Page 10 of The Picasso Heist
“Holy shit,” says Blaggy.
“Fuckin’ A,” says Wolfgang, walking away. “Have a nice day, gentlemen.”
CHAPTER9
THERE’S NOTHING LIKEa mic drop for a moment of clarity.Nice work, Wolfgang.
Nikolov watches him walk off, then his eyes snap back to the painting. He’s marveling at what it is. Or, more accurately, what it isn’t. There’s a fake Picasso hanging in MoMA, one of the most famous modern-art museums in the world.
“The kid’s got balls,” mutters Nikolov, and as soon as he says it I know two things for sure.
One, Nikolov is on board.
Two, the real power play is yet to come.
“Should we talk more elsewhere?” I ask.
“Yeah,” says Nikolov. He points at Blaggy. “Go with her to the car. I’ll be there in a few minutes. I need to make a call.”
Blaggy escorts me downstairs, out of the museum, and into a black stretch limousine parked near the corner of Fifty-Third Streetand Sixth Avenue. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Blaggy had a gun pressed against my head. Now he’s opening doors for me.
I’m alone in the back of the limo. The partition’s up so I can’t see the driver, but I can hear him lower his window and make some small talk with Blaggy, who’s waiting out on the sidewalk. I immediately text Skip, and he answers my question before I can even ask it. Yes, he tells me, Nikolov indeed just called someone from inside the museum. With the spyware Skip uploaded, we can now track Nikolov’s location through his cell and see phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls. Skip’s already run a trace on the guy Nikolov’s chatting with now—it’s one of his attorneys. He has several on retainer, mostly for business, legitimate and otherwise, and he also has one personal attorney, a limelight-loving shark named Peter Hammish. It’s Hammish whom he’s suddenly had the urge to talk to.
Skip texts again minutes later to tell me Nikolov is off the call and heading out.
I stash my phone and wait. The limo door soon opens and in climbs Nikolov, followed by Blaggy. They both sit opposite me. I’m looking only at Nikolov.
“I want it for myself,” he announces.
“Excuse me?” I heard him perfectly.
“You want my help to steal a Picasso and replace it with a fake. Then you want to sell the real Picasso on the black market for roughly sixty cents on the dollar. You get ten million, and I keep the rest. That’s what you’re proposing.”
“That’s right,” I say. “It’s your manpower, and you’d have the bigger exposure—you get the lion’s share of the money. Figure fifty million, just like I told you.”
“And I don’t want the money, is what I’m telling you. I want the actual painting.”
“But there is no money without selling the painting.”
“You’re not thinking big enough,” he says.
“Okay, then. What do you have in mind?”
“You have to be a member of Echelon to bid on the painting at auction, right? I’m not a member, which is why you initially said we can’t control who buys it.”
“Exactly,” I say.
“But what if we could?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“What if we knew exactly who was going to buy the painting?”
“In other words, we’d somehow be working with a member,” I say.
“That would open up some other revenue possibilities, wouldn’t it?”
“I can think of one.”
