The Moses Riddle (Thomas McAllister 'Treasure Hunter' Adventure Book 1) (23 page)

Lying in bed that night, he opened his mind. Back to childhood, back to the child’s question: if you had one wish, what would it be? If you could ask one question, no matter what it was, and get a truthful answer, what would you ask? Thomas knew his question without pause. Why? Why had she done it?

Could she have been working for the government the whole time? It was impossible. She had been at El Manati
before
Thomas arrived. The only way she could have been working for the government was if they told her to be on that hill before he arrived. But no one knew where he and Arturo were going that day. Hell, he and Arturo hadn’t known until the day before. He had gone over and over it and it just wasn’t possible. Thomas drew a deep breath. Unless . . .
Arturo had told them!

Arturo could have called ahead, after they’d used the satellite photographs to find El Manati. Then someone could have planted Ann there, to wait for him. Her orders would have been to befriend Thomas, maybe even enter into a relationship with him: do anything to learn the location of the Ark. Had she purposely gotten him drunk that first night? But if Arturo
were
an agent, why send Ann? It didn’t fit. Plus, Arturo had been referred to him randomly, by Dr. Ozgood. Accepting this theory would mean that Ozgood was in on it, too. Nonsense. Arturo was completely trustworthy. Ann couldn’t have been placed on the hill that day. She was there on her own. She was not an agent.

But that didn’t help him figure out how the hell they got her to shoot him. She’d handled the gun like a professional. She’d braced her right fist with her left hand, like police do. That required training. He had heard her use the words “cleaning crew” outside his room at the Harvard Club. Professional terminology. Those weren’t skills and terminology that the average Stanford trained archeologist possessed. Yet they’d had many archeological conversations and her knowledge of the Maya was deep, too deep to be anything other than real. The conflicts with Ann’s numerous and seemingly disparate traits had Thomas completely perplexed.

Every muscle in his body was sore, and he had a mild hangover. After a hot shower he put on a fresh bandage, and trudged into Taylor’s kitchen. Taylor had grapefruit, a large cup of coffee, fresh squeezed orange juice and two English muffins waiting for him. “You look better than you deserve to.”

“It’s this spa. Drinks. Hot showers. Breakfast, prepared conscientiously. I’m eternally grateful. And I’m feeling much better. Amazingly better.”

Taylor looked skeptical.
Later, he was in the guest bedroom when he heard the doorbell ring. It wasn’t quite noon, but he could hear Ethan talking to Taylor. Taylor was making up a reason to go out and run a quick errand.
Thomas emerged. “Good to see you. How are we doing?”
Ethan started right in. “I have about thirty minutes to take you through this and then I have to go. We’re having trouble getting one of the D.C. public works maps. I want you to feel comfortable with the plan, but I can’t stay and answer a hundred questions.”
Ethan placed two large blueprints on the long glass coffee table. “This is the original blueprint of the National Museum. It was designed by John Russell Pope and finished in 1941. Nice building.”
“It’s all right.”
“And here is the latest major remodeling and addition. Done by I. M. Pei & Partners, completed in 1978. Paid for by you and me and headed by none other than your pal, current director George Valmer.”
“Aren’t these blueprints top secret? How did you get a hold of them?”
“Yes, they are classified. I have my ways. The originals were available but hard to find and the addition done by Pei gave us big problems. But we got it. The additional money you gave us helped. Anyway, as you can see, Valmer added a three-story addition on the back. The top story is his office and reception area. Notice the great view he gave himself.” Ethan pointed to the office. “The treasure might be here.” He tapped the blueprint.
“The middle floor has become an extension of the modernism gallery and the basement floor, here, is a conference room. Another potential place for your treasure.”
Thomas pointed to a shaft running along all three rooms. “What is this?”
Ethan smiled. “Very astute. That is our transportation. An elevator shaft. You enter from the back. UP takes you to Valmer’s office. DOWN takes you to the conference room. The elevator is an Otis. It’s heavyduty, private, and easy to use. I wouldn’t be surprised if Clinton had used this set up for his little escapades. The Monica-vator, or something like that.” Thomas was reminded how much the English love scandal. “Looks good, Ethan, but can you get us in?”
“Here’s the plan. I’m not going into great detail, but trust me, I know what I’m doing. We pick you up at midnight. We drive an hour to Essex County Airport. It’s a smaller business airfield in New Jersey, two miles north of Caldwell. We fly to D.C. in a Lear 35. We arrive outside D.C. within twenty minutes. We drive to the museum, get the crate, and we’re out of there in minutes. Back to the Lear, and then back to New York.
“What about the museum’s security system—”
“Don’t ask questions, don’t get in the way. Just stay by my side. I need you beside me when we find the crate. That’s all you’re needed for. The less you know, the better. If you get caught, you don’t know anything. I like to do things a certain way. A job is like a fingerprint. If things I do were repeated to the right law enforcement people, they’d know this was my job. So trust me. You’re paying me a lot of money for a two-day job. Let me earn it”
Thomas decided to trust him. It would allow him to start concentrating on other things. “I understand, Ethan. I’m going to trust you. Just get it right!”
“In my mind, I’ve already got the treasure. You identify your crate, we carry it to our van, take it back to the airport, load it into the Lear, and thirty minutes later, we’re back in New York City. The whole operation will take less than four hours.”
“I hope you’ve got some contingency plans, in case things don’t go as planned like—”
“They will. And I do. I’m leaving now. My guys will be in front of the building at midnight. In a dark blue van with no windows. When we return from D.C., we will drop you and the box here. My men will help you carry it in, but what you do with it after that is up to you. We’ll have done our job.” Ethan was out of the door and on his way to the elevator before Thomas could ask any more questions.

A legend, Taylor, like Thomas, had been fortunate enough to discover a very large, very rich find early in his career. Taylor’s was before most governments had laws governing how the treasure would be divided. He was able to sell most of the artifacts to the highest bidder. Only a few friends knew he had kept a few priceless pieces. He had shown them to Thomas once. Large, solid gold Egyptian statues of RA, lapis lazuli jewelry, and beautiful emerald insects. “I couldn’t bear to part with them,” Taylor had said. “They cast a spell on me and I knew I would own them until I die.” Thomas remembered thinking that was the true definition of priceless. Taylor’s fortune had allowed him to do whatever he wanted with the rest of his life; teach, appraise, and play in the corn and wheat futures market.

As midnight drew closer, Thomas got up to change clothes. He’d had a pair of black pants, a black turtleneck, and black shoes delivered from Macy’s. He was in his room dressing when Taylor entered, carrying an assortment of boxes. He put them on the bed and began opening them.

Thomas peered over Taylor’s shoulder. Each box held a different pistol, except the last, which held a collection of knives. From left to right, there was a Walther PPK, a snub-nosed .38, a 9mm Berreta, a Sig Sauer, and a WWII issue Colt .45 automatic. They were all set in velvet and accompanied by two clips, except the snub-nose, which had speed loaders. The final box had a hunting knife, a double edged combat knife, a nice bone-handled machete, and a Swiss Army Knife. Thomas stared in awe.

“Taylor . . . my God, I had no idea you had these. You’ve got an arsenal here!”
“I live in New York. I’ve to keep up with the common thief. I’ve picked these things up through the years. Never really needed them. Except once in Shanghai. Did I ever tell you about that time that I—“
“Yes, yes. You’ve told me now a hundred times! My God, Taylor. Do you really think I should pack iron? I left my .32 in Mexico, with Arturo.”
Thomas picked up the big Sig Sauer. It felt good in his hand, but heavy and cumbersome.
“A few of those characters that were here last night were pretty seedy. I recommend the Sig Sauer.”
Thomas picked up the Beretta next. It felt perfect. “I do love a Beretta. It’ll only wind up causing trouble. I’d never shoot anyone anyway, at least not where we’re going. I think I’ll take a knife.” Thomas picked up the Swiss Army. “This is a given.” He dropped it into his pocket.
Taylor shrugged. “Keep in mind your first stop is not necessarily the place where you’ll end up. I know you trust Ethan, but what about those other guys? You don’t know them. What if you get caught? It could happen, you know. The government agent you’re dealing with has already stolen from you and had you shot. None of this is going into FBI files. What would stop him from taking you somewhere, tying cement shoes on your feet, and dropping you into the East River?”
“You make a good case.”
“What do you have to lose? You only use it if things go wrong.”
Thomas conceded, “Okay . . . I’ll take the Beretta and one clip.” He picked up the machete. “Now look at this baby. This is nice. Too cumbersome for tonight. But I could use it in Mexico.”
“It’s yours.”
Thomas swung right, then left. A deep pain shot through the left side

of his body and he tried to hide the wince. “This is more like what I’m used to lately. Arturo showed me a lot of little tricks down in Mexico. I’ve got to get downstairs.” He put the machete back in the box.

“Good luck, and be careful. Oh, and Thomas. Watch the double cross. Remember, you don’t know these guys.”
“Thanks, Taylor. I’ll be back later tonight. I’ll have the Ark with me but don’t wait up. I’ll need you to be sharp the next day. If you think of a good place to hide it leave me a note on the kitchen counter. Again, sorry about all this.” But he knew that secretly Taylor was enjoying all the intrigue.
Down on the street the blue van was nowhere in sight. He shrank back into the dark into the shadows and tucked the Beretta down into the small of his back. He checked his watch again. It was five minutes past midnight. He hoped nothing had gone wrong. Negative thoughts. What if the government had traced him to Ethan, or rounded up all the top thieves in New York, to thwart just such an attempt? Ethan had said that he was well known to some investigators.
After three of the longest minutes of his life, a blue Dodge van, with a commercial grade suspension, pulled up to the curb and turned on its hazards. The passenger window lowered and someone whispered, “Thomas?”
He hurried to the curb and the side door of the van flew open. He reached back and brought the Beretta around to the front of his pants, clutching it with white knuckles under his shirt. He didn’t see Ethan!
A man from inside the van barked, “Get in. Let’s go!”
“Where’s Ethan?” Thomas hissed.
“He’s at the airport. Get in!”
He used his left arm to pull himself up into the van and flashes of white-hot pain burned through his field of vision. There was one man in the very back seat, and one in the passenger seat next to the driver. The door flew shut behind him and he took the gun out. It was dark and he couldn’t see any of the men’s faces well. He searched for one he recognized from the other night.
The guy behind him said, “Relax, man, it’s us.” Thomas recognized the accent and slid the gun back into his waistband.
“What the hell are you doing with a Beretta?” The man asked.
“I liked it more than the Sig Sauer.”
“What are you going to
do
with it?”
Thomas was surprised. “You don’t know?”
“Would I ask, if I did?”
Thomas said, “I was going to blow your fucking heads off if you weren’t who you said you were.”
After that, the drive to the airport was silent.

Once in the air, he reviewed the plan. “The other men and I have been over this many times, Thomas. We’ll review it once for you, so that you know what is happening, but there will be no changes. Remember you’re along for the ride, until we get into the museum. We are going to be moving very fast. You’ll be with me. Just move with me, and be there when I need you. Never, ever talk. The other men and I have personal communicators and a few other signals that we use.”

He picked up a headset with both voice and ear components and showed it to Thomas. “At the professional level, stealing is an art. A dance. We have everything synchronized, based on exact traffic routes in D.C., architectural building plans, etcetera. Here’s the plan.” He pulled out a street map of D.C. and the plans for the National Museum of Art, both the old building and the addition, and ran through the game plan. His thoroughness was impressive and comforting. He had contingency plans, including a safe-house in D.C., in case things went sour.

The part that impressed Thomas the most was Ethan’s ability to acquire secret information. All of the architectural plans, electrical wiring grids, and the information about the security systems at the museum were labeled top secret. He even had the guard schedule. If 90 percent of any successful operation was planning, Thomas felt they had a very good chance of success.

Ethan finished and waited for Thomas’s reaction. Thomas said, “We spend no more than two and a half hours in D.C., get out with the treasure, and are back in New York twenty minutes later. An hour after that we’re back at the Dakota. Sounds fine to me.”

The jet touched down five minutes early at College Park Airfield in Maryland, outside the limits of Washington D.C. Once they rolled to a stop, the five men jumped out of the plane, leaving the pilot to deal with airport check-in.

The men strolled to the parking lot, where another blue van waited. They piled into the van, which was rolling before the side door was shut.
After they were on the road, Ethan said, “Driver, we’re five minutes ahead of schedule. Get us flush on the way there.” He glanced at Thomas. “In this business, being early is as bad as being late.”
Thomas peered out the window. He noticed they stayed on major streets but avoided the highways. “Why are we staying off the highways, Ethan?”
“Almost every major highway in this country has video cameras looped into patrol offices. Here in D.C., it’s worse. Some of the small roads are filmed, too. Intersections are especially bad, because they can get a still image of you. The patrol offices usually save the video for two days, sometimes four. After we make our play, they’ll be looking for us on those videos. That’s why even our front window is tinted.”
It was almost two in the morning as they approached the museum. As the operation became more real, Thomas found himself getting more nervous. It was one thing to talk about such a big break-in. It was entirely another to be involved in one. Why had he left so much to Ethan? Why had he been sleeping, when he should have been preparing? It never crossed his mind that the sleep had been restorative. Instead he berated himself for being lazy. Should he call the whole thing off? One block north of the museum, they pulled into a park and two of the men got out of the van and left on foot. It was too late to call off the operation now. While they were pulled over, the driver got out and placed a magnetized sign on the side of the van that read
Federal Heating and Cooling
.
They drove around for another five minutes, to give the men who’d gotten out time to reach the museum. Then the driver took them to the receiving entrance, located at the rear of the museum.
“Won’t they be suspicious of a heating and cooling van showing up in the middle of the night?” Thomas whispered.
Ethan didn’t bother looking at him. “Museums with priceless pieces of art must maintain tight temperature and humidity tolerances. Systems need constant tweaking. When the temperature or humidity goes outside the acceptable range, it triggers an alarm at the heat and air company. Normally, they call ahead, but it shouldn’t be a big deal for us to show up unannounced. This is the same color and style of van that Federal uses. No more talking until this is over.”
Five minutes had passed and they pulled into the parking lot of the museum. They rolled smoothly back to the receiving area. There was a ramp down so that when semis backed in, the edge of their trailers would be even with the loading dock. There were two well-lit guard houses. One on each side of the dock. Both had windows made of bullet-proof glass and both manned. Neither Ethan nor Thomas knew that the usual Pinkerton men had been replaced with marines, under DJ’s orders.
Over each guard house were cameras covering the dock area. Anyone coming or going would be seen on monitors, both in the guard houses and at the main security station in the basement of the older part of the museum.
Ethan knew and did not mention to Thomas that the museum had recently replaced their old Brinks security system with a new Honeywell Fortress5000 system. The Fortress5000 was a much better system, especially at motion and temperature detection. Fortunately, the loot they were stealing was probably in a conference room or office and not out on the museum’s public display floor, where most of the masterpieces were. Normally, temperature and motions detectors were used only for the main floors, where the really expensive, high-profile items were kept. So, they had to worry about approach, entry, exit, doors, windows and cameras, but not temperature and motion, which made the job easier. Ethan knew the Honeywell system well and would soon exploit some of its weaker points.
The van reached the dock. Ethan and Thomas hid on the floor in back. The security guards would see only one silhouette. That of the driver.
The driver made a lazy U-turn and began backing up, so that the rear of the vehicle would face the dock. It was proper maintenance vehicle procedure, when a company had something to fix and needed to access tools in the back of the vehicle.
The driver stopped the van about five feet from the dock, equidistant between each guard house. Thomas felt his heart rate increase. From his point of view, this was the most dangerous part of the operation. He had no idea how Ethan planned to get them past these guards. He hoped their excuse was good enough to warrant being behind the museum at night. He felt the van shift as the driver opened his door to get out. Without moving his head he strained to see Ethan, but couldn’t.
Still facing the floor, he heard the driver hail the guards. His nose was half an inch from the floor of the van. He smelled grease. He couldn’t see the two guards who came out of their shack, dressed in black uniforms rather than the khaki ones the regular Pinkerton men wore. The driver of the van noticed that the uniforms were not tan, as they should have been, but did not even pause. “Just getting my work order,” he said, while opening the passenger door.
The light behind the guards created long menacing shadows, accentuating their bulky M-16 machine guns. The driver reached into the van and extracted an envelope. He held it out, toward one of the guards.
DJ had brought these marines in to replace the under-skilled, low firepowered Pinkerton men. The marines were formidable in battle, but the 60-minute briefing they’d received for this assignment did not cover all of the museum processes. It didn’t transfer the knowledge that the Pinkerton men had acquired from doing the same job night after night for fifteen years. By replacing Pinkerton with his own men, DJ had compromised a well oiled system.
The Pinkerton men would not have looked as ominous as the marines did in their black assault uniforms, but they would have never allowed the driver of an unannounced repair van, however familiar, to walk around or open a passenger door before they had a full explanation as to why they had not been notified by the scheduler at the main guardhouse. The correct process for all unscheduled service personnel and vendors was to detain them, then thoroughly check credentials. The Pinkerton men also would have noticed that the driver of this Federal Heating and Cooling van was not Mel, their buddy of ten years, who always worked nights for Federal.
The two skilled fighters didn’t know any of this. Instead, the guard on the left leveled his M-16 and said, “What’s the problem?”
As the driver began to speak, there were two barely audible thumps, one from each side of the loading dock. The well aimed tranquilizer darts hit the marines in their necks. Ethan’s men had used the quickest tranquilizer known to man, one derived from a sedative used by the Tapirape Indians in the Amazon Basin, that instantly rendered prey immobile and unconscious.
The guards had fallen under the cameras, out of their view. The driver talked on, as if nothing had ever happened, for the sake of the cameras. He was gesturing and laughing and carrying on, as if he were having an animated conversation.
As he did, the two men who had fired the tranquilizers rushed forward. They stayed close to the building until they reached the cameras. Once under them, they removed small irregular stepladders from their backpacks and adjusted them to the proper height. They then removed long tubes that looked like telescopes and, in unison, clamped the long devices to the end of each camera lens. With these special lenses, the cameras would transmit to the main guard house whatever was in their last frame of view. They would do that for the next fifteen minutes, after which an alarm would sound because a small sensor in the brain of the camera would realize that for fifteen minutes nothing in its field of view had moved. Not a leaf, not a bug, not the repair van. The motion sensor in the camera was to guard against these freeze frame devices and was based on the principal that no one could get in, and out, in fifteen minutes or less.
Face down in the van, Thomas saw none of this. Suddenly, there was a tap on the side of the vehicle. “Put your ski mask on and follow me.” Ethan was up and out the side door before Thomas had even rolled over.
He scrambled out of the van and saw that the driver, the two other men they had dropped off earlier, and Ethan were all clustered around the door to the receiving dock. It was located next to the guard house on the left. As Thomas moved toward the door, he noticed the marines, dressed in black, on the ground. He double checked to make sure they were still breathing. He wondered how they’d been neutralized so quietly. He noticed that the cameras overlooking the dock had strange-looking extensions on them. Amazing. Drew and his team were professionals all right.
The cluster of thieves around the door was quiet and intense. Then there was a muffled pop, the door opened, and they poured into the museum. He picked up his pace, but couldn’t quite reach the door before it closed. Just before it clicked shut, it opened again and Ethan angrily pulled him in.
They were in a small hallway with an armored door directly in front of them. Thomas caught a glimpse of a key pad with an electronic sensor. The man in front turned back toward Ethan, who reached into his pocket and pulled out something the size of a credit card. The man held the card against the sensor and, miraculously, the door clicked open. A second later they were standing in the large, clean receiving area of the museum.
Thomas was astonished. They were in. They had broken into the government’s most exclusive museum in less than five minutes. The lights were not on, but the red glow from the exit signs provided fair visibility. Despite the dimly lit hallways, everyone but Thomas seemed to know exactly where they were going. It was as if they had been in the museum before. He had to sprint to reach them. He caught up with them by a newlooking freight elevator. One of the men pulled the top half of the elevator door up, using a canvas strap, and the bottom half of the door disappeared into the floor.
They entered the elevator. Two men slapped large pieces of felt on the edges of the elevator doors, then pulled them shut. There was a nice, quiet thump when the edges of the doors met. Ethan immediately hit a button labeled B and the elevator began its decent into the basement. After fifteen slow seconds, the elevator stopped and, once again, the doors split, half going up and half down into the floor. They stepped out into a wide hallway, clearly part of the new construction. Ethan motioned toward the two doors across the hallway from the elevator. He tried the knob but it was locked. One of the men stepped forward and held a small device to the keyhole. There was a click, the man turned the knob, and the door swung open, exposing a dark room. The men advanced slowly, as their eyes adjusted to the dim light provided from the corridor. Fuzzy shapes began to appear, a large conference table, chairs, other doorways along the other walls, and . . . Thomas’s heart skipped a beat. There, in the middle of the conference table, was a large black rectangle. And, although his eyes were still adjusting, he could easily tell it was the same size and shape as the crate that held the Ark.
He moved towards it, aware of the other men converging around the table. At any moment he expected a door to open, government agents to flow into the room, M-16’s at the ready, but nothing happened. Ethan handed him a Maglight. Thomas knew what to do. It was the only reason they’d risked bringing him.
He glided around the table, to the side that brought him closest to the crate. When he was only inches from it, he shone the light on its corner. He was looking for the 3000-year old, crudely fashioned nails that held the crate together. The wood looked the same. He thought he recognized a large gash on the side of the crate, but not until he saw the deteriorating spike, the one that might have come from the ancient foundry in Deir el-Medina, did he know that he was seeing the crate that held the Ark. He searched for the corner from which he’d cut his sample.
There it was
. He nodded to Ethan and gave him the universal sign for okay.
The two men assigned to carry the crate had been watching. They immediately moved in front of Thomas, lifted the case from the table, and hurried back to the double doors. Like a perfectly choreographed dance, the doors were waiting open for them. They were through the doors, up the elevator, and out onto the loading dock within two minutes. Thomas checked his watch as they piled into the van. The entire operation, from the time they’d pulled into the loading dock until that moment, had taken five minutes. That meant they had ten minutes to get as close to the airport as possible before the museum cameras recognized that nothing in their sights had moved, triggering the internal alarm.
Thomas knew that the minute the alarm sounded, an emergency process would begin. They would isolate the problem, determine whether it was a false alarm, and then notify George Valmer and whoever else was on their emergency call list. Valmer would probably call DJ. That would take another five to ten minutes.
Ethan had done some additional calculations. If DJ was good, he would have all flights from all area airports detained and searched. The logistics of that would take at least fifteen minutes. Airports had to be called, official explanations provided. So, the total, minimum, they would have to escape would be thirty minutes. It would be a close call. Thomas prayed they weren’t delayed getting back to the airport, and that the Lear wasn’t surrounded with red flashing lights when they reached it.