‘But wasn’t Bellak Jewish?’
‘As it turned out, yes. But by then a grateful Himmler had hung the portrait in his office on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin and even commissioned a second painting. When he discovered the truth, he had the SS officer shot and Bellak arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Then he ordered that every last one of Bellak’s works was to be tracked down and disposed of.’
‘Clearly, some survived,’ Tom said. ‘This one was stolen a few days ago.’
‘Why bother pinching that? The frame they had it in was probably worth more than the painting.’
‘I don’t know. Maybe because he was Jewish,’ Tom said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You should have seen the place.’ Tom was surprised at the anger in his voice. ‘Someone had done a real number on it. Swastikas and graffiti sprayed all over the walls. Children’s drawings from a local death camp torn to shreds, as if they were trying to make confetti.’
‘Bastards,’ Archie muttered, flicking his cigarette butt into the gutter. ‘And the painting?’
‘Sliced out of its frame and taken with them.’
‘But what would they want with it?’
‘That’s what I’ve been wondering.’
‘Unless…’
‘Unless what?’
Overhead, a train crashed its way towards London Bridge and Archie waited until the raucous clanking had subsided before answering.
‘Unless the painting was what this was all about. Unless they were trying to be clever by disguising an old-fashioned robbery as some sort of anti-Semitic attack.’
‘Exactly,’ Tom said, reassured that Archie had come to the same conclusion as him. ‘So I made some calls. And from what I can work out, it seems that over the last year or so there have been six thefts of alleged Bellak paintings from various private homes and collections across Europe.’
‘Six? I’d no idea that many had survived.’
‘Well, they’re not exactly the sort of thing anyone would bother cataloguing, are they? Even now, no one’s managed to join the dots. The cases have just stuck with the local police in each area. The insurance companies haven’t got involved because the pictures aren’t worth anything. I only found out because I knew who to ask.’
‘Someone’s going to a hell of a lot of trouble to steal a bunch of supposedly worthless paintings.’ A pause. ‘Tom? You listening?’ Archie looked up at him questioningly.
‘Don’t turn round,’ Tom said in a low voice, ‘but I think we’re being followed.’
Black Pine Mountains, nr Malta, Idaho
5th January – 5.34 a.m.
‘What’s the latest from inside the compound?’ Special Agent Paul Viggiano spoke over the background noise of technicians and ringing telephones, a trim muscular figure in his blue wind-breaker, FBI stamped in large yellow letters across his back.
Bailey, sitting at the kitchen table of the cabin they had commandeered the previous evening as their operational HQ, was the first to speak.
‘No movement, nothing. Not a single phone call. Even the generator shut down this morning. I figure it ran out of gas. No one’s come out to fix it.’
‘What about the dogs?’ Silvio Vasquez this time, the leader of the fourteen-man FBI Hostage Rescue Team that had been assigned to the investigation, sitting to Bailey’s right.
‘What?’ Viggiano frowned. ‘What the hell’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Didn’t someone say they had dogs? Have you seen them?’
‘No.’ Bailey shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
‘So that’s weird, right?’ Vasquez concluded. ‘A dog’s gotta take a leak.’
‘When did it last snow?’ Viggiano asked. Bailey noticed that he had found some loose matches and was arranging them into neat parallel lines as he spoke.
‘Two days ago,’ Vasquez answered.
‘And there are no footprints? You’re seriously saying no one has stepped outside that farmhouse for two days?’ Peering over, Bailey could see that he had rearranged the matches into a square.
‘Not unless they can fly,’ Bailey confirmed. ‘And that includes the dogs.’
‘I still say you boys have screwed up big time.’
It was the local sheriff’s turn to speak. A tubby man with ginger hair and a closely trimmed moustache, Sheriff Hennessy seemed to be in a permanent sweat, the perspiration beading on his pink forehead and cheeks like condensation on glass.
‘I know these people,’ he continued, the top of his clip-on tie losing itself in the fleshy folds of his neck. ‘They’re law-abiding, God-fearing folk. Patriots.’
‘So you say,’ Bailey began, feeling the resentment welling inside him. ‘But they happen to be on a federal blacklist for suspected links to the Aryan Nations and the Klan.’
Bailey saw Viggiano give a slight shake of the head, warning him to back off. ‘Now, Sheriff, it’s true we don’t know for sure that these people have done anything wrong,’ Viggiano resumed in a conciliatory tone, ‘but we do know that three days ago an exhibit was stolen from the National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland. We know that whoever took it left no physical evidence that we’ve been able to find.’
‘Apart from the security guard they strung up like a hunk of meat in cold storage,’ Bailey couldn’t help himself from adding.
‘We also know,’ Viggiano continued as if he hadn’t heard him, ‘that our Salt Lake office got a call yesterday suggesting these law-abiding patriots of yours were involved.’
‘I know all that,’ Hennessy said, dabbing his brow with a paper napkin taken from the dispenser at the side of the table. ‘But any crack-head could have made that call. It don’t prove nothing.’
‘It proves that the caller knew about the theft. With the press blackout the NSA have imposed, the only people outside of law enforcement agencies who could know about that are the people who did it. So this is a lead, Sheriff, and we’re going to follow up whether you agree with it or not.’
Hennessy slumped back into his chair, muttering under his breath. Bailey smiled, feeling somewhat the better for his capitulation.
‘So what’s the plan?’ he asked.
‘Well, I’m not sitting on my ass till these jokers run out of water and crackers,’ Viggiano declared. ‘We’re going in. Today.’
There was a murmur of approval from around the table, Hennessy excepted. ‘But I want to keep this simple,’ Viggiano continued. ‘We’ve got no reason to assume things will get ugly, so we keep the Humvees under cover and the choppers on the ground. Hopefully we won’t need them. Vasquez?’
Vasquez got to his feet and leant over the table. His face was dark and pockmarked, his lank black hair tucked under an FBI baseball cap which he wore back to front, his dark eyes glowing with excitement.
‘The Sheriff’s men have put road blocks here and here –’ he indicated two roads on