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“All clear, boss,” he says to Trap.
Trap acknowledges his head of security with a nod then turns to me. “You can wait out here if you want.”
I shake my head. “I’m fine.”
I see the set of his jaw. He wants to protect me. But Herzog’s dead and buried—or cremated or sent through a wood-chipper or whatever Sawyer Best’s mercenaries did to him when they finished their gristly clean-up. I need to see what my tormentor left behind.
Raising my chin, I follow Trap into the gallery.
This is the first time I’ve entered a client’s private space within the freeport. I understand from Trap’s literature that the six-floor warehouse is broken down into dozens of galleries. Each is temperature-controlled, protected from fire, water, and smoke. They’re sound-proof too, with electronics to boost connectivity for phones and computers. The air-handling system refreshes one hundred percent of the air every thirty minutes.
It’s called a gallery—I expect to see something like an art showroom. Plain white walls. Pinspot lighting. Maybe an austere Lucite desk.
But Herzog’s gallery looks completely different.
I recognize it immediately. The walls are painted the dark burgundy of his luxurious home office. A kilim rug sprawls across the floor, anchored by a heavy oak desk, complete with a fancy executive chair. A leather armchair waits for a guest.
My knees threaten to buckle, and my arms twitch. It takes a conscious effort not to place my hands on my head, not to sink to the floor in the Presentation Posture I mastered over three long years.
Trap’s watching me with the sort of attention usually reserved for hospital patients in the ICU. I meet his gaze directly. “I’m fine,” I say.
He acts like he believes me.
“Let’s see what he’s got in here,” he says, leading the way to the back of the gallery.
I follow, telling myself I’m safe. Nothing can happen with Trap by my side, with Mac standing guard at the gallery door. Nothing can happen with Herzog dead.
The rear half of the gallery is filled with storage shelves. I’ve learned about arrangements like this in the past six weeks, as I’ve studied auction houses and museum annexes.
Sturdy walls slide on metal tracks. Grooves in the floor and anchors on the ceiling keep the walls stable. Each surface can hold one or more paintings; they can be pulled all the way out for easy viewing.
At a quick glance, I count a dozen walls, with space at the back for more to be installed. The last one is fully extended, displaying a single painting.
“Holy fuck,” Trap says.
We move toward the work at the same time. It’s small, no more than two feet square. The composition looks familiar—a room with gray walls and a checkerboard floor, a pair of dark paintings on the wall, one woman sitting at a harpsichord and another standing, listening to her play. The light over all of them is silvery and delicate. It almost seems like I’m looking at an aged color photograph.
“Is that…?” I start to ask. I’ve seen this painting in books. I’ve read about it in articles.
“Vermeer,” Trap says, his lips tight. “The Concert. Stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990.”
We’re close enough to touch it now, but both of us know better than to damage a world-class work of art with the natural oil on our fingertips. I glance at Trap, and I realize he isn’t surprised to find this masterpiece hanging in the freeport gallery. “You knew it was here,” I say.
“I suspected.” He steps to the side, viewing the treasure from a slightly different angle. “The night I met Herzog, he hinted he had it. He didn’t want to ship it overseas. That’s why he became a freeport client. What do you think it’s worth?”
He’s asking me because I’ve spent the past six weeks in a crash course on auctioning art. I’ve spent hours and hours in New York auction houses, watching the valuation of paintings and sculpture. I’ve studied catalogs from recent sales.
“If I remember right, the museum said it was worth two hundred and fifty million, but that was years ago. A Leonardo da Vinci sold a while back for four fifty. So this Vermeer? Missing for so many years? Who knows what it would bring today?”
Trap looks over his shoulder at the other storage walls in the gallery. “What else was stolen in the Gardner heist?”
I try to remember the details. “A couple of Rembrandts. A Manet. Some drawings… The museum’s still offering a huge reward—ten million dollars, I think.”
Trap slides out one of the walls.
I’m pretty sure we both expect to find the missing treasures. But the paintings on display have nothing to do with the Boston museum. Instead, we’re staring at a huge canvas that looks like someone spilled cans of house paint. “That’s a Pollock,” I say.
The next wall has a classic Rothko, big blocks of red and black blurred into each other. There are a couple of Warhols and some Picasso drawings, a pair of brightly colored Matisse interiors and a Cezanne landscape. We find three Van Goghs and Monet paintings of Waterloo Bridge and a train station.
