Templar 09 - Secret of the Templars by Paul Christopher

Jasmine Street, turning through the open gates of the door in the low stone wall that went around her small saltbox house.
    As she opened the door, she could smell turpentine and shellac. She smiled, went through into the kitchen, flipped on the coffeemaker and headed to the rear of the house and into her studio. She stared at the painting on the easel, smiled again and went back for her coffee. Sipping thestrong, harsh brew, she returned to the studio and sat down.
    She looked at the painting again. It was a twelve-by-fourteen-inch watercolor of palmetto leaves in the sun. She had taken the necessary photograph of it during her vacation last winter in case anybody ever asked any questions. It was a perfect copy of John Singer Sargent’s
Palmettos
, which had last sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $7.5 million. The one on her easel would be sold to somebody in Europe for half that amount. One way or the other, the painting was hers.
    Hannah had been born June 11, 1968, in Moscow. She attended the Moscow Art Institute until she was eighteen, then gained an internship at the Hermitage as an apprentice in the restoration department. In 1988, she began a brief affair with a much older man named Pytor Novestev, a midlevel official at the USSR Department of Immigration, who made good on his promise to allow her and her parents to emigrate to Israel. They stayed briefly—just enough time to get their Israeli passports—and then traveled to New York. Over the next few years, Hannah attended NYU, Columbia and the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa, an institution renowned for producing some of the greatest artconservators in the world. She worked for several years at the Guggenheim and was finally coerced into taking an appointment as head of the fine arts department at Caldwell College.
    Pytor Novestev had also been a high-level KGB officer looking for potential sleepers in the United States. There had already been a plot to quietly sell off the Hermitage’s lesser-known works, and several years later the KGB, now reformed as the FSB, began to develop the idea. Over time contacts were made with less than loyal members of MI6, the French DGSE, the BND in Germany and, most important, the CIA. It was the BND with its incredible record keeping that had discovered Huff’s train and the complete inventory of its contents.
    It was in this way that the Vatican had become involved. By the time Pope Benedict had been hired for the top job in the Catholic Church, the Vatican Bank was already in trouble, not to mention its other problems and scandals about priestly pedophilia and the enormous lawsuits that resulted from it. All in all, Vatican City was tipping into bankruptcy. With the election of the Argentinian Pope Francis, bankruptcy was inevitable. Being a practical man, as well as a Jesuit, Francis agreed to liquidate the world’s art assets. The conspiracy was called Operation Leonardo, namedafter the most famous artist in the world, Leonardo da Vinci.
    Hanna Kruger was a small but vital part of the project. It was her job as a master copier and forger to re-create masterpieces that would replace the real artworks in museums all over the world. The real artworks would be deaccessioned and sold on the open market.
    On the surface the plan was perfect, but in reality it went one step further. After announcing the upcoming sale of the work in question, one of Hannah’s near perfect forgeries would go on the auction block instead. The original gallery or museum got to keep the original and Operation Leonardo got the cash. This worked especially well with the tens of thousands of works that had been looted from Germany, Poland and other soon to be Soviet countries that were then sent back to the Hermitage, never to be seen again. It also worked extremely well with the contents of Huff’s train, in which the only inventory of the contents rested with the Vatican and the British secret police. It