“Yes, Minister.”
“Taghinia will explain.”
Samimi tried to quash the panic down deep in his gut. “Yes, Minister,” he said, hoping that Nassir couldn’t hear how dry his voice had suddenly become.
“Excellent,” he said, and hung up.
“Repairs? What is he talking about?” Samimi asked.
Taghinia waved off the question. “We’re not talking about rugs, you fool.”
“It was a code?” Samimi hoped his acting would pass muster.
“Of course it was a code. The minister was telling me he wants us to get Hypnos home.”
“We have Reza working on that for us.”
“There is too much bureaucracy in this country. Too many regulatory commissions. Too many layers to deal with. We can do it much more quickly bypassing those formalities. We have to move the sculpture out ourselves.”
“We can’t take Hypnos out of the Met illegally.”
“We have men in place in the museum, don’t we?”
“Just two.”
“What’s to stop us from putting in a few more? Get five or six in there.”
“We put them inside the museum to protect the sculpture.”
Taghinia said nothing.
“You said it was security,” Samimi insisted.
“And it was, but it can become something else.”
Samimi hadn’t heard anything about this on the tapes. What had he missed? He felt stupid and then sick as something occurred to him. Twice during the past eight months, Samimi had delivered small objets d’art to the associate curator of the museum’s Islamic art department from a wealthy Iranian who Taghinia had said wished to remain anonymous.
“What about the pieces I’ve given to Deborah Mitchell…is she part of this plan?”
“More insurance.” Taghinia nodded.
“Are the pieces bugged?”
“No.” Taghinia laughed. “They are quite legitimate. I wanted you to get to know someone inside the museum who was familiar with the Islamic art collection.”
Samimi looked down at his fingers, splayed on the table. He had thought he’d outsmarted his boss, but he’d missed some important communiqués. “The Met is one of the most secure institutions in the world.”
“Your point?”
“It’s impenetrable.”
“You sound in awe of this museum. Are you? This Deborah Mitchell…does she mean something to you?”
From the first day that Samimi had walked into the great front hall of the Metropolitan Museum he’d been captivated by the marble and stone, the cool air perfumed by the gigantic arrangements of flowers tucked into alcoves, by the classical Beaux Arts architecture and the endless galleries leading to more endless galleries that offered up the artistic accomplishments of one great culture after another. It was hard for him to separate Deborah from where she worked. Of all the women he’d met in New York and was attracted to, she was the only one he’d refrained from trying to seduce. She was part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Of course not, but…what you are suggesting…it’s insane, Farid. You do realize that we are discussing an eight-foot-tall piece of sculpture. I know it’s an important artifact but…”
“Don’t be a fool. We’re talking about more than just a piece of sculpture.” He puffed on his cigar and his reptilian eyes narrowed. “In researching the records for Reza, our minister found a set of documents that he hasn’t shared with the lawyer, or anyone else. It appears that Hypnos could be a map of sorts that holds the secret to how man can access his inner realms and higher consciousness, making visions, clairvoyance, pre-cognition and out-of-body experiences all possible. If tapped, this power would allow man to use his imagination to affect reality. You’d just imagine murdering someone and your imagination would make it happen.”
“You can’t believe that.”
“For all the time you’ve spent in America you still haven’t learned her lessons, have you? Is there anything more valuable than potential, Ali? Than possibility? Than a promise or a threat? Hypnos and his secrets are rightfully ours. We want them back.” He flicked a half inch of dead ash into a crystal ashtray. “Whatever the cost.”
THREE
The lanky man ambled down the narrow Viennese street with the lazy insouciance of someone who never worried and who’d never been weighed down with tragedy or illness. He walked as if the stone pavers beneath his feet had been laid for him; as if the sun were shining and it were morning. But it was night and it was windy and wet, with the kind of cold, pelting rain that one expects in April, not May.
He’d been in this city for only six days but had seen enough to dislike it. Vienna felt tired to him, as if the weight of its secrets burdened its people with a heaviness they couldn’t shrug off and was too much for them to bear.
Or maybe he didn’t like it because he’d failed here.
He’d come to arrest Dr. Malachai Samuels for stealing ancient stones from an archaeological dig in Rome the year before. Samuels, a preeminent past-life therapist and amateur magician, had made all the evidence disappear, and to date neither Interpol nor the FBI had been able to connect him to the crime. But instead of taking the reincarnationist into custody, the agent had been involved in a bizarre incident at the Musikverein. Along with almost a thousand other people, he’d experienced a hallucination while listening to a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. To date, none of the investigators had offered a satisfactory explanation of what had occurred. Music could excite you or lull you into a state of extreme relaxation-but catapult you into a hyperreal fantasy of another time and place? Of another life lived and lost?
The press, both here and abroad, was still reporting the rumors that the occurrence was the result of a sonic anomaly that had caused a mass hypnotic past-life regression. Because he was a rationalist, the agent hoped the authorities testing the air in the music hall would discover there’d been a chemical attack. He preferred a black-and-white explanation and refused to accept that what he’d experienced during the concert was a memory of an earlier existence. Clearly his subconscious had manufactured a story in which people from the present played roles in an imagined past. There were hundreds of painkillers that caused delirium and delusions; his doctors had prescribed several of them for him when he was younger. Under the influence of narcotics, anything was possible.
A middle-aged man, carrying a string bag in one hand and a maroon umbrella in the other, hurried past, giving the agent only a cursory glance. Good. Everything about his demeanor and wardrobe was designed to disguise his involvement with law enforcement. The black shirt, jeans and leather jacket, the hair that fell over his collar-it was basically how he’d looked in college. The clothes just cost more now.
Stopping at number 122, an artless building identified as the Toller Archäologiegesellschaft-the Toller Archaeology Society-he rang the bell. Seconds later he was buzzed into a lobby where a middle-aged woman, wearing a wrinkled and shapeless navy dress, waited for him. Dr. Erika Alderman greeted him solemnly, then opened a second door that would have been invisible from the street and ushered him deeper inside the building.
He’d met the doctor yesterday at the funeral for the man Malachai had traveled to Vienna to visit. Her grief had been palpable and the agent had refrained from asking her about the events of the past few days. It wasn’t the right time or place. Besides, was there really anything left to discover? Malachai had been watched from the minute he’d arrived in Vienna, and although he’d visited here three times, there was no indication he’d had anything to do with his colleague’s death. So the agent was surprised when, after the ceremony, Dr. Alderman had approached him and, in a hoarse whisper that sounded as if she’d been crying too hard for too long, requested that he come by before he left for America. She had something to show him.