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Monique sorted through the many boxes of bullets. Each one had a bunch of numbers printed on the side—but the pistol did not. How was she supposed to know which ones to use? So she tried a bullet from each box until she found some that fit, in a box that read “.357” on the side. She was relieved that the number was small—she was pretty sure that meant the pistol was not as lethal as one with a bigger number. She loaded the pistol and, feeling a little foolish, stuck it into the waistband of her slacks.
Monique kept the pistol with her for the next three days. She even got used to the weight of it on her hip. And surprisingly enough, she relaxed. She pulled books from the shelf and read. She listened to music. And she found a couple of notebooks and some pencils, and she spent much of her time drawing. Sometimes she sat outside and sketched trees, birds, and flowers. And sometimes she sat at the heavy wooden table inside and just drew shapes, letting her pencil go wherever her subconscious told it to go. It was therapeutic. Monique slowly began to unwind and put the constant terror that had haunted her immediate past out of her mind. To her enormous surprise, she liked it here in the woods. The quiet, the loneliness, the isolation—all the things that should have driven her crazy—were soothing instead. She was alive, she was safe, it was over.
On the evening of her third day at the cabin, Monique sat at the table sketching. She was drawing from memory the faces of old friends from school and enjoying herself a lot. Each face carried so many memories, most of them good, and it was a bit like going through a yearbook.
She had almost finished a portrait of the boy who had taken her to the senior prom, when she heard a noise, a kind of tapping sound, just outside the door.
Monique froze. The tapping was too regular to be a windblown branch. Could it be a bird, or a small animal? Slowly and silently, she stood up and pulled the pistol from her waistband. Holding it in the two-handed grip she’d seen people on TV use, she stepped to the door. She stood there for a moment, waiting for the sound to repeat. It didn’t. Very carefully, she unlatched the door, turned the handle, and then, very fast, flung open the door.
Out of the corner of her eye, Monique saw a bright flash of light—and then nothing at all.
39
If you have never tried to lug around a large piece of plaster that’s been soaked in plastic and rolled up, take my advice and don’t start now. It’s too heavy for one person, or even three, and too big to stuff into anything except a custom-made shipping crate, and then it’s packed away where you can’t really keep an eye on it to make sure that there’s no damage, which bothered me more than it should, and—
Just take my word for it; don’t try it. It’s a nightmare.
But I did it. It took time, and it was time I couldn’t afford. I knew all kinds of BOLOs had gone out for me, everything from the Vatican cops to Interpol. And I’d already spent too much time in Frankfurt getting the thing ready, and then packed, and sending Monique off to safety. I could feel hot breath on the back of my neck. But finally I got the crate to a small airport on Sicily. I made one quick stop to mail a package, heavily insured, and then I called Stone’s redneck associate, Garrett Wallace. “I’m on my way,” I told him.
“Outstanding,” he said.
“You got the flash drive?”
“Oh, hell, yes,” he said.
“And the picture was clear? You could see the code?” I mean, it was kind of important, and the asshole was not being real communicative.
Wallace gave a kind of laid-back, good ole boy chuckle. “That big ole Frog got fingers like sausages,” he said. “We kinda had to squint to see around them.”
“But you did?” I said. “You got the code?”
He chuckled again. “I think you’da heard from us by now if we didn’t get it.”
He sounded so cheerful and friendly that for just a second I almost wanted to like him—almost. I stopped myself in time. The job was hard enough. I didn’t need to make friends with a sociopathic hillbilly. So I just went over the plan with him one more time, stressing the timing.
“Yeah, sure, we got all that, don’t you worry,” he said. “It’s gonna be just fine, Riley, we got this.”
I didn’t have much choice, so I believed him and hung up. Then I called the number Benny gave me. I told him where I was, and that I had the Thing for the Guy. Either he hadn’t seen Goodfellas, or he just didn’t think that was funny, and he didn’t seem like he wanted to chat, so I hung up and sat on the crate by the runway, waiting. I figured it would take some time, and I was a little worried about hanging out in one place for too long. Sicily was too close to Rome for comfort.
But Boniface must have had his jet standing by someplace nearby, because it was there in just under two hours. I heard the engines, watched the plane approach, and recognized Boniface’s Cessna Citation X as it touched down and taxied over. The door opened, the stairs rolled up, and my old flame Danielle stepped out with her robotic corporate smile already set in place. We got a few hardy Sicilian peasants from the baggage claim area to help. They loaded the big crate into the plane and we were in the air in under an hour.
The plane circled climbed up to altitude, and I could finally relax. I mean, not really relax, if that has to mean having five or six fruity drinks with paper umbrellas in them and then singing karaoke. This was not the time to get sloppy, not yet. There were still a couple of very tense moments ahead, and getting through them with all my body parts intact was going to be very, very iffy. Besides, I was pretty sure I did not want to witness Danielle singing karaoke. She’d probably pick a Plastic Bertrand song like “Jet Boy, Jet Girl.” Or worse, some Jacques Brel. The thought of her letting her hair down and singing “Les Coeurs Tendres” at thirty thousand feet was not a happy one.
But I could relax a little without paper umbrellas or karaoke. And I had a long flight ahead of me, the length of the whole continent of Africa, and then a big chunk of ocean, so there was no point in spending the whole time biting my nails and trembling in fear. I kicked back a little and let Danielle bring me things. Just little things; a very nice lobster thermidor with braised asparagus and a half bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. And of course some more of that excellent coffee so I wouldn’t get too comfortable. When I was full, I leaned back and pondered.
It had all gone about as well as I could have hoped, and that was nice. And Monique was away, out of it, safely tucked away in one of my hidey-holes, which was a bigger relief than maybe it should have been. And she was at a place I had paid for in cash, so there was no record of it that Stone or Boniface could find, as far as I could tell. She was as safe as I could make her. So I figured it was okay if I enjoyed the comforts Danielle could provide, and kicked back just a little for the duration of the flight. But I didn’t kid myself. It wasn’t over, not by a mile and a half. The hard part hadn’t even begun yet.
It seems funny to think of it that way, but it was true. I’d gone into this thinking stealing a fresco was going to be the hardest thing I’d ever done. But it was this next part that was making me lose sleep. For one thing, if I had gotten caught at the Vatican, all they’d have done was lock me up. If anything went wrong from here on, the best I could hope for was a quick and easy death, without any attention from Boniface’s girlfriend, Bernadette.
Thinking about that made relaxing a real challenge. But I managed somehow. Mostly because it was a truly long-ass flight, around seven thousand miles, with a stop at Cape Town to refuel. Maybe you can stay scared shitless that long. I can’t do it. After only an hour or so, I tilted the chair back and put away all the bad thoughts.
I slept a little, I had a couple more light snacks, and I went over what had to happen next if I was going to get out of it alive. I broke that up with a couple more minor treats from Danielle’s kitchen. A beef Wellington with a Château Margaux, a fettuccini with black truffles and some truly exceptional pinot grigio I’d never heard of—just a few simple, hearty peasant dishes like that, just to help wile away the long hours of the flight.
By the time we landed in the Kerguelen Islands I had gained a couple of pounds. Other than that, not much had changed. I was still worried, and I was still pretty sure I ought to be. This next step was maybe the most dangerous. And it was totally out of my control, which I hate like cancer. But there was no choice. I had to keep moving forward with my noble smile stitched to my rugged masculine face.
So I did. I supervised the guys who wrestled the crate off the jet and onto a trailer towed by a waiting ATV. They were the same uniformed guys I’d seen last time through, or at least it looked like them. When we had the crate loaded, I bade a fond farewell to Danielle, and we rode across the island to the wharf, where Étienne was waiting, with his familiar friendly sneer in place.
We got the crate on board, without any help from Étienne. He stood on the bridge, right next to the duplicate controls for the cargo hook, and did nothing. Just stood with his arms folded. But there was a set of controls for the hook on the gunwale, right next to the crane. So I attached the hook, we hoisted the crate on board, and forty minutes or so after landing I was headed out to sea.
