Okay. There was an end in sight.

“Let’s go,” he said, gesturing for her to lead the way.

No, he didn’t have PTSD, but neither had he come down from his last deployment. His instincts were still on high alert, which meant “weapon ready.” He hadn’t decompressed. Two weeks at home wasn’t enough to bring him back down, and neither was one beer in the Blue Iguana.

Dammit. He shouldn’t have drawn his pistol. Instincts were good; giving into irrational impulses wasn’t. But this place, this tunnel…he was sweating, and it was cool down here.

Unfinished business, that was his problem, and he needed to finish it. He’d been carrying the letter in his pocket around with him for months, and he needed to deal with it.

Great. Now he had it all figured out-for about the hundred millionth time. He knew what he had to do. He just hadn’t found the guts to do it, and now he was in this damn tunnel, unnerved.

Nachman was ahead of them, still shuffling along in his slippers, until he came to a heavy steel door set into solid rock. Johnny couldn’t even imagine what the whole setup had cost, but when Nachman opened the door, he knew whatever the vault had cost, it was nothing compared to the value of what was inside.

Geezus.

He glanced at “Miss Esme” and realized she’d been here before. She’d expected all this. She wasn’t struck dumb with amazement, and he was damn close.

“Welcome to my closet, Mr. Ramos,” Nachman said, letting the steel door swing open.

Closet was a misnomer, but Johnny understood what Nachman had meant about there not being enough room for him. The place was huge, but it was also completely packed, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with art, an unprecedented sight, utterly unique. It was a warehouse of masterpieces, old masters and new.

“Have you heard of the Alt Aussee, Mr. Ramos?” Nachman asked, leading the way inside, keeping his hand on the door.

“No, sir.”

“It’s a salt mine in Austria, southeast of Salzburg, a veritable labyrinth.”

When Johnny and Esme were inside with him, standing in one of the only clear areas Johnny could see, Nachman slowly pushed the heavy steel door closed behind them.

Johnny heard a lock fall into place.

Perfect.

Not exactly nightmare material, but close- being locked inside an underground vault deep inside a mountain.

Very close, actually.

Maybe even a little closer than Johnny wanted to admit.

Dammit.

But the art was stunning, and there was a museum’s worth of it, two museums’ worth, hundreds of paintings, pieces of sculpture both large and small, decorative items, vases, jewelry, glassworks, plaques, artifacts, ceramics, and more paintings- some of them massive, upward to eight or nine feet high and nearly as wide-all of it carefully and meticulously organized on racks and in cases, filling the cavelike vault. The ceiling of the room was more than twenty feet above them, the far end of it beyond where Johnny could see. Everything that should have been hanging on the walls and displayed in the mansion upstairs was down here in Nachman’s temperature-and-humidity-controlled “closet.” He’d felt the difference in the air immediately upon entering the stone depository.

“The Nazis used the Alt Aussee to store their plunder, literally thousands of pieces of stolen art,” Nachman said, “all of it nearly destroyed toward the end of the war, when the Germans set explosives inside the salt mine. Fortunately, the plot was discovered by the resistance fighters, and the bombs were never detonated. Some of those saved paintings reside here, now, Mr. Ramos, some of them awaiting proof of provenance so that I can return them to their rightful owners, many of them here because their rightful owners wish them to remain hidden from the world and safe, and a few of them rightly mine. And yet…” Nachman turned and looked at Esme.

“And yet some of Mr. Nachman’s most cherished pieces are still missing, pieces like the Monet,” she said.

“Pieces like the Henstenburgh,” the old man added.

“Yes, the Henstenburgh,” Esme echoed.

“And the…” Nachman’s voice drifted into a soft whisper.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” Esme assured him, and from the look on the old man’s face, pained and distressed, Johnny thought Esme probably had the right of it.

“No,” Nachman insisted. “Mr. Ramos should know the depth of our loss.”

Not necessarily, Johnny thought, wondering how in the hell he’d ended up in this place, in this strange situation, with this very strange little man wearing a bathrobe, when he’d started out the night with that beer at the Blue Iguana.

“There was a Rembrandt, Mr. Ramos,” Nachman continued. “And… and another, the other. They’re both priceless, utterly priceless, and they belong here.” The old man made a sweeping gesture with his arm, including the whole vault-and Johnny couldn’t fault his opinion, not too much anyway. A Rembrandt, any Rembrandt, had to be amazing, but he wasn’t sure what the value of something was if no one ever saw it except one old man.

“Isaac,” Esme said gently, when Nachman simply continued to stand there, his arm outstretched, his gaze distant, his lips quivering.

Johnny had a grandma, and her lips quivered sometimes, especially when she was getting emotional and about to cry, which was quite often.

Please, he thought. Please spare us Nachman’s tears.

Sobbing was only going to make things worse, besides making him personally uncomfortable. Nachman was old, yes, but he was still a guy underneath that silk bathrobe, which was as far as Johnny was going to take that thought.

He looked to Esme, silently asking her to “get on with it,” whatever “it” needed getting on with.

“Isaac,” she said again. “May we continue with the authentication?”

It took the old man a moment, but in the end, he nodded and continued on to a table set up in the middle of the vault.

“My dear,” he said, picking up a handheld black light and handing her a small screwdriver from a tool kit on the table.

Esme had already reopened the case, and now she used the screwdriver to undo the wooden frame holding the protective covering in place. When the frame was disassembled, she laid the painting out on the table, and then Nachman hit a switch on the side of the table, and the lights went out.

All the lights.

In an instant, it was completely, heavily, oppressively pitch-fucking-dark in the vault, which in Johnny’s mind had just been transformed into a tomb.

Extra perfect.

Now he couldn’t breathe.

Geezus.

He’d never had any freaking phobias. He didn’t have any phobias now, he was sure. He just couldn’t breathe, because suddenly some idiot in a fucking bathrobe had turned off all the lights-off, out, extinguished-and they were God knew how far underground with the weight of the whole freaking world bearing down on them, and-

The black light came on.

It wasn’t much, a purple glow falling on the Meinhard, but without anything to reflect. There wasn’t any Day-Glo paint anywhere, which was probably a good thing in this room.

“No luminescence,” Esme said, and he could just make her out, leaning over the painting, watching Nachman slowly run the light over the piece.

“Oh, my, Miss Esme, you are oh, so right,” Nachman barely breathed the words, his attention rapt. “I believe we have the Meinhard.”

He passed the black light over the painting two more times, with excruciating slowness, and all Johnny could think was “Dear God, man, get on with it, and get it over.”

But he kept those words to himself. To anyone in the room, which he knew made for a very small audience, had they been able to see him, which he knew they could not, he would have appeared perfectly normal, perfectly stoic, not a flicker of emotion, not a twitch of a muscle.