The Double Eagle (28 page)
Authors: James Twining
10:59
P.M.
A
t their lowest part, where the gabled rooflines angled down to meet the redbricked facade, the buildings on this street were four stories high. The large black iron cranes set into the top of each gable were the only evidence of their former lives as a series of merchants’ houses where grain would have been hauled out of barges on the canal into the storerooms on the upper floors.
A ground-floor entry into the Schenck Museum was always going to be out of the question. The windows were too exposed and besides it was too close to the control room, where the three guards gathered at night, one eye on the closed-circuit TV monitors and the other on the TV. A succession of gaudy quiz shows and translated American sitcoms filled the minutes between the patrol that two of them made through the building every forty-five minutes.
Tom knew it had to be the roof, but getting up there was almost as difficult. He could, potentially, have used a compressed-air grappling hook, but that was risky. Unlike in the movies, there was never any guarantee it would grip onto anything and he certainly couldn’t afford to have a titanium hook come crashing down onto the sidewalk from four floors up.
It only left one option. The old-fashioned way. The hard way. He had to climb up.
Tom settled his heavy backpack squarely onto his shoulders. He checked again that the street was empty and started up the far right-hand side of the building, well away from the video camera which was trained on the museum entrance.
To most people, the building’s sheer facade would have represented an impassable obstacle, but Tom knew that the building was old and the cracked and crumbling mortar gave a climber of his ability a succession of firm hand-and toe-holds. He moved smoothly up the front of the building, his fingers searching for first one handhold, then another, his feet driving him upward as they locked onto faint ridges in the brickwork. Every so often a decorative course of white bricks had been laid so as to form a narrow ledge allowed him a temporary relief.
Once he was about fifteen feet off the ground, he traversed a few feet across the side of the building until he reached a thick metal drainpipe that emerged at that point out of the brickwork and led up to the roof.
Below him a police car swung onto the street and made its way slowly past the museum entrance. Tom pressed himself flat against the wall, the brickwork scraping against his cheek, his left foot jammed between the drainpipe and the wall. The car drove by, paused momentarily, and then turned right over a bridge and down another street. Peeling himself away from the wall, Tom gripped the drainpipe and started up toward the roof.
Two minutes later he swung his right arm, then his right leg over the parapet and dragged himself onto the roof. He lay there for a few moments, fighting to catch his breath, his mouth dry and sour as his muscles leaked lactic acid. Overhead, the stars sparkled, brilliant jewels laid on a black velvet cushion. Just for a moment, Tom allowed himself to think again about what he was doing. He’d fought against this hard, but in the end Archie had probably been right. Much as he wanted to believe Jennifer’s promise of a fresh start, he couldn’t trust anyone but himself.
His watch beeped and snapped his mind back into focus. He was right on time.
Rolling to his feet, he grabbed a long black rope out of his bag. Securing it quickly to the parapet, he dropped it down the side of the building, the thin nylon cord nestling in the shadow cast by a neighboring tree. From the street it was almost invisible, but it gave him a quick way down. Just in case.
Behind the gabled façade the roof was flat, the original triangular roofline having been removed in the 1960s in favor of a starker, more modern look for the galleries below. As part of these works, a series of large skylights had also been set into the flat roof to allow natural light in. Tom padded over to the skylight set into the very middle of the building and crouched down next to it.
On cue, two guards appeared at the doorway of the large room beneath him and looked in, running their flashlights around the room. Nothing to report. As they withdrew, one of them suddenly flashed his flashlight up toward the skylights overhead. The powerful beam leapt up from the floor below and shone up through the glass like a spotlight. Tom jumped back from the opening and set the timer on his watch. He had forty-five minutes exactly until they came back.
He removed a small axle grinder from the front pocket of his pack. Battery powered and specially modified by him to silence the sound of the electric motor, it was ideal for etching into the glass. With a faint buzzing noise, he cut into its smooth surface, scoring the outline of a large square.
Replacing the axle grinder, Tom produced two Anver suction hand cups, aluminum handles with two large circular rubber sucker pads at each end of them designed to carry about sixty-six pounds of load each. Placing these against the glass, he eased down the black plastic lever at the center of each pad, creating a vacuum between the pads and the surface of the area of glass he had outlined.
This was the moment of truth. Get it wrong, and the glass would shatter into a thousand pieces. He jerked his hands and with a loud cracking noise the section of glass snapped cleanly out of the frame.
He was in.
11:31
P.M.
O
n the roof of the building opposite the one he’d just seen Kirk climb up, Kyle Foster unpacked his M24 from his bag and began to assemble it. Just for fun, he did it with his eyes closed, like they’d been trained to back at Fort Benning in Georgia.
First slip the barrel assembly into the stock. Then insert and tighten the action screws, locking in the trigger guard assembly. Then clip on the scope by using the half-inch combination wrench to tighten the front and rear mounting ring nuts. Finally insert the bolt assembly. Magazine in. Safety off. Good to go.
Foster preferred the M24’s bolt action to the PSG-1 or the M21’s semiautomatic mechanisms that spat shell casings all over the place. It was light, too, featuring a HS Precision stock made of a Kevlar, graphite, and fiberglass composite bound together with epoxy resins. Empty, without a scope, it weighed just five and a half kilos and had an effective range of about eight hundred meters. More than enough for tonight’s job.
He’d swapped the normal Leupold M3A 10x42 day optic scope for a Litton Aquila x6 night vision device. And just to make sure, he’d also clipped on a Harris bipod and an under barrel laser pointer. Double bagging it, as his old staff sergeant used to say.
His only real complaint with the whole package—apart from the well-known limitations of the M118 round, which used to drive everyone in his unit nuts—was the long action, which had been known to cause feeding problems if the rounds were not pushed all the way to the rear of the magazine. But as he grasped its familiar shape, the butt nestling snugly against his shoulder, his eye pressed up to the scope, such minor considerations faded into insignificance. He was only going to need one shot anyway.
Instead the memories surged.
El Angel Negro.
The dark angel, that’s what the locals had taken to calling him in Colombia. Not that they ever knew who he was, or even if he was human. Some said he was a ghost, carrying their children and brothers and sisters and parents into the forest never to be seen alive again, their mutilated bodies only found months later, buried in a shallow grave or strung high above them in the dark branches of the forest canopy.
“Why?” their innocent eyes had asked as he leaned over them.
“Because I can,” he had whispered. “Because I’ve been told to.”
Just like he’d been told tonight. The usual phone call, the clipped voice rasping its instructions.
“Follow Kirk. Stay close. Take up a position opposite. And don’t miss.”
11:32
P.M.
T
om placed the sheet of glass down a few feet away, loosened the suction pads and replaced them in his pack. Then he stood up and walked over to the chattering air-conditioning vent that sat just behind the skylight, a small pool of water at its base where the moisture extracted from the room below had condensed and dripped to the ground.
Kneeling down, Tom lifted a small remote-controlled Ramsey ATV winch out of his pack and secured it in place by looping a rope around the vent’s thick neck and then clipping it onto each side of the winch. Although designed to be powered by a car engine, Tom had adapted it for battery power. It wouldn’t last long, but it would be more than enough for what he had planned tonight. He flicked the winch on and fed out several feet of slack from its drum, the narrow steel cable glinting like barbed wire.
Standing at the edge of the skylight, he put his pack on back to front, so the main compartment sat on his chest, and clipped the cable onto the rappelling harness that he wore over his black overalls, the metal buckles, clips, and hoops wrapped in black tape to minimize noise and cut out reflective glare. Finally he slipped on a black ski mask, the material molding itself to his face with familiar intimacy. He was ready.
Crouching, he levered himself through the hole he had cut, until his legs were suspended in the room below, the winch taking his weight. He slid a small piece of hardened rubber under the wire to stop it rubbing against the frame. Pressing the remote control, he was silently lowered into the room.
The gallery floor lay about twenty feet below him, with the room itself measuring about thirty feet square. The only doorway into the gallery led out to a wide corridor with access to the other rooms and the main staircase down to the lower floors. There were also three cameras in the room—one static camera covering the doorway and two tracking cameras in opposing corners covering approximately half the room each. The white gallery walls glowed eerily in the moonlight, the semidarkness broken regularly by the periodic flashing of the small red lights that indicated that the three cameras were all functioning properly.
The gallery had been daringly hung with a mix of artists from across the centuries. Rothko next to Rembrandt. Modigliani next to Monet. On the left-hand wall, he could just about make out the outline of the Dürer sketch that he had been planning to steal all those years before.
Through the open doorway, Tom could also make out a faint green glow. He knew from Archie’s schematics that this was the control panel for the grid of infrared trip wires that would trigger if anything touched the floor. But the floor was irrelevant; he had no intention of touching it. So, too, was the static camera trained on the doorway, since he wouldn’t be going near that. But the other two tracking cameras, their glass eyes sweeping rhythmically backwards and forwards across the room every ten seconds or so, they would have to be dealt with.
Both cameras had been deliberately angled down toward the lower parts of the surrounding walls and the floor, their relentless gaze directed, understandably, at the actual paintings and sculptures and display cabinets that they were protecting. This meant that they took in perhaps only ten feet of vertical height at the most. Suspended just below the skylight in the middle of the room, therefore, Tom was out of the cameras’ field of vision and would remain so as long as he stayed high and kept his legs up.
Tom reached into the backpack and took out a small speargun. Usually kept on life rafts, the great advantage of the JBL Mini Carbine was its compact size, being only twenty-seven inches from tip to butt. Underwater, it had an effective range of nine feet, but on land and with a few modifications, Tom had increased it to twenty. He judged the distance from him to the wall over the top of the left-hand camera to be about fifteen feet, well within range. He took aim carefully a few feet above the camera, knowing that if he missed, the spear would crash down to the floor and set the alarm off.
As he steadied himself, he felt the familiar taste of carbon on his tongue, dry and metallic. This was common to most art galleries, the carbon filters installed to remove fumes and odors, but most importantly the sulfur dioxide generated by the exhalation of gallery visitors that could severely damage the paintings if left unchecked.
Swallowing, Tom squeezed the trigger and the spear flashed across the room, spooling a thin nylon rope out behind it as it slammed into the wall, burying its nickel-plated steel tip about five inches deep. Without pausing, he reloaded the gun, turned, and fired another spear above the other camera in the opposite corner.
With both spears in place, he fed the two pieces of thin nylon ropes that were attached to the ends of both spears through a metal tightener. Winding the small handle on the side of the tightener drew the ropes together until they were taut. He checked his watch. Thirty-five minutes left.
Tom attached himself to the nylon cord that was now stretched diagonally across the room and unclipped himself from the steel cable. Crossing his ankles over the cord, his back to the floor, he pulled himself across the room, the metal clip fizzing against the rope like a zip wire, until he was directly above the right-hand camera.
Reaching down, he clipped a small black box to the wire that carried the video signal back down to the control room on the ground floor. Once activated, this stored two minutes of video footage onto its small memory chip before switching into playback mode, overriding the input signal and transmitting its recorded images again and again until the batteries died about an hour later. He’d be long gone by then.
Tom switched the device on, waited the two minutes for the playback to start and then hauled himself back over to the camera on the other side of the room where he repeated the same procedure. Two minutes later and the room was effectively invisible to the guards downstairs. Twenty-five minutes left.
Tom heaved himself back along the nylon cord and stopped in the middle of the room. Looking down over his shoulder toward the floor, the square display case beneath him stared back. Through its glass top, the gold filigree that embraced the Fabergé egg’s green surface winked at him in the half light, urging him on. Tom grinned. He hated to admit it, but he was enjoying himself. The buzz was still there.
He clipped himself back onto the steel wire dangling down from the roof and, pressing the remote, lowered himself facedown until he was right above the display case, his breath gently clouding the glass surface before instantly evaporating. The case rested on an elegant brushed steel column that widened into a large square base that, ziggurat-like, cascaded down to the floor through a series of narrow steps and ledges, each about two inches wide.
Tom pressed the remote again and lowered himself below the level of the glass display cabinet, examining the sides of the metal column until he was only a few feet above the floor, his legs bent back to avoid brushing against its polished wooden surface. Right at the bottom of the column, just before the base widened out, Tom finally found the metal panel that he was looking for set flush to the surface and secured in each corner with four small screws. He checked his watch. Fifteen minutes left.
Slipping a slim electric screwdriver out from inside his jacket, he carefully unscrewed the plate, each screw sticking resolutely to the magnetized tip of the screwdriver as they came free, before he deposited them safely on the top step of the column’s base. The last screw came loose and Tom trapped the panel with his left hand to stop it from falling out.
But the sudden movement must have caused his right hand to shake a little, because the screw dropped from the screwdriver, hit the base of the platform with a metallic ping, and then rolled, with agonizing lethargy, down each of its narrow ledges toward the floor.