“What night was that?” Remi asked.
“Wednesday, I believe. I’d have to check the report. Whichever night it was, they were in and out pretty quick.”
Sam met Remi’s eyes. That would fit the time line of when the Ghost was stolen from Oren. Sam’s French was too stilted. Last thing they wanted was to arouse the guard’s suspicions, so he gave Remi a slight nod.
“Did your officer include in his report anything unusual about the truck?” Remi asked.
“Besides the late hour? Just that they drove the truck in, dropped off a shipping container, then left. If he’s hiding something from his wife, it’s probably there.”
Remi and Sam both turned toward the warehouse, seeing two trucks backed up to the docks, the doors open, the forklift drivers moving in and out as they loaded them with full pallets.
The security guard nodded toward the right side of the warehouse. “That third door is where they unloaded the container.”
“It’s still there?”
“The container? That I can’t say. It’s been closed up tight ever since.” He pulled his phone from his pocket, reading a message on the screen. “As much as I sympathize with your plight, my employers are on their way here. They’re acquainted with Monsieur Rossi, the owner. Friends, even. I don’t believe they’ll be so understanding if they discover you here.”
“Thank you,” Remi said. “We’ve seen enough to file our report.”
He returned to the building, opened the door, stopped, looked back, his green eyes alight as he regarded them. “Not that I’m the expert, but if I wanted a better view, I’d walk around the corner and approach from the west.”
They thanked him again, but he’d already disappeared inside.
Sam lifted his binoculars and took one last look inside the warehouse. A wall separated the main area from the third bay. A closed door near the loading dock led into it, but they’d never be able to get inside that way. Not without being seen. There was a fenced yard on the west side, filled with shipping containers. That meant there should be an exterior door leading into the building. “Let’s take a walk.”
He and Remi headed down the street toward the corner, crossing once they were out of sight of anyone inside Rossi’s warehouse. Other than the dozens of shipping containers stacked in the yard, the west side of the building appeared deserted. A door toward the back of the structure gave them hope they might actually have a way in. He and Remi followed the chain-link fence topped with razor wire until they reached a gate secured with a padlock. Sam picked it, and they slipped in. Pea gravel crunched beneath their feet as they walked between the containers, almost covering the soft beep of a forklift coming from behind the building. They reached the end of the row. Sam looked out, then ducked back, as the forklift shot around the corner, driving straight toward them.
72
As Sam and Remi sank back between two containers, the forklift driver stopped at the end of their row, maneuvering toward the stack of containers, the metal clanging as he slid the forks under the topmost one. A steady beep sounded as he backed away with it, disappearing behind the warehouse.
When he was gone, Sam looked at the fresh marks in the gravel, which exposed the dirt beneath, in the empty row next to them. “We need to hurry. He may be back.”
They crossed the open space toward the building, Remi taking the corner, to watch for the forklift driver, Sam going up to the door, the sign posted on it, in both French and English, announcing that it was an area restricted to authorized personnel only.
He picked the dead bolt, signaled Remi over. Once inside, he closed and locked the door behind them. The sounds of the busy warehouse next door filtered through the walls. Skylights lit the space, a lone shipping container in the center of the floor. Thankfully, the doors of the container faced away from the front of the warehouse and the office doors and toward the overhead door. Sam lifted the hasp, metal scraping against metal as he pulled open the container.
The entire front end was filled with boxes, stacked side by side, on two pallets. “Not what I expected to see,” Remi said.
Sam saw a pallet jack against the wall and rolled it toward the container, the wheels squeaking. “If you were going to hide a thirty-two-million-dollar car in a shipping container, would you risk boxes tumbling down and possibly damaging it?”
“Definitely not.” Remi, hearing muted voices on the other side of the door, looked that direction. “But we don’t even know if the car’s in there.”
“I’d stake our last two hundred euros on it. With Rossi’s sideline as a broker of stolen goods, he’s getting that stuff in and out of the country somehow.”
“Shipping containers filled with fake fronts of real boxes?” Remi said.
“Exactly.” He guided the jack by its tiller, pushing the forks beneath one of the pallets and raising it. As he pulled back, he felt how light the load was as it rolled, and it confirmed what he’d suspected. The entire pallet was stacked with empty boxes secured together.
Light filtered into the dark space behind it, and he could just make out a canvas-covered shape inside about the size and shape of the Gray Ghost. “That is a beautiful sight. Let’s get this other pallet out.”
She looked back at him. “We can’t just roll the car out.”
“It might be our only option,” he said, testing the weight of the other pallet, also too light to have anything in the boxes. “If we can get that overhead door open, once the car is in public view, Rossi can’t exactly say he didn’t know it was there. If he’s smart, he’ll back off and claim he had no idea it was the Gray Ghost. The police will come, do an investigation, and the Ghost goes home.”
“But Albert’s still in jail.”
“One thing at a time, Remi.” He pulled his flashlight out of his backpack, shining it into the container and under the car to see how it was secured for shipping. Nylon straps and wheel blocks. For an hour-and-a-half ferry ride, probably good enough.