Then waited.
“Karol?”
“All quiet nonstop.”
It was now or never. Although Karol would stop the security guards if they suddenly decided to check why a branch had just come to life, he wouldn’t be able to stall them for long. She started her stopwatch. Experience had taught her that if you haven’t gotten your hands on the goods in fifteen minutes, you’d best forget it and get out of there.
“I’m off,” she said, and in three bounds she had skipped to the recess in the surrounding wall.
The stone wall of the house, which at this point met the garage wall at a right angle, was as easy to climb as a flight of stairs. Bracing her legs, Lisa soon covered the few yards separating her from the second floor. The bedroom window was five feet to the left; luckily some protruding cornices and window ledges made the acrobatics easier, even for someone whose feet were gradually going numb from the cold.
She reached the window ledge and looked into the room. The windowpane was shielding her from a motion sensor as well as a heat sensor. She could feel the heat emanating from inside, a sign that they’d succeeded in warming up the stone residence. She thought about the monstrous heating bill Richmond was sure to have and snorted with laughter.
“What’s up?” asked Zofia, on the alert.
“Nothing. I’m going inside.”
The stopwatch showed two and a half minutes.
13
Life is not like a box of chocolates, thought Hermod, still using the name Jasper Leong, as he sat in the pleasantly warm interior of a luxury black SUV, in this case a Porsche Cayenne. Forrest Gump was wrong. Tom Cochrane was right in that song—life is a highway. But we’re blazing along the wrong way, blindfolded, with our hands chained to the steering wheel and a brick on the accelerator. However hard you try, however you maneuver, you’re going to hit something anyway. The only question is whether it’s a cement barrier, a Mini Cooper, or an eighteen-wheel logging truck.
“I bet it’s the eighteen-wheeler,” he said to himself in his native tongue.
Hermod’s Porsche was parked where it wouldn’t attract attention—in the driveway of a luxury residence on Hamilton Avenue, Rochelle Heights. The owners had an identical car, so nobody would notice the black SUV parked in the driveway of the Torrance family, now enjoying the sun on Maui.
So Hermod calmly sat behind tinted glass, holding up a telephoto lens equipped with night vision and watching a nimble, supple woman as she climbed up the wall of Richmond’s residence.
It’s great when everything goes to plan, he thought as he watched Ronia fiddling with an upstairs window.
14
Zofia had never been into extreme sports, was a cautious skier, swam in the sea only in shallow areas, and avoided horror films. And she had always earned her living as a civil servant in the public sector. Never before had she felt such tension, and she’d never have expected the sensation to be so visceral. She could feel the blood throbbing in her ears, her hands and feet going numb, and a strange quivering in her muscles.
On the computer screen she could see the image transmitted by the camera beside Lisa’s ear: a windowpane, in which the Swede’s face and bare breast were foggily reflected; the window frame; and the tip of a small drill, which Lisa was using to make a hole in the casing. Fine slivers of slate were gathering on the window ledge. The drill disappeared, and a moment later a small hand with absurdly red fingernails cautiously introduced a black cable into the hole.
“Are you sure the sensor won’t be onto that?” she whispered to Anatol, her voice shaky.
“Too small an object. Moving too slowly. No chance.”
Lisa was working the controls of a borescope. Zofia knew that apart from a camera there was a laser pointer in the cable. She had been shocked to learn that it was enough to neutralize a motion sensor in a residence filled with Impressionist paintings worth well over ten million dollars, not to mention the Raphael.
She shuddered when a light at the end of the street suddenly went out, then began to flicker. She thought it was a bad sign. The world’s way of telling them they were disturbing its order and had to stop.
“What’s the temperature inside?” Lisa asked.
“Ninety-four point one,” replied Anatol, looking at the control panel.
“My body temperature feels way cooler than that. Damn winter. Well, here comes the moment of truth.”
15
It’s not easy to fool a heat sensor. The device detects any large-enough object that appears in its field of vision; just a hand at a temperature different from its surroundings is enough to set it off. Thirty degrees warmer than room temperature, a human body usually sets off the alarm immediately. Clothing is of no help, nor—as Lisa had once tested—is a special diver’s wetsuit. Underwater it provides perfect protection from the cold, but on the surface it heats up in a flash and shines out on an infrared camera like a neon motel sign.
Just like with the motion sensors, here too was a simple solution—glass. It works as such a great insulator that anything behind a plate of glass is undetectable to the sensors. Lisa had specially made some immobilizers for the heat sensors—they looked like little model tarantulas, with abdomens made of glass and legs made of bent metal tubes. The only catch was that to place one of these little spiders on a sensor, you had to get close to it.
And that was why Lisa was parading about in the nude in New York State on a cold night—if she wanted to be invisible to the sensors, she had to create a situation where her body and its surroundings were at the same temperature. In the room behind the windowpane it was now ninety-four degrees, as she could plainly feel through the glass, which was warm, with hot air blasting out of the hole she’d drilled. Whereas chilled outside in the nude, her body must have been at about ninety-five degrees, so she should be able to approach the sensors without being noticed.
Lisa picked the lock, opened the window, and quickly slipped inside, being careful not to turn her backpack toward the sensor—the device might recognize it as a disruption. She stood on a soft, fluffy carpet and closed the window. Then she stared into the eyes of the alarm system.
“I’m inside. Karol?”
“You’re all right.”
She glanced at her watch. Eight minutes had passed. A long time.
Without turning around, she took a spider out of her backpack and slowly walked toward the sensor. She didn’t want to waste any time; it was as hot as hell in the bedroom, and she was afraid she’d start to overheat and become hotter than the air temperature, setting off the alarm. She went up to the device, careful not to cross the laser beam blocking the motion sensor, and stuck the glass spider to the wall.
“OK, moving on,” she said.
16
“Did it work?” Zofia asked Anatol, who was hovering over her shoulder.
“If not, we’d have heard the patter of paramilitary boots by now.”
Through Lisa’s third eye, they watched her movements. She opened a door into the hallway that had caused problems during the planning phase because on one side it opened onto a living room two stories high, and as a result there were three motion sensors and three heat sensors mounted in there, including one set at second-floor level and two at ground-floor level. First she set up three laser pointers on miniature stands, then she placed a spider on the sensor in the corridor. There was nothing she could do to the ones downstairs; she just had to march past them and hope they’d be too stupefied by the tropical conditions to notice.
Lisa got moving.
“Something’s not right,” said Zofia, after turning down the microphone so Lisa and Karol couldn’t hear.
“What exactly?”
“I’m feeling such awful anxiety that I can hardly breathe, as if I’ve overlooked something.”
“Like what?”
“Something earlier on. As if I’d failed to notice something simple at the start, when we were still in Poland.”
“Could it be stress?”
> “That too, but not only.”
“Zofia, this could be important,” said Anatol, laying a hand on her shoulder. “Has it been on your mind since this morning or did it just come up? Perhaps you saw something?”
Good question.
She looked up from the monitor. The broken streetlight continued to flicker outside.
It was dark inside Richmond’s house, but thanks to Lisa’s camera, they could see the gray hallway quite clearly, and a black passage leading to the art collection. With every step Lisa took the passage grew, until finally the outline of the patriotic painting by Hassam appeared, hanging opposite a door. There were patches in various shades of gray; with some difficulty she made out the shape of a star-spangled banner, and felt as if she were looking at a reproduction in a catalogue—black-and-white, flat and fuzzy.
She closed her eyes. The bad premonition was still bothering her.
“Zofia, it could be really important,” Anatol repeated.
“You’re not helping,” she snapped, and he removed his hand from her shoulder.
“Something’s not right,” they heard Karol say.
17
Karol’s task wasn’t difficult. He was supposed to keep any security patrol from appearing in the vicinity of Richmond’s villa during the robbery. On their first round, the patrol might head for the other side of the estate, through Orchard Place toward The Boulevard; that would mean a good twenty minutes before they reached The Serpentine, close to the team’s residence and Richmond’s house.
In a less optimistic scenario the patrol would head in their direction. At that point Karol would give the signal for Anatol to set off a small explosive charge in a residence on Manor Place. Small enough to break a window, set off an alarm, and buy them some time.
In the worst-case scenario some of the security guards would keep coming. Then Karol would stop them with a story about how he suffered from anxiety and couldn’t sleep. About how he always had to take late-night walks in the fresh air to calm himself down.
Finally the patrol emerged from their hut, and two guards set off at a slow pace in his direction. According to the plan, Karol was supposed to say “Fire away,” but instead he’d said that something wasn’t right.
“Fire away,” he whispered now.
The men had taken a few more paces toward the bush where he was hiding, when the door of their hut suddenly opened.
“Ding!” shouted a man in uniform. “Get over to 11 Manor; the alarm’s going off.”
Domingo Chavez turned on his heel, saluted casually, and then he and his partner went the opposite way.
“OK,” whispered Karol. “They’ve gone the other way.”
“Now tell us what’s not right.”
“It’s the same patrol as earlier. The same people. Normally they’re off by now. But that Chavez guy is still here with his pal, and they’re out on patrol. I don’t get it.”
An awkward, tense silence filled the ether. Just then Lisa spoke.
“Something’s not right here,” she said.
18
The contrast between the intense but essentially pleasant chill outside and the blazing heat inside Richmond’s house was appalling. Lisa was sweating like a pig, with drops of perspiration running down her body and soaking into the carpet; she had never felt as naked as she did now—she’d have killed to dry herself off.
The passage separating her from the Hassam and the Raphael was more like a gallery than a hallway. On the right side were three doors, leading into two bedrooms and a bathroom. On the left she was separated from the living room and the motion sensors in there by a latticed balustrade that gave no protection. She covered the distance close to the wall with her front facing the living room, so the sensors wouldn’t detect her backpack, though this was unnecessary now as the pack was just as hot as everything else.
There were no lights on in the house, but there was enough light from outside to give her a precise view of all the items that made up the expensive decor. Just as before, it made her wonder why a connoisseur of art, who hunted down Impressionists at American auctions, kept such hideous decorations in his nice living room, including some reproduction oil paintings of vases and apples, hung between a bear’s head and a rack of moose antlers. With her next step the streetlight reflected in the bear’s glass eyes, and she shuddered, feeling as if the stuffed animal were watching her. Calm down, she whispered to herself in Swedish. You’re being paranoid.
As she glided across the floor, only the murmur of hot water in the radiators could be heard, making her soft footsteps totally inaudible.
She reached the end of the hallway and took a close look at the door frame; the fact that the door to the strong room housing the expensive art collection was open seemed suspicious. And her instinct was right. The space between the hallway and “Hassam’s bedroom” was no ordinary doorway. In fact there was no door there at all. There were three subtle tracks the same color as the walls—that was why she hadn’t seen them through the cameras. She carefully lit up the ceiling with her headlamp and saw what was meant to slide into those tracks. The first shield, on the hallway side, was a thin plate that looked exactly like the walls next to it and served to camouflage Hassam and the rest. The second was a thick steel barrier, in other words a fireproof, burglar-proof fence. If the strong room was designed properly, the paintings should be able to survive intact, even if the rest of the property burned to the ground. The third screen that could be hidden inside or lowered from the ceiling was a sheet of glass, which let in a little daylight without blocking the view, while at the same time insulating the art collection against fluctuations in temperature and moisture, guaranteeing it ideal conditions.
The only question: Why were none of these barriers down?
“Something’s not right here,” she said again.
Twenty minutes had passed since she’d left her safe shelter behind the beech tree.
19
Zofia and Anatol listened as Lisa explained what she’d found and why she hadn’t gone in.
“Maybe he only closes it when there are guests in the house,” said Anatol. “He’s afraid of random individuals, inquisitive glances, changes in usual temperature and moisture. But when he’s not there, the house is secured, and there’s a steady temperature inside.”
“As long as nobody breaks in and turns it into the Amazon,” added Zofia.
“Perhaps he forgot. Or maybe he leaves it open so he can take the occasional look at his painting through the camera. There are no cameras inside the strong room, so that’s the only way he could see that it’s all working.”
“That would fit. Collectors are screwballs. When they want to gawk at a painting, nothing else matters.”
“Perhaps,” said Lisa. “Or maybe it’s a trap.”
Anatol groaned.
“No paranoia,” he said. “For now, everything’s going to plan. If the Young Man really is in there, grab him and get out—we can amuse ourselves with conspiracy theories on the way back to Poland. Chop, chop!”
20
Zofia’s bad feeling could have just been the hysteria of a person who had never been in this sort of situation before. The same could be said for Karol. The fact that the security guards had swapped shifts might be nothing, and Richmond could just have forgotten to lock the strong room.
However, Anatol had experience in combat conditions, and his intuition was telling him that something wasn’t right. He quickly checked their surroundings.
Lisa’s camera showed nothing but peace and quiet inside Richmond’s residence.
The security guards had gone to check the window three blocks down. OK.
The working cameras installed in the windows of the house they’d rented showed all was quiet.
The whole neighborhood was sleeping the deep, peaceful sleep of wealthy people who have grown rich at someone else’s expense. All quiet.
There was just that broken light blinking in the background.
Neverthele
ss, his anxiety was growing.
He checked everything once again.
Then went numb. He stared at the flickering light as if spellbound, because its blinking was repeating a pattern. On impulse he started to translate the flashes into Morse code. T, A, B, O, R, T, A, B, O, R, T . . . Tabor? It made no sense—he must be going crazy.
And then he understood. Not TABOR, but ABORT, one of the basic NATO orders.
He reached for the phone, hoping it wasn’t too late.
21
Chop, chop, get the hell out, screw you, thought Lisa, and wiped the sweat from her brow—it was dripping into her eyes, stinging them and obstructing her view. In one hand she held a small dental mirror, and in the other an LED flashlight; regardless of Anatol’s insistence, she preferred to look inside before entering. She stood between the tracks, watching out in case the steel barrier came crashing down, but nothing happened.
She held the mirror inside and set about examining the walls, ceilings and corners, to check for any extra sensors. After careful inspection of the strong room, which was not much more than two hundred square feet, she realized that all the security devices were probably behind her. She put the mirror away in her backpack and took out a small black box. This was her secret weapon, which she’d first tested several years ago, consisting of a high-powered battery and a magnetron from a microwave oven. The device could spew out waves at a frequency of 2.45 gigahertz in about fifteen seconds. Exactly the kind that can rapidly set water particles in motion to heat up food, or stun electronic security systems. She was hoping it would be enough to block the mechanism for hiding Richmond’s treasures behind the walls of the strong room.
She took a deep breath and went inside.
“I’m in,” she told them.
22
There was no time for sophisticated strategies. Anatol handed Zofia the phone with 911 already dialed.
“Say your name is Nicole Arundel, you live at 18 The Serpentine, you’re at home with your small daughter, and you’re hiding in the closet, because there are some men with guns downstairs, then hang up.”
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