"It's been cut out," Tom said thoughtfully, running his finger along the rippled canvas edge where the painting had been sliced from the frame.
"That's why I asked you to come," the rabbi said excitedly. "They could have left it in its frame if all they wanted to do was damage or destroy it. Do you think maybe they took it with them?"
"I doubt it," Tom said with a frown. "The people who did this don't strike me as art lovers."
"Especially not a painting by this artist," the rabbi agreed grudgingly.
"Why, who was it by?"
"A Jewish artist. Not well known, but dear to us because he lived here in Prague — until the Nazis murdered him. He was called Karel Bellak."
"Bellak?" Tom drilled him with a questioning look.
"You've heard of him?" the rabbi asked, clearly surprised.
"I've heard the name," Tom said slowly. "I'm just not sure where. I'll need to speak to my colleague back in London to be sure I'm thinking of the same person. Do you have a photo of the painting?"
"Of course." Rabbi Spiegel produced a photograph from his pocket and handed it to Tom. "We made a few copies of this one a few years ago for the insurance company. They told us the painting wasn't worth much, but to us it was priceless."
"May I?" Tom asked. "Keep it. Please."
Tom slipped the photograph into his overcoat.
"From what I remember of Bellak…" Tom began, pausing as two Czech policemen stepped into the room and peered around at the damage.
"Go on."
"Is there anywhere a little more private we can go?"
"Why?"
Tom tilted his head toward the policemen. "Oh." The rabbi sounded disappointed. "Very well. Come with me."
He led Tom back down the stairs and across the main body of the synagogue to a thick wooden door that he unbolted. It gave onto a small open space, the oppressive cinder gray walls of the surrounding apartment blocks looming down on all sides. A few trees reached into the small window of gray sky overhead, their leafless branches creaking in the wind and occasionally scraping their skeletal fingers against the stifling walls. Ahead of them, the ground undulated in a series of unexpected mounds and dips and was peppered with dark shapes.
"What is this place?" Tom asked in a whisper.
"The old Jewish cemetery," the rabbi answered.
It suddenly dawned on Tom that the dark shapes in front of him were in fact gravestones, thousands of them in all shapes and sizes, some leaning against others for support, some lying prostrate as if they had been sprinkled like seeds from a great height. They were jammed so close to each other that the ground, muddy and wet where the morning's frost had melted, was barely visible between them. Tom was certain that if he were to topple one, the rest would fall like a field of overgrown dominoes.
"For hundreds of years this was the only place the city allowed us to bury our dead. So each time it filled up we had no choice but to put down a layer of earth and start again. Some say there are eleven levels in all."
Tom knelt down at the stone nearest to him. A swastika had been etched on the stone's peeling surface. He looked up at the rabbi, who gave a resigned shrug.
"The war may have ended long ago, but for some of us the struggle continues," the rabbi said, shaking his head. "Now, Mr. Kirk, tell me — what do you know about Karel Bellak?"
CHAPTER THREE
It was a little game he played, something to pass the time on his rounds. As he came upon each exhibit he would test himself against the display's information cards to see how much he could remember. After twenty years he was pretty much word-perfect.
First there was the Myer flag system, a line-of-sight communication tool devised in the Civil War by an army doctor who went on to form the Signal Corps. The glass cases held the original flags, battle-torn and stained with age.
Satisfied, he walked on, his rubber soles squeaking rhythmically on the floor like a metronome marking time, the polished toe caps of his boots glowing with a white sheen from the dimmed overhead lights.
Al Travis had been a guard at the National Cryptologic Museum since it had first opened. He liked it there. He'd finally found a place where he felt he was part of something special, something important. After all, technically he worked for the NSA, the agency responsible for protecting Uncle Sam's information systems and breaking the bad guys' codes.
Hell, the NSA was right in the thick of things with this whole War on Terror.
He came upon the next exhibit — the Cipher Wheel. A series of rotating wooden discs, the wheel had been used by European governments for hundreds of years to encrypt sensitive communications. According to the card, it was designed to be used with French, the international language of diplomacy until the end of the First World War.
The Cipher Wheel's cylindrical shape nestled snugly in its display case, the wood polished by generations of anxious fingers. He paused, looked at it, and checked with the information card that he was right in believing this to be the oldest such device in the world.
And then of course there was his favorite exhibit — the big one, as he liked to say — the Enigma machine. The museum had several versions on display in two large glass-fronted cases, and Travis never failed to pause when he walked past, running his eyes appreciatively over them. He found it incredible that, in breaking the code generated by this oversized typewriter, Polish and then British mathematicians had helped win the war for the Allies in Europe. But that's what the card said, and who was he to argue?
A sudden noise made Travis stop. He checked over his shoulder and then peered into the semidarkness ahead of him.
"Anyone there?" he called out, wondering if someone had come to relieve him early. As he paused, waiting for an answer, a steel wire shaped into a noose was lowered from above him until it was hovering just over his head, glinting in the lights like a silver halo. Then, just as Travis was about to move on again, it snapped past his face, the wire tightening around his neck and pulling him three feet off the ground.
Travis's hands leapt to his throat as he scrabbled at the wire, his legs thrashing beneath him, his throat making an inhuman gurgling noise. Two dark shapes materialized out of the shadows as he struggled, and a third man dropped down noiselessly from where he had hidden himself in the roof space above the ceiling tiles.
One of the men pulled a chair over from the wall and positioned it under Travis's flailing legs. Travis located the top of the chair with his feet and, wavering unsteadily, found that he was just about able to perch on tiptoe and relieve the choking pressure on his throat, his lungs gasping for air, blood on his collar where the noose had bitten into the soft folds of his neck.
Teetering there, his mouth dry with fear, he watched as the three figures, each masked and dressed in black, approached the left-hand display cabinet. Working with well-drilled efficiency, they unscrewed the frame, levered the glass out, and leaned it against the wall. Then the man in the middle reached in, took out one of the Enigma machines, and placed it in his accomplice's backpack.
Travis tried to speak, tried to ask them what the hell they thought they were doing, to point out that there was no way they were ever going to make it off the base, but all that came was a series of choked grunts and whispered moans.
The noise, though, made the men turn. One broke away from the others and approached Travis.
"Did you say something, nigger?"
The voice was thin and mocking, the last word said slowly and deliberately. Travis shook his head, knowing that these were not people to be reasoned with, although his eyes burned with anger at the insult.