The Thieves of Darkness (39 page)

Michael prayed that Cindy and Simon were okay. Despite seeing them on the monitor, Michael couldn’t help feeling a sense of dread that he was walking into a trap that could kill them all.

Two shots rang out and then a fusillade erupted, thirty seconds of a barrage of gunfire before the world fell silent again.

Michael lay there in anticipation. Fear began to creep up his spine. Until…

“We don’t need duct tape for this one,” Busch said as he finally emerged from the far corner of the house and jogged down to Michael. “Now what, genius?”

They walked back to the front of the house, tried the door, and found it open. “That’s not good,” Michael said.

“He’s got guards, security, and a big-ass wall, why lock it?” Busch said.

Michael didn’t voice his fear of being set up to his friend and stepped into the house.

Michael and Busch walked across a marble foyer into a large, modern great room. Twenty-foot windows overlooked an aquamarine pool, trimmed in blue tile that looked as if it had been taken out of the Blue Mosque, its vanishing edge seeming to fall off into the Bosporus, which sat less than half a mile away. A poolhouse sat off to the side, its white pergola supported by pallid marble columns.

The midday sun filled the great room. The furniture was cold and modern: brushed-steel tables, acrylic chairs, a black armless sofa. The room had no personality: no family pictures, no heirlooms, no character to speak of. It was something out of a catalogue, impersonal and lacking comfort. It might have been Iblis’s house but it certainly wasn’t a home.

“Hey,” Busch said.

Michael turned to see Busch holding up the leather tube, its outer skin water-stained. Busch quickly unlaced it and opened the inner seal. His head snapped up to look at Michael.

“That would be too easy,” Michael said. “He either stuck it in a safe or has it with him.”

Michael wasted no time and quickly found a wide set of stairs leading to the lower level. Heading down, they both clutched their guns at the ready, expecting the unexpected.

They walked about the lower level, cautiously opening doors. There was a home theater; a glassed-in gym filled with free weights, a treadmill, and a stationary bike; a fully stocked wine cellar; a vacant bedroom. They met in a large game room, a gentleman’s playroom—pool table, card table, a large mahogany bar, a flat-screen TV mounted on the far wall in front of a large sofa.

But as they stood there looking about, they both came to the same conclusion.

“You sure you saw them on the monitor?” Busch asked.

“Positive. The monitor label said lower level.”

“Well,” Busch said, “they’re not down here.”

Michael looked around, feeling the walls, pounding the floors. All solid.

“They’re somewhere else,” Busch said. “Why would Iblis put a label pointing to where the people he kidnapped were being held?”

“Mmm.” Michael shook his head. “They’re here.”

“This level matches the footprint above. There’s no place for a hidden room.”

“Iblis is a thief,” Michael countered. “He’s also human. He has his trophies, his keepsakes. He’s a prideful son of a bitch. There is no way he lives in this sterile environment.”

“Maybe he lives in the poolhouse,” Busch half-joked.

Michael walked over to the bar and slipped behind it. The floor-to-ceiling bar was crafted of a dark African mahogany, trimmed in brass. Ornamental brass lights sat on either side of the large decorative piece, their bulbs dimmed, glowing warmly. The ice maker was full, the bar fully stocked with every liquor imaginable, from ginger wine to rum, absinthe to tequila, vodka, whiskey, Frangelico and Grand Marnier, to twice-distilled anise-flavored Turkish raki.

Michael examined it all carefully. The back wall was lined with segmented cabinets and liquor caddies made of the dark African wood. He ran his fingers along the seams, felt under the bar lip, opened the lower drawers and doors. He peered behind the bar. Though it abutted the rear wall, he could still see what he was looking for.

“I don’t think he lives in the poolhouse, but maybe…” Michael pulled back the brass ornamental light on the right side of the bar. “Maybe he lives under it.”

The left side of the bar separated from it, swinging out on whisper hinges to reveal a large metal door.

It was a seven-by-three-foot vault door with no discernible handle, lock, keyhole, or flywheel. Michael examined the door, running his hands up and down the steel frame, tracing the hair-thin door seam. He laid his ear against it, listening, thinking.

Manufactured by Matrix, it was one of the American firm’s best sellers, three inches thick with four protruding dead bolts on each side of the door that anchored into a steel frame and a Magna-Lock sill plate. It was one of the finest security devices in use. There was no key, no traditional combination flywheel. It was accessed via an electronic keypad that could be located away from the safe, an additional precaution against thieves in the night.

Michael turned and looked back at the room, his mind spinning, his eyes darting about.

“What are we looking for?” Busch asked.

“A keypad. It’s probably hidden behind a panel or behind some artwork.”

Michael and Busch opened every drawer, looked behind the bar, checked behind the cheap framed movie posters from
Casablanca, North by Northwest
, and
Spartacus
that adorned the walls.

Busch gripped the edge of the wall-mounted plasma TV and tilted it on its hinge. It only angled a few inches, designed to accommodate anyone sitting at the bar, but it was enough for him to see the wall behind it. “I hate that,” Busch mumbled to himself.

“What?” Michael said as he crouched behind the bar, moving aside a dozen crystal glasses.

“They buy them for show. What a waste.”

Michael stood up, tilting his head in question.

“Would you spend thirty thousand on a seventy-eight-inch plasma and not bother hooking it up?”

Michael stood there a moment semiannoyed at the distraction before crouching back down and moving the glasses. But then it hit him. He popped back up, his eyes searching the room. “Shit. He hid it in plain sight.”

“What?”

Michael grabbed the remote off the bar and examined it. It looked every bit like a TV remote, down to the manufacturer’s label: It had colored buttons for on and off, video feeds, DVR features, but most important, it had a numbered keypad.

“He accesses via remote?”

“Makes sense. You can leave it in plain sight, carry it around with you if you want. No one’s the wiser.”

“And if you’re like everyone else … you lose it every single night.” Busch looked over Michael’s shoulder. “How big’s the combination?”

“Nine digits.”

“Nine digits? That’s over a million combinations,” Busch said.

“Three hundred and eighty million, actually,” Michael said as he opened up the back of the remote. He pulled a set of miniscrewdrivers from his leather satchel and removed the cover face.

He looked around the room, his eyes quickly falling on a small maroon sensor above the bar. He climbed atop the mahogany cabinets and removed the cover face of the infrared receiver. He dug the maroon-colored box out of the wall, leaving it to hang on its three wires.

He hopped down, looking at the room as if for the first time. The couches, the bar, the table. His eyes finally stopped at the black audio/video cabinet that sat below the plasma TV. He walked over, looked behind the unit, and found a bundle of wires exiting the wall before disappearing into the back of the black case.

“Now what?” Busch asked. “Can’t you break the code? It’s only 380 million possibilities … smart-ass.”

Michael ignored his friend. “You never put the control computer for an electronic vault inside the safe. If it fails you are locked out in the worst of ways with no access to reset the system.”

Michael opened up the video cabinet and found the illuminated video system: DVD player, DVR, VCR, tuner, and on its own shelf behind a smoked-glass panel, a computer and flat-panel display. The screen read
Central Station
. Michael removed the clear panel and
looked closer at the computer. “You don’t use a twenty-thousand-dollar computer for iTunes.”

“What do you use it for?”

Michael pulled out the black computer tower and removed the back. “It controls your vault.”

He pulled out a flashlight, examined the inner workings of the computer, and popped out a small nickel cadmium battery. “All computers have a small battery that provides power to certain memory functions even when the system is down.” He examined the motherboard and popped out a black chip, holding it up for Busch to see. “MRAM is a nonvolatile memory chip that doesn’t need power to maintain its data. It’s where the security memory for this particular system and the vault door is stored, so in the event of a power failure, hard-drive crash, or corruption of the system, you can still access your vault. But if we take it out, along with the battery backup for the BIOS…”

Michael turned off the computer, waited thirty seconds, and fired it back up.

The screen glowed green and the display read:
System initialization. Reset system. Reset password
. Michael quickly typed and the system restarted. Now granted full access, he worked the computer for thirty seconds and, with a flourish, hit Enter.

A large whoosh followed by a heavy click sounded within the mechanics of the safe door.

The three-inch-thick door pivoted out to reveal a darkened hallway. And as the door moved to its extreme open position, lights flicked on in succession, moving down the hall, to reveal another world, a refined world of elegance and style, of trophies and secrets.

Michael and Busch stepped into the hall and found it lined with dark mahogany walls and recessed shelves. Thick blue and green Persian rugs covered rich hardwood floors. Paintings, lit under pin spots, mingled with sculptures and antique books upon the shelves. As they moved down the hall, Michael recognized the first piece of art: Pablo Picasso’s
Nature Morte à la Charlotte
. It had been stolen from a restoration studio in Paris in 2004, no clues left behind, no witnesses or leads,
never to be seen again. Michael shook his head as he walked on, but suddenly stopped and stared at an exquisitely detailed painting on a wooden pallet of the Virgin Mary holding Baby Jesus. The deep colors, the pride-filled eyes were rendered in lifelike, heart-rending detail. Stolen in 2003 from the Duke of Buccleuch, Da Vinci’s
Madonna of the Yarnwinder
was worth over $100 million.

“Nice,” Busch said, not comprehending what he looked at.

Michael said nothing as he came to a heavy mahogany door and opened it. The room was softly lit; a single chair sat in the center. What Michael looked at was beyond comprehension. Upon the walls were three Rembrandts, a Johannes Vermeer, an Edouard Manet, and five works by Degas. Michael stood staring in wonderment at the haul from a theft in Boston over fifteen years ago, one of the most renowned unsolved thefts of modern times. This room alone was worth over $400 million.

“Hey,” Busch called, looking at his watch.

Michael closed the door and they walked down the hall.

Iblis was a thief beyond compare. There had to be over a billion dollars’ worth of works of art down here, none of which he had chosen to liquidate, looking at them as trophies, badges of honor, successes that he could never share. Iblis was not vainglorious: He appeared to be self-satisfied, with no need for congratulations or back-slapping compliments for a job well done.

The hallway passed a small open lounge, a couch and two chairs focused on a single piece of art lit with three hidden pin spots in the ceiling. The seventeenth-century painting hung on the far wall of the room, the centerpiece of Iblis’s illicit collection. There was no question he considered it his greatest achievement.

As Michael’s eyes fell upon
Concerto de Oberion
, an oil masterpiece painted by Govier, his professional admiration for Iblis quickly dissolved.

Four people had died in that theft from the Franze Museum in Berlin: two grad students, each with a bullet through the temple, a twenty-year-old secretary with her throat slit—but it was the curator’s death
that chilled the art world. Hans Grunewald—the name had appeared on the news for weeks—had had his ears sliced from his head, the skin of his face filleted off, lye poured in his eyes, all while he was alive; tortured to give over the museum’s security codes. He had lingered for ten days, but had no recollection of the thief who had not only robbed the museum but robbed Grunewald of his senses and eventually his life.

Michael’s stomach twisted as he thought of Iblis displaying the Govier for the first time, how he applauded in a self-congratulatory fashion every time he sat before this work of art obtained through the death of four innocents.

Michael turned away in disgust, and what his eyes fell upon next nearly tore the heart from his chest. He looked upon a mahogany bookcase on the side wall next to the Govier; it was filled with books and mementos, keepsakes and photos. And it was the photos that disturbed him, far more than the Govier, far more than anything he could have imagined. Each of the pictures sat in a silver Tiffany frame, displayed in reverence, displayed with love, all of one individual. The pictures were through the years, teenhood, early twenties, the most recent appearing just days old, taken surreptitiously here in Istanbul within the grounds of Topkapi Palace, the subject entirely unaware. And each photo was meticulously presented with affection, exhibited with love, as if the subject was the greatest piece in all of Iblis’s collection. There was no question of Iblis’s feelings for his subject, no question that he stared upon her nightly, entranced by her green eyes, her long blonde hair. There was no question in Michael’s mind that Iblis loved KC.

Without another thought, Michael stepped from the lounge and continued to the end of the hall to find Busch staring at him.

“You see a ghost back there?” Busch asked.

“Let’s pray to God Cindy and Simon are down here so we can get out of hell.”