The Looters (29 page)

“His name is Ernest Stocker. He was once part of the team.”

“A SEAL?”

“Right.”

“Is he the one who was going to kill Abdullah?”

“Yeah, he was going to blow him away. It’s Stocker’s cap that Abdullah saw. He probably saw it again that day you showed up and found Abdullah gutted. Stocker always said he’d rather kill with a knife than a gun. More feeling on both sides of the blade.”

“So he also killed Lipton, Albert, the receptionist… Bensky. God knows how many others. And this is one of your buddies?”

I suddenly felt sick. I leaned over the side and threw up.

Coby took a beer from the cold box, opened it, and handed it to me. I pushed it away.

“Rinse your mouth with it. You’ll feel better.”

I drank the beer and dropped the bottle over the side. I’d just seen a boathouse full of centuries-old pieces get hit by a modern weapon. I wasn’t in any mood to worry about the ecology.

For the first time since I’d met Coby he appeared contrite. He avoided me, which was fine, because I stared straight ahead and saw nothing. My world was spinning out of control again.

I saw the coast of North Africa before Coby spoke.

“I owe you an explanation about Stocker.”

“You sure as hell do.”

“We were all in the same unit in Iraq. It’s hard to explain, but the ballsy guy who can use a rocket launcher in downtown London isn’t a bad guy to be backing you up on a commando mission.”

“Ballsy guy? What courage does it take to kill people with a rocket launcher? Have you been so out of touch with—”

“You’re right; you’re right. I said it wrong. I
am
wrong. I guess my point is, he was just another gung-ho SEAL. He got crazy afterward. Or maybe it was always there and it just burst out one day. One day he was a poor kid from Georgia enlisting in the U.S. Navy as the best he could do, and the next he was sitting on tens of millions of dollars in contraband art.”

“Did you hit any other museums besides the Baghdad one?”

“No. The only thing we’ve done is search for sunken treasure. I told you, the Iraq job was an exception. Ninety percent of the thrill was planning it and seeing that we could pull it off.”

He pointed at a coastline south of us. “North Africa.”

“I guessed that. Where are we going?” I asked.

“Ever been to the Casbah?”

“The Casbah? You mean the marketplace in Tangiers?”

“It’s not far from Casablanca. We can drop in and see Bogie and Bacall.”

“Bogie and Bergman. Bogie and Bacall had it all in
Key Largo
, not
Casablanca
. Tell me why this homicidal maniac wants me dead.”

“I’m sure it’s not personal. Stocker hates a lot of people, including me and the team. He’s a loose cannon.”

“That’s an understatement.”

“I told you we got in trouble over some Persian Gulf pearls. We—”

“I know; you were cashiered out for being AWOL and off on a treasure hunt when real men and women were fighting a war.”

“We launched a project recovering antiquities, first in the Caribbean, then did some stuff off Indonesia.”

“You stole antiquities in violation of the laws of all civilized nations.”

“Do you want to tell this story?”

“Can you talk about your crimes and misdemeanors without making it look like you were out saving the world instead of being a damn thief?”

“Okay, Ms. Pimp, we were a gang of thieves. Does that sound better to you? We started out in the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean Islands off the coast of Greece and Turkey. We pulled up antiquities, occasionally coming onto land at night, and picking up something being smuggled out for Lipton.”

He stopped and eyed me intently. “You don’t have a man in your life, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s obvious, you’re too damn critical. I can see that most guys would jump in for some good sex and then run. You’d constantly walk on his heels, yapping that he drinks too much, eats the wrong stuff, drives too fast—”

“I don’t need a lecture from a career criminal. You are a damaged person. Let’s stay on Stocker.”

“Like I said, we left the Navy and got involved in a project locating and recovering artifacts from the Aegean. The Hellenistic world of the Greek islands and coast of Anatolia are loaded with antiquities. Stocker was still part of the team, then.” He paused for a moment and narrowed his eyes. “And what did you mean when you called me a damaged person?”

“Some people go through life all screwed up. Maybe you got dropped on your head too often as a kid.” He had a weird expression on his face, almost comical. “Go on; you were drooling like a kid in a candy store about all the antiquities you stole in the Aegean.”

He chuckled without humor, then leaned over and brushed my cheek with his lips and whispered, “One of these days, you and me…”

I steered him back to the subject at hand. “You were talking about Stocker.”

“Before Lipton, we dealt with a French art dealer who ended up dying of natural causes. Really. We needed another outlet for the artifacts. Through a smuggler in Istanbul, we learned that Henri Lipton was a guy who wouldn’t look too close at a provenance. We connected up with him and did good business for quite a while. Like I told you before, he came to us with the Iraqi museum heist.”

“What went wrong with your partnership with Lipton?”

“Nothing, at least from the five of us you’ve met. We were happy with the ten percent deal and happy to have the money flow in slowly so a bunch of the stuff didn’t raise suspicion by getting dumped on the market. We all thought of it as a retirement fund, you know. That was the deal… Lipton would sell the stuff off very, very slowly, over a period of years, and do it with private sales that didn’t generate publicity or talk in the trade.”

“Instead the Semiramis went onto the auction block,” I said.

He shook his head. “That dumb bastard Stocker pushed Lipton into selling the Semiramis. That piece was supposed to go last, in the distant future, because it was worth ten times more than anything else and would cause worldwide attention in the art market. I spoke to Lipton after I found out it was going to be auctioned. He said Stocker was running crazy. Lipton was scared of him, and I didn’t blame him.”

“Stocker just suddenly went off the deep end?”

“The insanity was probably there all the time; it just took a while for us to see it. While the rest of us were satisfied with preserving antiquities for the world, sort of the Robin Hoods of artifacts…”

He paused to let me make a caustic comment, but I kept a straight face and my mouth shut.

“Stocker veered off and got into a different kind of smuggling. Small arms, things like automatic weapons, machine guns—”

“Rocket launchers.”

“Definitely rocket launchers. The guy loves things that kill, he really does, like some of us love women. This guy literally took his rifle and bayonet to bed at night. When the rest of us were kibitzing, lying about the beer we’d drunk and the women we’d poked—”

“Now that’s a romantic image. Drunken sailors grunting and humping. Spare me the details.”

“Stocker would pet his gun and talk about range and velocity. Not being an art lover like the rest of us, he’s perfect for gunrunning. There are civil wars and terrorist activities on every continent, so there’s a huge market for the stuff. And there’s a big supply of it, mostly in the old Iron Curtain countries.

“Stocker said he wanted more excitement. The gunrunning is a dirty, dangerous, bloody trade. I think some Bulgarian babe he met in Istanbul got him started. We were just glad to get rid of him. None of us were comfortable around him. Anyway, he made some money off of a couple small deals and then went for a killing.”

“What kind of killing?”

“One that took a lot more money up front than he had. He got Lipton involved. I don’t know how he did it. Lipton told me he was just plain scared. Maybe that was true, but I think it was more than that. I think Lipton actually bought into a gun deal with Stocker because he was having financial problems from the breakup of a partnership and some deals that went south. He was sitting on all those Iraqi museum pieces that weren’t bringing in any money. Using them to finance a big gun deal, he could get money out of the pieces by putting them up for collateral and get them back when the gun deal went down. All done under the table. No publicity, period.”

“I can see Lipton doing that. There were all kinds of rumors in the art world that he had financial problems. And no one would have accused Lipton of having too much integrity. No question, he loved art. But everyone knew he was willing to look the other way.”

Coby gave me a simpering smile.

“Wipe that smirk off your face. The difference between me and you is that you knew for sure Lipton was a crook because you were one, too. I never bought anything that I knew was actual contraband. What happened with the Iraqi pieces and the arms deal?”

“I’m not sure. Stocker came to us first and wanted us to back him when he went to Lipton with the proposal. We wouldn’t do it. Lipton bought in without telling us.”

“So why didn’t you want to get involved?”

“It was too much like work. Besides, there’s no glory in supplying arms that kill people. No one wanted to get involved with Stocker again, either. He was always a problem. Anyway, come to find out, Stocker bought the arms on credit, using the Iraqi museum pieces as security. When the arms deal fell through, he forced Lipton into selling the Semiramis to bail them both out.

“The people he bought the arms from were no one to screw with. Some kind of mafia types. Mean enough to scare Stocker. Lipton had to buy back the pieces, and he used the money from the Semiramis to do it.

“That wasn’t good enough for Stocker apparently. He wanted more. In fact, he wanted it all. He found out where Lipton had the rest of the artifacts hidden. We knew Lipton had transferred them to New York, but even we didn’t know the exact location. I don’t know how Stocker found out, but he stole them and has covered his trail by killing Lipton.”

“Jesus. What tangled webs we weave. So he wants to kill you so you don’t come after him.”

“And he wants to kill you because you know too much.”

“I do now. I didn’t before.”

“Stocker doesn’t know that. We were told the Semiramis sale was greased.”

“What do you mean?”

“The sale was set to go through even before it was auctioned.”

“No, that’s not possible. It was a public auction. There was no guarantee that we were going to buy the piece. We could have been outbid. I don’t know why he said it was greased.”

I thought about the players: Lipton, Neal, Hiram. Lipton and Neal could have positioned Hiram to make the buy by revealing to him the reserve price. That way they would have been assured of having a buyer… and Hiram would have been best prepared to make the buy.

I thought I had manipulated Hiram into paying fifty mil plus. It was looking more like I was a minor player.

“What’s next?” I asked.

Coby shrugged. “Stocker has the merchandise. He’ll sell the stuff and get very rich. Probably kill us off as he goes along. Will eventually get arrested because he’s crazy.”

“That’s encouraging—that he’ll eventually get caught for killing me. But it’s not that simple. You can’t get rid of a warehouseful of stolen antiquities with a yard sale. Stocker will have to work with someone in New York’s art world to sell the artifacts.”

We were both quiet for a long moment. Neal would be the obvious choice to market the contraband. But there were plenty of others in the trade who would look the other way and agent the stuff. Not to mention that I couldn’t see Neal getting involved with that crazy.

Finally, Coby nudged me with his foot. “Well, Captain, what do you think we should do now?”

I sighed. “We have a murderer on our backs. As soon as the Spanish police discover the remains of the treasure trove you had and that I had been there, they’ll believe we were both in on it. And killed Lipton to boot. So we’re probably wanted by the police on two continents. All trails lead to New York. That’s where the artifacts are and where Stocker has to sell them, especially now that he’s burned his bridges in London, in a manner of speaking. If we can find out who his connection is in New York, it would lead us to Stocker and the hoard.”

Coby nodded. “Yeah, sounds good.”

“Once we locate Stocker and the artifacts, we can turn him over to the FBI. And make sure the museum pieces get back to Baghdad.”

Coby nodded again, but this time his expression was blank. I didn’t like the look on his face, an expression that meant he was just pacifying me. When you think about it, what would clear me wouldn’t necessarily clear him.

We didn’t have the same motives, either.

I was sure now that I knew how the mind of this self-proclaimed “savior of the world’s cultural heritage” worked.

Even Robin Hood got paid for his work.

U
NITED
N
ATIONS
O
UTLAWS
T
REASURE
H
UNTING

Treasure hunters will be barred from historic shipwrecks and sunken cities pursuant to an international convention adopted by UNESCO in 2001.

The UN agency claims that the prohibition is necessary because new technologies have made the looting of deep-water wrecks easier.

The UN estimates that there are as many as 3 million shipwrecks scattered on the world’s ocean floors, with 65,000 off of North America.

Whole cities and remains of ancient monuments that have sunk beneath the seas, such as Port Royal in Jamaica and locations in the Greek isles, are also covered.

Treasure hunters and auction companies have made hundreds of millions of dollars from artifacts found on the ocean floors.

Chapter 46

Málaga

Special Agent Rick Nunes stood by the charred boathouse and stared up at the remains of the Malaga villa. Another FBI agent, Homer Clyde, and a Malaga police captain, Antonio Ramirez, stood nearby.

The villa and boathouse had been destroyed a week ago. By a man with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher.