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She was right.
I swallowed. “Yes, ma’am. We’ll find it.” I’d wanted to say King wouldn’t do that to me, but what did I know about what King would and wouldn’t do? Clearly the man didn’t see fit to confide in me.
Once Nadine and her team were gone, Linney, Ziv, Mouse, and I stared at each other.
“Now what?” Ziv asked me.
I ignored the growing fear I had for King’s safety. Regardless of all these mixed-up feelings and my concern over my career, I didn’t want him hurt. Images of Hungarian police finding him hiding somewhere in the building and doing something rash flashed through my head. I tried to shove them out and concentrate on the task ahead.
“Now we go find that damned crown and put the Hungarian away once and for all.”
When we entered the parliament building, the police directed us where to park before escorting us into the rotunda. Elek was handcuffed and propped against a column in the center of the room with guards standing close enough to make sure he couldn’t escape.
My heart stuttered in my chest when I saw the bag with the crown on the floor. The box lay beside it completely empty. Since the display was also empty, it looked like Nadine had been right. The crown wasn’t there.
“Who’s in charge?” I called in English and French. It had become a habit after working with Interpol.
“I am,” the officer replied in accented English. “Inspector Horváth. You are Agent Dirk Falcon with the art crimes task force, yes?”
I nodded. “What do we have here?”
The man indicated the panting tube an officer held with gloved hands. “Elek Károlyi, a Hungarian national residing in Greece and Paris, was in possession of what he claims is a forged painting sold to him under false pretenses by the thief known as Le Chaton, an American he identified as Kingston Wilde. He also claims Le Chaton was here in the building and had the Holy Crown with him.”
“Where did he go?”
The inspector pointed in the direction of a doorway. “There is evidence of someone tampering with a small access door to the river wall.”
The river. As in, the Danube. In December. As far as I knew, the man didn’t have anything on his person besides an earpiece, a multi-tool, and whatever he may or may not have snuck in his cargo pants pockets when I wasn’t looking. He certainly didn’t have a wet suit or scuba tank.
And he was presumably all alone with no support. Was his frozen body floating in the damned river right now? What if something had gone wrong? Was he hurt? Was he running through the streets of Budapest with the stolen crown unprotected? What if someone mugged him for it?
I pulled my phone out and checked it again. Nothing.
The inspector was still talking. “We’ve deployed officers to search the water around the premises, but we don’t know how much time he had before we noticed his method of escape. He’d shoved a wedge under one of the doors, presumably to slow us down.”
Please let him have gotten away clean.
I knew it wasn’t very ethical of me, but regardless of how King felt about me, I wanted him safe.
“Go ahead and take Mr. Károlyi to the station. You can hold him on unlawful entry while we sort all of this out,” I told the inspector.
Elek sputtered, overhearing me and looking up. “Who? Me? You must be joking. I’m not the thief here. You forget the forgery and the history of Le Chaton.”
Once he took a good look at me, I saw recognition dawn in his face. He looked from me to Mouse and back again. “What the fuck? This is…” He stared at me and squinted. “You’re not…”
Elek’s brain finally put two and two together and realized the man he’d met as an amateur art collector was actually the lead agent fighting art crimes in the world.
Oops.
I winked at him and enjoyed every minute of his face turning ashen.
“The forgery,” Elek demanded. “I have a painting King Wilde forged, and I can tell you where all of his other forgeries are. They are in museums all over the world. This is only one of them.”
The implication of his words hit me like a punch to the chest. If he gave us a list of major works that were discovered to be forgeries created by King… god, I didn’t even want to think about it. King would go to prison. Since he’d never mentioned forgeries to us in the beginning when we were drafting his immunity agreement, he wasn’t protected against them, only against theft. And if what Elek was saying was true… I couldn’t even imagine how much trouble King would be in.
And there’d be nothing I could do to save him.
There was no point in stalling. We had a million witnesses to Elek’s claim against King about the forgery. “Inspector Horváth, arrest him and get him out of here. Agent Mickey, go ahead and take a look at the painting if you would please.”
