Shit.
He was a U.S. Army Ranger, had been for five years, and there wasn’t anyplace he was afraid to go.
Sucking it up, and more than a little embarrassed that he had to suck it up to get off a damn elevator, he stepped into the tunnel. The feel of the dirt beneath his boots was uncomfortably familiar, the short deadness of the footfalls, but he kept going, one step after the next.
After about twenty feet, the tunnel branched off in two more directions. One glance at the additional corridors snaking off into darkness, and he drew his gun. Fuck it. Whatever he was going to be looking at, he was suddenly absolutely positive he wanted to be looking at it through the tritium dots on his gun sights. What the hell did he know, really? Anything could be down here, a bear, a mountain lion, anything, and a Ranger would be ready.
So he was ready.
Right.
With a.45 in the sub-subbasement of a multimillionaire’s mansion in the Colorado Rockies.
And there was Esme, up ahead, cool as a little cucumber, raising tufts of dust with her high heels.
And him, sliding along the wall behind her, knees bent, muscles tense, his trigger finger laid flat along the pistol’s slide-ready to slip inside the trigger guard, ready to rock and roll.
He checked his six, looking back toward the elevator, moving his pistol with his line of sight- ready-and when he turned back around, gun lowered again, he was facing Esme, stopped in the middle of the tunnel and looking at him with an expression of confusion, fascination, and maybe a little plain old “you’ve got to be kidding me” surprise.
Her gaze dropped down the length of him in less than a second, then took another one to come back up to meet his eyes. Her expression didn’t change. Everything was still in play as she stood and watched him, watched him calculate his odds-the odds of running into an enemy fighter, Taliban, al-Qaeda, Egyptian, Arab, Pakistani, an Islamic insurgent from anywhere who’d come to battle the coalition forces. Anyone who’d come in country to go up against him and his guys.
Zero, he decided. It was zero odds down here in Isaac Nachman’s sub-subbasement. Sure. He knew it was zero, or damn close to it.
Convinced, he slowly straightened up, flipping the safety back on his pistol before he slid it into its holster.
“PTSD?” she said, one of her eyebrows lifting a bit, adding a serious dose of flat-out curiosity to her question-more curiosity than the question itself implied.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, he knew what the initials stood for.
“No.” He shook his head. “Instinct.”
Pure instinct, the survival kind. A lot of soldiers struggled with PTSD in varying degrees and with a variety of symptoms. He knew it for a fact. He’d seen it on deployment and seen it each time they’d come home, and he knew that wasn’t his problem, not full-out anyway. Hell, he’d been in “combat” most of his life, fighting on street corners and in back alleys, and the night Dom had died, fighting it out in the lush, green expanse of City Park.
He’d seen a lot, done a lot, or so he’d thought until his first combat tour. When he’d come back from Afghanistan the first time, he’d come back with an unsolicited and unexpected realization about the night in the park: Dom had died clean.
It had seemed like such a bloody mess at the time, with Dom gasping in pain and gasping for breath, with the blood pumping out of him, out of the hole one of the Parkside Bloods had put in him. One shot, not even a well-aimed shot, just one unlucky shot had killed his brother. A bunch of Parkside gangsters waving their pieces around and pulling their triggers had managed to actually hit Domingo Ramos.
In real combat, death could be a lot different. First, the shots were better aimed. When the shooting started, a guy could be assured that his enemies were shooting at him, not just around him, shooting to kill, and that every guy out there with a scope was using it to target him, that every set of iron sights was leveled at him. Soldiers didn’t wave their guns around or hold them slanted on the side. That was only for dumbass gangsters and people in the movies.
The Rangers had most definitely taught him how to shoot.
The second thing about death in combat was the ordnance. Dom had been killed by a single 9mm round, a damn unlucky shot that had hit him square in the heart. But in combat, people got blown apart-into pieces. Some people still got shot, and it was never pretty, but guys also got literally blown to bits, and sometimes those guys looked like the lucky ones.
That was the third thing about death in combat- a warrior’s death wasn’t the worst way to go. Dead wasn’t the worst way to leave a battlefield. Johnny hadn’t known that until he’d been in combat and watched people die, and watched the people who hadn’t died.
He didn’t move his hand, but suddenly he could feel the envelope in his pocket, feel it like it was hot-not hot enough to burn, he wouldn’t give himself that. He wasn’t the one who had been branded by combat.
But he felt the heat, and he felt guilt-building in his chest and twisting in his gut and sweeping up to make his face hot, and suddenly, he wanted the hell out of this goddamn tunnel.
“What are we doing down here, Esme?” His words were short, his voice curt.
“Mr. Nachman keeps his collection down here in a vault, his art collection,” she said, very clearly, holding his gaze steady with her own. “There will be a black light in the vault, and we’ll use it to verify that the Meinhard I’ve brought him is exactly what I told him it is-the original painting, untouched, exactly what he’s paying for. Then he’ll give me the money, and we’ll leave.”
Okay. There was an end in sight.
“Let’s go,” he said, gesturing for her to lead the way.
No, he didn’t have PTSD, but neither had he come down from his last deployment. His instincts were still on high alert, which meant “weapon ready.” He hadn’t decompressed. Two weeks at home wasn’t enough to bring him back down, and neither was one beer in the Blue Iguana.
Dammit. He shouldn’t have drawn his pistol. Instincts were good; giving into irrational impulses wasn’t. But this place, this tunnel…he was sweating, and it was cool down here.
Unfinished business, that was his problem, and he needed to finish it. He’d been carrying the letter in his pocket around with him for months, and he needed to deal with it.
Great. Now he had it all figured out-for about the hundred millionth time. He knew what he had to do. He just hadn’t found the guts to do it, and now he was in this damn tunnel, unnerved.
Nachman was ahead of them, still shuffling along in his slippers, until he came to a heavy steel door set into solid rock. Johnny couldn’t even imagine what the whole setup had cost, but when Nachman opened the door, he knew whatever the vault had cost, it was nothing compared to the value of what was inside.
Geezus.
He glanced at “Miss Esme” and realized she’d been here before. She’d expected all this. She wasn’t struck dumb with amazement, and he was damn close.
“Welcome to my closet, Mr. Ramos,” Nachman said, letting the steel door swing open.
Closet was a misnomer, but Johnny understood what Nachman had meant about there not being enough room for him. The place was huge, but it was also completely packed, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with art, an unprecedented sight, utterly unique. It was a warehouse of masterpieces, old masters and new.
“Have you heard of the Alt Aussee, Mr. Ramos?” Nachman asked, leading the way inside, keeping his hand on the door.
“No, sir.”
“It’s a salt mine in Austria, southeast of Salzburg, a veritable labyrinth.”
When Johnny and Esme were inside with him, standing in one of the only clear areas Johnny could see, Nachman slowly pushed the heavy steel door closed behind them.