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“I look in. And there is a man—he has broken open the window. And he leaps out the window!”
Loskutnikhov frowned. “Surely he has a rope in hand? Or does he simply fall to his death?”
“No, not at all—he goes up!” she said.
“Up,” Loskutnikhov said. “You are certain?”
“I saw his feet disappear—at the top of the window. And then he was gone,” Anna said. “Gone up.”
“Thank you, miss,” Loskutnikhov said. He stepped around her and into Room 302, toward the window, where a drape was blowing in the breeze. He could smell the salt air—the Neva River, flowing to the nearby Baltic, was very close, just across the square and on the other side of the Winter Palace.
“Chief!” Ludmila called. “I need to see if anything is missing or damaged.”
“Yes, of course,” the chief said, and Ludmila scurried past him and into the room.
Chief Loskutnikhov followed in her wake. But halfway to the now-open window he paused. A pile of rumpled clothing lay scattered on the floor. It was a dingy, off-white color but seemed to be of decent make. “What is this?” Loskutnikhov said over his shoulder.
One of the guards hurried to his side. “It is a suit, Chief,” he said. “It was here when we arrived—we have not touched it.”
“Hmp,” Loskutnikhov muttered. He nudged the clothing with his foot, revealing some kind of padding buried in the heap, the kind an actor might wear to look fatter. The surveillance cameras would reveal how it had come to be there, but he was quite sure what it meant. “A disguise,” he said. He shook his head and continued on to the window.
There was nothing to see there. Large shards of glass littered the floor below it, but the window frame itself was free of them. Someone could easily have made an exit here, without risk of a cut from the broken glass. But then what? Loskutnikhov stuck his head out. He looked down. No broken body lay beneath the window. Only the usual colorful summer crowd moving across the Palace Square.
He looked up. There was nothing to see there, either. There were no hanging ropes, no sign of anything that might aid someone climbing to the roof. If the man had truly gone up, as the tour guide claimed, he had to be part spider.
“Chief!” Ludmila called from inside the room. He turned and saw her standing beside an empty display case, a look of shock on her face. “It is gone,” she said. “The Rothschild Fabergé Egg is gone.”
2
I don’t get political. I’ve got enough problems, and honestly? Politics is just too dirty, mean, and corrupt. Give me nice, clean thievery with an occasional hit on some overprivileged asshole who gets in my way. It’s a whole lot more honest, even the hit. Which is mostly on the kind of asshat who thinks a pile of inherited money makes him immune to the shit the rest of us have to slog through every day. I admit it, I like showing them just how wrong they are. And that’s me, anyhow—Riley Hood. Steal from the rotten rich and give to the formerly poor, meaning Me. Politics doesn’t fit in that picture, and so it doesn’t matter.
But every now and then something breaks through my wall of I-don’t-give-a-shit and gets my attention. Like recently; I usually don’t watch the news, but when the level of public hysteria starts to hit all the high notes for a long enough time so it’s all anybody is talking about, I figure I better tune in. It could mean money—losing it—if I don’t know what’s up, or making some if I can figure an angle.
So when the noise on something specific hits a certain level of manic frenzy, I pay attention. I mean, I walk into a bakery and hear the same shit I heard at the hardware store. I go to the cleaner’s and they’re talking the same smack I heard at the barber’s. If every jukebox is playing the same song everywhere I go, I have to figure it’s a number one hit and I need to learn the words.
And that’s what had happened for the past six months. Everywhere I went, same angry crap. Everybody talking, arguing, even fighting about the same thing.
So I paid attention, I did a little research, and let’s just say I was pissed off at Russia right now. If you know me at all, you know I’m a firm believer in the old saying—I think it’s from Shakespeare? Maybe the Bible? It’s the one that says, “Don’t get mad. Get even.”
Since I was bored anyway, I went to St. Petersburg, and I got even. With an absolute eye-knocker of an old Russian bauble. They were proud of it, too—like on the national-treasure level—which made it even more ideal. And to be
honest, a lot more fun. Po’shyol ’na hui, Ivan. Fuck you.
I spent a week coming up with a plan. It looked like a very nice scheme, practically a cakewalk all the way through. I even had a private buyer lined up, which sweetened the deal. I usually take short money and sell back to the insurance company. It’s safer, more certain, and for me it’s not about the money—I mean, as long as there’s enough to keep me in beans and beer. But this time, if I sold the egg to the insurance company, that meant the Russians would get it back, and like I said, I was pissed off at them. I wanted to sting them, make them lose their pretty little treasure.
So I had a private buyer, and I’ll just say that if it had been about the money, this guy would have been my new best friend. It’s amazing how much somebody will pay for one of those eggs. I mean, sure, they’re gorgeous, covered with jewels, have a cool history, all that. And let’s face it, a true collector gets a hard-on when he has something that special—especially when his other collector buddies can never have it.
This guy was a true collector. What he was paying me was enough to buy two of these Fabergé eggs at auction. And I barely worked up a sweat. It went like a Swiss watch all the way through, which was only a little ironic, since this particular Fabergé egg was partly a clock. Anyway, it was all good. That worried me a little; when things go well, that always means something really bad is sneaking up behind you. But it kept unrolling perfectly, so I took a deep breath and shut out the nagging little voice that said something terrible was going to happen.
I should’ve listened.
No problem at all putting the guard on his ass and setting off the first alarm, which would distract the Russians and cover the second alarm when I took the egg. It was an old trick, but the Russians went for it, I got the egg and made it up to the roof without a hitch.
So I was feeling pretty good about myself when I slid down from the rooftop of the Winter Palace and out onto the pier that’s across the street. I had a boat waiting. It was a forty-footer, built for the hideous weather they get up there in the Baltic. The engines were running, and there was a guy at the wheel, Arvid, who knew his stuff. And I knew him. I’d used him on a couple of jobs before this one. Arvid was Swedish. His father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and who the hell knows how many more great-greats had all been fishermen in the Baltic and North Atlantic. They knew the waters and the weather the way only old-world craftsmen can know their turf. And it turns out that part of the turf when you’re a Swedish fisherman can also mean being a smuggler now and then.
Totally understandable. Fishing for a living is very dicey. The fish come and go, the weather works overtime to screw you, and market prices are never in your favor. So for more generations than I can count, Arvid’s family had been bringing things across the Baltic without paying a whole lot of attention to technical formalities like import duties and taxes. Wine, brandy, silk, English wool, whatever people wanted and thought they paid too much for. It was all supply and demand, a pure lesson in market economics. And for the last two generations, that meant drugs, too. The money was too good to ignore.
It also made the enforcement get more serious. And that meant Arvid’s family boat was fast. It had to be to outrun the assorted national and international patrols. The boat looked like a beat-up old trawler—grease stains, fish blood, nets hanging off the side, old-fashioned round portholes—but Arvid had put a couple of great big brutish diesel engines in it and modified the hull, and he could outrun just about anything the cops had.
