The Hypnotist (22 page)

It was late, and Elgin Barindra should have already left the Phoenix Foundation. He only had a few more letters left in this box and was ready for the next discovery. He’d become fascinated by the world unfolding in the missives. New York City at the turn of the century was a rich stage for the spiritualists, philosophers and scientists involved in the Phoenix Club. For someone who loved history as much as Elgin, the hours he’d spent poring over these century-old letters was less like work than an indulgence. He was, in fact, spending so much time down in the subbasement immersed in the correspondence from people long since dead that he often found himself slightly dazed when he left the nineteenth-century Queen Anne–style building and exited into the midst of the bustle and commotion of the present day.

His favorite letters were those Trevor Talmage’s wife sent her husband while he was on archaeological digs. Sarah Talmage reported on their children, Esme and Perry, in so much detail and with such love that there were moments Elgin was almost positive he could hear a boy and girl playing in the next room, or thought he’d caught a glimpse of them running down one
of the hallways upstairs,
roughhousing,
as their mother referred to it in her letters.

When he came across a black-bordered letter expressing sorrow over the death of Trevor Talmage, Elgin felt grief that turned to anger when he learned, in yet another condolence note, that Trevor had been murdered by an intruder in this very building and found by his wife and children when they came home from seeing a musical. He became first indignant and then suspicious when he read about the scandal that ensued when Trevor’s younger brother, Davenport, took over the club and married his brother’s widow only eleven months later.

None of today’s letters had either progressed the story of the lives of those who lived in the townhouse or shed any more light on the mysterious Memory Tools, and he’d reached the bottom of the box. There were only two envelopes left.

He picked up one, opened it, pulled out a sheet of thick, creamy paper and recognized the by now familiar signature of Frederick L. Lennox, a regular correspondent of both Talmage brothers. There were already two dozen letters from the financier and art collector; this would make the twenty-fifth.

“I didn’t know you were still here,” Malachai Samuels said.

Elgin was startled and not for the first time. The co-director of the foundation moved around stealthily, almost slithering, the agent thought. Raising his left hand, Malachai glanced at his wrist. “It’s already nine.”

“I didn’t realize it had gotten that late,” Elgin said, honestly surprised.

“That must be very interesting.”

“Every letter is…they make the past seem so close.”

Malachai nodded as if he understood exactly what his librarian meant as he sat down and began reading the missive.

It was so quiet in the subbasement, Elgin could hear Malachai’s wristwatch ticking. Looking over, he noted that the square mother-of-pearl face had oversize black Roman numerals and fittings that had to be platinum because it was unlikely Malachai would wear ordinary stainless steel. This must have been the seventh or eighth watch he’d seen the reincar
nationist wear. Nothing about him escaped the librarian’s notice. That was his job, to pay attention to everything Malachai said or did and never forget that the man sitting next to him was most probably a ruthless criminal responsible for multiple robberies and the deaths of at least five people.

Malachai let out a long, slow breath.

“Is it something important?” Elgin asked, trying for a believable mixture of professional interest and personal detachment.

“One of the most fascinating aspects of reincarnation theory is the concept of coincidence. Are you familiar with it?”

Elgin said he wasn’t and sat back in anticipation of Malachai’s explanation. The possibility that this man might be a criminal didn’t stop him from being interested in what the reincarnationist knew.

“Nothing is an accident or a coincidence, according to past-life theories that go back though history, through the centuries, circling through cultures. If we were in the East, being skeptical about these moments that seem to be part of a bigger plan would be as unusual as questioning the wetness of water.” A look of delightful anticipation sparkled in his dark eyes. “You finding this letter now…” Unlike other people, when Malachai smiled, his expression was always framed by mystery. “You finding this letter now,” he repeated, “is nothing short of astonishing, Elgin.”

The rest of the operation took less than ten minutes. As the first FedEx truck drove off, a second, twice as big, drove up. The courier who climbed out immediately set to inspecting Hypnos. Seventy-four seconds after he started he signaled to his crew. One man jumped up on the forklift. Another opened the van’s door.

“We have someone watching,” the courier told Lucian. “If you don’t want anything to happen to you, you’ll wait here until we’re out of sight before you go back inside.”

Lucian assumed the man was bluffing. Even if the Matisse Monster had positioned someone at the airport, the local FBI agents would have found him by now and would have a long-distance, high-range rifle trained on him.

As soon as the truck was a few hundred feet away, Lucian sprinted back to the hangar. “Let’s get going,” he shouted to the agents inside as he flung the doors open.

Everyone came to life. Olshling and three agents ran outside to retrieve the crates. A waiting black sedan revved its engine. Matt Richmond opened the car door and Lucian jumped in. As the driver drove out of the hangar and took off, Lucian turned around and watched Olshling supervising the crew loading the
paintings into the belly of the cargo plane. Lucian couldn’t allow himself any satisfaction; the game wasn’t over yet. Retrieving the paintings was certainly important—to the Met it was all that mattered—but the FBI wanted the extortionist, the fences and the actual thieves. Only putting the whole crime ring behind bars would satisfy them. But only finding out who had killed Solange would fully satisfy Lucian.

“The signal is great,” said Richmond, pointing to the red blip on the GPS screen that represented the FedEx truck.

“I know it’s a long shot, but were they able to pick up anything from all those phone calls?” Lucian asked his partner without taking his eyes off the screen.

“No.” Richmond shrugged. “But if this signal holds that won’t matter. You did good.”

Once Charlie Danzinger had finished destroying the Hypnos reproduction—stripping the gold and silver, ripping out all but a few of the semiprecious stones, artificially aging the wood and turning the gleaming Greek god into a ruined hint of what it had once been—Lucian had spent an hour alone with the sculpture.

Opening the back door, which itself was five feet tall and two-and-a-half feet wide, he’d entered a space big enough for him to stand in. Inspecting the sculpture’s guts, he pored over its internal construction, examining the curved wooden ribs that made up the armature. It was an engineering marvel, as beautiful in its own way as the exterior. Running his fingers over the walls, he’d searched for a joint where he might be able to insert the GPS tracking device, a state-of-the-art piece of electronics the size of a pea. A crisscross of wooden slats and supports up near the statue’s shoulder proved ideal, and he’d affixed it to the back of one of the slats. Then, using stains, he’d mixed up a mound of putty, matched it to the wood and covered the device with it.

Later, he’d asked his boss to step inside the statue and see if he could find the device. After a half hour, Doug Comley had given up. Not someone who took failure well, for the rest of that day he’d been out of sorts and annoyed. It probably hadn’t been Lucian’s smartest political maneuver.

The sculpture’s signal stayed strong for the next forty-five minutes, and they followed it onto I-405 N toward Santa Monica and then onto US-101 N toward Ventura. At the Ojai exit, the blip veered off the highway. Fifteen minutes later it stopped on what appeared to be a rural road. They were one hour and thirty-eight minutes away from LAX. The Lake Casitas Recreation Area was the closest named location on the navigational system, and it didn’t mean anything to any of them.

“Where the hell are we?” Richmond asked as he looked out at the mountainous expanse surrounding them. Born in Brooklyn, Richmond had never lived anywhere but New York City except for the months he spent training at Quantico—which, legend had it, had been an ordeal for him but a bigger ordeal for those around him. He claimed he needed concrete under his soles and bus exhaust in his lungs.

“Nature, Matt. It’s called nature,” Lucian said.

“Lovely. Now let’s collect our friend Hypnos and get back to civilization.”

Activating his radio, Lucian checked in with the backup teams. Eight men in three cars were all less than five minutes away. He suggested that they park around the last bend and proceed on foot in case they were being watched. He and Richmond were going ahead. During the call, he never took his eyes off the red dot that identified the position of the transmitting device he’d affixed inside of Hypnos.

Forgoing the open road, Lucian and Richmond trudged through an abutting orange grove and eight minutes later came
to a rise. Below them a complex of buildings that seemed to have sprouted out of the rocks, trees, hills and earth spread out over fifteen or twenty acres.

“There’s not much activity down there,” Richmond said after a minute of observation. “Whatever it is seems shut down for the night.”

The area did seem deserted. Lucian counted a dozen buildings, ranging in size from midsize homes to airplane hangars. The stunning architecture incorporated long, low, horizontal lines, strongly projecting eaves and cantilevered balconies. “Let’s see how close we can get,” he said.

They climbed down the incline and hurried through another grove of orange trees and onto the complex grounds without encountering any kind of gate or fence. Checking his GPS device again, Lucian pointed to a bungalow set off to the side among a copse of eucalyptus trees. “According to St. Christopher here, the statue is in the farthest building to the right, back there.”

Years ago Doug Comley had named the first directional signal device he’d used St. Christopher, after the patron saint of travelers, and ever since then his team all used the moniker.

“Hey, Gary, how many people can you see inside?”

Gary Fulton, one of the L.A. team members, studied his P3 mobile remote sensing system. The size of a cell phone, it used microwaves to see through walls. “Looks like there are five people inside.”

“When there’s a will… Let’s go do this,” Richmond said in his signature upbeat style. He annoyed some of the other agents with his irrepressible optimism, but never Lucian, who appreciated Matt’s energy and relied on this clear-thinking man who believed they were a team of supermen who could overcome any obstacle.

Seven minutes after instructing two of the backup teams to position themselves around the building and the third to prepare to go into the bungalow with them, Lucian and Richmond reached the driveway, where the large FedEx truck was indeed parked. Stealthily, Lucian worked his way around it, his gun drawn, while Richmond and the agents who’d just arrived on the scene provided lookout.

The vehicle was unattended and empty. The GPS had indicated the sculpture was inside the building; now Lucian was certain it was.

He made it back around to Richmond and the rest of the team and cocked his head toward the building. It was time to proceed.

Golden light streamed down from skylights illuminating a reception area with an unattended desk and a half-dozen expensive-looking chairs set against the walls. According to St. Christopher’s blinking red dot, they were right on top of the signal. Deep inside the building and to the right, they could hear the murmur of voices and followed them down a wide, carpeted hallway. They’d passed three empty offices by the time they reached an atrium with a double-height ceiling that appeared to be an informal conference room with two exits. The murmurs that had led them here had ceased, and the GPS couldn’t zero in any more precisely on the location of the sculpture within the building itself. They were on their own now, working blind. Richmond pointed to first one door and then to himself, and then the other door and then to Lucian, indicating that they should split up.

Behind them a voice boomed out.

“Hands up. You’re trespassing.”

Even with a gun in hand, the guard didn’t have a chance; he was outnumbered and he found out just how outnumbered pretty fast. Lucian and Richmond spun around, Glocks pointed at him while Jeffries came from one side to grab his pistol and Agent O’Hara came at him from the other and wrestled him to the ground.

Just steps behind the first guard, a second guard ran in.

Right into the four FBI agents who were ready for him.

Sellers and Jeffries cuffed both men’s hands and feet. O’Hara taped their mouths shut. But what to do with them? Lucian couldn’t waste a man to stay with them. He motioned instructions to Sellers. A gun was better at herding than a dog any day, and with incentives at their back, the two men shuffled obediently along.

The first door Lucian tried led to an empty kitchen. The second led to a dimly lit room with dark gray walls and a dozen black leather lounge chairs set up in rows facing a movie screen almost too large for the space. There, two men in FedEx uniforms wielded crowbars and hammers as they worked at prying open the large wooden crate that had come out of the belly of the courier plane a few hours before.

“FBI,” Lucian called out. “Drop your weapons. You’re under arrest for trafficking in stolen goods.”

“We don’t have any weapons,” one of the FedEx men called out, and then dropped the tools.

The second did the same.

“Down, now. On the floor.” Lucian’s words shot out like rapid gunfire. “Hands behind your back.”

Both FedEx men dropped down and in doing so revealed a third man, who had been standing slightly behind them and out of view. He was well over six feet tall with black hair threaded with silver strands that shone in the indirect light. His eyes were light gray and looked almost like steel as he turned his gaze on the troupe of agents that had just invaded his space. The surprise in his eyes turned to indignation.

“You are trespassing.”

The same instincts that enabled Lucian to identify the authenticity of a painting in a few seconds informed him he was looking at the Monster who had defaced the Matisse painting and had been negotiating with Tyler Weil and the Metropolitan Museum.

“Step away, please, sir,” Lucian ordered.

The man remained where he was.

“You’re under arrest for trafficking in stolen goods. You can make this as easy or as hard as you want. It’s up to you.”

“Stolen goods? I’m afraid you’re wrong.” The man glanced back at the partially opened crate and as Lucian approached he could see an emotion in the silver eyes he recognized immediately—longing. “This was a very fair trade.”

“Holy shit, Lucian,” Richmond said under his breath. “Don’t you know who he is?”

Lucian had no idea. “What’s your name, sir?”

“Darius Shabaz,” he said, pride evident in every syllable.

Shabaz? Lucian pictured a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds, heard a clap of thunder and saw the emerald letters appearing on the movie screen in his mind as, with each flash of lighting, the letters burned and built into the completed logo: Sha…Shabaz… Shabaz Productions.

This was who had devised the exchange of the sculpture for the four paintings? The movie producer?

Lucian pulled out a pair of handcuffs. What was going on? He ran through a dozen scenarios. Could Shabaz have had something to do with Solange’s murder? Was he somehow connected to Malachai? The only parts of the puzzle that now made sense were all the professional disguises—the men in the Los Angeles hotel room, the fake FedEx trucks, the choreographed action.

“Darius Shabaz, you are under arrest,” Lucian intoned. Shabaz remained still but bowed his head as if in prayer, his posture slumped and his shoulders rounded as if hearing his name had broken something in him.

Lucian was only two feet away from the producer when he felt the floor tremble, saw the walls shake and heard a deep rumbling.

“It’s an earthquake!” Shabaz yelled out, as Lucian, Richmond and the three FBI agents fell into a wide crack that had opened up in the floor.