Besides, what he had seen that evening when he had quickly dropped in just before closing time had confirmed Archie’s view. Apart from the refurbished ticketing area and the installation of an extra set of fire doors on the second floor, everything looked the same.
It was more of a private collection than a museum, really, housed within four slender eighteenth-century houses that had been knocked together behind their picture book facade to create several large lateral galleries. Collected over the last fifty years by Maximillian Schenck, the sole heir of the largest retailing family in the Netherlands, it was an eclectic but immensely valuable collection of Impressionist and Old Master paintings, modern sculpture, antique furniture, and objets d’art.
And one of the highlights was unquestionably the Fabergé egg that Tom was going to steal that night.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
The man was definitely following Tom.
For a few minutes, Jennifer had thought that she might be imagining it, that he was just walking the same way. But as he darted between cars and behind trees, his head low, turning where Tom turned, stopping when Tom stopped, that possibility rapidly evaporated.
So Jennifer held back, careful to stay fifty yards or so behind as she tracked the two men in front of her, watching where she stepped, controlling her breathing, tacking from shadow to shadow like a small boat racing upwind. The instructors back at Quantico had taught her well.
They walked on, past cars that lined each side of the canal like a multicolored metal wall. And everywhere bikes, so many bikes, chained to trees and railings and lampposts and street signs. Even to each other. Every so often they would step past a bar or a basement peepshow and the barrel-chested bouncer standing outside would ask them if they wanted to come in as they each walked past, first Tom, then the man, and finally Jennifer, as if they were all part of some bizarre extended conga.
As they walked deeper into the city, the dull bass of the live bands playing in the depths of innumerable sweaty bars and the laughter of gap-year students staggering from coffee shops gradually faded into the distance. Instead Jennifer’s constant companion was the canal, flowing thickly alongside her, its surface dark and coagulated by the night.
Ahead of her, first Tom, then the man, turned right. Jennifer made her way slowly to the end of the street, wary of Tom turning back on himself, or running into the back of the man who might have stopped ahead of her. She edged to the street corner and looked cautiously around it.
But both men had disappeared.
CHAPTER SIXTY
At their lowest part, where the gabled rooflines angled down to meet the redbricked facade, the buildings on this street were four stories high. The large black iron cranes set into the top of each gable were the only evidence of their former lives as a series of merchants’ houses where grain would have been hauled out of barges on the canal into the storerooms on the upper floors.
A ground-floor entry into the Schenck Museum was always going to be out of the question. The windows were too exposed and besides it was too close to the control room, where the three guards gathered at night, one eye on the closed-circuit TV monitors and the other on the TV. A succession of gaudy quiz shows and translated American sitcoms filled the minutes between the patrol that two of them made through the building every forty-five minutes.
Tom knew it had to be the roof, but getting up there was almost as difficult. He could, potentially, have used a compressed-air grappling hook, but that was risky. Unlike in the movies, there was never any guarantee it would grip onto anything and he certainly couldn’t afford to have a titanium hook come crashing down onto the sidewalk from four floors up.
It only left one option. The old-fashioned way. The hard way. He had to climb up.
Tom settled his heavy backpack squarely onto his shoulders. He checked again that the street was empty and started up the far right-hand side of the building, well away from the video camera which was trained on the museum entrance.
To most people, the building’s sheer facade would have represented an impassable obstacle, but Tom knew that the building was old and the cracked and crumbling mortar gave a climber of his ability a succession of firm hand-and toe-holds. He moved smoothly up the front of the building, his fingers searching for first one handhold, then another, his feet driving him upward as they locked onto faint ridges in the brickwork. Every so often a decorative course of white bricks had been laid so as to form a narrow ledge allowed him a temporary relief.
Once he was about fifteen feet off the ground, he traversed a few feet across the side of the building until he reached a thick metal drainpipe that emerged at that point out of the brickwork and led up to the roof.
Below him a police car swung onto the street and made its way slowly past the museum entrance. Tom pressed himself flat against the wall, the brickwork scraping against his cheek, his left foot jammed between the drainpipe and the wall. The car drove by, paused momentarily, and then turned right over a bridge and down another street. Peeling himself away from the wall, Tom gripped the drainpipe and started up toward the roof.
Two minutes later he swung his right arm, then his right leg over the parapet and dragged himself onto the roof. He lay there for a few moments, fighting to catch his breath, his mouth dry and sour as his muscles leaked lactic acid. Overhead, the stars sparkled, brilliant jewels laid on a black velvet cushion. Just for a moment, Tom allowed himself to think again about what he was doing. He’d fought against this hard, but in the end Archie had probably been right. Much as he wanted to believe Jennifer’s promise of a fresh start, he couldn’t trust anyone but himself.
His watch beeped and snapped his mind back into focus. He was right on time.
Rolling to his feet, he grabbed a long black rope out of his bag. Securing it quickly to the parapet, he dropped it down the side of the building, the thin nylon cord nestling in the shadow cast by a neighboring tree. From the street it was almost invisible, but it gave him a quick way down. Just in case.
Behind the gabled façade the roof was flat, the original triangular roofline having been removed in the 1960s in favor of a starker, more modern look for the galleries below. As part of these works, a series of large skylights had also been set into the flat roof to allow natural light in. Tom padded over to the skylight set into the very middle of the building and crouched down next to it.
On cue, two guards appeared at the doorway of the large room beneath him and looked in, running their flashlights around the room. Nothing to report. As they withdrew, one of them suddenly flashed his flashlight up toward the skylights overhead. The powerful beam leapt up from the floor below and shone up through the glass like a spotlight. Tom jumped back from the opening and set the timer on his watch. He had forty-five minutes exactly until they came back.
He removed a small axle grinder from the front pocket of his pack. Battery powered and specially modified by him to silence the sound of the electric motor, it was ideal for etching into the glass. With a faint buzzing noise, he cut into its smooth surface, scoring the outline of a large square.
Replacing the axle grinder, Tom produced two Anver suction hand cups, aluminum handles with two large circular rubber sucker pads at each end of them designed to carry about sixty-six pounds of load each. Placing these against the glass, he eased down the black plastic lever at the center of each pad, creating a vacuum between the pads and the surface of the area of glass he had outlined.