Finally, the bucket settled silently onto hard-packed soil on the estate side of the wall.
Gorodin and Vanik climbed out with their equipment. The museum entrance kiosk was far across the grounds. They moved cautiously in the darkness through a grove of aspen, and hurried toward it.
Gorodin’s stomach butterflied pleasantly as they reached the kiosk. He had the electronic card key that he’d taken from Churcher’s wallet on the Foxtrot. He inserted it into the reader next to the elevator.
The doors rolled open.
The alarm system in the museum deactivated.
Gorodin leaned into the elevator cautiously, looking for signs of surveillance devices. Satisfied the elevator was clean, as he had expected, he entered.
Vanik followed.
The elevator closed and descended, taking the two Soviet agents into the museum below.
McKendrick’s Corvette screeched up the ramp in the parking garage beneath Forensic Center.
McKendrick spun the wheel right and glanced sideways to Andrew next to him. “Feel better now?” he asked, in a sharp tone devoid of compassion.
Andrew slumped in the low seat of the Corvette and nodded automatically.
“Good,” McKendrick replied, “because I’m really pissed off.” The vein in his neck was popping again.
“What?” Andrew asked, baffled.
“You almost blew it in there!”
The car came up onto the street.
McKendrick flicked on the headlights, slammed the transmission into second, and turned west into Old Spanish Trail, heading for the South Loop.
“What’re you talking about?” Andrew snapped, pushing into a more upright position.
“Boulton? The package in the museum!” McKendrick taunted angrily. “I knew I should’ve never told you about them!”
“Back off me,” Andrew said. “I didn’t say anything. But I probably should have.” He felt like a child unjustly accused of snitching, and squirmed in the seat.
“No fucking way!” McKendrick exploded. “If your old man wanted anyone to know he was connected to that package, he would’ve said so! You think he told me, ‘under anonymous cover,’ just for the hell of it? He didn’t even want Boulton to know!”
“Okay, okay, you have a point,” Andrew said defensively. “But something’s not right here, dammit! I felt it the minute he didn’t show up at the stables that morning.”
“Shouldn’t have said that to Coughlan, either,” McKendrick shot back.
“Why not?” Andrew asked, without sounding argumentative.
“Cause I figure you’re right,” McKendrick replied less vociferously. “Something weird’s going on. If you’re smart, you’ll forget it. Your old man’s dead. Nothing’s going to change that.”
“Forget it?” Andrew exclaimed. “You heard Coughlan. You know my father didn’t do any diving. That leaves subs and cement booties, and I don’t like the sound of either!”
“Tough!” McKendrick snapped. “It was his life, he lived it his way. Whatever he was into, he knew it was hardball, that’s for sure.”
“Come on, Ed,” Andrew pleaded. “We’ve gotta do something. We just can’t—”
“No! I’ve gotta do something!” McKendrick interrupted angrily.
“The package—” Andrew said flatly.
McKendrick ignored him and downshifted.
“Ed,” Andrew pressed.
McKendrick tightened his lips, and stomped the gas pedal to the floor.
The Corvette laid down a patch of rubber and took off. Its taillights left a red smear in the darkness.
Andrew lurched backwards, pinned to the seat by the sudden acceleration.
The car rocketed into the on-ramp of the 610 Freeway. By the time it hit the traffic lanes it was doing well over a hundred.
In the underground museum on the Churcher estate, Vanik was crouching in front of a storage room door, positioning a device made of precisely machined stainless steel parts over the lock.
This door and five others — four of which Vanik had already opened — led to climate-controlled rooms where paintings not hung in the galleries were stored. The doors were arranged in a semicircle, and opened onto an atrium from which the galleries fanned out.
Gorodin exited the adjacent storage room.
Vanik questioned him with a look.
Gorodin shook no, disgusted. “Not in there, either,” he replied in Russian.
“Two more to go,” Vanik said, discouraged. “Maybe Comrade Deschin was wrong. Maybe the package is in the mansion or offices downtown?”
“No.” Gorodin said flatly. “Minister Deschin knew Churcher for over thirty years. They were very close. He was positive something this sensitive and important to Churcher would be kept here. Get on with it. We’re wasting time,” he added impatiently.
Vanik shrugged and returned his attention to the device that he had positioned on the door. He grasped the handle — a long, one-inch-diameter stainless dowel — and spun it. Three mechanical jaws tighted on the edges of the lock’s hardened steel faceplate. Additional turns of the handle drove a super-hardened steel drillbit into the keyhole, then gradually retracted it, tearing the lock assembly from the door.
Vanik removed the device and set it aside. Next, he inserted a machined crank-handle into the jagged opening. He engaged the now exposed inner locking mechanism, and rolled back the four dead bolts that penetrated two inches into the metal frame on both sides of the door.
Gorodin pulled it open, reached inside, flipped on the lights, and entered the storage room.
Like the other storage rooms, this one was lined with parallel racks filled with canvases. A long work table with large, flat steel file drawers beneath, took up the center of the space.
Gorodin went to the drawers, opening them bottom to top, searching as he went, and not taking the time to close them. Once certain the package of documents wasn’t in the drawers, he crossed to the racks of paintings, and began flipping through the canvases.
In one rack, The New York School — a Rothko, a Klein, a large Pollock, two Rauschenbergs, a Warhol, and three de Koonings. In the next, Impressionists — three prize Tahitian Gauguins, two Monets, Matisse’s “Chambre Rouge,” four Lautrec lithographs, Van Gogh’s “Prison Courtyard,” and a Degas. In the third rack, Renaissance masters — a da Vinci, a Raphael, a Titian, a Giorgione, two Botticellis, four Michelangelo drawings, and a Veronese. In the fourth, a massive Courbet by itself. The fifth was filled with over a dozen Picassos. The sixth contained, Russians — three Kandinskys, a Pevsner, three Malevich sketches, and a Chagall, and then, two more Chagalls. These last two canvases were exactly the same size, and stored back-to-back in a tight-fitting clear plastic sleeve — the only works stored in this manner.
Thus intrigued, Gorodin pulled them from the rack and carried them to the worktable.
The flamboyant oils were two of many Chagall had painted in Russia for the Jewish Theater in 1920. At the time, he had already spent four years in Paris, returning to his homeland just prior to the Bolshevik uprisings to court his long-time fiancée. He was made commisar of art for his home city of Vitebsk, where he founded an art school. Its students, like the master who taught them, produced works diametrically opposed to the state-approved Social Realism. And in 1923, Chagall’s style was challenged by the new regime.
“Don’t ask me why… a calf is visible in the cow’s belly. Let Marx, if he’s so wise, come to life and explain it to you,” Chagall replied. He and his bride left Russia soon after, never to return.
Now, sixty-three years after Chagall painted them, GRU agent Valery Gorodin held the two masterpieces that had never been exhibited in Russia or the West. He slipped the back-to-back canvases from the plastic sleeve, and in the space between them found what he was after.