The Billionaire's Caress Read online

  Grant considers my words, then nods and turns back to his security guys. “I want him isolated until we sort this out.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Hodge says, his voice pleading. “You have to believe me, Mr. Carlson.”

  “Alright, alright,” Grant grumbles. “Sorry to scare you, Hodge, but from this point on it’s ‘trust but verify.’”

  “Thank you, sir,” Hodge says, then turns to me. “Ms. Saunders – I am so sorry for what happened. I had no idea…”

  “I know, Hodge. It’s alright.”

  “It’s not alright… I never meant to put you in danger… I’m so, so sorry…”

  My heart breaks for the guy. He’s really torn up.

  “Take him down to the security station,” Grant says, “and sit on him until we can definitively clear him.”

  All but one of the security guys escorts Hodge out of the penthouse. The last guy remaining says, “We checked with the gallery owner, an Emilia Van der Wahl. She said that she got a phone call yesterday afternoon offering her $20,000 cash to rent out the gallery today, no questions asked. She took it.”

  “Does she know who it was?” Grant asks. “Did she meet him?”

  “Nope. Once the money showed up via delivery service – in a locked briefcase, with a combination texted to her – she followed his instructions to a ‘t’ and left the key out back.”

  “Who the hell just rents out their gallery on a minute’s notice to a complete stranger?”

  “Apparently somebody with money problems,” the security guy says. “Her gallery’s insured, so she wasn’t worried about anything getting stolen… but she needed the money to keep it open.”

  “Epicurus probably knew that,” I say. “He probably targeted her specifically because of that.”

  Grant sighs. “Follow up with the delivery service and the phone call to the gallery owner, Jim. I doubt you’ll find anything, but we can hope.”

  “You got it, Mr. Carlson.”

  The security guy walks out.

  “So not only is he a wizard with technology, he’s rich enough to throw away twenty grand to send you a message and mess with your head,” I say.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Grant replies.

  “Why not?”

  Grant grits his teeth. “Because of those things he told you to ask me.”

  “Yeah, about that…”

  Grant sighs in resignation, then gestures with his head. “Follow me.”

  6

  We walk down a wood-paneled hall in the penthouse. Grant stops halfway down the corridor and presses three spots on the wall.

  Just like the passageway in the hotel, a door swings open where there hadn’t been anything before. The separations in the wood paneling form the outline of the door, which swings inward.

  “You really like these secret passage things, don’t you?” I ask.

  “You have no idea.”

  We walk through, into a dimly lit corridor. There don’t seem to be any other doors – but by now I know better. Ten steps in, he stops and presses another three spots.

  A panel slides open, revealing a keypad. He types in a 10-digit number, and a final door opens up in front of him, magically appearing in the wall.

  “What the hell?” I say.

  “Some people have panic rooms. Me… I have secret rooms.”

  “Why?”

  “Take a look.”

  He gestures, and I walk into one of the strangest rooms I have ever seen in my life.

  It’s an art gallery, sort of. A dozen or so pictures hang on the white walls of the 30x30 room.

  There’s an impressionistic seascape with a single boat in the water, and half a dozen small figures on the tan, flat beach.

  Another looks like a Picasso, with fractured lines and unusual planes.

  Another painting is of three figures – a highly realistic portrait of a woman seated at a piano, a long-haired figure seated with his back to the viewer, and a standing woman who might be singing. It looks European, maybe from the 1600’s or 1700’s.

  Painting after painting, eighteen in all. I can’t be sure – I’m not exactly an art aficionado – but the works seem similar in style to great masterpieces I’ve seen all my life.

  “What is this?”

  “Probably the single greatest private collection of art in the world,” Grant says.

  “Wow, somebody’s modest,” I mutter.

  “I’m not being modest. That painting right there?”

  He points at the seascape.

  “That’s ‘View of the Sea at Scheveningen’ by Vincent Van Gogh. It was stolen in 2002 in Amsterdam. This one here?”

  He points at the painting of the three figures in front of the piano.

  “‘The Concert’ by Vermeer. Stolen in 1990 by a couple of guys dressed as Boston police officers. It’s valued at over 200 million dollars.”

  Holy shit…

  Grant walks around the room and gazes at the paintings with a look of wonder on his face. “The paintings in this room are unique – because they were stolen and never recovered. The sum total of all the works in here is beyond priceless.”

  I stare at him, a rising feeling of disgust in my stomach. “You buy stolen paintings?”

  “I didn’t exactly buy them.”

  Suddenly, it all becomes clear.

  “You’re a thief ?! You steal paintings?!”

  “Not from museums,” he protests, like the fact he didn’t take them from museums makes it all okay.

  “Oh, just people, then,” I say sarcastically.

  “From the people who stole them in the first place. Or who bought them from the thieves.”

  “How do you steal them?”

  “Well, the first thing you should know is that I’m what you would call a cat burglar.”

  I stare at him. This is surreal. “Like in a movie?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I thought you were an architect!”

  “I have my hobbies,” he says with an impish grin.

  “Are you being serious right now, or is this some kind of bad joke?”

  “It’s not a joke, I assure you. I’m one of the best burglars in the world. I could have tracked down the owners of these paintings, then figured out how to steal them… but it’s way easier when the people who own the stolen works stash them in buildings with secret passageways.”

  I stare at him, my mind blown.

  It’s genius.

  Horrible, but absolute genius.

  “You rob people whose houses you designed,” I realize.

  “I don’t rob all of them,” Grant says, annoyed. “Not even most of them. I’ve broken into a couple hundred skyscrapers and mansions over the years – some I designed, a lot that I didn’t. These paintings are the hauls from maybe a dozen jobs. Besides, I’m going to eventually give them back to their rightful owners.”

  “‘Eventually’?”

  “I’m not going to keep any of them longer than three years.”

  “Oh, so you’re a good cat burglar,” I sneer. “Because you only steal from a handful of people, and then you’re going to give it all back.”

  “To the rightful owners. The museums or private owners.”

  “Riiiight.”

  He’s getting angry. “I do it for the thrill, not the paintings. They’re just an added benefit.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  Grant fixes me with a cold, piercing look. “I would have thought that the woman who broke into the Defense Department servers at 15, and who was one of the highest-ranking members of Anonymous by 17, might understand what I’m talking about.”

  I blush.

  He’s got my number.

  Because yes, I do understand.

  I know the thrill he’s talking about. The rush of working so hard to get behind that locked door you’re not supposed to enter… the frustration of being denied, time after time… and then the pure ecstasy when you finally bust it open, like a treasure
chest in some sort of digital pirate’s tale.

  Not that I’m about to admit that to him.

  “How do you know all that?” I ask angrily. “About Anonymous and – and the rest?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “Tell me!”

  “What does it matter? All that matters is, in the end, you and I are exactly the same.”

  “No we’re not,” I snap.

  “Oh, that’s right… you quit,” he says mockingly.

  Now I’m furious. “Maybe you should have quit. Is that why Epicurus is after you? Did you steal a painting from him?”

  Grant’s face goes pale, and his smile fades. “No. Not a painting.”

  “But you broke into his house?”

  “Not his house, no… but one he was renting. One I designed.”

  “And you checked the secret rooms?”

  “Yes.”

  “And…?”

  Grant looks absolutely haunted as he answers. “I found the women he was keeping imprisoned.”

  I stare at him. I want so badly never to have heard what he just said.

  “…what?”

  “It’s easier if I just tell it from the beginning.”

  7

  “I’ve been doing this for years. Remember when I said that my obsession with secret passageways and architecture began when I was five, and I visited that Victorian house? Well, I saw Entrapment when I was a teenager, and I was like, I want to do THAT, too. Sean Connery, man. I wanted to be a thief because of him. And because I figured I could get chicks like Catherine Zeta-Jones, I guess. So I started studying in my off-time. Rock climbing… lock picking… rappelling… tight-rope walking… parkour…”

  “Parkour?”

  “Jumping and scaling obstacles. Jumping from building to building. French guys created it in Paris just for fun, to do crazy shit in the urban jungle. It’s saved my life more than a couple of times.”

  Damn. No wonder his body is in such good shape.

  “My family had money – which you already know – so I could afford to hire the best teachers there were. And the best teachers were criminals. In college, I would actually pay former Interpol guys to hunt down the greatest thieves in the underworld, then offer them exorbitant sums to teach me whatever they could over the course of a week. My father thought I was blowing obscene amounts of money on partying. He never found out I was actually studying under some of the most wanted men in the world.

  “When I wasn’t drafting or studying architecture, I was paying some Italian safecracker to show me everything he knew. Or an Australian burglar who knew how to bypass the most up-to-date security systems in the world. Or a South American who used thermite to take the doors off of bank vaults.”

  “Thermite?” I interrupt.

  “It’s a pyrotechnic substance that burns at incredibly high temperatures. Cuts through just about anything. I don’t use it much, because I like to get in and out undetected, but it’s definitely useful in a pinch.

  “Anyway, I never did it for the money; I did it for the challenge. I rarely stole anything. The thrill was in breaking in somewhere I didn’t belong, then getting out undetected. Architecture challenged my mind and imagination; breaking and entering challenged my wits. My ability to think on my feet. To stay cool under pressure. Not only that, but the skill sets overlap. When I break in somewhere, I visualize the entire building like I do when I’m designing a mansion or a skyscraper. I know every way in, every way out, and I can plot every step, avoiding as much trouble as possible on the way to my goal.

  “So, I was just breaking in places for fun, never taking anything, until I found my first stash of art. I was 24, and I’d broken into a Manhattan penthouse from the outside. Twenty-three floors up. I was doing an internet search on my phone while I was there, trying to determine who the artists were, and how much I could have robbed them for. That was when I realized they had a stolen Picasso. It had been taken three years before, and it was hidden away in some multi-millionaire’s study. That was the first thing I ever stole.” Grant chuckles. “I actually delivered it back to the Louvre. Flew to Paris on my father’s private jet, rolled up the canvas in a cardboard tube, and paid a motorcycle delivery guy to hand it to the museum head. The biggest thrill of my life up to that point was all the international headlines: ‘Stolen Painting Mailed Back To Museum.’

  “But before too long, my architecture career started to take off. I was designing 200 million dollar skyscrapers. Twenty million dollar homes. I couldn’t exactly afford to be jet-setting around as a cat burglar anymore. So I combined my two passions: I started designing hidden passageways into homes and buildings… convincing the owners to install safe rooms… and then a year or two later, I would break in and nose around on my own. Most of the time it was stuff that didn’t interest me. Jewelry, money, gold. But occasionally…”

  He sweeps his hand around the room.

  “Occasionally I would hit the jackpot. And it was the perfect crime. The pictures were all hot. What were they going to do, report that they had a stolen Vermeer that had gotten stolen again? No. The people who had these paintings, they couldn’t do anything but curse and scream and want to kill me – except they didn’t know who I was. And meanwhile, my collection grew.

  “Life was good. I had my international reputation as a famous architect. I also sit on the board of the construction company my father runs. And every month, I would take a little outing into one of the buildings I had designed and built years before. Just for old times’ sake.

  “Everything was going smoothly… until last week.

  “While I was in LA, I decided to hit a home I designed in Bel Air three years ago. It was a good challenge. Massive open grounds… top-notch security system. But I knew all the ins and outs. Hell, I’d designed the damn thing.

  “I scoped out the comings and goings of the guy who owned it. It puzzled me a little at first; I’d built it for a married couple. Billionaire hedge fund guy and his trophy wife. But all I saw was one guy coming and going. A twenty-bedroom mansion, but no servants, no support staff. Just this one guy. I never got a good look at him because he drove in and out of the garage in a Jaguar. He was always inside the car by the time the garage opened, and he always closed the garage door before he got out of the car. Not only that, but the Jag’s windows were tinted. I couldn’t see inside. All I knew was that he would go out every night at 9PM and stay out until 1 or 2. That’s all I needed to know. Perfect window of opportunity.

  “It was a Friday. The guy left about 9:15, and I broke in right after. I won’t bore you with the details, but I was at the top of my game that night. Bypassed all the defenses, deactivated the security system, and made it inside flawlessly. Not one false move.

  “I had designed the house to have a central panic room on the second floor. The entryway was controlled by a numerical pad, a fingerprint scanner, and an optical scanner. Triple defense. It was state of the art, no way you could break in. Impossible.

  “Except I had also designed an entry point through the walls, from a secret passage in the attic. I got in no problem. Slipped through the panel I’d put in the ceiling.

  “There were two interior rooms, but they weren’t nearly as heavily guarded as the panic room’s main door. It was like an airport; once you get through security, nobody asks to see your license anymore, just your boarding pass. The doors were supposed to be simple numerical entry pads, and that’s it.

  “That’s not what I found.

  “The door handles were tied up with heavy chains with several locks each: a combination lock, a key lock, and some sort of electronic prototype I’d never seen before. I was like, ‘What the hell is this guy guarding?’ My curiosity was insatiable, so I started to go to work. I figured I had plenty of time.

  “I was working on the first lock on the first door when I heard someone scream inside.

  “I about shit my pants as I slammed back against the wall. All that stuff about being cool under pressure? Ou
t the window. I’d never heard somebody scream from the other side of a door I was trying to break into.

  “But I could hear this woman’s voice crying, ‘No! No! Please God, no…’

  “Suddenly I realized, She must think I’m somebody else.

  “‘Hello?’ I called out.

  “The voice stopped.

  “I tried again. ‘Are you okay in there?’

  “‘Oh my God – oh my God, please help me!’ she screamed.

  “‘What happened?’

  “‘Oh my God, please, just get me out of here!’

  “‘Who are you? What’s going on?’

  “‘Please, just get me out before he comes back!’

  “‘Who? Before who comes back?’

  “‘I don’t know his name, I just… oh God… please, get me out of here…’

  “All of a sudden there was another woman’s voice from the door behind me. I about shit my pants again.

  “‘Hello?’ the second woman called out.

  “‘There’s somebody else in here,’ I said to the first woman.

  “‘She’s new,’ the woman sobbed. ‘She’s only been in here a week.’

  “‘Hold on, I need to talk to her.’

  “‘Don’t leave me in here!’ she screamed. ‘Oh God, please don’t leave me in here!’

  “‘I won’t, I swear I won’t,’ I told her. ‘I just need to check on the other woman.’

  “I talked to both of them, got their names. Carol Smith and Sofia Gutierrez. They were college students who had been drugged or chloroformed, and then they woke up in these… rooms. I won’t go into details, but they were basically his… slaves. His playthings. He was a sadist. Neither of them knew what he looked like, because he always wore a mask. Carol said there had been another woman, but she had stopped making noise a week ago. Carol didn’t know what had happened, but she could guess. The night after the other woman went quiet, Sofia appeared.

  “I skipped the locks. I would have picked them if I didn’t want the owner to know I’d broken in – but my only objective was to get them out now. So I used the thermite. I always carry a little bit with me in my bag of tricks. There was enough to burn through both doors’ chains. I made sure my mask was in place so they couldn’t identify me, then I got the women out moments afterwards.