On-screen, the tall man nodded to his companion, who lifted a black bag onto the bed and reached in. The teeth of what Bennett instantly recognized as a surgical bone-saw sparkled in the light. Deftly, the figure slid back the man's left pajama sleeve and placed the blade on his arm, just below the elbow. The man jerked his arm but to no avail, what little strength he had left clearly ebbing away in his attacker's strong grasp.
Bennett glanced at Laura. She was standing with her back to the door, her hand over her mouth, her eyes glued to the monitor.
"Don't make a sound." His voice was thin and choked. "We'll be fine as long as they don't know we're here. Just stay calm."
The saw sliced through the skin and muscle in a few easy strokes before it struck bone, the main artery gushing darkly as it was severed and the blood pressure released. In a few minutes the arm had come free, the limb expertly amputated across the joint. The stump oozed blood. Abruptly, the struggling stopped.
Working quickly, the figure wiped the saw on the bedclothes, then returned it to his bag. The arm, meticulously wrapped in a towel snatched from the foot of the bed, soon joined it. The victim's face was still masked by the pillow, the bedclothes knotted around his legs like rope where he'd kicked out and got himself tangled up. The heart-rate monitor showed only a flat line, an alarm sounding belatedly in the empty nurse's station down the corridor.
The two men moved away from the bed, across the room, careful not to touch anything. But as he was about to shut the door, the tall man suddenly looked up into the far corner, into the camera lens, straight into Bennett's eyes, and smiled.
"Oh my God," Bennett whispered in slow realization. "They're coming for the tapes."
He jerked his head toward the other monitor. The thin man was walking slowly up the corridor toward them, the blade of the knife in his hand glinting like a scythe.
Laura began to scream, a low, desperate, strangled call that grew louder and louder as the image on the screen drew closer.
PART I
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
CHAPTER TWO
The shattered glass crunched under the leather soles of Tom Kirk's Lobb shoes like fresh snow. Instinctively, he glanced up to see where it had come from. High in the wall above him white sheeting had been taped across a window frame's jagged carcass, the plastic bulging every so often like a sail as it trapped the biting winter wind. He lowered his gaze to the man opposite him. "Is that how they got in?"
"No."
Rabbi Spiegel shook his head, his side locks bumping against his cheeks. Although smartly dressed in a dark suit and white shirt, he was thin and frail, and the material seemed to hang off him like loose skin. A faded black silk yarmulke covered the top of his head, firmly clipped to a fierce growth of wiry gray hair. His face was hiding behind a wide spade of a beard, his watery eyes peering through small gold-framed glasses. Eyes that burned, Tom could see now, with anger.
"They came in through the back. Broke the lock. The window… that was just for fun."
Tom's face set into a grim frown. In his midthirties and about six feet tall, he had the lithe, sinewy physique of a squash player or a cross-country runner — supple yet strong. He was clean shaven and wearing a dark blue cashmere overcoat with a black velvet collar over a single-breasted gray woolen Huntsman suit; his short, normally scruffy brown hair had been combed into place. His coral blue eyes were set into a handsome, angular face.
"And then they did this?" he asked, indicating the devastation around them. Rabbi Spiegel nodded and a single tear ran down his right cheek.
There were eighty thousand names in all — Holocaust victims from Bohemia and Moravia — each painstakingly painted on the synagogue's walls in the 1950s, with family names and capital letters picked out in blood red. It was a moving sight, an unrelenting tapestry of death recording the annihilation of a whole people.
The bright yellow graffiti that had been sprayed over the walls served only to deepen the unspoken weight of individual suffering that each name represented. On the left-hand wall, a large Star of David had been painted, obscuring the names underneath it. It was pierced by a crudely rendered dagger from which several large drops of yellow blood trickled toward the floor.
Tom walked toward it, his footsteps echoing in the synagogue's icy stillness. Up close he could see the ghostly imprint of the names that had been concealed under the paint, fighting to remain visible lest they be forgotten. He lifted a small digital camera to his face and took a picture, a loud electronic shutter-click echoing across the room's ashen stillness.
"They are evil, the people who did this. Evil." Rabbi Spiegel's voice came from over his left shoulder, and Tom turned to see him pointing at another piece of graffiti on the opposite wall. Tom recognized it as the deceivingly optimistic motto set above the gates of all Nazi concentration camps: Arbeit macht frei — work sets you free.
"Why have you asked me here, Rabbi?" Tom asked gently, not wanting to appear unfeeling but conscious that anything useful that the rabbi might have to tell him could soon be lost in the emotion of the moment.
"I understand that you recover stolen artifacts?"
"We try to help where we can, yes."
"Paintings?"
"Amongst other things."
Tom sensed that his voice still had an edge of uncertainty to it. Not enough for the rabbi to pick up on, perhaps, but there all the same. He wasn't surprised. It was only just over six months since he had gone into business with Archie Connolly. The idea was simple: they helped museums, collectors, governments even, recover stolen or lost art. What made their partnership unusual was that, after turning his back on the ClA, Tom had spent ten years as a high-end art thief — the best in the business, many said. Archie had been his long-term fence and front man, finding the buyers, identifying the targets, researching the security setup. For both of them, therefore, this new venture represented a fresh start on the right side of the law that they were still coming to terms with, Archie especially.
"Then come upstairs. Please." The rabbi pointed toward a narrow staircase in the far corner of the room. "I have something to show you."
The staircase emerged into a vaulted room, the pale morning light filtering in from windows set high in the white walls. Here there was no graffiti, just a series of shattered wooden display cases and a tiled floor strewn with drawings and watercolors, some torn into pieces, others screwed up into loose balls, still more covered in dirty black boot prints.
"This was a permanent exhibition of children's drawings from Terezin, a transit camp not far from here. Whole families were held there before being shipped east," the rabbi explained in a half whisper. "You see, there is a certain awful innocence about war when seen through the eyes of a child."
Tom shifted his weight onto his other foot but said nothing, knowing that anything he might mumble in response would be inadequate.
Rabbi Spiegel gave a sad smile. "Still, we will recover from this as we have recovered from much worse before. Come," he said, crossing to the far wall, "here's what I wanted to show you."
A gilt frame, perhaps two feet across and a foot wide, hung empty on the wall, only whitewashed stonework visible where the painting should have been. Tom edged toward it.
"What was there?"
"An oil painting of this synagogue completed in the early thirties."