Page 66 of The Picasso Heist
“Second,” I whisper back.
“Huh?”
“You’re trading the painting for the vases. Not the other way around.”
“Fair enough,” he says. “First or second, as long as I see them.”
“You will.”
We get closer to the water, and the low hum of the motor on Shen Wan’s Boston Whaler slices through the silence of the deserted lot. There’s no dock, only a ladder. Shen cuts the engine and ties a rope around one of the rungs, and I drop to a knee and take the two steamer trunks that are housing the vases from him.
I set them down on the wood slats of a discarded pallet and glance at Bergamo. He looks like a kid on Christmas morning. Pure anticipation.
Shen climbs the ladder, greets me with a smile, and points at hisRolex, keeping track of the three-minute window. “Seven seconds to spare,” he says. “Lucky seven.”
Shen and his boat are out of surveillance range when the cameras start rolling again at the shipyard, fresh off their reboot. We have all the time in the world now, if we want it.
We don’t. No one says it; it’s simply understood:Let’s be quick about this.Bergamo lays the case on the pallet and opens it for Shen.
He looks at the painting, gives Bergamo a nod. “Beautiful,” says Shen.
The word has barely left his mouth when the light hits his eyes. It’s bright, blinding. I turn, trying to see where it’s coming from, but the light is all I can see, a piercing white halo. No, make that two halos, side by side. They’re like headlights except this isn’t a car. It’s two people. And, judging by their entrance, neither one is an angel.
“Beautiful indeed,” says the first.
He dims his headlamp. He’s still a silhouette but all any of us needs to see is the barrel of his gun as he steps forward.
We’re being ambushed.
CHAPTER58
THE SECOND ONEdoes the same thing as his partner, dimming his headlamp and stepping forward with his gun outstretched. He takes a few steps to his right to cut off any angles and ensure no one’s making a run for it.
I don’t even have to look at Bergamo to know that the thought of running isn’t remotely close to entering his mind. He might be in shock. He might be scared for his life. But between the Picasso and the vases, there’s more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of art here, and there’s no way in hell he’s abandoning it. Not unless he absolutely has to. And not without at least trying to talk his way out of this.
“How much do you want?” Bergamo asks them.
The two smile behind their ski masks but only one answers. It’s the one who spoke first, and it’s clear he intends to have the last word.
“What do we want? Not much,” he says. He points to the pallet. “Only what we can carry.”
“You guys don’t strike me as the art-collecting type,” says Bergamo.
“We’ll try not to be offended by that.”
“What I mean,” says Bergamo, “is that those things—the painting, what’s in the trunks—they aren’t easy to offload.”
“Oh, crap. So you’re saying we can’t put them on eBay?”
Treating these guys like a couple of idiots isn’t exactly the smartest strategy, and for the very first time since I’ve known Enzio Bergamo, he isn’t sure what to say or do next.
Shen Wan calmly seizes on the silence. “I trust you know who you’re stealing from,” he says.
“I know who we’renotstealing from. You’re just the middleman. A very wealthy one, maybe, but still just the middleman.”
“So you do know who I am,” says Shen. “Which means you must also have some idea of who my partners are.”
“Yes. They’re even more wealthy than you, Mr. Shen. They’ll be just fine.”
