“My assistant told me that the pieces my father has donated to the gallery arrived yesterday and are ready for unveiling tonight.”
“That is correct. The five items were cleared by customs this morning and are already in the hands of the gallery’s curators.”
“Have you ever seen any paintings from the Kakamura period, Mister Mitchell?”
“No, I don’t believe I ever have.”
“Well, you are in for a treat. These five paintings come from around 1180 A.D. and are considered to be unique. I don’t believe that there are five finer pictures in the world,” said Atsuko. A moment later, her assistant walked in the room and handed her a flute of champagne. None was offered to Mitchell, who would have declined it anyway. He never drank when he was on assignment.
“Your father is quite generous to donate these paintings to the Sackler Gallery,” said Mitchell.
“The Sackler Gallery is world renowned and has the largest collection of Asian art in all of the United States. It only seemed fitting to my father to present them as a gift for millions to see. Leaving them in his private collection of art seemed a waste,” said Atsuko as she sipped her drink.
The door to the room opened. Matsuda walked in. If Mitchell had thought that he looked calm before, he now looked positively glacial. His every move seemed to be choreographed with clockwork precision.
“It is time, Miss Satomi,” announced Matsuda in English. “Mister Mitchell’s limo is waiting downstairs to take you to the gallery.”
“Shall we?” said Mitchell to Atsuko with an inviting smile upon his face.
With a slight nod, Atsuko and her assistant fell into line behind Matsuda and one of his men; the other was already waiting at the far end of the hallway for the elevator to arrive. Closing the door behind them, Mitchell quickly dug out his phone and called Jackson to tell them that they were on their way. From beginning to end, Mitchell figured that they would be out of the hotel for no more than five hours.
His estimate wasn’t even close.
8
Rolling up his window to block out the biting sand whipping across the road, Cardinal bemoaned the fact that the car’s air conditioning had stopped working two days ago. He had cleaned the filters himself and tried playing with the air-conditioning unit, but it was no use; the unit was shot and would have to be replaced when they returned their car in Beijing. After spending the better part of a week driving up and down the road leading to and from the border, they had begun exploring every side road and goat path they thought the students may have accidentally taken during the storm. Most faded away into nothing after a few kilometers, while some led them deep into the desert. No matter where they looked, they still had yet to find a single trace of the missing students or their vehicle.
Sam looked over at Cardinal. “Gord, I’m beginning to think that this is becoming an exercise in futility. If we don’t find something soon, I’m afraid that were going to have to head home soon and tell the parents that they would most likely never know what happened to their children.”
“Yeah, you may be right,” replied Cardinal.
Sam sat back in her seat, looking uncomfortable and irritated. She missed the air-conditioning far more than Cardinal did and was quickly running out of clean clothes to wear. Looking down at a map of the road in her hands, she bit her lip in frustration. The map was covered in red ink from where she had marked off all the dead-end roads that they had explored over the past few days. She was growing restless. Preferring to be out and about on her feet, driving back and forth along the rocky and sandy trails of the Gobi Desert was starting to get under her skin. Grabbing a bottle of water, she opened it and took a long swig, when from behind, coming like an apparition out of the blowing sand, sped a Mongolian Army jeep, missing their Rover by millimeters.
“Someone’s in a hurry,” said Cardinal, watching the vehicle quickly disappear from sight, swallowed up in the drifting sand.
“Watch out,” hollered Sam as another jeep came racing out of the sandstorm. This one driving straight down the middle of the road, honking its horn loudly.
Quickly turning the wheel hard over to the right, Cardinal jammed his foot down on the brake pedal. Sliding off the road, their Rover came to a shuddering halt. Sam and Cardinal watched as a couple more vehicles, closely followed by two trucks loaded with soldiers, hurriedly drove by.
“They looked like they were going somewhere fast,” said Sam, still looking through the windshield of their Rover, trying to see if there were any more vehicles coming their way.
“I wonder what could be going on?” said Cardinal, looking over at the map on Sam’s lap, trying to see if the road they were on went anywhere special.
“Feel like taking a look at what’s going on?” asked Sam as she quickly recorded their current position in her hand-held GPS, so they could find their way back if they got lost in the storm.
“As we’ve never been this far west before, I don’t see why not,” replied Cardinal. Placing the vehicle in gear, he edged back onto the road, driving carefully with one eye glued on the rearview mirror, just in case any more military vehicles decided to appear out of nowhere.
The storm abruptly stopped an hour later, allowing Sam and Cardinal to roll their windows down again, thankfully letting in some fresh air into their stiflingly hot Rover. Driving up onto a slight rocky rise, Cardinal brought their vehicle to a sudden stop. He couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw a military recovery truck dragging a civilian car off the road and into a makeshift parking lot that was filled with at least three dozen cars and trucks of all makes and sizes.
“Grab the binos out of the back,” said Cardinal to Sam as he backed their Rover off the crest of the rise and back into lower ground, so they wouldn’t be visible to the soldiers working below.
A minute later, Sam and Cardinal were outside on their stomachs, looking down into the parking lot. A small lizard sat on a rock sunning itself under the deep-blue sky, not paying the slightest bit of attention to them. They were both surprised to see several soldiers holding AK-47s in their hands, walking the perimeter of the vehicle lot. As a highly trained sniper, Cardinal had an eye for observing things, discerning even the smallest detail from hundreds of meters away. Slowly, he moved the binoculars over the abandoned vehicles, trying to determine just what was going on. Holding his gaze fixed on a battered looking Land Rover, Cardinal asked Sam to nip back to their vehicle and return with the information on the missing students’ Rover and to bring back her camera.
“No need. I memorized the information on the missing car, and I brought my camera with me,” said Sam with a wink at Cardinal, holding up her Nikon D3100 with its telephoto lens attached. Bringing the camera up to her eye, Sam zoomed in on the Rover.
Cardinal shook his head and grinned to himself. They had been together for so long that they had started to anticipate what the other person was going to say or do.
“Their Land Rover is a beige 2010 model. Just like the one in the parking lot,” explained Sam.
Cardinal read off the license plate number to Sam, who quickly confirmed that it was their vehicle. They had found the missing Land Rover. However, seeing the Mongolian Army moving so many vehicles into a guarded parking lot in the middle of nowhere left them both with more questions than answers.