The Last Templar - Страница 9

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"I'll tell you what," he told Lucien. "Make this worth my while, and I'll go to fifteen."

He saw a flicker in Lucien's weasel eyes. He was hooked.

Lucien opened a drawer and pulled out a small digital camera. He looked up at Gus.

"I need to—"

Gus nodded. "Knock yourself out."

Lucien took a couple of pictures of the cross, clearly doing a mental run through his client list already.

"I'll make some calls," Lucien said. "Give me a few days."

No good. Gus needed die money and the freedom it would give him. He also needed to get out of town for a while until the dust settled around the museum job. All of these things he needed now.

"Uh-uh. It's got to be quick. A couple of days, max."

Once again, he could see something working away behind Lucien's eyes. Probably trying to figure how he could work a deal with a buyer, a fat fee for promising to barter the seller down, even though the seller had already agreed. The slimy little shit. Gus decided that a few months from now, when the time was right, he would really enjoy paying Lucien another visit.

"Come back at six, tomorrow," Lucien said. "No promises, but I'll do my best."

"I know you will." Gus picked up the cross, grabbed a cleaning rag that was lying on Lucien's desk, and wrapped it around the jeweled relic before tucking it into one of the inside pockets of his coat.

He then put the gun into another. "Tomorrow," he said to Lucien, and grinned hu-morlessly before he went out into the street.

Lucien was still shaking as he watched the big man walk all die way to the corner and disappear from sight.

Chapter 10

"You know, I could've done without this right now," Jansson growled as Reilly dropped into a chair across from his boss. Already seated at the table in the assistant director in charge's office at Federal Plaza were Aparo and Amelia Gaines as well as Roger Blackburn, who ran the violent crimes/major offenders task force, and two of Blackburn's assistant special agents in charge.

The complex of four government buildings in lower Manhattan was just a few blocks away from Ground Zero. It housed twenty-five thousand government employees, and was also home to the New York field office of the FBI. Sitting there, Reilly was relieved to be away from the incessant noise in the main work area. In fact, the comparative tranquillity of his boss's private office was just about the only thing about Jansson's job that was even remotely tempting.

As ADIC of the New York field office, Jansson had been shouldering a huge burden over the last few years. All five areas of major concern to the Bureau—drugs and organized crime, violent crime and major offenders, financial crime, foreign counterintelligence, and, the latest black sheep of that odious herd, domestic terrorism—were firing on all cylinders. Jansson certainly seemed built for the task: the man had the imposing bulk of the former football player he was; although beneath his gray hair, his solid face had a detached, distant expression. This didn't throw the people working under him for long, as they quickly learned that one thing, beyond the proverbial death and taxes, was certain: if Jansson was on your side, you could count on him to bulldoze anything that came in your path. If, however, you made the mistake of crossing him, leaving the country was definitely worth considering.

With Jansson being so close to retirement, Reilly could understand why his boss didn't particularly appreciate having his last few months in office complicated by something as high profile as METRAID—the robbery's imaginative new case name. The media had, quite rightly, pounced on the story. This wasn't a routine armed robbery. It was a full-blown raid. Automatic machine-gun fire had raked New York's A-list. The mayor's wife was taken hostage. A man was executed in plain sight; not just shot, but beheaded, and not in a walled courtyard in some Middle Eastern dictatorship, but here, in Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue.

On live television.

Reilly looked from Jansson to the flag and the Bureau insignia on the wall behind him, then back again as the ADIC rested his elbows on his desk and sucked in a barrelful of air.

"I'll make sure I tell those bastards how inconsiderate they've been when we book 'em," Reilly offered.

"You do that," Jansson said as he leaned forward, his intense glare sweeping across the faces of his assembled team. "I don't need to tell you the amount of calls I've gotten on this or from how high up they've come. Tell me where we are and where we're going with it."

Reilly glanced at the others and took the lead.

"Preliminary forensics don't point us in any particular direction. Those guys didn't leave much behind besides shell casings and the horses. The ERT guys are pulling their hair out at having so little to go on."

"For once," Aparo chimed in.

"Anyway, the casings tell us they were packing Ml 1/9 Cobrays and Micro Uzis. Rog, you guys are looking into that, right?"

Blackburn cleared his throat. He was a force of nature who had recently pulled off the dismantling of the biggest heroin distribution network in Harlem, resulting in over two hundred arrests. "Garden variety, obviously. We're going through the motions, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Not on something like this. Can't imagine these boys just bought them off the Web."

Jansson nodded. "What about the horses?"

Reilly picked up. "So far, nothing. Gray and chestnut geldings, pretty common. We're cross-checking them against records of missing horses and chasing down the saddles' points of origin, but again . . ."

"No brands or microchips?"

With over fifty thousand horses stolen each year across the country, the use of identification marks on horses was becoming more and more prevalent. The most popular method was freeze branding, which involved the use of a super-cold branding iron to alter the color-pigment-producing cells, resulting in white hair growing at the brand site, instead of colored hair. The other, less common, method involved using a hypodermic needle to inject a tiny microchip with an identification number programmed into it under the skin of the animal.

"No chips," Reilly replied, "but we're having them scanned again. The chips are so tiny that unless you know exactly where they are, it's not an easy find. Added to the fact that they're usually hidden in less obvious areas to make sure they're still there, if and when a stolen horse is recovered. On die plus side, they did have freeze brands, but they've been branded over and are now unreadable. The lab boys think they may be able to get something by separating the different passes to bring up the original mark."

"What about the outfits and the medieval hardware?" Jansson turned to Amelia Gaines, who had been following up that line of investigation.

"That's going to take more time," she said. "The typical sources for that type of kit are small specialists scattered across the country, especially when it comes to broadswords that are the real thing, not just party props. I think we'll get something here."

"So these guys just disappeared into thin air, is that it?" Jansson was clearly losing patience.

"They must have had cars waiting. There are two exits out of the park not far from where they dumped the horses. We're canvassing for witnesses, but so far, nothing," Aparo confirmed. "Four guys, splitting up, walking out of the park, that time of the evening. It's easy to go unnoticed."

Jansson sat back, nodding quietly, his mind collating the disparate chunks of information and ordering his thoughts. "Who do we like for this? Anyone have a favorite yet?"

Reilly glanced around the table before chiming in. "This one's more complicated. The first thing that pops to mind is a shopping list."

Art thefts, especially when the objects were well known, were often either stolen to order or presold to collectors who wanted to own things, even if they could never allow them to be seen by anyone else. But from the moment he had arrived at the museum, Reilly had pushed this angle to the back of his thinking. Shopping lists almost always went to smart thieves. Riding horseback along Fifth Avenue wasn't the action of smart people. Neither was the mayhem and least of all the execution.

"I think we're all on the same page on this," he continued. "The profilers' prelims also concur.

There's more behind this than just grabbing some priceless relics. You want to get the pieces, you choose a quiet, rainy Wednesday morning, get in before the crowds, pull out your Uzis and grab what you want. Lower visibility, lower risk. Instead, these guys chose the busiest, most heavily guarded moment possible to stage their heist. It's almost like they wanted to taunt us, to embarrass us. Sure, they got the booty, but I think they were also out to make a statement." "What kind of statement?" Jansson asked. Reilly shrugged. "We're working on it." The ADIC turned to Blackburn.

"You guys agree?" Blackburn nodded. "Put it this way. Whoever these guys are, they're heroes on the street. They've taken what all these coked-out jackasses fantasize about when they're plugged into their PlayStations and actually gone out and done it. I'm just hoping they don't start a trend here. But, yeah, I think there's more going on with these guys than cold efficiency." Jansson glanced back at Reilly. "So it looks like it's your baby after all." Reilly looked at him and quiedy nodded.

Baby wasn't exactly the first word that sprung into his mind. It was more like a two-thousand-pound gorilla, and, he mused, it was indeed all his.