“He means to grab the owner of the house,” Cassidy said with some relish. “Not a problem, boss.”
Gunn tapped his keyboard some more, tongue between his teeth. After a moment he wiped sweat away and made an anguished face. “Damn, it’s gonna be touch and go here.”
“Get on with it, geek,” Cassidy urged.
With a final flourish he hit the last key, attempting to loop the camera feed until they were across the bridge. Nobody breathed. Gunn clenched his fists.
“Oh shit…”
Bodie started forward, cursing their bad luck.
“No, no, wait…” Gunn suddenly held his laptop up in triumph. “It worked. Took a while but… it’s safe to go.”
Now the second building could be accessed. The safe room should be to their right, at the top of the stairs, and promised to be gigantic, spanning two floors. When Lucie asked how they would find a compass in a treasure trove, Bodie responded honestly.
“Not a clue, love. But we’ve done it before.”
“I don’t find that the most suitable reply.”
“It’s pretty good for Bodie,” Cassidy said. “Usually it’s littered with lots of curse words too.”
A door protected with a Kindle-size digital keypad stood before them, but this wasn’t the only worry. Soft light shone from the floor below and they could faintly hear music. Although no voices were evident, Bodie called a halt. They listened for a while, hearing nothing. The team peered through the balcony but saw no signs of life, not even shadows.
Cross shrugged. “Embrace the night,” he said. “We’re on the clock here.”
“You can say that again,” Gunn said softly. “The problem with forcing one’s way into a system is that you could then be purged. You can also be noticed at any moment. Get on with it, for God’s sake.”
Bodie signaled for Cross to go ahead. While Gunn fretted, the thief connected a device to the keypad that crunched numbers and learned any passcode by matching processors, and waited. Soon, his minidisplay flashed red.
“Five minutes,” Bodie said.
Gunn hung his head. “Not good,” he whispered. “Not good at all. I recommend scanning the area and fast.”
Bodie and Cassidy were already descending the staircase, but again saw no signs of life. Maybe Kirke was asleep on the sofa. From the background check they knew he was a loner, intent wholly upon himself.
They returned to find Gunn rechecking his override, gripping his laptop between white fingers, and Jemma standing over him, biting her lip in concern. Cross was ignoring them both.
“How’s it going?” Bodie asked.
“It’s slipping,” Gunn moaned. “I’ve already lost control of the top-floor cameras.”
Cross sighed with relief. “We’re in.”
Cross jabbed the code into the keypad and opened the door. Inside there were no more corridors, no partitions, just a wide room with four walls and a ceiling, a simple staircase in the middle.
The area was open plan, several large statues taking up the main space and paintings festooning the walls with color. A quick check revealed no hidden nooks and crannies. It also revealed, as expected, that the inner room held no cameras.
Immediately, Bodie discounted the top floor.
They descended to the bottom level. Disappointment set in when they were faced with a mirror image of the top floor. It took a moment for Bodie to notice the single, significant detail.
“Ah, bollocks,” he said. “Now that’s gonna be a major problem.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The safe measured eight feet in height and three feet in width. It was an old Gardamm, a manufacturer that prided itself on making burglary-proof products and supplying to the American government not only valuables vaults, but means of weapons storage as well.
“I cracked one before,” Cross said dubiously. “Remember Milan?”
“Of course, but Eli… we were fully equipped.”
“Dammit, Bodie, get out of the way. Can’t hurt to try, am I right?”
“In the meantime,” Gunn said, “we need a plan B in case he fails.”
Bodie knew both men had valid points. He’d known Cross for many years now, and every time he came across something different, a new challenge, he approached it with puppy-dog eagerness. Cross was a jaded man in a burned-out world, but if there was one big reason Bodie admired him, it was that he never gave up.
Bodie turned to Gunn. “Failure doesn’t exist,” he said. “We don’t leave this house without that compass. Get it sorted.”
It was then he saw Cassidy, who stood on the other side of the room, gesticulating wildly. Instantly, he saw what troubled her.
The lower-floor security door stood wide open. Through it he could see straight to the downstairs living quarters. Crap, is that a pair of legs?
It was. When Bodie moved closer he saw the sprawled-out sleeping figure of what could only be Carl Kirke. The proportions were right. The hairline was right. The man lay on the carpeted floor, with what appeared to be a large poster of a woman’s face clutched in his arms. Bodie could hear heavy snoring quite clearly.
“Awkward,” said Heidi as he related the scene to her through the earpiece.
“Weird,” Cassidy whispered. “Think I should knock him out to prevent us disturbing him?”
“Why not leave him for the moment,” Bodie said. “Let’s not forget at least that a Chinese government faction and one other brutal gang are hunting these statues and, possibly, the compass by now. As we know, the international artifact- and relic-hunting grapevine runs faster than a fiber-optic cable.”
Cassidy took a closer look at the poster in Kirke’s arms while Cross played with the big Gardamm. The man from Alabama had employed his field kit already, using a portable listening device for the tumblers and a blindfold for the concentration. He wouldn’t break off to jot anything down; he wouldn’t even move unless someone physically lifted him out of the way. Cross was way down the rabbit hole already, the job the focus of all existence.
Not even Gunn’s anxiety could move him.
Cassidy returned. “It’s a signed poster of Heather Locklear,” she said. “I don’t get it.”
“I do,” Bodie said. “Is he butt naked?”
“Eww, no. Whoa dude, are you saying he fell asleep…” She made a gesture.
“Maybe. Maybe millionaires like to sleep with their old memories. Let’s try not to disturb him.”
Cross remained as stiff as the statues that surrounded him. Bodie left Jemma on watch and cataloged all the valuables he could see. He didn’t have to do that — Heidi hadn’t requested it — but the careful relic hunter inside him knew that a thorough scrutiny of the safe room could pay dividends in the future.
Thirty minutes later the silence in his head was broken.
Heidi came out with something odd. “Chatter heading your way.”
Bodie frowned at a reflection of himself in a highly polished Faberge egg. “What?”
“The agency set up a listening station around our perimeter. We have eight unknowns inbound.”
Bodie looked over to Cross, still huddled in front of the safe as if at daily worship. “They hostile?”
“If you mean hostile hostile, then I don’t know, but in your situation any new development is hostile. Wait, it appears they flew in.”
Bodie knelt down beside Cross. “Like we did?”
“No, no, they flew in over the mountains and landed right beside the house. Smooth as silk. I have no idea what they used. We only caught the ‘all-safe’ communication that passed afterward.”
Bodie looked up toward the ceiling as if his eyes could penetrate all the way to the third building and the land that lay beside it. “They’re about to find out somebody beat them to it.”