Checkmate in Amber Read online

  I watched José drive away, and headed back to my car on my own. Absolutely alone, because from now on Operation Krylov was completely down to me.

  As I drove back through Ávila’s city walls later that evening, the radio announced that Schröder’s Social Democrats had won the general election, alongside the Greens. Germany was entering a brand new stage in its long and singular history.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Despite its being in Switzerland, Zurich Airport is a lot closer to Baden-Württemberg than the airport in its own state capital, Stuttgart. So Roi had booked me a 4pm flight from Paris-Orly into the world’s wealthiest financial center. Barely an hour later, I was sitting in Läufer’s knock-out Mercedes and heading down the N1 highway at full speed towards Gossau and the border with Germany.

  Läufer - Heinz - was the perfect combination of two conflicting personalities. It was as if there were two completely different people inside him. One was not far short of his fortieth birthday, good-looking, charming, dependable and smart. The other was still in full adolescent turmoil, reckless, provocative and permanently blessed with the illusion of eternal youth - disheveled long blond hair, black leather jacket, beat-up sneakers and faded jeans. He was seriously into conspicuous consumption - his classy Merc, his Iridium cell phone, the huge bunch of flowers he gave me when he met me off the plane, and so on - but was much more rough-and-ready when it came to his personal tastes.

  ‘Möchten Sie etwas trinken?’4 asked the waiter in the bar where we stopped for dinner just after crossing the border. Dinner at five-thirty in the afternoon! A good four hours earlier than I was used to …

  ‘Ein Pils, bitte.’5

  The huge half-liter mug of beer disappeared down his throat in next to no time. Personally, I was having a hard time handling the bitter taste of the creamy-headed golden brew so popular with German truck drivers.

  ‘We should leave here at seven,’ said Heinz, checking his watch, ‘so that we can get to Friedrichshafen by seven-thirty. Is there anything you need to get? Did you forget anything? Do you want to smoke some weed to mellow out?’

  ‘What I really want is for you to mellow out,’ I answered with a smile. ‘But now you really have made me nervous. Let’s go over exactly what you have to do, just to make sure you don’t slip up somewhere.’

  ‘What are you on about? All I have to do is pick you up when you’re through and get you back to the airport.’

  ‘Fine - but just run through the schedule from start to finish so I can be sure that you’ve not forgotten something.’

  I laughed my way through dinner with Läufer. At heart he was a lone genius, a Peter Pan misunderstood. A good part of his charm lay in the way that his thoughts and feelings were so rapidly reflected on his face, and in the sheer energy, enthusiasm and spontaneity of his conversation. The truth was that spending time with him was a real pleasure, a good timeout before the whistle blew for action.

  At seven-thirty on the dot we were driving through the streets of Friedrichshafen. Its empty and deserted streets. It was like a ghost town - no bars, no nightclubs, nobody walking their dog. Not a thing. Not even any cops.

  ‘Germany’s not like Spain, Ana,’ Heinz explained, half-apologetic. ‘And Friedrichshafen’s not Mallorca, or Benidorm or Marbella.’

  ‘Sure - but not a single car on the road except for ours?’

  ‘Listen, that’s the way it is round here at this time of day. If we were in Stuttgart or Munich, there’d be plenty of people on the street. But this is a working town. A lot of folk are fishermen who get up really early.’

  We left Friedrichshafen and headed northwest, following a winding road which led us up the steep slope of a small mountain. We were traveling through deep forest which had a slightly sinister feel to it in the darkness. When we reached the top, the view over Lake Constance was stunning, a perfect crescent moon reflected in its waters and, only five hundred yards away, the dramatic silhouette of Castle Kunst, fast asleep without a single light on. It was beautiful, and impressive: a medieval fortress built on a small island close to the shore and linked to it by a long bridge. Which I was on the point of crossing in next to no time.

  Läufer switched off his headlights and moved ahead slowly to park the car behind a nearby clump of trees, making it invisible from the roadway. My now jumpy companion, hardly a veteran of nighttime raids, helped me get my small kitbag out of the trunk and then stood stock-still as he watched me go through my standard quick-change routine. First I took off my jacket and blouse, and then my pants, leaving just my light, tight-fitting leotard. Over that, I pulled on a black thermal protection suit, of the type used by sailors to prevent loss of body heat in case they had to abandon ship in freezing cold waters. The skintight suit was amazingly comfortable and covered my entire body except for my head and hands.

  ‘It had never even occurred to me,’ whispered Läufer through the darkness. ‘Do you always do this, Ana? I mean, do you always wear all this gear and stuff?’

  ‘Every time,’ I replied, carefully arranging my hair inside my black neoprene headgear. ‘The suit doesn’t just protect me from the cold. It prevents my body heat tripping any heat sensors there might be. Did you know that the human body emits the same level of radiation as a 500-watt lightbulb? If the sensor network around the main defensive wall detects any rise in temperature, the alarms will be triggered, and you and me will be spending the night in jail.’

  ‘You look really beautiful in that suit, Ana,’ he joked, ‘you really do. Don’t ever take it off.’

  I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and put on my boots, making sure that the laces were good and tight. Läufer was dying of curiosity.

  ‘Go on, tell me. What’s so special about the boots?’

  ‘They’ve got stealth rubber soles that can handle a straight vertical climb up a sheet of glass. They lock on to ledges, cracks and incuts like cats’ claws. And - before you ask - what I’m sticking into my ears right now are miniature sound amplifiers which have just,’ I told him as my movements matched my words, ‘turned the noise that your lungs are making into the second cousin of a hurricane. Nobody can take me off guard and they help me control the noise that I make myself. So please keep it quiet now. Get back in the car and catch some sleep. I’ll be back in under an hour.’

  I adjusted the strap of my night vision goggles over my headgear and fitted them firmly onto the bridge of my nose. Immediately, everything around me began to glow with that distinctive green light - including Läufer’s pale face.

  ‘And if you don’t return?’ the poor guy asked me, shaking like a leaf.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I told him, putting on my backpack and the carry tube with Donna’s fake in it. ‘You’ll be woken up by the police sirens.’

  I quickly crossed the highway and stopped for a second, scanning the wooden bridge. I had my fingers crossed that it wouldn’t creak much as I crossed it, and fortunately my prayers were answered. Calm and balanced, I moved smoothly across it towards the island and, once on land again, silently circled the outer wall of the castle until I reached the west side which faced out onto the lake. My earphones confirmed that the watchdogs were still unaware of my presence. Their kennel was just on the other side of the castle wall. Carefully calculating the angle, force and trajectory of my throw, I lobbed the canister of tranquilizing gas and watched it as it arched over the battlements and disappeared from view. I heard the thud as it hit the ground, and then the startled bark of one of the two dogs. The other probably didn’t even have time to open its eyes before a heavy dose of clorazepate dipotassium and mivacurium chloride put them both to sleep in under a second. The gas didn’t do them any permanent damage: they would wake up the next day as happy as a pair of puppies after a good night’s sleep.

  I pulled a small coil of rope out of my backpack, 45-feet long and less than half an inch thick, and fixed it to the clamp at one end of the three-pronged grappling hook which would anchor my ascent to the battlements at the top o
f the castle wall. I began to swing it in ever increasing circles, and when it reached the right speed, I released it like an Olympic hammer thrower. I had carefully calculated the rope length necessary to avoid the grapnel landing on the walkway behind the battlements and setting off the alarms, and it successfully hooked onto the parapet at the first attempt. Then I attached my two mechanical ascenders to the rope, took a firm hold of them and began to scale the wall at maximum speed. When I reached the top, I straddled the parapet and slowly scanned the walkway through my goggles to locate the pattern of infrared rays. And there they were, flickering weakly against the bright green background. In fact, they didn’t even cover the full distance from watchtower to flanking tower. Yet again, the slipshod incompetence of the White Knight Company was a joy to behold. How they got away with their huge price tags was a complete mystery to me.

  I moved forward along the parapet until I was next to a section of the walkway which fell between two infrared fields and had been left completely unprotected. Quietly I dropped down onto it and strolled across to the inner wall, as cool as a cucumber. With the grappling hook securely set onto the inner battlement, I lowered myself smoothly down onto the well-kept lawn of the magnificent castle bailey. Now completely silent and deserted, it was strange to imagine that this very courtyard had witnessed the military training drills, the jousts, the tourneys, games and even feasts and dances, of a society and people now forever gone.

  There they were, my two ferocious Rottweilers with their shiny black coats, as sound asleep as bears in hibernation. I gathered up the gas canister and put it in a bag which I hermetically sealed and stuck in my backpack. I had no time to lose, so I began to run towards the castle keep, taking out a new 100-foot length of rope, another small three-pronged grappling hook and a tiny Belgian-made hunting crossbow, which my father had bought me at an auction many years before. I reached the keep’s stone wall, and pressed myself flat up against it as I assembled what I needed. Once it was ready, I stepped about three or four yards out, cranked the bowstring tight, lodged it in the cocking mechanism, fitted the bolt with its grapnel into the groove, aimed at the roof parapet - and fired. A soft whistling sound pierced the silence - and almost deafened me through my earphones. No instrument is as accurate, as deadly and as silent as a well-made hunting crossbow.

  I scaled the keep wall, and found myself on a flat roof. It was square-shaped and concrete-built, with the decking finished in tar paper around the elevator machine room and pierced by gas, heating and ventilation pipes, not to mention the chimney flue. Nothing very medieval about that. Luckily, there were no more sophisticated security measures to crack. All I had to do was get into the building through the roof door and I’d be standing in Hübner’s Pinakothek. The door was fitted with a fancy lock and anti-pick and anti-drill protection. Smiling quietly to myself, I heaved a sigh of relief. I’m sure it can’t be that difficult, but I actually didn’t have a clue about opening doors by picking or drilling locks. But I did know quite a lot about skeleton keys, and was the proud owner of a magnificent bump key with a fine set of bronze springs made for me by the German company Brühl Technik GmbH. I just slid it into the keyhole, turned it and bumped it until it raised the driver pins above the keyway and slipped the latch.

  Voilà! Castle Kunst was mine, all mine …

  On the other side of the door, there was a beautiful polished timber staircase which led down to a wide passageway with fine carpets, Spanish tapestries, and Baccarat crystalware and Sèvres porcelain displayed on shelves between the windows. Purely out of habit, I headed down it on tiptoe, although I knew very well that there was no danger of my being heard, seeing as the sound of my steps was muffled by the soft carpeting and the Seitenberg couple lived four floors away. At the end of the passage, a carved oak door slid open with barely a sound and there I was in Hübner’s private gallery. Imagine my astonishment when I realized that, hanging on the walls and on the panels suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the room, were most of the major works stolen from Europe’s top museums over the last few years: Cézanne’s unfinished landscape Le Cabanon de Jourdan and the two Van Goghs - L’Arlésienne and Le Jardinier - taken from Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art; Camille Corot’s Le Chemin de Sèvres, Robert de Nanteuil’s Self-Portrait and Turpin de Crissé’s Daims dans un paysage hijacked from the Louvre; Monet’s Falaises près de Dieppe and Alfred Sisley’s Allée des peupliers de Moret, until recently happily hanging in Nice’s Musée des Beaux-Arts. And a whole range of other masterpieces which aroused my admiration - and my envy.

  Clearly the Chess Group was not the only team of dedicated professionals involved in this lucrative line of business in Europe, one which had recently and massively expanded with the emergence of the post-Soviet Eastern European market. But we were still clearly the best when it came to modus operandi. Our rivals had a regrettable tendency to use military weapons when pulling a heist, whereas we just used our brains. So, it was crystal clear that it had been Helmut Hübner - the oh-so-respectable businessman, cookie magnate, philanthropist and former member of the Nazi Party - who had been behind the recent spate of major art thefts.

  ‘Jesus! I can hardly believe it!’ I whispered without thinking. The sound of my amplified voice in my ears almost gave me a heart attack and stopped my breathing. It was the first time that I had ever done this during an operation. Still, the sight before my eyes would have knocked out any self-respecting art collector.

  The Krylov painting was hanging on the upper section of one of the central panels. I recognized the muzhiks’ familiar faces from seeing them so many times on the screen of my desktop, but this time as strange greenish images because of my goggles. Not allowing their ghostly suffering to distract me, I carefully unhooked the canvas and lowered it onto a length of silk I had laid out on the floor to use as my improvised workbench. I took the tools out of my backpack and set to work. Fifteen minutes had passed since I’d left Läufer in the car. It would take me about as long again to get back there, so I had barely half an hour to switch the paintings and erase any sign of my presence there. A seriously tight schedule.

  I placed the picture face down and, with the help of a screwdriver, levered up the tacks which nailed the stretcher frame to the picture frame and then pulled them out with a pair of pliers. I carefully removed the two supports and began the difficult task of drawing out, one by one, all those damn numbered nails that held the canvas in position. Luckily it turned out that I didn’t need to use any of the replica nails that Donna had gone to so much trouble to get her hands on, as every single one of them came out clean, although not without a struggle at times. I straightened up at the waist, to stretch my muscles and check the results of my work so far. All going fine and nothing to worry about. I took a deep breath and was just about to get going again when something unusual - exactly what, I wasn’t sure - caught my attention. Was it a slightly different coloring on the edges of the canvas revealed by my infrared-sensitive goggles? Was it a damp patch or just a shadow? I took a careful look, and no, it was none of those things. What the hell was it? Mystified, I crouched down and suddenly there it was. Absurd. A totally unexpected glue-paste lining on the back of the canvas.

  Paste linings are used exclusively in the restoration of canvases badly worn out by the passage of time. Old canvases often show rips and tears or small areas where strands have frayed or broken under tension. The correct way to proceed is to reinforce their underside with lining, which prevents further movement and makes it more resistant. Only then can the canvas and the paintwork itself be safely restored. But Krylov’s work was a mere youngster by comparison, barely over eighty years old and with no apparent damage, and had been painted onto modern machine-made canvas, very strong, very resistant and still in perfect condition. So why on earth had someone stuck that stupid lining on the back?

  I pulled Donna’s copy out of the carry tube and replaced it with the Krylov original which I had carefully wrapped in a length of soft muslin. I
knelt back down on the floor and began to fit the forgery onto the stretcher frame. Carefully stretching the canvas over, I fixed it in place with the numbered nails, making sure that each went back into its original hole. Then I put the picture frame face down on the length of silk, fitted the stretched canvas inside it and then nailed it in with the same tacks I had removed with the pliers. I finished up, checked it over and then hung the painting back in place on its panel. Well-satisfied with the result, I stowed away all my bits and pieces. All I had to do now was get out of there as quickly as possible, and I’d be safe and sound.

  I made my way back to the flat roof, abseiled down the keep wall and freed the grappling hook by shaking the climbing rope sharply until it fell loose. I coiled up the rope, replaced it in my backpack with the grapnel and ran quickly across the castle bailey, feeling conspicuously spotlit by the moonlight. ‘One day I’ll no longer be up for this,’ I thought to myself. ‘I just won’t be able to handle the physical demands of this risky line of work. And then what’ll I do?’. Of all the members of our Group, I was number one on the early retirement roster. When that day came, how the hell was I going to spend my time - sitting in my little antique store watching the clock go round? Well, yes actually - no two ways about it. I’d better get used to the idea and enjoy the here and now, because when I became a wrinkled old lady, I’d be watching the game from way up in the stands. Through binoculars.

  I scaled the outer wall, with an affectionate parting glance at the sleeping Rottweilers, abseiled down the other side until my boots hit the ground, and then retrieved the grapnel. The difficult part was over. Once I crossed the bridge and got back up to Läufer’s car, yet another Chess Group sortie would have come to a successful conclusion.