Cold War - Jerome Preisler [71]
She wasn’t surprised. He was a brave man. She wished she felt that kind of courage on her own.
The beatings continued to alternate with the crude, bare-sustenance meals.
Time after time it was the same.
Until the last time.
That last time they returned, it was to take him away. By then he’d been in desperate shape and could barely stay up on his legs. She remembered panicking as they dragged him off the floor, into the blackness beyond the cage. She had verged on crying out that she’d tell them whatever they needed to know, anything, if they only let him be. But then she’d thought of his vow to defy interrogation, his resolute, unsubmitting heart, and checked herself. She hadn’t wanted to fail him, to fall short, and had bitten down on the words, watching them take him away, watching the door of the cage slam shut behind him—
Another scream suddenly bayoneted her thoughts now, and she jerked bolt upright as if slapped, the chain of her handcuffs clinking coldly between her trapped, chafed wrists.
The screaming continued to slash the blackness; shrill, tormented. There was no wishing it away anymore. No telling herself it wasn’t real. That wouldn’t work, wouldn’t help, not now. . . .
She heard footsteps outside the cage, several sets of them, approaching with that familiar martial cadence. Then the cage door opened, lights glaring inside, dazzling her. She cowered back, squinting, shielding her eyes with both hands as they adjusted to the brightness.
The marked man entered, the rest of her jailers hanging behind him, positioned to either side of the entrance with their weapons at their hips. He crossed the floor of the cage, stood very still before her, framed in that terrible blaze of light.
Shevaun Bradley waited.
Trembling, cringing against the cage’s metal wall, she waited.
At last the marked man bent low over her.
“Now,” he said, “we talk.”
And outside in the black, Scarborough’s screams strung on and on above the heavy clashing roar of great machines.
ELEVEN
PARIS, FRANCE MARCH 12, 2002
HAVING WORKED OUT THE SOLUTION TO A SEEMINGLY insoluble problem, the mind longs for verification. It is not simply enough to know intuitively that something is correct; humans desire external confirmation. A math student wants the proof to be convincing and communicable. A police officer making an arrest wants the satisfaction of a conviction in a court of law.
Nessa wanted the Picasso, or more likely, the series of Picassos. She had consulted experts on her theory of a painting from the time of Guernica; there had been no firm consensus, but to her mind that made it even more convincing. Even more convincing was the buzz from certain quarters that she was not the first to make such inquiries. A Japanese collector had approached a professor in Barcelona, a curator in Los Angeles had been queried by a Belgian entrepreneur—there were questions in the air.
If she could find Elata, Nessa figured she would know within a half hour if she was right or not. She would charge him with theft and threaten him with a jail term of several years for stealing the letter from the museum. She would find out about the Picassos—as well as many other paintings. For he was a nervous man, haughty but on the edge and easily broken; she’d seen it in his eyes on the platform.
She could have grabbed him then. But at that moment there had been nothing to charge him with.
Nessa stared at a list of the men and two women who were suspected of having employed Elata over the last decade; it was not a long list, but every name was a prominent member of the art community and the world at large. Two had net worths that topped that of several countries. To say that their wealth and power protected them was an understatement—though with the right