New York City
April 28
Clara Gautreau blew out a silent breath as she effortlessly boosted herself to the peaked rooftop. Reynard was usually vehement in his demurral of her extracurricular activities, but she knew why her guardian had asked. He needed to replace the item lost in Las Vegas; in Reynard’s business, customer satisfaction was paramount. He discouraged her pastime as unequivocally and persuasively as he could, but she was single-minded.
Reynard had saved her life all those years ago, and while they weren’t related by blood, they were as connected as any parent and child could be. She owed him everything, and yet he continued to give. She had been stunned when he had written to ask this favor; she was sure his disappointment with himself for needing to ask was mitigated by a tinge of pride in her abilities. So here she perched, focused, ready.
The Upper East Side home was quiet, as expected at 3:30 a.m. The owner, a corpulent South African diamond mogul, was not in residence. He and his family used the 16,000 square foot home about four weeks a year. This was not one of those weeks, but a full staff remained on the premises year-round. The house had state-of-the-art security: a museum-quality Bosch IP system with control center, management systems, fire and intruder alarms, heat and motion sensors, lockdown capability, and cameras. Child’s play, thought Clara from her nest between two sharp peaks of the cross-gabled roof. She changed her gloves from the heavier, sticky climbing pair to a thinner, form-fitting latex.
Three days ago, the skylight next to her had inexplicably suffered a cracked seal, repeatedly triggering the alarm. The damage had been repaired, and the alarm company was scheduled to rewire the window tomorrow. The skylight consisted of two rows of four, two-by-two-foot decorative stained-glass panels that were original to the home and opened for cleaning with a manual crank. Lucky thing that, because it would break Clara’s heart to have to damage the fragile works of art.
Apparently, the panels could also simply be shoved open, because two days ago from the rooftop bar of the boutique hotel across the street, Clara had observed one of the repairmen shoulder it open rather than go to the trouble of turning the crank. Now, with slightly more finesse, she wedged a device between the panel and the rooftop. Working like a miniature car jack, the apparatus silently lifted the lower-left pane to a height of about ten inches.
Clara had timed the operation down to the second. It should take just under seven minutes. Go time. Clara slipped inside and dropped soundlessly to the terrazzo tile of the fifth-floor solarium. The security measures on this floor were less intense; Jan Hendricks’s vault containing nearly fifty million dollars in uncut diamonds and exquisite jewelry was located on the second floor—maybe some other time. Her destination was the third floor.
The central staircase was an architectural marvel. It ascended at a curve from the first to second floor, stopping at a broad landing with French doors that led to a balcony. The stairs continued curving upward to the third-floor landing at the front of the house, the fourth floor at the back, and finally the fifth-floor landing where Clara currently stood under a Palladian window. It was a thirty-six-foot drop to the third-floor landing below; security cameras precluded using the stairs. She wrapped a cloth around the banister rail and then fastened the retractable wire from her harness over it; she would leave no trace. She lowered herself to the third-floor landing, unclipped the repelling wire, leaving it to dangle, and waited.
One floor below a toilet flushed. The bathrooms in the living quarters were all en suite so she just needed to make sure the bathroom visit didn’t include a late-night snack. When she was satisfied the house slept, she continued down the hall to the office.
The lock was a standard tubular drive-in double cylinder steel deadbolt that she picked with ease. The door opened silently, and she beheld her prize hanging behind the Edwardian desk. Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Painted by Rembrandt in 1633 and stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, the painting depicted Jesus and his Disciples in a boat on a raging sea and measured slightly larger than five feet high by four feet across. Despite the painting’s size, this part was going to be surprisingly easy because unbeknownst to Jan Hendricks, he had defeated his own security measures himself.
She had quite pleasantly discovered everything she needed to know about this office when she toured the house. In her position, every home on the National Registry of historic places was available for viewing with the perfunctory consent of the owner. Several of her colleagues had viewed the home to examine the unique architectural features, especially the staircase, the mouldings, and the windows. No one batted an eye when she requested to examine the rib vaulted ceiling and escutcheon moulding in the office; the painting in question, however, had been concealed by a retractable screen.
The room did not have cameras; Hendricks did not want his activities in this room recorded for posterity. The primary line of defense was an impenetrable grid of heat and motion sensors that blanketed the room from floor to ceiling, infrared and invisible to the naked eye. Any movement faster than one foot per second and any deviation of more than three degrees from the ambient temperature of the room triggered the alarm. When activated it was impossible to circumvent. Nearly.
Hendricks liked his treasures; he also liked his creature comforts, one of which was floor heaters. The sensor alarms had been recalibrated to allow for the heat coming from the floor to a height of eight inches. Clara accessed the simple remote-control signal using an app on her phone and engaged the floor heaters already conveniently set to body temperature, ninety-eight degrees.
With a grace and fluidity honed by a dozen years of ballet, Clara lowered herself face-down to the floor and, inch-by-inch, using only her fingers and the balls of her feet to propel her, she slid across the hardwood, skirting the Ziegler Mahal Persian rug. Once she was beneath the masterpiece, she set to work. The frame had been wired, but not the painting itself. In her experience, Clara had discovered most people of Jan Hendricks’s ilk wanted to avoid unnecessary eyes on their contraband, so they installed the alarms and sensors before the actual painting, creating a serious but unavoidable vulnerability in security.
Lying on her back, she extended the tool in her kit to its full length and carefully removed the painting from its housing. She lowered it at the requisite speed to avoid tripping the sensors. Then, she pulled the cumbersome tube from her back, withdrew the item it contained, and replaced it with the magnificent Rembrandt. Using the same tool, she raised the painting she had brought and affixed it in the frame.
A toilet flushed again. Water running. She felt more than heard movement in the house. Someone was awake. Heavy footsteps moved across the inlaid terrazzo tile of the front hall, then faded. Someone was getting a late-night snack. A lilting giggle and a whispered shhh had Clara rethinking the kind of snack. She waited again for silence, then began her methodical return trip.
At the office door, she deactivated the floor heaters and took a brief moment to admire her handiwork. The replica wouldn’t fool anyone who took a long look, but with the family out of the country, that could be months. It was a pretty good forgery with the exception of one flaw. In the original, one of the disciples depicted—a tiny portrait of Rembrandt himself—looks out at the viewer with one hand on his hat and another on the mast rigging. In Clara’s forgery, the tiny hand wasn’t on the rigging; it was extended forward...middle finger up.
She allowed herself a small smile then closed the door, reengaged the deadbolt, and moved to the landing where she refastened the retractable wire to her harness and floated back to the fifth floor. In the solarium, she climbed a spiral wrought iron staircase that led to an ornamental indoor balcony, stood on the decorative rail, and leapt the three feet to the open skylight. Once she had completed the simple descent down the elaborate exterior facade, she removed the black skull cap, releasing a waterfall of stick-straight butterscotch blonde hair. She placed the cap and gloves into her pack and withdrew and donned a lightweight red windbreaker. Next, she took out a blue, nylon duffle which she unfolded and opened, then transferred all of her items into it.
When that was completed, Clara stopped the timer on her watch. Twelve minutes, forty-three seconds. Well, she grumbled, always room for improvement. And with that, she popped in her AirPods, turned the corner, and sauntered down Fifth Avenue looking exactly like what she was, a grad student.