key from a chain around his neck and opened the leather portfolio on the table. Then he removed a folder and flipped through the papers. The stack of papers was nearly an inch thick and was composed of bearer bonds in various amounts. The largest denomination was for an even $1 million. The smallest, $50,000. The banks that had issued the bonds were from a hodgepodge of European countries, from Great Britain to Germany to the most prevalent, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The total was $100 million.
It was a king’s ransom to purchase a princely prize.
But to the software billionaire, it was just money. He lived for the fulfillment of his own desires. It was not the art of the Golden Buddha that intrigued him, nor the history that surrounded the icon like a cloud; it was the fact that it had once been stolen and now it had been stolen again. It was the crime that turned him on, the inflation of his ego he would feel when he knew that he was the only man in the world to possess the rare and priceless artifact. Truth be told, he already owned a collection of stolen art that rivaled any museum in Europe. Monet, Manet, Daumier, Delacroix. Da Vinci sketches, Donatello bronzes. Illuminated manuscripts, crown jewels, stolen historical documents.
Warehouses in California were filled with antique automobiles, historic motorcycles, and early airplanes. Stolen Civil War artifacts, Romanov icons heisted from a museum in St. Petersburg, scientist Nikola Tesla’s writings lifted from a museum in Romania after the fall of communism, secret presidential letters, even a toilet from the White House.
The first computer, the first personal computer, the first mass-produced consumer computer.
Those last were for nostalgia, since computers were where his fortune had come from. He still had a hard copy of the first program his company had sold—one he had stolen himself from an unsuspecting programmer who’d believed he was just helping another enthusiast. That had been his first and largest theft, and it had set the stage for all the others.
He stared at the bonds again, then reached for the satellite telephone.
EDDIE Seng watched as a pair of olive-green Zodiac boats were raised from a lower deck on a utility elevator that exited amidships on the
Once the second boat touched the water, Kasim duplicated Murphy’s efforts. The two boats sat idling in the night. Seng climbed aboard Murphy’s vessel and checked the supplies that had been loaded aboard down in the inner workings of the
“You got everything?”
Huxley stared at her list, then found the last item. “We’re good.”
Next, Seng reached across between the boats and handed Kasim a CD. “These are the coordinates for the onboard GPS—we are running an exact copy on this boat. Let’s try to stay within ten feet or so of one another, that way the radar shielding should hide us both.”
Kasim nodded. “You got it, Eddie.”
“Okay, Mark,” Seng said quietly as he threw off the line, “you can take us out.”
Murphy slid the control lever down and the boat backed in reverse. A few minutes later, the two boats were skimming across the rain-splashed water at speeds of nearly thirty knots. For all intents and purposes, they were undetectable. Any radar that might try to paint them was being jammed; anyone listening for the engines would not be able to hear the noise over the storm. Help was coming.
TWO in the morning and the trio in the tunnel had between three and four hours until first light.
That was not as much of a problem as it might seem. Right now, the main threat was drowning. Hornsby stared ahead to where a large tile pipe was spilling its contents into the main sewer. What had begun as a trickle from the offshoot pipes had grown into angry torrents of water. The pipe ahead was raging with such force that the stream of water was slapping against the far wall of the main sewer like the torrent from a broken fire hydrant.
“From that point forward,” Meadows said, “we lose the bottom half of the sewer to water.”
Already the water was knee-deep, and the farther the men had gone, the more it had risen. Now they were at an impasse. From here to the end of the line, the water would be too deep to walk through. “Let’s inflate the rafts,” Jones said wearily.
Hornsby opened one of the duffle bags and removed a pair of folding rafts. Taking a high-pressure air supply from inside the bag, he attached it to a raft and turned the switch. The raft unfolded and quickly became rigid. Two minutes later, Hornsby turned off the inflator.
“We need to place the Buddha in one raft,” Hornsby said, “and the three of us in the other.”
“Weight problems?” Jones asked.
“Each raft can carry a maximum of seven hundred pounds,” Hornsby said. “Since none of us weighs under a hundred pounds, he’ll need to ride alone.”
Meadows was unpacking the second raft. He laid it out and attached the inflator. As it was filling with air, he spoke. “What do you think?” he asked his partners. “Should we let the Buddha lead or follow?”
Hornsby thought for a moment. “If he’s behind, the weight might push us into something.”
“But if he leads,” Jones said, “we can let go of the lead rope if we get into trouble.”
Meadows stared at the rapidly filling pipe just ahead. “There will not be much steering required,” he said, pointing to the rising water. “I think we’ll all just go with the flow.”
“Then he leads,” Hornsby said as he grabbed one end of the Buddha to wrestle it onto the raft, “and we just go along for the ride.”
“Hear, hear,” Meadows said.
“Makes sense to me,” Jones added.
