Paul Christopher - Michelangelo_s Notebook

The sergeant led his group north through the thinning trees, stopping finally within sight of the ditch. Taking Reid with him again, he scrabbled out to the old Panzer for a final reconnaissance of the farm. It was false dawn, a bare sheen of dull lightness on the eastern horizon. There was no light at all from the farmhouse or any of the outbuildings. Swinging his binoculars around to the abbey tower he looked for the slightest flicker from the sniper’s position. The sergeant gauged the distance between the tower and his own position. A good five football fields, but nothing for a talented rifleman with one of those zs4 scopes on a Krag or even a 43. He figured it would take them the better part of two minutes for his bunch to get down to the side wall of the farmhouse with no real cover in between except a few depressions and one big boulder. Jeez, the sniper could take them all out with ease.

“You better take the cocksucker like I told you,” muttered the sergeant.

“You say something?” Reid asked.

“No. What about Cornwall and his pals?”

“They know enough to stay back until we open things up.”

“Good. I figure two minutes to get down to the wall. See the boulder?”

“Yeah.”

“Keep everybody left of that on the way down. I won’t traverse the guns on the tank any farther than that.”

“Gotcha.”

“I’ll stop firing when you reach the wall. Hit it with a couple of those potato mashers you took off that Jerry a few days ago. Open up a hole.”

“We take the place?”

“Not unless Terhune and the others have softened them up, and not until you’re sure the sniper’s out of it. He’s the key. He manages to get out of the tower and find some other spot we are uckfayed. Understand?”

“Sure.”

“All right. I’m going to load the belts into the gun now. At six on the dot-that’s ten minutes-we should hear Terhune and Winetka opening up. When you go in send Teitelbaum and Dorm on point with the BAR, maybe get them in one of those depressions. Then Patterson with that Russian gun of his, then you and the rest. The loos still got their Thompsons?”

“Cornwall’s got a great gun.”

“Probably blow you all away the first time they fire. Christ. Who came up with the idea of giving officers weapons?”

“Not me.”

“Get going.”

“Right.”

Reid slipped away into the darkness and the sergeant snaked his way up to the open turret of the abandoned German tank and slithered inside. Trying to be as quiet as possible, he began feeding the long belts of ammunition into the twin machine guns. The rounds had different colored tips, so they were probably a mixture of tracer, ball and incendiary, just like their American counterparts, but it would have been nice to know which was which. It took him less than two minutes to load both guns with 250-round belts. He peeked out through the gradually brightening slot in the turret. He glanced at his watch; all hell was going to break loose out there in about five minutes. He grinned. The sergeant could hardly wait.

Michael Valentine moved through the rooms of the top floor of the Ex Libris building methodically. Every area of the apartment had been torn apart; no drawer was left unopened, every cupboard had been searched. The intruder had come in through an airshaft vent and exited through a small unalarmed bathroom window. Following behind Valentine, Finn Ryan was horrified by the damage. Valentine ended his survey in the kitchen.

Valentine sat down at the yellow Formica table. “What did you do when you heard the glass breaking?”

“I thought the thing to do would be to investigate.”

“And then you thought again.” Valentine smiled.

“It wasn’t like in the movies. The girl goes out onto the moonless dock to look for her boyfriend and a hand comes out of the water and grabs her ankle. I’m not that stupid.”

“The real thing.”

“After Peter…”

“The glass breaks and…” Michael prompted.

“I turned around, got back into the elevator and went back to the office. I phoned the cell number you gave me.”

“So he never made it down to the office, never got to the computer.”

“No. I was there most of the day.”

“It looks like he did a fair amount of damage, but nothing irreplaceable.”

“What if he comes back?”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen. If he was really looking for something he would have come down to the office.”

“He was trying to scare us?” asked Finn.

“I think so.”

“Why?”

“We’re getting too close to something. We’ve been doing a lot of digging. There could be, probably are, alarm bells ringing.”

“Did you find out anything when you went to your dealer friend?”

“Lots,” said Valentine, and then he told her about what Peter Newman had said and about his visit to Eric Taschen. In turn she told him about her efforts on the computer.

“So what does it all mean?”

“It means that there’s more than one thing going on. The murders of Crawley and Gatty are connected, and so is the third guy I told you about-the one my connection at One Police Plaza told me about, Kressman I think his name was. So far there’s no real evidence but it looks as though they were all involved in some sort of deal to put stolen and looted art onto the open market. I don’t think that particular set of killings has anything to do with you at all. The whole thing with the Michelangelo drawing was just bad timing. I think Crawley would have died anyway.”

“Peter wasn’t bad timing.”

“No, which means that one of Crawley’s partners in crime was worried about what you’d found. Whoever that was hired Peter’s killer and the Vietnam gang member on the courier bike.”

“So there’re two killers out there?”

“Yes. One wants you and that drawing wiped off the slate. The other is interested in the group that Gatty, Crawley and this Kress were involved in-the ring that both Newman and Eric Taschen mentioned.”

“They have to be connected.”

“Yes. Presumably the art is the common factor.”

“The stolen art market?”

“From what you told me about the history of Greyfriars it has to go deeper than that. This Carduss Club is obviously some kind of secret society, like Skull and Bones at Yale, except a little less obvious.”

“According to what I found out they disappeared in 1945 or something.”

“So did Skull and Bones, except they didn’t disappear at all-they just changed their name. Your Delaware-numbered company-they have the least restrictive incorporation laws in the world; that’s why the CIA always uses them for their proprietary companies, like Air America.”

“You don’t think this is some kind of spy thing, do you?” She looked at him carefully, trying not to think too much about what he really was or what his real relationship had been with her father. Maybe that could come later but there was no time for it now.

Valentine’s expression darkened. “No. It’s big, though. The man they just found murdered in Alabama was dealing in hundreds of millions of dollars.” He shrugged. “It’s not hard to get into big money when you’re dealing in Michelangelos.”

“So what do we do now? Detective Delaney must have figured out I wasn’t part of any plot to kill Peter by now. Why don’t we go to the police?”

“It’s not just your boyfriend. Now it’s Crawley, Gatty and Kressman as well. That’s four murders in as many days and millions of dollars’ worth of stolen paintings. Enough motive to keep you in jail for a long time; enough motive to have you killed. Somehow you’ve stumbled on a conspiracy involving a lot of big-time people-people with things to hide and the ability to keep them hidden at all costs. Until we know exactly who those people are and how far the conspiracy goes we stay away from the cops.”