Page 55 of Alex Cross Must Die

She was obviously eager to get into the details of the sting, but Poe couldn’t muster the interest. Through the door, he could hear two cops downstairs guffawing at a crude joke.

“You two work it out,” he said. “I need a break from these Neanderthals.”

CHAPTER 57

TEN MILES AWAY,in his Manhattan penthouse, Luka Franke was using the Van Gogh he’d lifted in Cairo for practice. By coincidence, it was almost exactly the same size as the Picasso he intended to steal from the Williamsburg gallery the next day.

He had built a replica of the gallery’s display case, complete with alarm system. He had also laser measured the dimensions of the gallery floor, the height of the ceiling, the distances to the exits. Everything. Down to the centimeter.

Disconnecting the alarm would be child’s play. A simple wiring bypass. The same panel contained the connections for the surveillance cameras. Careless but convenient. And not totally surprising. This was a pop-up gallery, after all, not the Smithsonian.

He had already hired his shills, a Swiss couple with impeccable credentials who would create a diversion at the right moment. He had ordered a uniform for himself to match those of the gallery guards, two of whom were now on his payroll. Now it was just a matter of making the switch—and making it undetectable. For that, he would rely on his own sleight of hand, and the wizardry of his Japanese technicians.

Franke had supplied the refractive index and gradient for the Plexiglas case, along with the lumens and positions of the gallery lights. His young freelancers at Hitachi had done the rest.

Franke stared at the Van Gogh from the front, then from 30 degrees to each side, the most extreme angles available to the gallery viewers. Amazing. At every point, the illusion held up.

He opened the case and gently touched the surface of the painting, which was not a painting at all. It was an electronic image on a finely textured screen, as thin as a coat of varnish, mounted on canvas and powered by a battery the diameter of a hair. The resolution was rated at 4,000 dpi, much higher than what the human eye could actually discern. A comfortable margin, thought Franke. And worth every penny. A Picasso, even a lesser-known piece, could fetch tens of millions.

Franke stepped back two and a half feet, the exact distance from the case to the gallery’s visitor barrier. He looked back and forth from the image to the stolen original, which was sitting on an easel alongside. The difference was undetectable. Franke pressed a button on a slim controller in his pocket.

On the impossibly slim screen, the image of the Van Gogh dissolved, replaced by an image of the Picasso, every bit as perfect.

Franke smiled. He liked things to be precise. Safer that way. He had learned early in life that art theft was no game. It was a demanding and dangerous profession. Sometimes deadly. And there were only three things that made it worth the risk.

Money. Cred. Payback.

CHAPTER 58

AT 2 A.M.,Poe was slumped on a barstool, staring into an almost empty glass.

“Sir, do you need a ride somewhere?”

“Last call already?” asked Poe, looking up slowly from his ice cubes.

“It is for you, my friend. Sorry.”

Poe stared at the bartender with bleary eyes. This was the last place he expected to be cut off. In general, he spent his leisure time in high-end establishments. But he preferred to do his serious drinking in spots like this, the divier and more forgiving the better. He’d found this place on a quiet corner a few blocks from the Brooklyn Navy Yard and immediately felt at home. The décor was dark wood and red vinyl. The playlist was late ’90s. There were no craft cocktails.

“I’ll be fine,” said Poe. He tipped his glass back, letting the last of the cold vodka drip down his throat. He slapped an extra twenty on the bar and stood up.

“Get some sleep, buddy, okay?” said the bartender.

Poe placed both hands on the bar and leaned in, lowering hisvoice to a whisper. “‘Sleep—those little slices of death!’” He leaned back. “Do you know where that’s from?”

“Sorry, I don’t,” said the bartender.

“A Nightmare on Elm Street 3,” said Poe.

The crowd had thinned considerably since he’d claimed his stool. There were only two couples left on the tiny dance floor. Poe weaved past them and headed for the door.

He liked drinking by himself. Gave him time to think. And he’d been thinking hard. About Sloane Stone. About Huntley Bain. About the subway murders. About the kidnapping. But mostly about Helene Grey. He was wondering if he’d made a mistake by getting close to her, especially now that she and her team had rudely intruded on his space. Not her idea, he realized, but awkward nonetheless. They hadn’t spoken in two days, except to exchange possible leads. In the office, it was all business, all the time. Like nothing had ever happened between them.

Maybe it shouldn’t have, thought Poe. Maybe it had been a mistake. Maybe he still wasn’t ready.

The night air was sticky. There were no cabs in sight. Poe didn’t mind. He felt like walking. He took a couple of deep breaths and headed east. At least hethoughtit was east. After two blocks and a couple of turns, he realized that he was headed in the wrong direction. Nothing looked familiar.

He looked toward the street signs marking the next intersection. He recognized the street names from his map of pilfered NYPD data.

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