Now the other seven books – these had possibilities. After a brief look he locked them in the vault for safekeeping.
Chapter Five
There were a dozen important projects on Brian’s plate so he delegated the valuation of the seven volumes to his assistant Collette Conning. Brian felt fortunate to have her – she had been with the gallery when its previous owner, Darius Nazir, first invited Brian to Manhattan. At that time Brian was a Dallas stockbroker responding to a proposal that been sent to his firm. Nazir was seeking to raise money through a public offering of stock. That New York meeting led to an unusual set of events, the mysterious death of Darius Nazir and a fortuitous bequest that caused Brian to become owner of Bijan Rarities.
Much had happened in Brian’s five years at the helm and Collette had been a big part of it all. She was like a rock, steady and strong even when she was seriously injured in an attempted robbery at the gallery just over a year ago. As soon as she recovered, she was back at her job. Brian Sadler had depended on Collette even more when he had opened the London branch of Bijan. It was due entirely to Collette’s presence that he was able to be out of the office more often, either at the London gallery or in the field looking for artifacts.
It was Collette who took the phone call late the afternoon before that fateful event.
The caller asked for the senior person present, confirmed who she was then said, “This is the Archdiocese of New York. Please hold for the Archbishop.”
As a practicing Catholic, Collette involuntarily straightened in her chair and fixed her hair as she waited for New York’s senior cleric to come on the line.
“Good afternoon, Miss Conning. I have an inquiry to make, about a particular item I think is in the possession of your gallery. I read with interest the article in the Times about the ancient manuscripts that were found in Nova Scotia a few months back. Does Bijan Rarities have them now?”
She confirmed they were in the gallery. Seven of them were locked safely in the vault and the eighth, the scrappy book about the Templars, was tossed aside on Brian’s office worktable. She told the Archbishop all this without thinking. Then she paused. I’m acting like a schoolgirl. He doesn’t want to know all this information. He just wants to know about the bibles, I bet.
“Very good, Miss Conning. I’d like to send a representative from the Church to take a look at the Templar manuscript. He’ll be a Jesuit – I’m not certain which one I’m sending yet so I can’t give you a name. Would tomorrow around 12:45 be a good time? He won’t be long – he just wants to see the condition of the volume and look at the title page. He’s doing research for me and this volume might help us. If it’s what it purports to be we may be interested in making an offer.”
“Of course, Your Excellency. Tell him to ask for me please.”
“God bless you, Miss Conning. Thanks for your help.”
Her heart was pounding as the call ended. This was the most important person she had ever spoken with, and she would remember this call for the rest of her life.
Sadly on both counts, the caller wasn’t the most important person she had ever spoken with. And the rest of her life turned out to be very short indeed for Collette Conning.
Chapter Six
After the explosion Brian rushed out of the Fox studios and gave a fleeting thought to hailing a cab. He had less than eight blocks to go and quickly determined walking, running actually, was fastest. It was much faster this time of day in midtown Manhattan.
He dodged traffic as he jaywalked across 47th Street and ran east toward Fifth Avenue. Turning north on the famous street and looking ahead, Brian saw emergency lights flashing from a dozen vehicles – police cars, fire trucks and a couple of ambulances. Policemen were setting up barricades a few blocks in front of him. He ran east across Fifth then north past Saks Fifth Avenue. All of Saks’ massive front windows were blown out from the blast’s concussion. Glass shards littered the sidewalk and he crunched over them. He passed St. Patrick’s Cathedral and glanced at a priest standing on the front steps looking north.
The devastation ahead of him was mind-boggling. Where his gallery had been there was a gaping black hole. The façade of his building had been blown away at ground level and two stories above. Above street level, jagged girders and the interiors of offices were exposed to the elements. Bodies lay strewn on the streets. A half dozen cars and trucks that had been passing in front of the gallery were tossed like toys to the other side of the avenue, stacked on their sides against buildings as though a tornado had blown through. The smell of gasoline and a nasty stench carried south on the breeze to where Brian stood. He knew what the steely odor was but his mind went into shutdown mode. It didn’t let him deal with that reality.
How could anyone have survived this? How could Collette…could she be alive?
In shock and lightheaded, Brian kept walking north, closer and closer to the massive, almost unbelievable destruction. By the time he reached 54th Street, not far from what had been Bijan Rarities, there was so much debris on the sidewalk that he was forced to stop. Traffic was still crawling along on 54th and he absently walked directly in front of a cab, oblivious to its presence. In typical fashion the cabbie honked and waved a derogatory finger at him. “What the hell you doing?” he screamed in broken English at Brian as the taxi snaked its way through. Brian ignored him, looking only ahead at the devastation.
Hands roughly grabbed his arms from behind. “Hey, buddy. Where do you think you’re going?”
Brian turned and looked blankly at one of New York’s finest. Absently he said, “That’s my gallery. I own that place. People in there work for me. That’s where I work too.”
The policeman immediately sensed that Brian was in shock. “Okay. You need to let me take you over here where you won’t get hurt. We don’t know what else may happen here and there’s a lot of stuff on the street.” The cop took Brian’s arm and guided him to the west side of Fifth Avenue where a group of men were standing on the curb talking. One of them, dressed in a dark suit and tie, saw the cop approaching.
“Detective, this guy says he owns the place that was bombed.”
Brian muttered quietly to himself. “Bombed. Bombed. That’s just crazy.” His words were slurred and suddenly his head lolled back. He began to fall to the pavement.
“Hold on! Hold on, buddy,” the policeman shouted, glad he still had a grip on Brian’s arm. He lowered Brian to the sidewalk and leaned him against a pole. “I think he’s in shock, Detective. Not too surprising, I guess. I figure I would be too.”
When Brian awoke a few minutes later a paramedic was kneeling in front of him holding an ampule of ammonia under Brian’s nose. The pungent odor jolted him back into reality.
“What…what happened?”
“Just take it easy, sir. You’re in shock and you passed out. The officer had your arm or you’d have fallen.”
It took a moment for Brian to recall what was going on around him. Sirens wailed in the distance as additional help headed toward the site. Across the street and up a block he saw the huge hole that now occupied the place where his entire storefront had been. Everything was destroyed. He had no idea how anyone or anything inside the gallery could have survived. And although he knew vaguely he should be more attuned to what was going on, he couldn’t pull thoughts together in his head.
“What happened?” Brian made an effort to stand up.
The detective gave Brian a hand. “Let’s get some ID, sir, and confirm who you are before we talk. Sorry to put you through this right now but in this situation we have to be sure everything is what it appears to be.”
Within minutes Brian had produced his driver license and a business card identifying him as the CEO of Bijan Rarities with his Fifth Avenue address a block away. His mind was beginning to clear and he said, “Was this a terrorist bombing?”
Immediately wary, the detective shot back, “Why would you say that, Mr. Sadler?”
“Because the first thing I thought of w
hen I saw the destruction was 9/11.”
“That’s a fair statement. I’ll admit I thought of 9/11 too.” The detective glanced up Fifth Avenue and watched a forklift unloading large concrete barricades off a semi-trailer. Until they knew more about what had happened today and why, Fifth Avenue would be blocked, ensuring a second truck bomber wouldn’t be successful, at least in the same place.
“OK, Mr. Sadler. Let me get a few basics from you. Where were you at one pm?”
After Brian’s response the detective made one quick call and confirmed Brian’s airtight alibi. He had been on live television at the time of the bombing. Next he asked Brian who likely was inside the gallery and took notes as Brian talked.
Other than Collette, Brian hadn’t thought about who might be inside. The shock he experienced had dulled his mind and kept him from considering the terrible possibilities.
“Uh, at the very least my assistant Collette Conning and our security guard were there. There could have been others.” Suddenly he felt panic overcoming him. He began to shout to workers across the street. “Have you found anyone? Is Collette OK? Help her! God, help her!” He grabbed the pole next to him, suddenly lightheaded again.
The detective grabbed his arm to steady him. “Mr. Sadler, try to stay calm. The FBI is doing the initial check and with the extent of the damage it may be awhile. There’s no need to panic until we know something more. I promise I’ll let you know as soon as I find out anything about your staff. Now let’s think about something else. What kind of security systems do you have in place?”
“I have cameras! We can check the cameras!” Brian hadn’t thought of that either but it could be the key to finding out what had happened just prior to the bombing.
The detective looked up, speaking calmly in order to soothe Sadler. “I was betting you had security cameras. Now I hope you’re going to tell me the data’s stored offsite. If your server’s in there”…he pointed at the gallery…”we probably won’t have anything to look at.”
“No, it’s offsite. Everything feeds to a server housed at 41st and Lex.”
“That may be the only good news today. Can you call the service and get the ball rolling on producing those videos?”
By seven pm, when the full effect of what had happened hit Brian Sadler, he was at home in his apartment. Nicole had checked on him several times during the day. His parents had too.
Around three pm the Special Agent-in-Charge of the FBI in New York had called Brian’s cellphone, giving him a grim report – there were no survivors in the wreckage that had been Bijan Rarities. The remains of eleven people had been removed from the smoking rubble on Fifth Avenue. Seven people had died in the second and third floor offices above Bijan. The other four were in the gallery itself. Only three were intact. The fourth was the driver – parts of his body had been recovered from the truck’s cab. Although none of the deceased had yet been identified, Brian counted in his mind. Collette. The guard. The driver. One more, probably a customer. He dropped his head into his hands and sobbed uncontrollably. What the hell is going on? Why did they target me?
Brian talked to Nicole as a news report, broadcast from the same Fox studio where he himself sat only six hours earlier, flickered on the screen in the background.
Tears flowed as he talked to his girlfriend. “Nicole, it’s all gone. It’s all gone. My people, my customers, my gallery. It’s all gone. For what? What’s this all about?”
Brian had asked the same questions all afternoon, first to himself, then the authorities, now to Nicole when they finally had gotten time to talk.
“Sweetie, they’ll figure it out. I know you’ve been through a lot. Did you hear from Harry?” She tried to get his mind off the stark reality of the loss of two employees. She knew how much he would miss Collette, a trusted friend and valuable asset to the business.
“Yes, he called earlier.” William Henry Harrison IV, the President of the United States, had been Brian’s college roommate. Harry had called to offer his condolences; he told Brian he had spoken personally to the FBI director to ensure expeditious handling of this case.
Chapter Seven
Despite the urgency of the situation it took over twenty-four hours for the security monitoring service to retrieve all the footage, edit it into readable format and courier a CD to the FBI. Once it was ready the Special Agent-in-Charge asked Brian to come downtown and view the footage.
The agency sent a car to bring Brian to 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan. The loss Brian had suffered was beginning to take its toll; he was staying mostly in his apartment on the Upper West Side and found himself weeping profusely without warning on a regular basis. He figured he shouldn’t be surprised – Nicole had warned him yesterday that healing could take days, maybe months.
In a small conference room at FBI headquarters the Special Agent-in-Charge, Jack Underwood, and another agent were waiting. A laptop sat on the table, ready to display onto a large wall-mounted screen.
Agent Underwood began. “We have the data from all your cameras from the time the store opened at 10 am to the end of the day or when they stopped recording, which of course includes the blast. Have you viewed data from your cameras before, Mr. Sadler? Are you familiar with how to navigate the data?”
Brian confirmed he was so he took the chair in front of the laptop. Accessing the CD the security company had provided, he scrolled through the cameras by number. There were six – he knew their numbers from memory.
“I think we should look at the primary camera in the showroom first,” Brian said. “It’s motion-activated and has about a 200 degree panorama. Three other cameras are fixed on various parts of the gallery and two are outside. After this one we can go wherever you want.” He felt reasonably good at this point. He was interested to see what happened but knew the footage could hit him hard, depending on what had gone on at the gallery.
They watched Brian enter the showroom at 8:37 am followed by Collette Conning at 9:31 and the guard promptly at ten. No customers arrived until 11:31 am when a man dressed in a suit and tie was admitted. The guard dutifully checked his name off a sheet on a clipboard.
“Pause for a sec,” Underwood said. “The guard was expecting your customer, from what I see here. Is that normal?”
“Yes. Our front door is always locked. Given the rarity and value of our items, walk-in traffic is discouraged. A sign on our door says, well I guess I should say said, that we operate by appointment only. People make appointments and Collette gives the information to the guard. He knows who to expect and marks their names off a sheet when they arrive.”
Underwood turned to the other agent, “Make a note. See if we can retrieve any information off the backup of Bijan’s computer system about the appointments the customers made for the day of the bombing.”
“We back up automatically every night,” Brian commented. “I think we can get access to Collette’s information. Presuming the customers made appointments the day before, that is. If it was the same day as the bombing then it won’t work unless by some miracle her hard drive still exists.”
Brian restarted the video. Collette situated the customer in a small consultation room and brought in two old vases for his examination. Then she went to her desk at the rear of the showroom.
At 12:45 pm the guard admitted a priest dressed in the black robes and hat of a Jesuit. He dutifully made a mark on his clipboard. Obviously the priest also was expected.
The priest walked to Collette’s desk. She stood and greeted him and he sat. They spoke for a moment then she gestured to a display counter to her left. The priest walked to the counter and Collette went down a hall that was out of range for the camera they were viewing.
“I think she’s going to the vault,” Brian said as the footage continued to run. “We can look at another camera to figure that out.”
In a moment Collette reappeared carrying a manuscript on a tray. As she walked almost directly under the camera Brian stopped the video. Using the arrows o
n the keyboard and a function key, he zeroed in on the object on the tray.
“What the hell…”
“What is it, Mr. Sadler? What’s that old book?”
“She wasn’t going to the vault. I figured she was going for one of the old bibles we have locked up. That priest actually was interested in something that was in my office. We recently got eight old manuscripts from a client for valuation. Seven of them are likely very rare – they’re in the vault. The eighth is the one she’s carrying. It’s a ratty book that I think has no value. It’s part of a set, the rest of which is missing, and it’s in extremely poor condition. It was just thrown on a table in my office. Why did the priest want to see that particular book?”
“I want to come back to that. For now let’s keep going.”
Brian restarted the feed and they watched Collette put the tray on the counter in front of the priest. She donned cotton gloves as the priest glanced at his watch, then pressed a button on it.
“Stop the video!” Agent Underwood said abruptly. “What’s he doing?”
Brian rewound then put the feed on slow mode. The frames crept along. Collette spoke to the priest, put on the gloves then looked in his face as the priest raised his left hand, checked his watch then moved his right hand to his left wrist. The Special Agent motioned for Brian to stop the video.
“Look at the time on the video feed. It’s exactly 1 pm. Looks like an alarm went off on his watch. He looked at the time, said something then hit the button to silence it. Is that what it looks like to you?”
Brian and the agent agreed.
Underwood made a note on a legal pad. “Let’s continue.”
Collette opened one worn page of the book, then another. The priest absently looked at them. He appeared to be disinterested. Odd for a man who had made an appointment to see the book she was showing him.
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