Midnight Angels Read Online Free PDF Page B

us has to worry about living to a hundred,” Frank said. “And, frankly, I’m not sure I would want to, even if I had the option.”
    “I think you’d be a very sexy old man,” she said. “And it would be great fun to see you spend three hours every morning trying to find your slippers.”
    Frank laughed and waited as a young waiter in a crisp white shirt rested a plate of biscotti in front of them. “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s the right thing, what we’re doing. Our success can’t be judged on the number of artistic works we find. Our success is simply in making the attempt.”
    …
    DAVID WAS AMONG the first of Andrea Westcott’s student recruits.
    He first met her at a lunch she arranged at a small restaurant two miles from his college campus. He would never forget that initial encounter: Enthralled by her knowledge of the art world, enraptured by her beauty, he had pledged his allegiance to the goals of the Vittoria Society by the time the waiter rolled the dessert cart toward their table. They kept in touch from that day forward, either by mail or in person. It was during those heady months, with the arrival of each new letter or the start of a fresh conversation over warm cups of coffee, that David fell in love for the first and only time.
    One semester after he landed his first teaching position at a small college in the Pacific Northwest, he was on a plane bound for the Scottish Highlands, sitting in a first-class seat directly behind Frank and Andrea, about to begin his maiden mission for the Society, a trackdown of a stolen Modigliani painting.
    David had learned about artists in schools, in books and walking the halls of many museums. But he learned about art from Andrea. She taught him to look beyond the books and venture past the lectures to see the work for what it was. Over time, though, what she saw and what he saw veered in opposite directions. Andrea loved a work for its combination of raw skill and inherent beauty, while David loved it for its financial worth. But that should not have come as a surprise. Andrea never had a need or a hunger for money, whereas David craved wealth and found himself at a loss whenever the Society donated a retrieved work when it could have been pocketing millions. But it went even further. David had pledged his love to Andrea, and learned quickly and painfully that such devotion would never be returned.
    He broke free of the Vittoria Society in the spring of 1983 and spent the next two years traveling through Europe, taking the initial steps toward laying down the foundation for a new network. He wanted to emerge with a group that would rival the Society in intellectual power, financial backing, and museum and gallery connections, but whose purpose was radically different. His end goal was the accumulation of wealth, and there would be no boundaries to his cohorts’ methods of operation,including the recruitment of professional assassins and experienced mercenaries.
    David had absorbed a great deal of knowledge in his time with the Society, but no lesson had greater impact on him than the need to operate in secrecy. He felt it crucial that his group function in darkness, utilizing code names and third-person intermediaries, with no one knowing the true identities of their accomplices. Both the money and the art would be funneled down back channels, cleaned and washed by hired hands with no apparent connection, and then processed through a series of secured banks in Europe and the Middle East. He would travel alone and undercover, emerge long enough to lock in the transaction or locate the missing art, then fade back into the mist. He would require an identity cloaked in mystery and tinged with danger, but one that would still give him an identifiable signature in both the artistic and criminal communities.
    By the summer of 1985 the pieces of the elaborate puzzle were in place. The Immortals opened their doors to the business of dealing in