The Looters (26 page)

A padlock was hanging from the hasp. I stared at it. It wasn’t snapped shut. It lay there open and easy to remove. I took the lock off and pushed open the door. Stepping in, not bothering to look for a light switch out of fear someone at the house would see the light go on, I closed the door most of the way behind me. I left it open just a crack to take the edge off the darkness.

The immediate odor of dried salt water and stale seaweed hit me. The smell of things that had been in the sea for a long time.

From a stream of sunlight coming through the open doorway I made out a small bronze cannon layered and tarnished from sitting at the bottom of the sea for an eon. Old, perhaps centuries old, but certainly not an antiquity from the Iraqi museum.

As I looked closer I made out a sea-encrusted metal chest. An anchor from an old Spanish galleon or other ship of the era.

Like the piece of eight Coby claimed was a lucky find off Florida, the boathouse had the stuff of Blackbeard’s treasure trove, not Mesopotamian antiquities.

A shadow fell across my stream of light from the doorway. Someone kicked the door open.

I turned—and screamed.

“I left it unlocked for you,” Coby grinned.

I ran, bursting by him. He grabbed me by the shirt and jerked me back. I spun around swinging my fists and he grabbed both my wrists and held me.

“Stop it!” he yelled.

My hands were gripped in vises.

“And don’t kick me.”

He had read my mind. Again.

“Just stop. If I wanted to hurt you, I had plenty of time alone to do it. So relax. I won’t hurt you.”

“You bastard,” I spit out.

“True. But you’re going to learn to love me. If you haven’t already.”

“Not likely. I’m going to have you thrown in prison. I’ve already called the police.” That was technically true. I had left a message for Agent Nunes.

He stared at me. “What number did you dial for the police? Nine-one-one won’t do it.”

“I… I… had the hotel call.”

“You’re lying. You didn’t see me until you were in the taxi.”

“You knew I was following you?”

“Hell, you did everything but send off flares.” He let go of my wrists. “Just calm down. I told you I left the door open for you. I wasn’t lying. I wanted you to see that I wasn’t hoarding pieces from Baghdad.”

I gestured around. “What are you hoarding?”

“What does it look like to you?”

He turned on the light. More chests and cannons, wine bottles, olive oil jars, old rigging, tools, and other implements were stacked around the room.

“It looks like you’ve found a galleon,” I said. I shot a glance out the door at the bay. “Spain had an empire the sun never set on before the British, and they also brought home the riches. There must be dozens of sunken galleons off this part of the coast alone.”

“Hundreds, probably. Over five thousand Spanish ships went down around the world. We found one of them.”

I knew enough about the laws of the sea to realize that treasure hunting—robbing antiquities from sunken ships—was generally illegal. But it wasn’t the right time or place for me to be tempting fate with more threats I couldn’t back up.

“Let’s get some air,” he said. “This place stinks.”

“Are you Viktor Milan?” I blurted out. I wanted him to confirm it.

“Yeah. I’m Viktor Milan.”

Chapter 41

I didn’t know what to think as we walked along the beach together. He never pointed a gun at me or threatened me. He acted as if he had arranged the meeting. And at this point, I wasn’t sure that he hadn’t.

Nothing made sense to me, especially walking on a romantic beach with a good-looking blond, tanned, slightly aging surfer type, an L.A. Venice Beach golden sun god in his youth… wondering whether I was going to be murdered.

“I guess I should call you Viktor, though I admit, you don’t look like a Viktor,” I said.

“Call me Coby.”

“But you just said you’re Viktor.”

“What’s in a name?”

“Are you going to murder me?”

He shot me a look. “Should I?”

“You’ve already tried it once. Maybe twice. Maybe three times if you count grabbing me in Zurich.”

“Give me a break. That was obviously set up to meet you.”

“You’re a military guy. You know how to use weapons.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You think that was me behind the rocket launcher?”

I wasn’t sure, but I couldn’t hold my tongue. “You also murdered that poor man in New York. He saw your SEAL cap. And you killed Mr. Bensky to cover your tracks.”

I was strangely calm. I had absolutely no control over anything. I not only didn’t have any answers, I didn’t know the questions to ask.

“You are one gutsy woman. Do you always tell murderers that they’re murderers, right to their faces?”

“I’m insane.” And revved up.

He nodded. “That, too.”

“Why did you kill those people? Is the money really worth it?”

He sighed. “Okay, let’s clear this up right now. Look me in the eye. Do I really strike you as someone who could kill people?”

I looked into his probing eyes. “I think so. You look like you can be a bastard when you want to be.”

“I forgot eyes are mirrors to the soul. So let me rephrase the question. Do I look like I’m crazy enough to blow up a building with unarmed people in it with a rocket launcher?”

I had to think about that one. I didn’t want to believe he was a killer, but I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. Things weren’t making any sense.

“Who exactly is Viktor Milan? Besides a liar and bastard.”

“Is that any way to talk to someone you made passionate love to?”

“You’re avoiding my questions?”

“I am an enigma.”

“You are a shit.”

“Okay.” He nodded and pursed his lips. “You earned the right to know. Viktor Milan is… I guess he’s what lawyers call a legal fiction. It’s a made-up name. Like Microsoft or IBM or General Motors. It’s like if your name is John Blow and you want to start a company named Jack Shit, you have to get a legal paper that says you’re John Blow doing business as Jack Shit.”

I nodded like a bobbing doll. “Is that lecture supposed to explain anything? We’re talking murder and thievery, not Business 101. Why don’t you try plain English?”

“That answer was supposed to point out that there are millions of people operating companies under names besides their own. Viktor Milan was created so we could do business under a prestigious international-sounding name in one of the world’s financial capitals.”

“Wasn’t it also created so you could forge provenances without getting caught?”

He tried to smother a smirk, but it didn’t work. “That, too.”

“So you’re the crooked bastard that created the fraudulent provenance that ruined my life and got people killed. If I had a gun, you sonofabitch, I’d shoot you, really shoot you where it hurts.”

That didn’t make much sense to me, either, but I was seething.

“I haven’t killed anyone. Yet. But I’m working up to it.”

“If you didn’t kill Lipton and the others, who did?”

“That’s a good question. The only thing I can tell you is that it wasn’t me.”

“You’re lying, of course, lying, lying, lying.” I shook an accusatory finger at him. “Does not compute. If you didn’t do it, you know who did. The killings all go back to your phony provenances and the looting of the Iraqi museum.”

He made a noncommittal listening response, then said, “Since you know so much, why don’t you tell me.”

“All right, I don’t believe you blew up Lipton’s gallery. Not personally, at least, though you might have arranged for it. But I have proof that you murdered Abdullah, the Iraqi curator.”

He acted like I had just slapped him in the face.

Steering me with a grip on my arm, he turned us around and started back toward the boathouse. My heart started beating faster. Had I said too much?

“Has it occurred to you, Miss Know-It-All, that if I was a cold-blooded killer, you would be digging a hole for yourself right now?”

The thought had occurred to me, but my life was in ruins and I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I was so frustrated, I could have thrown myself at him and beaten him with my fists. I felt tears coming, but I fought them back. “I want the truth from you.”

“One thing I’ve learned in life is that there is more than one version of the truth in most situations. But let’s take it one a step at a time. I didn’t kill Abdullah. In fact, I saved his life once. I didn’t kill Lipton and the others. I also wasn’t aware they were going to be killed and the place torched.”

“Tell me about Abdullah.”

“He was a stupid old man.” He shook his head. “No, that’s unfair. He should have just kept his mouth shut. He was too…”

“Idealistic?”

“Yeah, a real romantic in a world without pity. He didn’t understand that no one cared about what he was willing to give his life for, not even the people in his own country. Yeah, I saved his life, but getting his head whacked didn’t teach him to keep his mouth shut. Ultimately it got him killed.”

I stared at his SEAL cap. “How did you save his life?”

“We’ll go into that in a moment.”

He led me up to the boathouse and the speedboat tied up at the pier. The boat was nosed toward the bay.

“I want you to meet some friends,” he said.

Cold fear gripped me. It must have shown on my face. I was ready to make a run for it. He took my arm firmly and led me to the boat.

“They’re out there,” he said.

A large fishing boat sat in the distance.

“Over the sunken galleon?” I asked. “Is that how you’re bringing up the treasure?”

“Your mother apparently never told you that curiosity killed the cat. So does having a big mouth.”

He led me aboard the speedboat.

“Things have gotten a little more high-tech than sending down a lone diver in a diving suit. We use a million-dollar robot with cameras for eyes that probes the wreck. And we have a high-powered suction tube that can bring small items to the surface. Before we get to the point of finding treasure, we need to find the sunken vessel.

“It used to just take a pirate’s treasure map, some quill scratches on a piece of leather by Long John Silver. Things have changed. Now we start with a vague historic record of the region where a ship went down, preferably a Spanish galleon with a bellyful of Inca and Aztec gold and silver. Almost always the history record is full of holes because where the ship went down is a matter of conjecture.”

As he talked, he pulled in the plastic bumpers that kept the boat from rubbing against the dock.

“Using all the clues we get from records and rumors of the day, we refine the ship’s location with GPS tracking and imaging. Once we pin down a manageable area in which to make a focused search, we use sonar, sound waves, and ground-penetrating radar to map the ocean floor for forms that fit a ship’s contours.”

“That makes you nothing more than a high-tech thief.”

He pretended to wince at the accusation as he started the engine. “I consider myself a savior and custodian of antiquities.”

I screeched. “My God—you’re delusional.”

He grabbed a beer out of a cold box in the cockpit and asked, “Beer? Soda with a little arsenic chaser?”

“No, thanks.”

He steered the boat toward the larger vessel in the distance. He kept the throttle low, with the boat barely making headway in the water. Obviously he wanted to talk before we reached the bigger boat.

He peered at me again over a swig of beer. “You realize that everything I say is my word against yours.”

I made a zipping motion across my lips. “My lips are sealed.”

I didn’t volunteer that I’d already used his name in vain in a voice-mail message to an FBI agent.

“You’re lying again,” he said, “but after falling in love with you, I find myself completely at your mercy.”

“You’re confusing lust with love. And I’m sorry I made love with a thief and a murderer.”
Good girl, Madison; that should help your present hopeless situation
.

“All right, let’s deal with your uninformed prejudices. There’s a ship out in the bay, at the bottom. It went down around three hundred years ago with a rich cargo. No one cares about it. It sits at the bottom of the bay, covered by sand. Lost, ignored, abandoned, no one to love it.”

“You love it. At least the rich cargo.”

“My motives are not important. My job is to find the sunken galleon. After I find it, to recover the treasure—”

“Treasure to you, precious cultural relics to the people of Spain.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Okay, let’s deal with that theory. You think of me as a thief. I see myself as another Lord Elgin.”

I burst out laughing. I howled. “You
are
delusional.”

“Lord Elgin was the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the early 1800s. At the time, the vast Turkish empire, ruled by a sultan in Istanbul, included Greece, along with much of the rest of the Balkans.”

“I’m familiar with the Elgin tale. And historical geography.”

“I should have thought of that myself, you being a… what did you call yourself? A pimp?”

“Bastard.”

“Let me refresh your memory. While he was visiting Athens, Elgin saw the Parthenon and other irreplaceable relics of Western civilization deteriorating and even being deliberately damaged. He watched soldiers use marble sculptures thousands of years old as target practice for their muskets. At an earlier time, when Venice was fighting the Ottoman Empire, the Parthenon was used as a powder magazine by the Turks. It blew up, destroying the center of the building.”

I finished it for him. “So Elgin grabbed everything he could and shipped it off to Britain.”

“Shipped it off where it is safe and sound today in the British Museum, rather than being damaged and destroyed by war, theft, and neglect. The world can appreciate irreplaceable works done thousands of years ago because Lord Elgin saved them. The marble reliefs are there, along with a lot of other priceless antiquities like the Rosetta Stone, which provided the key to reading ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.”

“Are you aware there are a few million Greeks who believe that those antiquities belong back in Greece? Not to mention that I’m sure the Rosetta Stone is just one of a long list of antiquities the Egyptians would like to see returned.”