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She sat down on the bed and pulled aside the crude bandage that had been wrapped around her injured shoulder. She was prepared for the worst, possibly an infection that she couldn’t feel because of nerve damage.
Instead, the wound was scabbed over as if she had merely suffered a scrape. The puckered skin around the bullet hole looked pink and healthy, not the angry red welt of septic bacteria eating away at her. The pain was completely gone, and she could move her arm normally, which seemed impossible given that she was shot twenty-four hours before. She felt her forehead, and it didn’t seem like she had a fever.
The door to her room opened. It was Tagaan and the guard who had been watching her. Both were wearing holstered pistols.
“You will go with Dolap,” Tagaan said, nodding at his comrade, who had a wisp of a goatee and a scar in the center of his lip.
Beth stood. “Why?”
“You have work to do.”
Tagaan walked over to her and roughly looked under the bandage.
“Excellent,” he said. “It’s almost morning. You’ll get another dose of Typhoon when you come back.” He pushed her to the door. “Go.”
Dolap took her by the arm and guided her through a large building, where they passed at least a dozen rooms with bunk beds, meaning this had to be the main barracks.
When she got outside, her earlier assessment that there were enough lights for a small town seemed right on. Scores of men, all Filipino and obvious Typhoon users, based on their musculature, moved about in a purposeful way. She counted more than fifteen buildings arranged around a central plaza dominated by a huge stalagmite stretching halfway to the roof. The buildings were separated into quadrants. Most of them were prefab structures like the ones she’d seen at the chemistry lab north of Manila.
The biggest building was three stories tall and fronted by several loading docks with trucks backed up to them. She could hear sounds of machinery coming from inside as if it were a factory. Next to it was another building, almost as large, with ten more trucks parked outside. Two men were wheeling a huge powered cart from the factory to the second building, its cargo covered by a tarp. She got a quick look inside the building when they briefly raised the overhead doors and she saw rows of sleek, black, bullet-shaped objects lined up inside.
A truck pulled away from the factory and drove down a road leading from the plaza to the far end of the cave. It disappeared inside a tunnel that must have been the entrance to the cavern. Then she saw a helicopter parked on a pad big enough for two and realized that the opening in the roof above was wide enough to fly through. So, two ways out, not that it helped her in the slightest.
Tagaan said to Dolap, “Radio me when you are done.” Then he walked toward the factory and disappeared inside.
“This way,” Dolap said and guided her past the central stalagmite. She shuddered when she saw a set of manacles bolted to the rock. Blood stained the ground and the shackles as if someone had flayed themselves trying to get free.
At the opposite side of the central plaza, he took Beth into a smaller building the size of a mobile home. When she went in, she was surprised to find it air-conditioned, m
uch different from her sweltering accommodations. He locked the door with a key, sat her at a long table, and went to the back of the building.
Beth wiped her sweat-stained brow on her shirt as she waited for him. The one window was shuttered and covered with iron bars, and the door looked solid enough, so escape seemed impossible. Besides, she had nowhere to go.
Dolap returned, holding six hard plastic tubes, and Beth’s heart rate skyrocketed as she understood what they were.
He set them on the table and said, “You are to appraise these for sale. If you damage them, you die.” He seemed bored and considered her no threat, which was probably true since he was built like a professional wrestler.
He went to the restroom, leaving Beth alone. She picked up the first tube and uncapped the end. Inside was a rolled-up canvas. Her heart fluttered with excitement as she carefully pulled it from the tube.
When she unrolled it on the table, she gasped, nearly fainting, when she recognized the three-foot-by-three-foot painting. It was the exquisite image of a girl sitting at a harpsichord with a man seated next to her. Another girl was standing and holding a sheet of music while she sang.
If authentic, it was The Concert by Vermeer, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990 and one of only thirty-four Vermeer works known to exist. On the open market it would be worth more than two hundred million dollars, the most valuable unrecovered painting in the world.
She could barely restrain herself from ripping open the other tubes and laying eyes on the bounty before her. But she had to safeguard the Vermeer. It seemed to be in good condition for having been in less than ideal conditions for all these years.
Dolap flushed the toilet and returned from the back of the building, holding a steaming cup of coffee. He pulled out his phone and sat in the other chair, idly playing with something on the screen. He set the full mug on the table, and Beth nearly knocked it away, afraid that a spill would damage the work of art.
But even though it made her cringe to leave it there, the coffee mug gave her the inkling of an idea, and she didn’t object. She couldn’t get away, but maybe there was a way to tell someone where she was.
“I need a pencil, a piece of paper, and access to the Internet to do my work,” she said.
Dolap looked up, annoyed that he had to tear his eyes away from his phone. “No Internet.”
“You mean you don’t have Internet access here?”
“No Internet for you.”
So they did have Internet service.
