Reckless

“When you have as much money as Cameron Crewe, you can buy doctors, politicians, whomever you want,” Frank observed bitterly. “Normal rules don’t apply.”

“I still need to see Tracy.”

Jeff told Frank what he’d learned in Colorado. The general’s eyes widened.

“Good God. Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“You still have the footage?”

“Oh yeah. I have it. I have copies of it too. All in very safe places.”

The two men stood in silence for a while. Rushing travelers surged and jostled around them, like water in a stream gushing past two large rocks. At last Frank spoke.

“Don’t tell her yet.”

Jeff looked shocked. “What do you mean? I have to tell her. She has a right to know.”

“And she will know. Just not right now.”

Jeff opened his mouth to protest but Frank cut him off.

“Think about it. You don’t know how news like that might affect her. She’s only just emerged from a coma, Jeff.”

Jeff hesitated. He hadn’t thought about it that way.

“She’s safe right now. Crewe’s taking care of her.”

That’s what I’m afraid of.

“Let her rest. And while she’s out of action . . .” Reaching into his jacket pocket he pulled out a brown manila envelope, smiling broadly, and handed it to Jeff. “You can go to Belgium and bring back Hunter Drexel.”

Frank was clearly delighted that Tracy had been sidelined. The Americans were out of the running.

Jeff stared at the envelope. “What’s this?”

“Your ticket to Bruges. Drexel’s expected at a poker game there this Saturday. Playing under the name Harry Graham.”

Harry Graham . . . why does that ring a bell?

“It’s a stunning city,” said Frank.

“I know.”

Jeff and Tracy had pulled off a wonderful job in Bruges once, conning a vile wife beater out of one of the finest collections of Dutch miniatures in Northern Europe.

“Your train leaves in an hour,” Frank said brusquely. “I’ll ride to Gare du Nord with you and brief you on the way.”

CHAPTER 24

LUC CHARLES’S SATURDAY NIGHT poker games were legendary among the Bruges fine art community. At Charles’s idyllic fifteenth-century converted monastery overlooking the Spinolerai Canal, the game was always seven card stud. Despite the fact Charles himself invariably came out on top—the self-made collector and owner of the most valuable collection of Dutch impressionists still in private hands was not a man who liked to lose—invitations to Luc Charles’s poker night were much prized. To be offered a seat at Luc Charles’s infamous baize-topped card table, rumored to have once belonged to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, and to sit beneath the Vermeers and the Rembrandts and the Hedas was to have reached the very pinnacle of Belgian society. Charles’s money might be new—Luc’s father was a baker from a Brussels suburb—but his home and art collection were old and grand enough to make even the snobbiest aristocrat’s eyes water with envy, and their pupils dilate with longing. Fortunes were made and lost at Luc Charles’s poker table, and the host was always happy to accept a painting in lieu of cash. At his own valuation, of course.

Tonight’s players were a mixture of regulars and newcomers. Pierre Gassin, senior partner at Gassin Courreges, the most prestigious law firm in Brussels, was a familiar face, as was Dominique Crecy, the great modernist collector. Johnny Cray, an American trust fund baby on a tour of a place he pronounced “Yurrup,” was a newbie. So was his friend, Harry Graham.

Graham was older, very thin, with badly dyed hair and a withdrawn, slightly moody manner.

“He looks ill,” Luc Charles told Johnny Cray, pulling the young man aside. “His skin’s positively yellow. Does he have blood poisoning?”