out on the floor to use as my improvised workbench. I took the tools out of my backpack and set to work. Fifteen minutes had passed since I’d left Läufer in the car. It would take me about as long again to get back there, so I had barely half an hour to switch the paintings and erase any sign of my presence there. A seriously tight schedule.