The Hypnotist

FORTY-THREE

The rest of the operation took less than ten minutes. As the first FedEx truck drove off, a second, twice as big, drove up. The courier who climbed out immediately set to inspecting Hypnos. Seventy-four seconds after he started he signaled to his crew. One man jumped up on the forklift. Another opened the van’s door.

“We have someone watching,” the courier told Lucian. “If you don’t want anything to happen to you, you’ll wait here until we’re out of sight before you go back inside.”

Lucian assumed the man was bluffing. Even if the Matisse Monster had positioned someone at the airport, the local FBI agents would have found him by now and would have a long-distance, high-range rifle trained on him.

As soon as the truck was a few hundred feet away, Lucian sprinted back to the hangar. “Let’s get going,” he shouted to the agents inside as he flung the doors open.

Everyone came to life. Olshling and three agents ran outside to retrieve the crates. A waiting black sedan revved its engine. Matt Richmond opened the car door and Lucian jumped in. As the driver drove out of the hangar and took off, Lucian turned around and watched Olshling supervising the crew loading the paintings into the belly of the cargo plane. Lucian couldn’t allow himself any satisfaction; the game wasn’t over yet. Retrieving the paintings was certainly important-to the Met it was all that mattered-but the FBI wanted the extortionist, the fences and the actual thieves. Only putting the whole crime ring behind bars would satisfy them. But only finding out who had killed Solange would fully satisfy Lucian.

“The signal is great,” said Richmond, pointing to the red blip on the GPS screen that represented the FedEx truck.

“I know it’s a long shot, but were they able to pick up anything from all those phone calls?” Lucian asked his partner without taking his eyes off the screen.

“No.” Richmond shrugged. “But if this signal holds that won’t matter. You did good.”

Once Charlie Danzinger had finished destroying the Hypnos reproduction-stripping the gold and silver, ripping out all but a few of the semiprecious stones, artificially aging the wood and turning the gleaming Greek god into a ruined hint of what it had once been-Lucian had spent an hour alone with the sculpture.

Opening the back door, which itself was five feet tall and two-and-a-half feet wide, he’d entered a space big enough for him to stand in. Inspecting the sculpture’s guts, he pored over its internal construction, examining the curved wooden ribs that made up the armature. It was an engineering marvel, as beautiful in its own way as the exterior. Running his fingers over the walls, he’d searched for a joint where he might be able to insert the GPS tracking device, a state-of-the-art piece of electronics the size of a pea. A crisscross of wooden slats and supports up near the statue’s shoulder proved ideal, and he’d affixed it to the back of one of the slats. Then, using stains, he’d mixed up a mound of putty, matched it to the wood and covered the device with it.

Later, he’d asked his boss to step inside the statue and see if he could find the device. After a half hour, Doug Comley had given up. Not someone who took failure well, for the rest of that day he’d been out of sorts and annoyed. It probably hadn’t been Lucian’s smartest political maneuver.

The sculpture’s signal stayed strong for the next forty-five minutes, and they followed it onto I-405 N toward Santa Monica and then onto US-101 N toward Ventura. At the Ojai exit, the blip veered off the highway. Fifteen minutes later it stopped on what appeared to be a rural road. They were one hour and thirty-eight minutes away from LAX. The Lake Casitas Recreation Area was the closest named location on the navigational system, and it didn’t mean anything to any of them.

“Where the hell are we?” Richmond asked as he looked out at the mountainous expanse surrounding them. Born in Brooklyn, Richmond had never lived anywhere but New York City except for the months he spent training at Quantico-which, legend had it, had been an ordeal for him but a bigger ordeal for those around him. He claimed he needed concrete under his soles and bus exhaust in his lungs.

“Nature, Matt. It’s called nature,” Lucian said.

“Lovely. Now let’s collect our friend Hypnos and get back to civilization.”

Activating his radio, Lucian checked in with the backup teams. Eight men in three cars were all less than five minutes away. He suggested that they park around the last bend and proceed on foot in case they were being watched. He and Richmond were going ahead. During the call, he never took his eyes off the red dot that identified the position of the transmitting device he’d affixed inside of Hypnos.

Forgoing the open road, Lucian and Richmond trudged through an abutting orange grove and eight minutes later came to a rise. Below them a complex of buildings that seemed to have sprouted out of the rocks, trees, hills and earth spread out over fifteen or twenty acres.

“There’s not much activity down there,” Richmond said after a minute of observation. “Whatever it is seems shut down for the night.”

The area did seem deserted. Lucian counted a dozen buildings, ranging in size from midsize homes to airplane hangars. The stunning architecture incorporated long, low, horizontal lines, strongly projecting eaves and cantilevered balconies. “Let’s see how close we can get,” he said.

They climbed down the incline and hurried through another grove of orange trees and onto the complex grounds without encountering any kind of gate or fence. Checking his GPS device again, Lucian pointed to a bungalow set off to the side among a copse of eucalyptus trees. “According to St. Christopher here, the statue is in the farthest building to the right, back there.”

Years ago Doug Comley had named the first directional signal device he’d used St. Christopher, after the patron saint of travelers, and ever since then his team all used the moniker.

“Hey, Gary, how many people can you see inside?”

Gary Fulton, one of the L.A. team members, studied his P3 mobile remote sensing system. The size of a cell phone, it used microwaves to see through walls. “Looks like there are five people inside.”

“When there’s a will… Let’s go do this,” Richmond said in his signature upbeat style. He annoyed some of the other agents with his irrepressible optimism, but never Lucian, who appreciated Matt’s energy and relied on this clear-thinking man who believed they were a team of supermen who could overcome any obstacle.

Seven minutes after instructing two of the backup teams to position themselves around the building and the third to prepare to go into the bungalow with them, Lucian and Richmond reached the driveway, where the large FedEx truck was indeed parked. Stealthily, Lucian worked his way around it, his gun drawn, while Richmond and the agents who’d just arrived on the scene provided lookout.

The vehicle was unattended and empty. The GPS had indicated the sculpture was inside the building; now Lucian was certain it was.

He made it back around to Richmond and the rest of the team and cocked his head toward the building. It was time to proceed.

Golden light streamed down from skylights illuminating a reception area with an unattended desk and a half-dozen expensive-looking chairs set against the walls. According to St. Christopher’s blinking red dot, they were right on top of the signal. Deep inside the building and to the right, they could hear the murmur of voices and followed them down a wide, carpeted hallway. They’d passed three empty offices by the time they reached an atrium with a double-height ceiling that appeared to be an informal conference room with two exits. The murmurs that had led them here had ceased, and the GPS couldn’t zero in any more precisely on the location of the sculpture within the building itself. They were on their own now, working blind. Richmond pointed to first one door and then to himself, and then the other door and then to Lucian, indicating that they should split up.

Behind them a voice boomed out.

“Hands up. You’re trespassing.”