Afghanistan, Nuristan Province, not the Kunar- Johnny was looking right at it. He could smell it, feel the dust sifting down on him. There had been so many tunnels cut into the mountainsides, and Third Platoon’s job had been to search a section of them.
He knew better than to reach for his pistol. He was in Colorado, not a war zone, but the sight of the tunnel, actually being in one again, unnerved him.
It shouldn’t. He hadn’t been unnerved in Nuristan, not even the first time, when they’d gotten rocked by mortar fire on their way out. They’d spent another four weeks clearing tunnels, and he’d never broken a sweat-until now.
Shit.
He was still in the elevator, and Esme and Nachman were heading around a corner. He wasn’t going to let that happen, for her to go off in the darkness of a damn tunnel with a strange old man, and him just stand here and watch her disappear.
Shit.
He was a U.S. Army Ranger, had been for five years, and there wasn’t anyplace he was afraid to go.
Sucking it up, and more than a little embarrassed that he had to suck it up to get off a damn elevator, he stepped into the tunnel. The feel of the dirt beneath his boots was uncomfortably familiar, the short deadness of the footfalls, but he kept going, one step after the next.
After about twenty feet, the tunnel branched off in two more directions. One glance at the additional corridors snaking off into darkness, and he drew his gun. Fuck it. Whatever he was going to be looking at, he was suddenly absolutely positive he wanted to be looking at it through the tritium dots on his gun sights. What the hell did he know, really? Anything could be down here, a bear, a mountain lion, anything, and a Ranger would be ready.
So he was ready.
Right.
With a.45 in the sub-subbasement of a multimillionaire’s mansion in the Colorado Rockies.
And there was Esme, up ahead, cool as a little cucumber, raising tufts of dust with her high heels.
And him, sliding along the wall behind her, knees bent, muscles tense, his trigger finger laid flat along the pistol’s slide-ready to slip inside the trigger guard, ready to rock and roll.
He checked his six, looking back toward the elevator, moving his pistol with his line of sight- ready-and when he turned back around, gun lowered again, he was facing Esme, stopped in the middle of the tunnel and looking at him with an expression of confusion, fascination, and maybe a little plain old “you’ve got to be kidding me” surprise.
Her gaze dropped down the length of him in less than a second, then took another one to come back up to meet his eyes. Her expression didn’t change. Everything was still in play as she stood and watched him, watched him calculate his odds-the odds of running into an enemy fighter, Taliban, al-Qaeda, Egyptian, Arab, Pakistani, an Islamic insurgent from anywhere who’d come to battle the coalition forces. Anyone who’d come in country to go up against him and his guys.
Zero, he decided. It was zero odds down here in Isaac Nachman’s sub-subbasement. Sure. He knew it was zero, or damn close to it.
Convinced, he slowly straightened up, flipping the safety back on his pistol before he slid it into its holster.
“PTSD?” she said, one of her eyebrows lifting a bit, adding a serious dose of flat-out curiosity to her question-more curiosity than the question itself implied.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, he knew what the initials stood for.
“No.” He shook his head. “Instinct.”
Pure instinct, the survival kind. A lot of soldiers struggled with PTSD in varying degrees and with a variety of symptoms. He knew it for a fact. He’d seen it on deployment and seen it each time they’d come home, and he knew that wasn’t his problem, not full-out anyway. Hell, he’d been in “combat” most of his life, fighting on street corners and in back alleys, and the night Dom had died, fighting it out in the lush, green expanse of City Park.
He’d seen a lot, done a lot, or so he’d thought until his first combat tour. When he’d come back from Afghanistan the first time, he’d come back with an unsolicited and unexpected realization about the night in the park: Dom had died clean.
It had seemed like such a bloody mess at the time, with Dom gasping in pain and gasping for breath, with the blood pumping out of him, out of the hole one of the Parkside Bloods had put in him. One shot, not even a well-aimed shot, just one unlucky shot had killed his brother. A bunch of Parkside gangsters waving their pieces around and pulling their triggers had managed to actually hit Domingo Ramos.
In real combat, death could be a lot different. First, the shots were better aimed. When the shooting started, a guy could be assured that his enemies were shooting at him, not just around him, shooting to kill, and that every guy out there with a scope was using it to target him, that every set of iron sights was leveled at him. Soldiers didn’t wave their guns around or hold them slanted on the side. That was only for dumbass gangsters and people in the movies.
The Rangers had most definitely taught him how to shoot.
The second thing about death in combat was the ordnance. Dom had been killed by a single 9mm round, a damn unlucky shot that had hit him square in the heart. But in combat, people got blown apart-into pieces. Some people still got shot, and it was never pretty, but guys also got literally blown to bits, and sometimes those guys looked like the lucky ones.
That was the third thing about death in combat- a warrior’s death wasn’t the worst way to go. Dead wasn’t the worst way to leave a battlefield. Johnny hadn’t known that until he’d been in combat and watched people die, and watched the people who hadn’t died.
He didn’t move his hand, but suddenly he could feel the envelope in his pocket, feel it like it was hot-not hot enough to burn, he wouldn’t give himself that. He wasn’t the one who had been branded by combat.
But he felt the heat, and he felt guilt-building in his chest and twisting in his gut and sweeping up to make his face hot, and suddenly, he wanted the hell out of this goddamn tunnel.
“What are we doing down here, Esme?” His words were short, his voice curt.
“Mr. Nachman keeps his collection down here in a vault, his art collection,” she said, very clearly, holding his gaze steady with her own. “There will be a black light in the vault, and we’ll use it to verify that the Meinhard I’ve brought him is exactly what I told him it is-the original painting, untouched, exactly what he’s paying for. Then he’ll give me the money, and we’ll leave.”
Okay. There was an end in sight.
“Let’s go,” he said, gesturing for her to lead the way.
No, he didn’t have PTSD, but neither had he come down from his last deployment. His instincts were still on high alert, which meant “weapon ready.” He hadn’t decompressed. Two weeks at home wasn’t enough to bring him back down, and neither was one beer in the Blue Iguana.
Dammit. He shouldn’t have drawn his pistol. Instincts were good; giving into irrational impulses wasn’t. But this place, this tunnel…he was sweating, and it was cool down here.
Unfinished business, that was his problem, and he needed to finish it. He’d been carrying the letter in his pocket around with him for months, and he needed to deal with it.
Great. Now he had it all figured out-for about the hundred millionth time. He knew what he had to do. He just hadn’t found the guts to do it, and now he was in this damn tunnel, unnerved.
Nachman was ahead of them, still shuffling along in his slippers, until he came to a heavy steel door set into solid rock. Johnny couldn’t even imagine what the whole setup had cost, but when Nachman opened the door, he knew whatever the vault had cost, it was nothing compared to the value of what was inside.
Geezus.
He glanced at “Miss Esme” and realized she’d been here before. She’d expected all this. She wasn’t struck dumb with amazement, and he was damn close.
“Welcome to my closet, Mr. Ramos,” Nachman said, letting the steel door swing open.
Closet was a misnomer, but Johnny understood what Nachman had meant about there not being enough room for him. The place was huge, but it was also completely packed, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with art, an unprecedented sight, utterly unique. It was a warehouse of masterpieces, old masters and new.
“Have you heard of the Alt Aussee, Mr. Ramos?” Nachman asked, leading the way inside, keeping his hand on the door.
“No, sir.”
“It’s a salt mine in Austria, southeast of Salzburg, a veritable labyrinth.”
When Johnny and Esme were inside with him, standing in one of the only clear areas Johnny could see, Nachman slowly pushed the heavy steel door closed behind them.
Johnny heard a lock fall into place.
Perfect.
Not exactly nightmare material, but close- being locked inside an underground vault deep inside a mountain.
Very close, actually.
Maybe even a little closer than Johnny wanted to admit.
Dammit.
But the art was stunning, and there was a museum’s worth of it, two museums’ worth, hundreds of paintings, pieces of sculpture both large and small, decorative items, vases, jewelry, glassworks, plaques, artifacts, ceramics, and more paintings- some of them massive, upward to eight or nine feet high and nearly as wide-all of it carefully and meticulously organized on racks and in cases, filling the cavelike vault. The ceiling of the room was more than twenty feet above them, the far end of it beyond where Johnny could see. Everything that should have been hanging on the walls and displayed in the mansion upstairs was down here in Nachman’s temperature-and-humidity-controlled “closet.” He’d felt the difference in the air immediately upon entering the stone depository.
“The Nazis used the Alt Aussee to store their plunder, literally thousands of pieces of stolen art,” Nachman said, “all of it nearly destroyed toward the end of the war, when the Germans set explosives inside the salt mine. Fortunately, the plot was discovered by the resistance fighters, and the bombs were never detonated. Some of those saved paintings reside here, now, Mr. Ramos, some of them awaiting proof of provenance so that I can return them to their rightful owners, many of them here because their rightful owners wish them to remain hidden from the world and safe, and a few of them rightly mine. And yet…” Nachman turned and looked at Esme.
“And yet some of Mr. Nachman’s most cherished pieces are still missing, pieces like the Monet,” she said.
“Pieces like the Henstenburgh,” the old man added.
“Yes, the Henstenburgh,” Esme echoed.
“And the…” Nachman’s voice drifted into a soft whisper.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” Esme assured him, and from the look on the old man’s face, pained and distressed, Johnny thought Esme probably had the right of it.
“No,” Nachman insisted. “Mr. Ramos should know the depth of our loss.”
Not necessarily, Johnny thought, wondering how in the hell he’d ended up in this place, in this strange situation, with this very strange little man wearing a bathrobe, when he’d started out the night with that beer at the Blue Iguana.
“There was a Rembrandt, Mr. Ramos,” Nachman continued. “And… and another, the other. They’re both priceless, utterly priceless, and they belong here.” The old man made a sweeping gesture with his arm, including the whole vault-and Johnny couldn’t fault his opinion, not too much anyway. A Rembrandt, any Rembrandt, had to be amazing, but he wasn’t sure what the value of something was if no one ever saw it except one old man.
“Isaac,” Esme said gently, when Nachman simply continued to stand there, his arm outstretched, his gaze distant, his lips quivering.
Johnny had a grandma, and her lips quivered sometimes, especially when she was getting emotional and about to cry, which was quite often.
Please, he thought. Please spare us Nachman’s tears.
Sobbing was only going to make things worse, besides making him personally uncomfortable. Nachman was old, yes, but he was still a guy underneath that silk bathrobe, which was as far as Johnny was going to take that thought.
He looked to Esme, silently asking her to “get on with it,” whatever “it” needed getting on with.
“Isaac,” she said again. “May we continue with the authentication?”
It took the old man a moment, but in the end, he nodded and continued on to a table set up in the middle of the vault.
“My dear,” he said, picking up a handheld black light and handing her a small screwdriver from a tool kit on the table.
Esme had already reopened the case, and now she used the screwdriver to undo the wooden frame holding the protective covering in place. When the frame was disassembled, she laid the painting out on the table, and then Nachman hit a switch on the side of the table, and the lights went out.
All the lights.
In an instant, it was completely, heavily, oppressively pitch-fucking-dark in the vault, which in Johnny’s mind had just been transformed into a tomb.
Extra perfect.
Now he couldn’t breathe.
Geezus.
He’d never had any freaking phobias. He didn’t have any phobias now, he was sure. He just couldn’t breathe, because suddenly some idiot in a fucking bathrobe had turned off all the lights-off, out, extinguished-and they were God knew how far underground with the weight of the whole freaking world bearing down on them, and-
The black light came on.
It wasn’t much, a purple glow falling on the Meinhard, but without anything to reflect. There wasn’t any Day-Glo paint anywhere, which was probably a good thing in this room.
“No luminescence,” Esme said, and he could just make her out, leaning over the painting, watching Nachman slowly run the light over the piece.
“Oh, my, Miss Esme, you are oh, so right,” Nachman barely breathed the words, his attention rapt. “I believe we have the Meinhard.”
He passed the black light over the painting two more times, with excruciating slowness, and all Johnny could think was “Dear God, man, get on with it, and get it over.”
But he kept those words to himself. To anyone in the room, which he knew made for a very small audience, had they been able to see him, which he knew they could not, he would have appeared perfectly normal, perfectly stoic, not a flicker of emotion, not a twitch of a muscle.
He was contained.
But he was on a countdown in his head, and he’d seen the switch Nachman had hit to turn out the lights, and when he got to zero, he was lunging for the switch and turning on the goddamn lights. It would be embarrassing, revealing, but not as bad as passing out.
He forced another breath into his lungs.
“Then, sir, I would appreciate payment,” Esme said, in a tone of voice that was very clearly taking control of the situation, and all Johnny could think was Thank God, somebody is taking control of this very dark situation.
“As you wish,” Nachman said, and in the next instant, the lights came on.
Johnny held himself back from collapsing in relief.
He was a Ranger, for God’s sake.
He let out his breath and waited, watching Nachman shuffle over to a wooden Chinese cabinet with dozens of drawers. One by one, the old man opened drawers and pulled out stacks of cash. Bundle after bundle, stacking them in his arms, his lips moving as he quietly counted to himself.
“Five thousand, ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand…”
Geezus, and just when Johnny had thought the night couldn’t get any more bizarre.
He looked to Esme, to check his bearings, but for once, she didn’t catch his gaze. She was busy, damn busy, scanning the walls and the racks, looking at all the paintings, her expression one of intense focus, as if she was cataloging the hoard.
He looked back at Nachman. On, and on, and on, the man counted, until he reached eighty thousand dollars, then he broke a bundle and counted off two more thousand.
Eighty-two thousand dollars. Johnny tried to think what the most cash he’d ever seen in one place had been, and it fell far short of eighty-two thousand dollars.
God, that was a lot of money, far more than he’d anticipated. He doubted if Burt Alden would make it through another day with that kind of money on the line. He wondered if it was all going to Bleak, or if there was a hefty commission in there for Esme. A commission on eighty-two thousand would sure explain her underwear-oh, hell, yeah.
He swept the vault with his gaze. He was standing in the middle of more than a fortune, more than two or three fortunes. Esme had said the Meinhard was worth two million, and it was no bigger than a piece of typing paper. The sheer volume, the sheer square footage of all the other paintings in the vault would probably put the value of the vault’s contents up into the hundreds of millions, maybe even into the billion-dollar range.
A strange, strange night all around, he thought, doubting if he would ever see its like again, and pretty much hoping he wouldn’t.
When Nachman was finished at the cabinet, he brought all the money to the table and withdrew a folded piece of paper out of the pocket on his robe.
“Eighty-two, not one hundred thousand,” he said, sliding the paper over to Esme. “Dear Burt still owed me twelve from a small loan we negotiated last April. With interest, the total is currently eighteen. He apparently found himself a bit short with another of his associates.”
That was one way to put it, Johnny thought. And from twelve thousand to eighteen thousand in five months? Hell. Nachman wasn’t a bathrobed wimp. He was a freaking loan shark, a great white.
“Yes, sir,” Esme said, taking the paper. She opened it up, and Johnny saw her father’s signature on the note-Burt Alden in big letters next to the hen scratches of Nachman’s spidery hand. Then she started packing the money into the case. When it was full, she closed it up and put it back in the messenger bag still bandoliered across her chest.
He watched her stuff the remaining stacks of hundred-dollar bills on either side of the case in the bag, and when she had all the cash secured, he watched the subtle but profound relief that passed over her, the brief closing of her eyes, the slight softening of her shoulders-and without a thought, he reached out and stroked her cheek, letting her know that come hell, high water, or a hundred more goddamn tunnels, he was seeing this night through with her, all the way through. She wasn’t alone.
Yeah, she’d had a tough night so far, but he could take care of that, too, whatever she wanted, and he was hoping with everything he had that it was more of what she’d wanted sitting in Solange.
Her lashes lifted, her gaze rising to meet his, and a slow wall of heat rolled straight through him. Unbidden, a smile curved his mouth. Yeah, they were on the same page here, and it was time to take her home.