“Not that the website gets many hits.”

“Most museums don’t get many visitors. It’s the fact that those things are preserved that counts.”

As soon as they got back to the hotel, Heinrich checked his email. Still no message from Jan.

“Damn it,” he muttered as he looked up the shipping number for the Spitfire model. “Damn it,” he said again when he saw that it had already been delivered.

Why hadn’t the kid emailed him? Should he call the halfway house and check that Jan was OK? No, he’d better not. Those guys would just think he was being a pain. But he should contact Jan somehow, shouldn’t he?

He had no idea what to do.

“OK, focus,” he told himself. “You can’t help that kid until you have a job here, and that won’t happen unless you get your shit together and crack this case. Go to bed, get some sleep, kick some ass. You can fix this later.”

Heinrich got into bed and forced himself to relax. He’d taught himself discipline on the job. Being a detective required patience and the ability to relax when necessary, as well as to stay up when necessary. To hell with circadian rhythms.

He was just easing into a half sleep when he sprang up and rushed to the computer.

“Damn it,” he muttered as he fired Biniam an email. He wanted the hacker to check the security of the online registry. He should have remembered to do that before. He could tell he was slipping, and he didn’t have the luxury to slip.

Forcing himself to not check his email for messages from Jan, Heinrich got back into bed, closed his eyes, and started taking slow, deep breaths. After a long struggle, he slept.

CHAPTER SEVEN

 

Heinrich hadn’t liked this plan before, and he really didn’t like it now. The “antiquities shop” turned out to be a storage shed in a warehouse and light industrial district in a dusty Athens suburb. Two long rows of storage sheds faced each other across a narrow lane. They were squat concrete structures with metal shutters for doors, each connected to the other with no spaces between them. That left nowhere for them to hide and keep an eye on the millionaire. They ended up having to hide around the far corner of the row. The shed the antiquities people were using was dead center in the row, a good hundred yards away.

Heinrich, Thalia, and Adonis stood with their backs against the wall, hidden from view of the row of sheds but in plain sight if the thugs drove in with reinforcements.

There was nowhere better to stand. The two plainclothes officers stood in a similarly bad position at the other end of the row of sheds. Adonis wanted to have men on both ends so they could cut off the smugglers’ retreat. Heinrich had protested, saying that this plan guaranteed that if anyone else came, they’d be spotted. Adonis overruled him.

Heinrich had also asked for a gun, but the pretty boy had overruled him on that too. Hardly surprising. The guy didn’t have the authority to hand out firearms to foreigners. This meant that besides the three cops, the only people who would have guns would be the criminal gang. Wonderful.

At least pretty boy and his flunkies were well-armed with Beretta M9s.