In four days the Vermeer would be hung on a wall at the Rijksmuseum. In four days it would be vulnerable to the Ontario Crew.
Which meant I had four days – four! Four days to plan, prepare and execute an art theft. Way too much time had been taken up being almost murdered, beaten up and recovering from same.
Also, I should probably think of something clever to say at my bookstore panel on that same night, but that was a lower priority.
Part One, stealing the Vermeer, was complicated, but only because I wanted to raise my eighty percent probability of getting clear of the building to more like ninety-five percent. That extra margin would involve a lot of moving parts, some of which I’d already set in motion.
Part Two would be even more complicated. Because I wasn’t just going to steal the damned thing, I was going to commit a whole different crime at the same time. And also make a great deal of money.
Complicated.
The synonym for complicated in the world of crime is vulnerable. Each new complication was another moving part that might fail. And the odds of failure had risen dramatically with the realization that the Ontario Crew was watching me.
It wasn’t hard to figure out where they’d gotten the idea to watch me: the initial leak had to have come from a government source, and it was probably about Delia, not me directly. A lot of Feebs and Spooks are ex-military, and USP One, Daniel ‘the Chipster’ Isaac, sold weapons to the military. It would not be a surprise if he had connections in the CIA certainly, and probably in the Bureau as well. Politically connected billionaires facing imminent death by COPD had ways of deploying their cash.
Several thoughts occurred: if someone in the FBI had leaked word that the Bureau was onto the Ontario Crew, how had that led to me? I was supposedly nothing more than a CI file number. The answer was mundane, of course: the leak had been about Delia, Willy Pete had followed Delia and Delia had led him to me. And I was an unknown property, someone the Ontario Crew would want to know about.
The more startling realization was that the Ontario Crew knew the FBI was onto them and yet they were still active. The fact that someone in the Bureau had leaked didn’t alter the reality that rational crooks did not commit their crimes while aware that the Feebs were on to them. You know, unless someone had basically buried them in a pile of money. Fifty million buys a lot of initiative.
The Ontario Crew had presumably done the same math Delia had. They knew we couldn’t rat them out to the Dutch. And they knew as well as I did that in the absence of wall-to-wall, 24/7 surveillance, they were pretty safe. But there was that wild card: me. I bore looking into.
I left Delia and Chante and walked off by myself, down through the Red Light District, De Wallen, the roughly two acres of bars and coffee shops and sex workers sitting in red-lit windows. I was not enticed by the several offers aimed at me, the most direct of which was from a scary hag who sang rather than said, ‘Fucky-fucky, let’s go fucky-fucky.’ This had the unfortunate effect of reminding me of rumpy-pumpy, which in turn made me wince as I remembered the abrupt way I’d shut Tess down.
My phone dinged. It was Delia.
Hey: Located Hangwoman.
Cool. Bit late tonight.
Yep. Tomorrow. Night. I’ll get a vehicle.
I checked the time. I’d left Delia an hour earlier in the café, so how had she suddenly discovered the Hangwoman’s location when all we had on her was a train and a terminal?
The explanation was inescapable: Delia had agents in town. Goddammit, she had people watching me. Professionals, too, or I’d have twigged them. Agents who must have watched from the shadows and followed either Hangwoman or Chante to the train station and then onto the train, leaving me in something of an emotional quandary: was I more angry at the presence of Feebs? Or more relieved that they’d followed Hangwoman to whatever rat hole she lived in?
I watched creepy dudes and prurient tourists eyeball the ladies until depression threatened and I headed for the apartment. Chante was asleep, a relief, because I was still too jazzed to sleep and wanted to work on my plan.
I sipped Talisker and fleshed out the details of my shopping list and contemplated the nature of my fucked-up life. I fell asleep on the sofa at some point and woke to the aroma of coffee and the sounds of Chante in the kitchen.
This time around at the Rijksmuseum I was not the corpulent, sporty dude with the bad mustache, I was the slow, stooped, gray-haired pensioner in a tan canvas jacket, worn thrift-shop shoes and a plaid flat cap. I established a pattern of taking lots of pictures, lots of video, even pics of things clearly irrelevant: lockers, steps, signs. The idea was to look like an easily dismissible old fart who didn’t really know why he was taking pictures of security cameras, guards, the mounting of various paintings, sight lines, distances, crowd concentrations, bathrooms, stairwells …
I retrieved my backpack from the coat check, plopped down in the museum café, ordered an open-faced sandwich and a Pellegrino and opened my newest (non-FBI) laptop. I opened Pages and started to walk the plan through, once again, step by step.
The museum was not going to be the problem, the problem was going to be a bunch of technical issues having to do with tracking Wi-Fi connections, stacking up alternate sites to use for broadcast, and the complex issues around money traveling over the internet. Also there would be some DIY construction work, not a strength of mine.
US Person Isaac lived in Las Vegas. That was a nine-hour time difference from Amsterdam. My ten a.m. would be Isaac’s one a.m. No good. My five p.m. would be his Pacific Time eight a.m. That was better – not much point in my plan if the Chipster slept through it all.
Five p.m. would be H-Hour. Six p.m. would be the first broadcast. Six p.m. here would be eleven a.m. in the media centers in New York. At that time the media would light up with the news while Isaac was eating his corn flakes in Vegas.
Plus, five p.m. would be rush hour, lots of people on the streets and canals, fewer in the museum and no school groups I’d have to worry about trampling.
I went over it again. And again.
1. The diversion(s).
2. The snatch.
3. The camera walk.
4. The dump.
5. The cameras again.
6. The exit.
7. The exterior diversion.
8. The boat.
9. The twelve-hour tick-tock.
10. The banking.
11. The reveal.
I groaned inwardly at the thought of the work still to be done and I shuddered at the thought of all that could go wrong. I had an exit plan in that event, but I wasn’t thrilled with it as it involved a great deal of bike riding, at the very least.
Could I build an alibi? If so, was that just gilding the lily? Should I line up a patsy? And would that be a case of buying trouble? Anyway, who was my patsy going to be, I didn’t know anyone in Amsterdam.
The old saw holds that armchair warriors talk tactics, while professional soldiers talk logistics. In the writing world, the corollary is that wannabes talk inspiration, while pros talk deals and options. A stick-up artist only thinks about the seventy-two dollars he’ll get from a liquor store and the meth he can buy with that money, but armed robbers are lazy and reckless. The professional thief does his homework, and his prep work. The professional plans for problems.
But so much prep work! And so little time.
And as to time, I was to meet Delia at six. Three hours.
In the intervening time I could start acquiring addresses. I typed in airbnb.com, checked map view and began to list properties that fronted the canals here in Amsterdam. Then a pair of properties, one in Antwerp the other in Düsseldorf, as safe houses in case it came to that.
The cost was getting ridiculous. I was spending money like water, burning carefully constructed identities along with their credit cards and passports, and, I reminded myself, it was not as if any of this was my idea. I’d been bullied into it.
I nurtured these grudges as a way to rationalize what I hoped would be an impressive payday. How impressive? That would depend. My net worth was right around two million in various accounts in places where banks didn’t ask questions. I might well double that. This could be a seven-figure score, and in real money, not discounted by a fence.
The FBI is regrettably pretty damned good at following the money, which meant I needed a way to discourage, slow down, even abort FBI interest in tracking my profits. Well, later for that. First, I had to get together with Delia and find my would-be killer and figure out just who wanted me dead. And how much they were offering to pay.
It was going to be humiliating if the price on my head was too low.