The Girl with the Emerald Ring: A Romantic Thriller (Blackwood Security Book 12) Read online

  The four-year-old Fiesta was a bit of a come-down after driving a series of brand-new Mercedes for the last decade, but I didn’t care. Better to own my car than to have Piers remind me who financed my lifestyle every five minutes. Or worse still, my parents.

  I carefully closed the boot and squeezed through the narrow gap to the driver’s door. According to my father, Hugo had inherited the gallery building from his parents, and it came with a tiny yard and half a dozen parking spaces at the rear—a real luxury in Chelsea. Since I didn’t have parking at my apartment, he let me keep my car there, tucked in between his old Jaguar and Henrietta’s BMW compact. Yet another reason to hang on to my job.

  When I set the satnav on my phone, the route was one solid red line from beginning to end. No problem—thanks to Henrietta, I had plenty of time, and I could listen to an audiobook on the way. And stop off for a coffee. And pick up a bag of carrots for Chaucer. And perhaps grab a microwave meal for dinner. The big supermarket near Earl’s Court had a café and free parking, so it seemed rude not to. Far better to get my caffeine fix at Tesco prices than pay through the nose in a hotel bar while I waited for AJ Lonsdale to arrive.

  The painting would be okay in the car for a few minutes, wouldn’t it? I’d heard of gadgets that could detect electronics—laptops and the like—but not canvas. Besides, there was CCTV. Surely even the most brazen of thieves would hesitate before breaking into a vehicle in broad daylight in a busy car park under the watchful eyes of a camera.

  Should I head to the café first? Or the produce section? After I’d exited the car, I yawned as I carefully skirted around a homeless man and headed towards the store. Why weren’t the doors opening? Oh. Because that was the exit. Duh. Wake up, Bethany. In four hours, I’d see the only male I still cared about, and then I could go home to get some sleep. Honestly, I was so over humans. Give me a horse any day.

  CHAPTER 2 - ALARIC

  “FUCK, CINDERS—COULD you have found a more inappropriate surveillance vehicle?”

  Alaric McLain watched in the rear-view mirror as Emmy Black closed up behind him in a sleek black Aston Martin. Even with his windows shut, he heard her approach.

  “I’m sorry, okay?” Emmy’s voice came through the speakers in his rented Honda SUV. “I’ve had two hours’ sleep, and I’m barely functioning. I could’ve sworn there were more cars in the garage, but all that was left was this and a motorbike.”

  “Why didn’t you bring the motorbike?”

  “You want me to wear leathers in this temperature? I’d sweat like a pig.” Granted, she had a point there. Early May, and the weather in London had gone haywire. The last two days had been like a cheerleader’s pool party—wet and hot. “Plus there was nowhere to put my rifle.”

  Alaric didn’t even try to hide his groan. “You brought a rifle? We’re chasing an art thief, not a bunch of terrorists.”

  “You told me that terrorists steal art to finance their activities. ‘It’s not like in the movies,’” she mimicked. “‘Forget Ocean’s Twelve and The Thomas Crown Affair.’”

  That was true. Many people shared a romanticised image of art thieves, fostered in no small part by Hollywood. In real life, men who took masterpieces didn’t do it for the challenge or a bet—more often than not, they were hardened criminals after cold, hard cash, and paintings made easier targets than, say, a bank or an armoured truck. Narcotics dealers used them as trading cards. Thieves sold them through fences for a fraction of their true value. Or occasionally, they were stolen to order for people who ran roughshod over others to satisfy their selfish desires.

  The police didn’t tend to take art theft seriously either. As long as nobody got hurt and the insurance companies paid up, cultural crimes got put on the back burner. Despite the vast sums of money involved, museum heists got handled by the same squad as a common or garden burglary, and those cops didn’t have the knowledge or the resources to recover stolen paintings.

  How did Alaric know all this? Because he’d once been a member of the FBI’s Art Crime Team, a small band of investigators and undercover agents who specialised in recovering treasures that would otherwise be lost forever. It had been a surprise transfer, a promotion, and it made a change from dealing with plain ol’ RICO violations. Although the Art Crime Team worked out of Washington, DC, he’d spent much of his time overseas, skulking through the underbelly of society in search of missing cultural artifacts. Many of them made their way to the United States—it was the biggest market in the world for stolen treasures.

  One day, Alaric might have masqueraded as a thief, the next, as a middleman or a buyer. Undercover work was his speciality, the ability to hide in plain sight a skill he’d been perfecting since childhood. Colleagues called him a chameleon. His father was a diplomat, and moving from country to country had meant Alaric learned to fit in quickly. He’d lived everywhere from England to Italy to Tanzania to Poland, and as a result, he’d learned more about people than an entire anthropology department. It had been only natural for him to join the CIA after college and take his hobby of being places where he shouldn’t be to a whole other level. Bureaucracy and a boss he couldn’t stand led him to quit after four years, but the FBI had welcomed him with open arms. At least, they had until they’d fired him.

  Hence today’s little excursion.

  With no Bureau backup anymore, Alaric had been forced to turn to Emmy—his ex-girlfriend and part-owner of Blackwood Security. His own private intelligence agency, Sirius, was still in its infancy, and all three of his business partners were men. They may have been experts in their field, but male-female surveillance teams tended to work better, other than the rare occasions when the female half turned up in a fucking supercar, obviously.

  “I’d have preferred you in the leather outfit,” he told Emmy.

  “Of course you would, but the bike was a bright red Ducati. Look on the bright side—no sane person would run surveillance in this beast, so Blondie won’t suspect a thing.”

  Blondie was a retail assistant named Bethany Stafford-Lyons. They’d met her last night during the Pemberton gallery’s latest exhibition, where they’d snooped around and planted half a dozen bugs in addition to gushing over the paintings and pretending to drink champagne. Her hair colour came from a bottle, the contents a shade or three too light for her complexion, and either she’d been on vacation recently or her tan was applied by hand as well. Stafford-Lyons took care of herself, but she wasn’t a princess. When she’d handed Alaric a drink, she’d tried to hide the chips in her manicure, then blushed when she noticed him glance at a faint bruise on her calf still visible through her sheer pantyhose.

  A preliminary background check showed Stafford-Lyons was a thirty-four-year-old divorcee who’d worked at Pemberton Fine Arts for the last five months, but apart from that, she hadn’t held a job since she graduated from Oxford with a first-class honours degree in art history. Credit records were sketchy, mainly because she didn’t appear to have paid for anything prior to her divorce. A kept woman. Her only sins had been an arrest at an animal rights protest when she was eighteen and a handful of parking tickets. One of Alaric’s business partners, Judd, ran in those sorts of circles, and his assessment of her father suggested a manipulative man who’d stop at nothing to get his own way. The ex-husband? A “blithering idiot, a sycophant.”

  Was Bethany Stafford-Lyons hurting for money? Rumour said the divorce settlement hadn’t been kind to her. Sure, her address was in Kensington, but 122c Carlton Terrace was a tiny apartment, a far cry from the Surrey mansion she’d lived in previously. The change in lifestyle must have hurt. Had she been tempted to get involved with Pemberton’s side hustle to make some extra cash?

  Alaric dropped back a few car lengths, letting Emmy take the lead through Chelsea. He hated to admit it, but the Aston fit in quite well there. They could swap positions after they left the area.

  Where was Stafford-Lyons heading? He had no idea. The bug had picked up Pemberton talking on the phone earlier,
and he confirmed he’d be sending his assistant to the meet with Red After Dark as previously arranged. Since the gallery manager was tied up with customers and the lazy brunette with the nicotine habit didn’t have a vehicle, that left Stafford-Lyons. Certainly she’d carried a box of the right size towards the rear exit of the gallery.

  “You really think this woman can lead us to Emerald?” Emmy asked. “She seems kind of…virtuous.”

  “You know who else seemed virtuous? Bernie Madoff.”

  “Fair point. Care to give me a proper briefing yet? I’m not completely in the dark, but it’s definitely twilight.”

  “I would’ve done it last night over dinner if you hadn’t lived up to your nickname and run out on me, Cinders.”

  The moniker had come about after Emmy lost one of her high-heeled pumps in a wine bar on their first date. Red-lacquered soles, size six. His first two wilderness years excepted, Alaric had bought Emmy a pair of designer heels for every birthday, remembering Bradley’s instruction to go up a size in the Louboutins. Bradley was Emmy’s assistant, a man who knew more about fashion than Vogue and who’d been responsible for the Brioni suit habit Alaric had never been able to break.

  “Believe me, I’d rather have sat around drinking wine until the early hours, but when some fucker breaks into one of the properties we monitor…”

  “Did you get him?”

  Silence. If Emmy had been sitting in the passenger seat, Alaric knew she’d have been wearing her snarky “what do you think?” face.

  “Of course you got him.”

  “I also got a lot of questions from the cops plus a whole ream of paperwork. They really don’t love it when bad guys trip down the stairs.”

  “Hence the lack of sleep and the tetchiness?”

  “I’m not tetchy.”

  “Whatever you say, Cinders.”

  “Briefing?”

  Alaric swallowed a laugh. Nearly eight years, and Emmy hadn’t changed a bit. Not like him. In many ways, he was grateful for that. How many other women would step off a jet at Heathrow, spend the night fighting crime, and then go straight out on a job with barely an explanation? Plus she still trusted him while many others didn’t.

  “Remember when Emerald went missing? That wasn’t the only painting the thieves took—there were four others stolen in the same heist.”

  Collateral damage, no doubt snatched because of their proximity to the main prize. The Girl with the Emerald Ring had been the obvious target. Once held in the private collection of Ada and Gerhard Becker, it was moved to their namesake museum in Boston upon Ada’s death fifteen years ago. In her native Germany, Ada had grown up as the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and with money no object, she’d spent years amassing art, a passion she’d inherited from her father and one that hadn’t diminished when she emigrated to the United States at the age of thirty-seven. In her will, she’d insisted her collection go on show for the nation to enjoy when she passed.

  It was from the Becker Museum that Emerald had been stolen thirteen years ago in a daring robbery involving smoke canisters and a rooftop escape. None of the guards from the surveillance room downstairs noticed a thing until it was too late, mainly because they were far too busy chasing a squirrel through the sculpture hall, which it later emerged had been released by the thief or thieves. The police found a box hidden behind a life-sized model of Aphrodite, complete with a remote-controlled locking mechanism and a handful of macadamia nuts. Presumably a “visitor” had left it there. Nobody noticed, and why would they? The security team had been concerned with people taking things out of the gallery, not bringing them in.

  “Yeah, I remember. But the others weren’t as valuable, were they?”

  “No, but collectively they were still worth millions. And two weeks ago, a contact of mine believes they caught sight of Red After Dark in Hugo Pemberton’s studio.”

  “That’s the one with the red-headed woman running into the forest?”

  “You remember?” Alaric was impressed, but then again, Emmy was fond of art herself, although her tastes tended towards more modern pieces. Her ability to appreciate a painting’s beauty was yet another thing that had attracted him to her.

  “We spent weeks looking for those paintings before you fucked off to who knows where. And Blackwood’s still looking for them. We never stopped.”

  “Really?”

  “Dude, I never give up.”

  True. Emmy always had been a tenacious bitch, which was both a good thing and a bad thing, depending on the situation.

  “That makes two of us. If it’s the last thing I do, I want to get Emerald back where she belongs and find out who took the pay-off as well.”

  The pay-off. Alaric’s downfall. The day it disappeared had been both the best and worst of his life. After months of undercover work, he’d finally gotten a lead on Emerald, the jewel in the Becker Museum’s crown. Negotiating the purchase had taken weeks, and together with his colleagues at the Bureau, he’d planned an elaborate sting operation involving a yacht, a helicopter, and a payment of ten million dollars—one million in cash and the rest in diamonds. Except things hadn’t quite gone according to plan.

  The first indication that the job was jinxed came when the helicopter the FBI had dredged up—the only one available that didn’t scream “law enforcement”—developed an engine problem. The doohickey to fix it wouldn’t be available for at least a week, apparently.

  That presented a problem because when Alaric had spoken to the broker the evening before, he’d claimed to be in Florida, a thirteen-hour drive away but only two hours by air. If Dyson had men watching for Alaric’s arrival and he suddenly appeared in a car, rather than by helicopter as they’d previously discussed, that would arouse suspicions. Cue a call to Emmy, who’d offered up her Eurocopter plus a pilot for the short hop from her place near Richmond to Virginia Beach.

  Issue number two had revealed itself the following morning as he ate breakfast with Emmy. The scheme called for two bikini-clad girls to accompany him—every rich asshole had them—but one of Alaric’s would-be deck ornaments had fallen down the stairs at the Chesapeake field office and broken her ankle yesterday afternoon. By the time she got out of surgery and somebody thought to inform Alaric, it was too late to arrange a replacement.

  “We’re gonna have to call this off,” he said, groaning into his oatmeal. “We can’t go ahead without Gina.”

  “Why not?”

  The FBI’s team had been finely balanced—the staff that an unscrupulous businessman would be expected to travel with versus a team capable of taking down Dyson and his goons if the need arose. The few people who’d met the guy said he usually brought half a dozen men. As well as the bikini girls, Alaric’s alter ego, Joseph Delray, had a captain and a deckhand for his yacht, plus a butler and a bodyguard. Any more and they risked scaring Dyson off.

  The captain and deckhand knew boats, the butler was another agent from the Art Crime Team who spent most of his time behind a desk, and the bodyguard was a former marine picked out by Alaric’s boss. Secretly, Alaric thought the marine was a bit of a dick. A call to his old college roommate, himself a captain in the USMC, confirmed Alaric’s initial impressions—Corporal Hooper had been great at sucking up to the brass, apparently, but not so good in the field. Nobody had been sorry to see him go. That left the girls, one of whom had been selected for her shooting skills and the other for her rack.

  “Gina was our best marksman, and the job’s risky enough as it is. I had to fight like hell to get it approved, and now the program manager’s getting cold feet. Quite frankly, so am I.”

  “So you need a girl who can shoot?”

  “Yes, and they’re in remarkably short supply.”

  “What time do we leave?”

  Alaric did a double take. “You?”

  “I think I’m qualified to wear a bikini, and I certainly know how to fire a gun.”

  “You said you had a meeting at ten.”

  “A meeting I�
��ve been looking for an excuse to ditch, and this one’s perfect. Would I rather sunbathe on a boat or freeze my tits off in an air-conditioned conference room in Langley while a bunch of spooks argue with each other? Hmm, let me think for a nanosecond…”

  “I’m not sure the boss’ll go for that.”

  “No, but his boss’s boss will. I won’t even charge the FBI for my time.” Emmy grinned, and Alaric had never been able to resist her smile. “This is gonna be fun.”

  CHAPTER 3 - ALARIC

  EIGHT PHONE CALLS and two hours later, Emmy and Alaric had boarded her helicopter together. That was the only reason he was still alive today.

  Off the Virginia coast, he feigned relaxation while the captain motored the Seaduction—a nice fifty-footer confiscated from a drug dealer and his fifth wife—out to sea to meet their prey. The trip took on a jovial air as the girls lay out on the sun deck and the guys sipped drinks from the cooler, and Alaric dared to hope that the exchange might even go smoothly. By all accounts, Dyson was an honourable guy—for a thief, anyway—and he didn’t have a habit of double-crossing his buyers. Tough but fair, Alaric’s sources told him. If Dyson said he had Emerald, then the painting was in his possession.

  Four miles off the coast, the captain shut off the engine and waved Alaric over.

  “This is it, boss. These are the coordinates, but there’s nothin’ here.” No, there wasn’t. Just a blue sky and gentle swell as far as the eye could see. “What now?”

  “Now, we wait.”

  A half hour ticked by before a small scallop vessel appeared on the horizon. Alaric thought at first that it would pass them, but it turned to circle them once before it approached.

  “This is it,” Emmy said from her position on a sunlounger. “A shitty fishing boat. Nice move.”

  As the scalloper came closer, Alaric saw that the occupants were anything but fishermen. He counted six men, all wearing jackets despite the heat. The muscle. The main man, the man Alaric had dug through the dark reaches of society to find, was nowhere to be seen. Rumour said he was older, a nondescript shadow.