Trophies of War Page 15

  The corridor was empty. But was it empty because the killer was about to re-enter it or because he had just left?

  Shut up, shut up, Lyon told himself.

  The third room was a place The Anvil would have loved to spend more time in. It was row upon row of wooden racks holding every kind of edged weapon. Longswords as tall as a man, scimitars, dirks, rapiers, katanas and ornate ceremonial swords. He thought about taking one or two, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Maybe he could ask the bosses for a sword as payment. He stopped in front of a stack of daggers on a small table and touched one with a jewel-encrusted gold hilt.

  The daggers slid and almost fell on the floor. The Anvil scrambled to push them back onto the table into some sort of stable pile.

  Idiot! he reproached himself. Focus!

  Lyon realized that the two rooms at the far end of the hallway now had closed doors. The other two—the one he was now in and the one directly across the hall—were open.

  The killer must have closed them. And now he must be across from them—possibly about to enter the armor room.

  He put his mouth to Beth’s ear.

  “Get ready to run,” he whispered. “I have an idea.”

  The fun was really building now. The weapons room cleared, The Anvil closed the door and entered the last room. He knew they were in there and didn’t care about being quiet anymore. This room was filled with armor of every kind—ancient shields, medieval suits of armor, even horse armor on wooden models. He tapped his knife on the crest of a nearby samurai helmet and swept the room with his flashlight.

  Then he heard whispering.

  From behind the wooden horse, Lyon saw the killer in the light in the doorway. He ducked his head down and made sure Beth did the same. He caught her eye and held up a finger.

  One.

  The voice was coming from deep inside the room, a low whisper The Anvil couldn’t make out. He weaved his way through ghostly armored riders on armored horses, following the sound. He was starting to feel disappointed.

  Stupid rabbits. It’s no fun for the hunter when you make it so easy. Stop talking!

  Lyon saw heavy black boots pass them and heard the tapping of metal on metal. Holding Beth’s gaze, he held up another finger.

  Two.

  In the farthest corner of the room, The Anvil readied himself for the kill. Would it be the man or the woman first? Even if it was going to be easy, at least there was one surprise to be had.

  He tightened his grip on the knife and thrust his flashlight toward the sound of the whispering.

  There was no one there.

  Confused, he turned to search nearby. As soon as the beam of his flashlight left the corner, he noticed a glow in the darkness.

  It was the screen of a mobile phone.

  He picked it up and saw that, beneath smears of blood on the screen, a video was playing in the phone’s web browser. A video of a man whispering.

  Lyon held up a third finger and nodded, pulling Beth behind him. He ran out of the armor room, not looking back, the iron key ready in one hand, a heavy duffle bag in the other.

  He felt Beth pressed up against him as he tried to unlock the door. His hands were shaking and he was having trouble getting the key into the lock. Gritting his teeth, he gripped the key with two hands and forced it in. Remembering that people in life-or-death situations can display superhuman strength, he had a momentary thought that he might break the key in the lock.

  Lyon held his breath and unlocked the door.

  The lock clicked and he flung open the oaken door, running out of the Beer Tower faster than he had even run before. Beth kept pace with him, showing no sign of slowing or that her bag of documents was weighing her down.

  Sasha’s BMW surged with the slightest touch of the accelerator, but Lyon resisted the urge to rocket down the highway back to Moscow. With a trunk full of stolen documents and blood on his hands and clothes, he didn’t want any run-ins with the Russian police. Beth punched the Ritz Carlton’s address into her phone and put it in the cup-holder so Lyon could hear the turn-by-turn directions. They rode through the darkness in silence for several miles as their shock and fear began to wear off.

  “All of this over a painting,” Lyon muttered as he merged onto the M8 highway. It was close to midnight and the road was empty.

  Beth said nothing.

  “What the hell was that back there?” Lyon asked.

  “I don’t know,” Beth answered.

  “Who was that and how did he get in? The guard locked the door behind us when we came in, so he would have had to open it for whoever that was.”

  “Maybe the guard knew him, too,” Beth offered.

  “Jesus Christ,” Lyon replied and described the killer. “If you had seen the guy, you would know just how disturbing that thought is.”

  “Those are prison tattoos,” Beth said.

  “No shit,” Lyon replied.

  “No—Russian prison tattoos have special meanings,” Beth explained. “I forget what the significance is of the text under the eyes or the barbed wire, but anything across the face usually means someone who never expected to get out of prison. Or someone who received a life sentence and wants everyone to know it.”

  “So what is a man like that doing in an art repository?” Lyon asked. “It doesn't make any sense.”

  “It may have something to do with Sasha,” Beth replied.

  Lyon waited for her to explain. She didn’t.

  “Okay, there’s obviously something you’re not telling me,” he said, annoyed. “Start talking.”

  “There may be a connection between Trophy Brigade art and the Russian mafia,” Beth said at last.

  “Oh my God,” Lyon said. “You’re just telling me this now?”

  “I never saw any proof,” Beth pleaded. “It was just rumors. That was why I connected with Sasha, to find out if the rumors were true.”

  Lyon thought for a moment.

  “All that business about museum insiders helping people like me,” he said. “That’s not what your story is about, is it? It’s this mafia business? Isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Super,” Lyon sighed. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and gritted his teeth. What have I gotten myself into?

  “I mean, it is about secret restitution also,” Beth explained. “But the mafia connection was the main thrust of the story. We’ve known for a while that the Russian mob has been stealing icons from churches and selling them on the black market. The suspicion has been that they’ve been doing the same with trophy art. Taking pieces from places like St. Sergius where presumably no one would miss them—or no one would talk about missing them, anyway—and sell them for millions. It actually has a long history in Russia. Even the government got into it. Since the Soviet days, they’ve sold off parts of their museum collections to raise money. They probably did the same with trophy art.”

  “And Sasha’s work finally caught up with him,” Lyon suggested. “The wrong people took notice of what he was doing and didn’t like him playing in their sandbox.”

  “Looks that way,” Beth admitted.

  They rode in silence for another long while.

  “Sorry I didn’t warn you about this,” Beth said. “I guess I took the whole journalistic ‘don’t say anything until you have proof’ thing a little too far. I didn’t think anything like this would happen.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re ok,” Lyon replied. “We made it out, even if Sasha and his friend didn’t.”

  “Right … well, I’m sorry about that, too.” She paused. “I’m not really sure what to do next.”

  “We go back to the hotel, figure out what to do with all these documents we took, and get the hell out of Russia.”

  Looking at the neat piles of documents stacked on the hotel room floor, Lyon considered the new significance of the Trophy Brigade archive. Just a few hours ago, they were nothing more than artifacts of history—now they were reasons to kill or be killed. They were reason
s to be afraid. He knew enough about the Russian mafia to know that he wanted nothing to do with them. He also knew that Russian police weren’t likely to be much help. Getting on the next flight out of Moscow was the only answer.

  But what do I do with all this stuff?

  The plan had been to spend a day or two sifting through the archive, looking for any clues that might lead to his mother’s Manet or anything of interest to Beth. Now, that was out of the question.

  “We can’t take these with us,” Beth said, twisting open a bottle of mineral water from the mini bar.

  “Right,” Lyon replied, leaning back on the couch and stretching. “It’s not worth chancing it at the airport, either in our carry-on or checked bags. Both might get searched.”

  Beth checked the time on her phone.

  “Normally, I would suggest we search for an all-night copy center and hit the scanners,” she said. “But it’s midnight now—we’ll never get it done in time to catch the early flight.”

  Lyon nodded. He reached over to a nearby pile and picked up the green diary with the map inside.

  “This I can put in my carry-on. It will look like any other book on an x-ray and hopefully won’t raise any alarms if security goes in for a closer look.”

  Beth took the book from him and flipped through the pages. She unfolded one corner of the map to take a look.

  “The map is in German, but the diary is in Russian,” she said. “Without Sasha to translate, I’m not sure what we can make of this. Or the rest of it.”

  Lyon looked down and shook his head.

  “I’m an idiot,” he said. “So obvious.”

  “What?”

  Lyon reached into his pants pocket and pulled out his phone. He pointed at Beth’s tablet on the coffee table.

  “We don’t need to find a copy center—we have scanners right here.” He pointed to his phone’s camera. “We can take pictures of everything and look at it later or have someone translate for us back in the States. We might even get it all done before we have to leave for the airport.”

  Beth grabbed her tablet and sat cross-legged on the floor next to a stack of documents. She opened up the camera app and began snapping away, flipping one page after another. Lyon pulled a pile of papers over to him and did the same.

  Three hours later, fortified with caffeine from the in-room coffee maker, Lyon and Beth were making good progress. Well over half the Trophy Brigade documents were in the ‘done’ pile. They didn’t take time to look at anything—they just took photos as fast as they could. Endless pages of Russian, German and French lists and several albums of photographed artworks.

  Lyon tossed his phone on the couch and rubbed his eyes.

  “I’m crashing,” he said.

  Beth drained her cup. “Me too, but we have to keep going. Have some more coffee. We’re almost done.”

  “Maybe,” Lyon replied, looking at his watch. “We need to get going in two hours, and we don’t even have tickets yet.”

  “Then less talking and more working,” Beth said, tossing an empty half-and-half container at him.

  Lyon turned over the next document in his pile. It was yet another list—line after line of Cyrillic text and Arabic numerals—but this one had Latin alphabet characters mixed in.

  It looked like a record of the crate numbering Lyon had seen before. He scanned the list.

  There it was, near the bottom of the page.

  G46.

  “Look,” Lyon said, holding the paper up for Beth to see. “Remember this?”

  “Wow,” Beth said. “That’s the crate number from the Jeu de Paume that had your mother’s painting in it. Too bad we can’t read anything else on the page.”

  “Yeah,” Lyon replied. “I’ll take this one with me. When we get home we should be able to find someone to tell us what this document is.”

  He folded the page in half and stuck it inside the cover of the green diary. About to turn back to the rest of his pile, he stopped. There was something about that document—a flash of deja-vu or something he half-remembered. He pulled it back out.

  In the upper right corner was a series of lines, drawn on the page in black ink. Some were parallel, some were at right angles to each other, some intersected. A heavy dot was drawn at the end of one of the longer lines.

  Why does that look familiar?

  Lyon willed his tired brain to make the connection. He knew he was wasting time and that it could wait until they were home or at least on the plane, but he couldn’t help it. It was going to bother him until he figured it out.

  He thumbed the pages of the diary, but nothing jumped out at him.

  The map.

  He unfolded the map that he had found with the diary. The page was filled with irregular shapes linked by lines, all labeled in German. It was a map of something, but what? Then he saw what had sparked his memory.

  There in the lower left corner of the map, was the same diagram of lines. The diagram on the map had numbers on each of the lines. He compared it with the document he had just found. The lines were the same, but the map had numbered labels while the document did not. There had to be something to this, with the G46 crate being on the list and this diagram linking it to the map.

  Lyon folded both pages and and put them back into the green diary, which he then slid into his briefcase. As soon as they could find someone to translate, these were going to be the first puzzles he wanted solved.

  “Time’s up,” Lyon said, showing Beth his watch. “We need to pack up and get out of here. The first flights leave in three hours.”

  Beth yawned and stretched. Lyon tried not to get caught looking.

  She held up a thin stack of papers.

  “These are all I have left. All the photo albums are done. I say it’s good enough. I’ll bring these in the taxi to the airport, should be able to finish up on the way.”

  “Alright,” Lyon said. “Go to your room and throw everything into your suitcase. I’ll be ready in five minutes.”

  “What are we going to do with all this?” Beth asked, nodding at the stacks of papers and books strewn across the floor.

  Lyon thought for a moment.

  “Let’s put them back in the duffle bags,” he said. “We don’t want to leave them in the room and connect our names to stolen documents. We’ll find a way to ditch them on our way out.”

  The hotel lobby was busier than Lyon would have expected at such an early hour. He hoped it was a good thing—more distractions for anyone who might notice them. Beth gave him a look that told him she didn’t share his optimism.

  “Take the bags to that couch over there,” Lyon told her in a low voice. “Push the duffle bags back on the far side next to the arm, put our bags right in front. I’ll check out and get us a taxi. When we leave, we only take our bags. Hopefully the hotel staff won’t see the duffles and think that we’re forgetting them.”

  Lyon played the harried traveler at the front desk, cutting down on the typical checkout banter with the clerk. He glanced over his shoulder to see Beth arranging the luggage. No one seemed to be paying attention to her as she slid the document-filled bags out of sight.

  The clerk called a bellman over and asked him to flag a taxi. The man said he would get Lyon when the cab was ready.

  Lyon joined Beth on the couch, sitting on the end furthest from the duffle bags.

  “I think we’re all set,” he said, stifling a yawn. “Taxi should be here in a minute.”

  “Don’t do that,” Beth said, now yawning herself.

  Lyon tried to remember when he had had a decent night’s sleep. He couldn’t. He also realized that no sleep meant no dreams. Lyon had almost forgotten about the dream that had been tormenting him these past few months, replaying the night of Megan’s accident like security footage stuck on infinite repeat.

  Megan.

  The sadness washed over Lyon, but he pushed it down in his mind, forcing himself to think about anything else. He was about to say something to Beth when h
e noticed three men coming in through the revolving door. The first two were wearing suits and ties—cheap-looking, ill-fitting suits, but suits.

  The third man was the killer from St. Sergius.

  Beth saw him too.

  “Oh, shit,” she said. “That’s him from last night, isn't it?”

  He nodded. What the hell do I do now?

  The three men walked to the front desk, waiting behind two women who were talking to the clerk.

  “Go. Now,” Lyon said, quickly standing up and grabbing his bags. He took Beth by the elbow and steered her to another door at the front of the lobby, making a wide circle so they stayed out of sight of the three men. Just as one of the men moved up to speak to the front desk clerk, Lyon and Beth burst out into the early Moscow darkness.

  The bellman, on his way inside, looked surprised.

  “Your taxi, sir,” he said to Lyon. He made a move toward their luggage.

  “Thanks!” Lyon said, pushing the man aside. He threw open the taxi’s trunk and heaved their two roller bags inside, slamming the lid. He and Beth scrambled into the car. “Domodedovo Airport! We’re late, let’s go!”

  The driver grunted, put the car in gear and pulled onto Tverskaya Street.

  Lyon didn’t know if it was just paranoia, but he thought he saw the killer’s tattooed face watching them go.

  The sun was coming up now, casting a red light across the scattered clouds. As the taxi barreled down the highway, Lyon could see the sky reflected on the surface of the Moskva River. Soon they were out of the city, the road a line through the Russian forest. Lyon stopped looking over his shoulder to see if anyone was following.

  “That guy back there was definitely Russian mob,” Beth said. She whispered the word mob, her eyes darting to the cab driver in distrust. “No mistaking those tattoos.”