The Hypnotist

by M. J. Rose

  “How do you know that’s the sculpture you want?” Lucian asked.

  Marie Grimshaw held back a gasp. Deborah Mitchell looked up, startled. Tyler Weil clenched his fists.

  “What the fuck?” Talbot asked, his mouth twisted into a mean, angry snarl.

  “There are two identical pieces of that sculpture in the museum. One is the original. The other is an almost perfect copy. And there’s no guarantee which one this is. How do you know the museum didn’t put the copy on display, since it was the copy that was instrumental in recapturing the paintings?”

  “This is the sculpture I want, and you know it.”

  “I don’t, and you can’t. And no one is going tell you which is which unless you take the explosives off those women and get these people out of here.” He gestured to the crowd behind him.

  Talbot looked at Weil. “Is this sculpture the real deal?”

  “It is.”

  “Can you be sure he’s not lying to you?” Lucian asked earnestly. “Don’t you think the director of the museum would lie to you if he could so that you’d take the wrong piece? His priority isn’t these people. He only wants to protect his art,” Lucian said derisively. “I can prove which is the real Hypnos.”

  Weil cursed under his breath.

  Lucian ignored him and continued. “Think about what your boss will do to you if you bring them the wrong sculpture.”

  The terrorist was fully engaged now—angry, confused and focused on Lucian, which was just how the agent wanted it. “Take off the belts.” Lucian gestured at Emeline and the others. “And I’ll tell you if this is the right piece or not.”

  “I’m not bargaining with you,” Talbot said. “I’ll take all of you out if I want to.”

  “It’s a known fact the original has ivory hands and feet. The copy doesn’t, because it’s now illegal to buy ivory.”

  “Is this ivory?” The ringleader reached out and touched the god’s left hand.

  “I don’t know but there’s a simple test we can do to see if it is.”

  “Do it, and fast.”

  “Take off the belts.”

  “I told you, no bargaining.”

  Lucian knew the man was feeling the stress; he could see a flicker of worry in his eyes.

  “To find out if the ivory is real…” Lucian pulled out the lighter that he still carried to prove his willpower was stronger than his desire, and flicked it on. “Take off the belts and I’ll show you how you can tell if this is the original or the fake.”

  Chapter

  SIXTY-SIX

  Marie Grimshaw’s jaw hurt where her captor had slapped her, and her hip throbbed where he’d kicked her. Her heart was beating so hard and so fast she didn’t think it could keep going for much longer. She watched as the FBI agent flicked his lighter and wasn’t sure she could tolerate the flood of tension that rose in her. When the blue-orange flame flared, Nina felt Veronica’s whole body spasm as if the fire had reached out and burned her.

  “What is it, baby?” Nina asked, bending over, whispering in her granddaughter’s ear.

  “What is taking them so long? Where are they?” Veronica groaned.

  “Who, darling? Who?”

  “Hosh. Our sons! The people from the shtetl?”

  Nina shook her head in frustration and looked back at the FBI agent.

  Beside them, Andre Jacobs hung on to Emeline’s arm and she struggled to support him and keep him upright. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he muttered, a fool’s promise, a drunk’s ranting, even as his knees buckled for the third time.

  Samimi’s panic was escalating as he watched the scene play out. Everything had been timed. He needed the men to move Hypnos out of there and get it down to the warehouse before Taghinia met them there. All of Samimi’s plans depended on that small window of time he’d built into the schedule, but they were fast using up every one of those extra seconds, and the way things were going he was going to lose his opportunity. There was nothing to do now but go take over, even though he was supposed to stay in the background. Samimi allowed himself a glance at Deborah. He didn’t want her to see this. Wished there was some way to avoid it. But he knew there wasn’t.

  Her eyes met his. Her terror was so intense it pained him. But he had only minutes to spare. If everything went all right, it wouldn’t matter that he’d exposed himself, and if it didn’t…well, Taghinia would take it out on him anyway, and nothing he did now would make that punishment any more merciful.

  “Where is the other sculpture?” Samimi shouted. “Get it down here immediately. As soon as we see it, we’ll remove the belts.”

  Lucian shouted at Weil. “Do it. Now.”

  Weil looked at Olshling and nodded.

  “I can get it here in ten minutes,” Olshling said.

  “You have three,” Samimi said. He nodded to two of his men. “Go with him.”

  As soon as the men were gone he pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number. “Stand by,” Samimi said to the man on the other end of the phone. “We’ll be ready to move out in five to six minutes.”

  Across the room he felt Deborah’s eyes still on him, but this time he didn’t look.

  Chapter

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  Olshling returned in four minutes and ten seconds wheeling a second sculpture that looked identical to the Hypnos already standing in the center of the room.

  “Which one is real?” Samimi demanded.

  “Take off the belts,” Lucian insisted.

  Samimi nodded to the lead terrorist, who untied the belt around Nina’s waist and then moved on to Veronica.

  Once her granddaughter’s belt was removed, Nina started to pull the little girl away from the podium.

  “I can’t go,” Veronica screamed. “I can’t leave Hosh.”

  “Shut her up,” Samimi’s number-one man shouted.

  “I won’t go!” the child cried.

  “If you don’t shut her up, I will.”

  This was how tragedies happened, Lucian thought as he rushed over and knelt down in front of the child. The tension was too high. He had to get the little girl to calm down. He spoke in a low, desperate whisper. “This time,” he said, not sure how he knew what to say, not caring as long as it made sense to her, “this time you have to leave. You have to go, now. None of what happened before was your fault, do you understand?”

  She was crying, not like a child, but with the dry, choking sobs of an old woman who had no tears left.

  “You couldn’t have saved him. But this time you can save yourself, and your grandmother.”

  Veronica’s mouth relaxed and her eyes softened and she was just a seven-year-old kid, standing there, terrified but turning, moving, pulling at her grandmother’s hands, hurrying to get away from the center of activity.

  As each belt came off each hostage, one of the other terrorists took it and strategically placed it somewhere else in the atrium. One at the base of a Tiffany window. Another around the feet of a bronze sculpture of Diana. They were rigging the room with the explosives.

  Lucian calculated the threat and tried to figure out the intruders’ strategy. How were they planning to escape? How were they going to get the sculpture out of here? And once they were gone, how much time would he and the staff have to empty out the room before the explosives were detonated?

  “We met your demands, now tell us,” Samimi demanded of Lucian after all the belts had been removed and the hostages, no longer isolated at the podium, had returned to the group of other terrified guests. “Which of these two sculptures is the original?”

  “I don’t know, but…” Lucian spoke slowly, trying to buy time and anticipate what their next step was, watching their faces, looking for a sign. “When you burn ivory,” he said, “its surface will go black, but you can wipe the carbon off and the ivory remains unhurt.” He flicked his lighter and held the flame up to the broken thumb on the right hand of one of the statues.

  Tyler Weil didn’t utter a sound or m
ake a move to stop Lucian as a film blackened the god’s finger. A few seconds went by, and then the material started to bubble. An acrid smell filled the air.

  “If that was the real Hypnos, if that was what happens to real ivory—” Lucian pointed to Weil “—he never would have let me do that.”

  Lucian moved a few feet to the left and flicked the lighter again, this time holding the orange-blue flame up to the second statue’s broken right thumb.

  Everyone watched, mesmerized, as the hypnotist’s finger blackened. And then, not thinking about how hot the ivory would be, not caring that he’d burn his skin, Lucian wiped the carbon off.

  Hypnos’s thumb was intact and unharmed. “This is the piece you want,” Lucian said.

  At that moment, almost on cue, Lucian heard the sound of acoustic waves.

  He looked up.

  Hovering over the Charles Engelhard Court of the American Wing was a red-and-white helicopter with the words Sight-SeeNY stenciled on its side in blue. In a city that monitored its airspace so vigilantly, it was absurd that small planes and choppers flying under 1,100 feet weren’t required to file flight plans. But they weren’t, and so dozens of companies flew tourists around the island on sightseeing tours. But none of those companies would have needed an external sling capable of lifting thousands of pounds. There was only one reason such a sling was hanging off this chopper.

  It was a foolproof escape plan. Almost.

  Chapter

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  The west wall of the American Wing faced Central Park and, like the ceiling, was made entirely of glass panes. Dead center were two wide glass emergency doors.

  “Open the doors,” the lead terrorist shouted at Olshling. “Now.”

  The head of security looked over at Lucian for instructions.

  As the agent most closely involved with the Met for the past eight years, Lucian knew the details of all the security systems in place. To open those doors required both a biometric fingerprint scan and retina scan. He felt a kick of something that was almost hope. Now that he knew how the intruders planned on getting away, Lucian didn’t think they planned on detonating the explosives. The goal was to take the sculpture and get away.

  Damn if Lucian was going to let that happen.

  He was going to need Olshling to be listening and thinking, and not just reacting. Normally Lucian would have bet on him. But knowing someone in peacetime didn’t always prepare you for how they would react in war.

  “Do it all, Nick. Everything. Open all the systems. Fast,” Lucian instructed, and then he stepped to the side. He was standing to the left of the sculpture now. On the right, closer to the door, was one of the terrorists—the brutish one who had wheeled the statue down from upstairs was watching Olshling, who was still in front of the glass doors. They were all watching him. Lucian took a half step back. Then another. He was behind Hypnos now. No one was paying attention to him.

  Olshling entered a PIN number and then put his finger on the biometric reader. A red light flashed. Then he looked up. The retina scanner blinked green. A single second later a screaming alarm went off, the ear-shattering noise filling the great hall and overpowering the chopper’s whirring.

  Talbot rushed Olshling, grabbed him around the neck and screamed in his ear. “Shut it off! Shut it off! No tricks, damn you. What the hell are you trying?”

  It took Olshling three seconds to punch in the cancellation code.

  The siren came to a dead halt.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Talbot yelled.

  “Forget it,” Samimi screamed as he shoved the man aside and pushed open the door. “We have to get out of here now. Fast. Move. Everyone out!”

  Behind them, the partygoers who saw the doors open surged forward—they wanted to get out—and fast.

  Three of the terrorists held the crowd back, pushing and shoving the hysterical crowd back out of the way, while the other two ushered Hypnos out and into the net hanging off the extension sling connected to the helicopter, and then all of the men jumped on beside him. The exodus had taken less than forty-five seconds to accomplish.

  As the chopper rose up above the Beaux Arts building, six men and an ancient chryselephantine sculpture swung back and forth above the tree line while, below, the museum’s guests stampeded the doors, desperate to escape the building even though the threat was gone.

  In the mad rush, Jim Rand, one of the Met’s board members, who was holding his wife’s arm, was thrown to the ground. Her hysterical screams for help went unheard. Hitch Oster assisted two elderly women, both in tears, through the door. Not far behind him Marie Grimshaw stumbled and found herself being helped by a stranger. Olshling was caught up in their wake, unable to fight the push of the crowd, and wound up outside. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the chopper and the swaying bounty it carried. He prayed Lucian Glass knew what he was doing.

  Chapter

  SIXTY-NINE

  Less than a quarter of a mile away, west of the Met, deep in the park, the helicopter hovered above a white panel truck parked in the otherwise deserted loading area behind the Belvedere Castle.

  Nassir’s master plan had allowed three-and-a-half minutes for the chopper to lower the sling and for the men to hop off and get the sculpture loaded on the waiting truck. They all made it with fifteen seconds to spare.

  Ali Samimi jumped in beside the driver, who took off, speeding through the park, heading for a secure location just a mile and a half away.

  Above them the aircraft flew off in the opposite direction. To anyone watching from a distance, the delivery, which had been made below the tree line, would have been invisible. Even if the authorities were able to pinpoint the exact location where the chopper hovered, by the time they reached it, the truck would be long gone.

  Glancing at his watch, Samimi cursed the minutes he’d lost inside the Met. There was only a slim chance he’d now have enough time to accomplish his own goal tonight. If nothing else went wrong, he might be okay. But it would be close. He soothed himself with the thought that as good as the police and FBI were, if no one knew what they were looking for, they wouldn’t be able to find it. And no one knew anything about this truck.

  Activating a switch on the dashboard, Samimi listened to the panels on the outside of the van slide forward. A white rig that had no lettering or identification on its side panels when it left the castle’s loading dock was decorated with a bakery’s logo when it exited the transverse.

  With the cookies and milk slats in place, the driver proceeded without incident across town to Seventh Avenue, then south, then west again to Ninth Avenue and then downtown until finally pulling into a warehouse on Twenty-First Street, beating their best practice time by three minutes.

  Earlier that day, Samimi had inspected the site one last time, checking the electronic garage door opener and secreting a shoe box–size parcel, wrapped in plain brown paper, in an out-of-the-way dark corner.

  Now, while the movers opened the truck doors and started to unload the statue, Samimi retrieved his package and, after checking that no one was paying attention to him, unwrapped it and put its contents in his pocket.

  Feeling slightly more secure, he returned his attention to the movers. “Be careful,” he admonished from across the room.

  A few seconds later, he repeated the warning. Based on the glances they shot him, the movers didn’t appreciate his prompts. Finally Larry Talbot, the terrorist who’d led the operation inside the Met and who now had his mask off, let loose. “We got it here in one piece, didn’t we? Back off, Samimi, and let us do our goddamned job.”

  Talbot was right. Samimi knew he was just making it worse, but he was nervous. There was so little time. He needed to get everyone out of here before Taghinia showed up so he could make his phone call and set the final part of the attack in motion.

  “Hurry,” he said, ignoring Talbot’s fury.

  Finally, after minutes that seemed like hours, the men piled back into the truck. Samimi opened the
warehouse doors and watched the van drive out onto the street and into the night. In less than three hours the vehicle would be crushed and compacted in a plant in New Jersey, reduced to nothing more than a rectangle of useless rusted steel and rubber.

  Alone in the warehouse, Samimi looked at his partner in crime. Hypnos sat dead center of the large, otherwise empty space. With the lights of the truck gone, the interior was tomblike. Only one of the dozen fluorescents that hung from the rafters of the old carriage house still worked, casting the sculpture’s long shadow across the wide wood-planked floor and up onto the wall. Turning his back on the treasure that had been at the heart of so much turmoil and death, Samimi pulled out his cell phone and started to punch in the number he’d memorized that would connect him to the office of the director of the New York office of the FBI—

  “Who are you calling?” Farid Taghinia’s voice boomed out as he shut the door behind him and pocketed his set of keys.

  Samimi’s pulse quickened as he spun around. His boss was three minutes early. “You,” Samimi said quickly. Too quickly? “I was calling to tell you everything had worked out and that we were here.”

  “Excellent job.” Taghinia, unlit cigar clamped between his lips, was walking around Hypnos, inspecting it. Reaching out, he touched an ivory hand. “So this is the god of sleep, the brother of the god of death.” He touched a broken foot. “We’re almost done with this unsavory job, and I for one will be happy when this—” he groped for the right word “—this monstrosity is out of here and on his way back to our country.”

  While Taghinia still had his back to him, Samimi had to move fast. “I’m not sure that’s going happen,” he said as he pulled out the Kimber M1911 pistol that he’d secreted away earlier that afternoon.

  “What nonsense are you talking?” Taghinia turned around. The cigar was gone. In his right hand he held a SA Sig Sauer P226. Laughing, he said, “Put the gun down.”