A Magnificent Crime (21 page)

Paris

 

Brooke and I strolled into the lobby of the Mercure Hotel, chatting like old friends. Old friends who just so happened to be scrutinizing everyone in the lobby out of the corners of their eyes, old friends who had their pockets stuffed with lock picks and micro-cameras, old friends who were about to break into the hotel room of an Interpol officer.

I tried to ignore the churning discomfort deep in my belly. Brooke had talked me into this, and I still wasn't sure it was the right way to go.

She'd called me about twenty minutes ago, saying it was urgent. She'd had drinks with the Interpol officer Hendrickx, and she'd successfully charmed him. Specifically, this meant she had learned which hotel he was staying in, then had stolen his hotel key card.

Unfortunately, she hadn't gleaned any information about the case.

“It was too awkward a subject to raise,” she said as we casually walked into the elevator of the Mercure. “I tried a couple of times, but he was very closed about it. Highly suspicious.”

“So how do we know he's not coming back to his hotel room right now?”

“He invited me to the theater, and we planned to meet there. I told him I needed to go home and freshen up first. But the performance started ten minutes ago. Obviously, I'm not going to show, but he'll wait awhile, then either leave or just stay for the whole performance. Best-case scenario, we get two hours. Worst, twenty minutes. But he'll definitely wait until the first intermission for me.”

“How can you be sure?”

She gave me an impatient look. “Please, Cat. I can read that much about a man.”

It was an opportunity we couldn't pass up. And as long as we were in and out in twenty, we should be fine.

But
should be
was never a very reassuring pair of words in my world. I tightened my fists as the elevator carried us up to the seventh floor.

Just outside the elevator, we heard a couple of people coming down the corridor, around the corner. We did not want to be seen, so we ducked into the staircase and waited until they were gone.

This was not the most modern of hotels, either. Disadvantage: the faint unpleasant smells of stale smoke and mildew. Advantage: no CCTV.

Still, we didn't want any witnesses.

We strolled along the corridor, like we were coming back from a shopping trip. Then we stopped outside Hendrickx's room. Brooke slid the key card in while I kept lookout.

The handle light went green with a faint click. She opened the door, and we both slipped in like a pair of Siamese cats.

Time was ticking. My stomach churned, and I prayed I didn't have a panic attack. I had work to do.

We fanned out. Brooke went straight for the desk drawers, and I targeted the safe inside the closet. Brooke found very little in the drawers. He was very careful, obviously.

But not so careful that he didn't trust the safe. I cracked it in no time at all. It was a very cheap, outdated safe; it would take me longer to get through the knots in my hair after a long drive in a convertible.

What I found was some money, his passport, and a notebook. I opened the small leather-bound notebook and scanned through the pages. He kept fairly scanty notes, likely committing the rest to memory. Probably smart.

But nonetheless, there was some useful information to be gleaned. I held my breath as I read his notes.

He didn't know my identity. He didn't even have a very good description, as my disguise had clearly sucked him in.

This was good news.

Brooke walked over to where I sat on the bed, and she read over my shoulder. She snapped photos with her micro-camera while I inspected the pages for further clues. Halfway down a page I read,

I chewed a fingernail. He'd realized the Louvre was a target.

This was bad news.

It was okay, though—this wasn't exactly revolutionary. The Louvre was always a target. I just hoped he didn't know which
part
of the Louvre was my target. The next page read:

Barlow.
Did he mean Jack Barlow? I knew Gladys had provided Jack with Hendrickx's name, but now they were working together?

This was very bad news.

Ethan and I were in the Gare de Lyon station, waiting for the train that would take us the three-hour journey to Geneva. Sounds of luggage being wheeled across a polished concrete floor echoed under the vaulted ceiling. Tour operators hawked their services, hoping to be heard over the din of squealing train wheels and crackly PA announcements. Light filtered into the station from windows high above.

After learning from Lafayette that the Louvre vault was modeled after the Geneva Freeport, we had been mightily discouraged at first. And then we started to see the advantage.

“Well, although there's no way in hell you're getting anywhere near the Louvre vault—unless you're an employee or something—you
might
have a chance to check out the Geneva Freeport,” Ethan had pointed out.

Say you're a billionaire looking for somewhere to store your vintage collection of antique Louis Vuitton steamer trunks. The Geneva Freeport would be more than happy to court your business by opening the door and inviting you to tour their facilities and decide if you'd be satisfied with their layers of security.

It was brilliant.

“Okay, now for the fun part,” Ethan had said. “Thinking up our covers.”

“Our?”

“Yes, I'm coming with you, obviously. I can be a pretty convincing art collector. And billionaire.”

I had looked at Ethan carefully. I had no doubt he could.

I was torn. On one hand, it made me feel safer that he would be coming with me. And our cover would be much more plausible. Between Ethan's knowledge of art and mine of sparkly things, posing as a couple with plenty of precious belongings should be no problem.

On the other hand, there was still that niggling guilt at the base of my brain. Was I betraying Jack? How would he feel knowing I was going on a weekend jaunt with Ethan?

But it wasn't a holiday. It was work. I had to keep that firmly in mind.

So I would have one main goal for the trip: to get a good look at the vault, gather as much intel as possible, and figure out how to break into it.

But a secondary goal was to keep things with Ethan on a strictly professional level. Okay, so, yes, we were headed out of town on a trip together. And yes, we would be posing as a married couple.

That didn't necessarily mean anything inappropriate. Right?

I glanced up at the huge boards with flipping numbers of train platforms and destinations. The air was filled with the smells of french fries from the fast-food stands and warm buttery croissants from the cafés. People in business suits strode by our bench, holding paper-wrapped baguette sandwiches.

We had about fifteen minutes to wait. I reached for the newspaper that rested on the bench beside me and glanced at a headline. In French, it said:

My eyes popped. I scanned the article quickly for more details. It seemed one of the staff from the Louvre was having dinner in a Beaubourg neighborhood bistro and developed a severe allergic reaction because the waiter accidentally served him the wrong kind of soup, a lobster bisque instead of cream of mushroom. It took only one spoonful. He had a known seafood allergy, so he carried an EpiPen, but apparently, it malfunctioned. An ambulance was called, but according to local reports, an unusual clog of traffic prevented the ambulance from getting to him soon enough.

“Holy shit,” I said. “Ethan, look at this.”

His eyes went equally wide at the headline. We read the rest of the page together.

The article made special mention of the fact that this guard was involved in the transport of the Hope Diamond to the Louvre and, in fact, was the last person to touch it before it was installed in the museum display case. Chills went up my arms. The man's dining companion, whose identity was unknown at this point, could not be reached for comment.

According to the article, the instant fear and question on everyone's mind was whether this tragedy had been caused by the Hope Diamond curse.

I looked at the photograph, a grainy image of a middle-aged man with a mustache. Nobody I recognized. I immediately thought of Sophie. What would she think when she caught wind of this?

More importantly, what did I think?

“Think it's a coincidence?” Ethan asked.

I frowned. “It has to be. People die of anaphylactic shock, right?” In itself, it wasn't that weird. It was a tragic set of circumstances, to be sure, but nothing that couldn't have happened to anyone. No, there was no curse. It was not the sort of thing grown-ups believed in.

Right?

Ethan took the newspaper from my hands and stared at it closely. “Curse, maybe not. Suspicious death? Definitely.”

I narrowed my eyes at the page as I gazed at it over his shoulder. He was right. But why would anyone want to kill an off-duty guard? Had he known something?

There was no making sense of it. And a few minutes later we boarded the train. I decided to put the incident out of my mind for now.

We stepped from the romantic, belle epoque aesthetic of the station onto a thoroughly modern train. It was all sleek lines and had a clean, updated interior, complete with huge picture windows and a new train smell. My feet made soft, muffled footfalls on the carpeted interior. My ears vibrated with the sound of air circulating through ventilation fans.

We trundled our way out of Paris and soon began flying through the French countryside. The city views of town houses and monuments gave way to rolling green pastures and old stone farmhouses. Now and then we zoomed past tiny villages, mere clusters of buildings, little more than a market, a tobacco shop, and a bakery.

Ethan gazed out the window. “They'd be beautiful villages to explore,” he said. “A little wine tasting. A few nights in a charming bed-and-breakfast . . .”

I nodded, sighing. “Another lifetime maybe.” I got an immediate visual of taking that kind of trip. With a companion . . . who turned, in my imagination, to gaze at me—and his face looked an awful lot like Ethan's.
Wait.
Shouldn't that be Jack?

I frowned, turning my face to the window to hide my distress.

And then a reminder to pay my Visa bill bleeped on my phone. I was thankful for the distraction. I smiled at this little system I'd developed. I was pretty good these days at staying on top of these things—not traditionally a forte of mine. But I'd made some changes after a disaster last year with the IRS—several years of unpaid back taxes—that almost landed me, à la Capone, in prison.

I pulled up the statement on my iPhone and scanned through it before paying.

Hold up.

Three hundred ninety-eight dollars at Coach? I drew a total blank. I had no memory of buying anything at Coach, certainly not for that amount. I looked at the date, April 13. And the location, Baltimore
.

Huh?
That didn't make sense. I hadn't been to Baltimore anytime recently.

I scanned down. There were several charges made in Baltimore. Including a gas station charge. And . . . a car rental?

Obviously, my card had been compromised. It happened all the time. I fished out my wallet from my purse. The card was still there, exactly where I'd left it. So it hadn't been stolen, just compromised electronically. Which—believe me—was quite easy to do.

The irony of a professional thief being robbed was not lost on me.

But it would be easily fixed. I made a quick call to Visa, informed them of what had happened, and after much waiting and repeating myself, they were satisfied the charges weren't mine.

Good. Problem solved.

We soon arrived in Geneva. On the cab drive from the station to the Freeport—located at the airport—I caught glimpses of the city, elegant and cosmopolitan, clustered around a shining lake with the Alps looming spectacularly in the background.

We checked into a sleek hotel by the airport and got ourselves cleaned up. Well, a bit more than that, because we needed to step up our game beyond merely clean. We dressed in Tory Burch and Ralph Lauren and Gucci. We adorned ourselves with a Tiffany necklace for me, a Rolex for him.

We were in disguise, too, of course. I wore a glossy dark brown wig and makeup that granted me an exotic olive-toned appearance. Ethan instant-colored his hair to a distinguished salt and pepper and inserted dark brown contact lenses to cover those striking green eyes of his.

We needed to look every inch the jet-setting couple, and I had to admit, we did a pretty good job. Ethan came to stand beside me in the mirror to straighten his cuff links, and I applied a final layer of lipstick. I caught a glimpse of the two of us in the bathroom mirror. We cut a good image. Today we were Michael and Veronica Channing.

I thought about the task at hand. Psychotic butterflies were flinging themselves around in my stomach like they were in a mosh pit. I really needed my nerves to hold out. This was not the time for a panic attack. Besides, there was no real danger here. I wasn't trying to steal anything, after all. This was a recon mission only. We needed to get in, tour around, take some surreptitious photographs, observe the locks and security systems, then walk out, all smiles and handshakes.

It's just . . . well, I wondered how they dealt with people who faked their identities, lied, and gained unauthorized access to the Freeport. Likely, the Swiss did not look upon such activity favorably.

I peeked into my clutch purse, catching a glimpse of the tarot card, which I had tucked inside. I snapped it shut and took a deep breath.

We arrived at the Freeport in time for our appointment. Ethan had called ahead to make arrangements, and our passports and documentation had been faxed ahead. Forged passports, I should say.

When we arrived, the security guard seated in the small hut at the front gate checked our passports, comparing them to the ones in his database. He scrutinized us with a serious, blank expression and then pushed a button. The gate lifted with a buzz, and we drove through in our rented black Mercedes.

We walked into the main office through a slick foyer of concrete, glass, and steel.

A man came out to the waiting room to meet us. He was short but had broader shoulders and a stronger build than typical Swiss men, who—like most Europeans—tended toward lean. He wore a gray flannel Oscar de la Renta suit with lapels so sharp you could shave a man's face with them.

“Monsieur et Madame Channing,” he said.
“Bienvenue.”
He introduced himself as Monsieur Claude Gurtmann, and he spoke in French, the predominant language of this part of Switzerland.

He wore a smile that did not reach his eyes; his gaze was formal, searching. His hair was combed so precisely, I suspected he accounted for each and every strand.

This was not going to be quite the cakewalk we were hoping for.

His employers would have hired him specifically to screen out undesirables and allow only the most appropriate clients into the Freeport.

Still, all we needed was a bit of a tour. To see the facility, specifically the vaults. And then we could be gone. We didn't need him to deem us appropriate clients, just to let us have a little peek.

After introductions were made, he led us through to his private office. The austere space appeared as though it had barely been used. Not a paper clip was out of place.

“So what brings you to the Geneva Freeport, Mr. Channing?” he asked in clipped French, his Swiss accent barely perceptible.

“We like the model of the others, like the Singapore Freeport,” Ethan said, “but we believe the Geneva Freeport is the superior choice. Your facility is the best. And we like the best.” He turned to me and put a hand on my knee. “Don't we, darling?”

I smiled at Ethan and turned to look at Monsieur Gurtmann. “We settle for nothing less,” I said.

“What is it, exactly, that you are looking to store in the Geneva Freeport?” he asked.

I blinked. This was not a question I had expected—the whole idea of the Freeport was to have complete privacy.

He smiled and bowed his head. “It is not my intention to pry into your affairs, but what I mean is, do you have particular storage needs? For instance, we have climate-controlled cellars specifically designed for wine storage. And areas optimized for automobiles.”

“Art storage,” Ethan said, “is what we're interested in.”

After interviewing us for a few minutes, Monsieur Gurtmann was apparently satisfied and asked us if we were interested in a tour.

We most definitely were.

Monsieur Gurtmann rose. “Please, I must ask that you leave any electronics here. Phones and the like. They will be quite safe, I assure you.”

My stomach pinched. I'd hoped he wouldn't say this, but it wasn't unanticipated. We had made contingency plans.

As we stood, I retrieved my lipstick, applied a quick touch-up, and tucked the lipstick back in my purse. The fact that this is perfectly acceptable behavior in public, particularly in Europe, is a great advantage for women. Especially for those women whose lipstick tubes happen to contain tiny audio recorders that can be surreptitiously turned on while twisting the tube.

Now our conversation would be recorded, so I could capture all the tidbits I might miss the first time around. It was all part of doing good recon.

The instant we walked through the door, I had begun taking mental notes on the windows, doors, and other escape options. On the guards, the CCTV.

The three of us walked through the first layers of security.

“Do you mind if I take a few notes?” I asked, withdrawing my pen and a tiny notepad. The pen, of course, was a very special Montblanc, fitted with a micro-camera. I hoped this request wasn't odd. I hoped it synced with the Swiss ideal of precision and attention to detail.

“Of course not.”

As we approached the vault doors, I snapped pictures with the Montblanc. I took photographs of the steel bar doors, the keys, the biometric entry pads.