Chapter 15: THE MODIGLIANI JOB
[Chelsea, Manhattan — Transport Route, 9:07 PM]
The traffic light on Tenth Avenue and 26th turned red forty seconds ahead of schedule.
Jimmy's contact at the Department of Transportation — a systems technician with a gambling problem and a flexible relationship with traffic signal software — had adjusted the timing on three consecutive lights along the transport route. Not enough to cause gridlock. Just enough to create a seven-second window where the armored van would idle at an intersection with no cross-traffic and poor camera coverage.
I stood on the corner in a traffic enforcement uniform I'd assembled from a surplus shop in the Bronx: reflective vest over a dark uniform shirt, badge clipped to the chest pocket, portable radio on my belt that received but didn't transmit. The cap was pulled low. The posture was borrowed from a traffic cop I'd watched direct cars near Times Square for forty-five minutes — weight shifted forward, hands authoritative, the specific stance that communicated I belong here to every driver who glanced sideways.
Jimmy waited in a panel van one block south, engine running, rear doors prepped.
The armored transport turned onto Tenth Avenue at 9:06. White van, Christie's security logos on the side, GPS dome on the roof. Two crew — driver and passenger, both in company uniforms, neither armed beyond standard-issue pepper spray. Christie's used contracted security for routine transports, not ex-military. Cost savings that made my job simpler.
The light turned red. The van stopped. I stepped off the curb.
"Evening." I tapped the driver's window with one knuckle, keeping the other hand on my radio. Professional, bored, routine. "Random safety inspection — we're checking commercial vehicles on this corridor tonight. Can you pull to the shoulder for about two minutes?"
The driver was mid-forties, mustache, the expression of a man who'd been doing this run for years and resented any deviation. "We're on a scheduled transport."
"I understand, sir. This won't take long. Just need to verify your brake lights and tail signal compliance. Pull forward past the intersection, right side."
Annoyance, not suspicion. He edged the van forward, past the intersection, into the loading zone beside a closed restaurant. The passenger — younger, heavier, already reaching for his phone to report the delay — shifted in his seat.
This was the moment.
Jimmy needed three minutes with the rear compartment. I needed to keep both crew members focused forward for those three minutes. One body couldn't do both — maintain eye contact with the driver while physically positioned to block the passenger's view of the rear.
I pressed inward. Past the surface thoughts, past the tactical calculations, into the dense architecture of the first ability. The clone.
The clone had failed in Nice — three seconds of shimmer before collapse. In the weeks since, I'd practiced in my apartment. Alone, doors locked, curtains drawn. Short sessions — thirty seconds, a minute, pushing the duration up in increments that left me shaking and nosebleed-prone but gradually, painfully building tolerance. My best attempt had produced a stable clone for four minutes and twelve seconds before the attention-splitting had overwhelmed my concentration and the duplicate had dissolved into empty air.
Four minutes. That was all I had.
I stepped into the shadow between the van and the restaurant's awning. The driver couldn't see me. The passenger was checking his phone. I closed my eyes, visualized the split, and pushed.
The shimmer came immediately — my outline rippling, doubling, a ghost-image separating from my body like a shadow gaining depth. The sensation was vertigo and pressure and the feeling of reaching into my own chest and pulling something loose. Two seconds. Three. The ghost solidified. The shimmer faded. A second body stood beside me, wearing the same uniform, the same face, the same badge.
My awareness fractured.
Two sets of eyes. Two sets of ears. The van's engine idling through one body's hearing while the restaurant's ventilation hummed through the other's. The asphalt's texture under eight shoes instead of four. My stomach lurched — the sensory doubling was still overwhelming at close range, the twin streams of perception crashing into each other like competing radio signals.
Focus. Split the attention. One body forward, one body back.
The clone walked to the driver's window. Resumed the conversation — brake light inspection, tail signals, standard procedure, two minutes maximum. The driver's irritation was manageable. The passenger stayed on his phone.
I — the original, the one who would keep the memories regardless — moved to the rear of the van. Jimmy was already there, having emerged from the panel van with his toolkit and the practiced silence of a man who'd been disabling vehicle compartments since the Clinton administration.
The rear lock was a dual-mechanism — electronic bolt plus physical deadbolt. Jimmy bypassed the electronic component in eighteen seconds with a device that spoofed the onboard security system's radio frequency. The physical deadbolt took another twelve. The doors swung open.
Inside: three transport cases, foam-lined, sealed. The Modigliani was in the middle case — Jimmy identified it by the lot number stenciled on the lid. He extracted it, slid a weighted replica case into its place (prepared in advance, matched for dimensions and approximate heft), and closed the doors.
At the front of the van, the clone was wrapping up. "All clear on the signals, sir. You're good to go. Apologies for the delay."
"About time," the driver muttered.
The van pulled away from the curb. The GPS dome blinked once, twice, resumed its steady pulse. Two blocks ahead, the adjusted traffic lights returned to normal timing. The transport continued to Christie's secure facility carrying one genuine lot and one carefully weighted substitute.
I pulled the clone back. Ducked into the alley between the restaurant and an office building, pressed against the brick wall, and dissolved it.
The snap-back hit like a wave breaking over my skull. Dual perception collapsing to singular, the clone's sensory stream cutting off mid-input, and the full cognitive weight of four minutes of split consciousness crashing back into one brain. My knees buckled. I caught myself on a dumpster, one hand against the cold metal, and my nose started bleeding — steady, warm, dripping onto the uniform shirt.
Nausea rolled through me in a slow swell. Not the sharp kind that passes quickly — the deep kind, the kind that sits in the center of your body and radiates outward, telling you in unmistakable physical language that you've done something your biology was not designed for.
I spat blood into the gutter. Wiped my face with the back of my hand. The headache was already building — not the gradual pressure of a Talent Copy integration but a sharp, immediate vice grip, the neurological protest of a consciousness that had just been running two bodies and was furious about it.
Jimmy materialized at the alley's entrance, the transport case under one arm. He stopped.
"You're bleeding."
"Sinus thing." I straightened up. The world tilted, settled, held. "Gets worse with stress."
"That's a lot of blood for sinuses."
"It's a lot of sinuses."
He studied me for two seconds. The question was visible on his face — a practical man's assessment of whether his partner was functional or a liability. Whatever he concluded, it stayed internal.
"Van's running. Let's go."
---
[Panel Van — Heading North on the West Side Highway, 9:24 PM]
Jimmy drove. I sat in the passenger seat with my head tilted back and a balled-up fast food napkin pressed against my nose. The Modigliani's transport case sat between us on the console, sealed, precious, representing roughly a hundred and eighty thousand dollars of debt freedom.
"Clean job." Jimmy's voice was flat, approving. "The traffic stop was smooth. Driver didn't blink."
"Your lock work was faster than the Tribeca job."
"Different mechanism. S&G residential versus Christie's transport — the transport lock is higher-grade but more standardized. Once you know the spoof frequency, it's just a deadbolt." He merged onto the highway. The city slid past in streaks of light and concrete. "You looked rough back there, though. After the stop."
"Long day."
He let it drop. Jimmy Chen was a professional, and professionals didn't interrogate success. The Modigliani was in the van, the driver hadn't noticed, and the GPS was tracking a weighted replica to Christie's secure facility where it would sit undiscovered until someone opened the case for pre-auction inspection. By then, the drawing would be on the other side of a fence network that didn't keep receipts.
Jimmy turned on the radio. Jazz. Something with a horn section that filled the silence between two men who'd just committed a federal crime and were processing it in their own ways.
I pulled the napkin away from my nose. The bleeding had stopped. The headache persisted — a deep, slow throb synchronized with my heartbeat, the kind of pain that would take twelve hours and a lot of water to clear. The nausea had receded to a low simmer.
But underneath the physical cost, something else: satisfaction. The quiet, fierce glow of a plan executed. The clone had worked — not perfectly, not easily, not without a price tag that my body was still calculating — but it had worked. Four minutes of dual operation. A traffic stop conducted by one body while the other assisted a heist. Two minds, one consciousness, splitting the impossible into the merely painful.
In Nice, I'd managed three seconds before collapse. In my apartment, four minutes of motionless concentration. Tonight, four minutes under operational pressure — moving, talking, problem-solving in two bodies simultaneously. Progress. Bloody, agonizing progress.
Jimmy dropped me three blocks from my apartment. I took the subway entrance instead, rode one stop, exited, and walked the remaining distance through Hell's Kitchen's late-night grid. Standard counter-surveillance: vary the route, break the pattern, never lead a tail straight to your door.
The apartment was dark. I locked the door, dropped the uniform in a garbage bag, and lay down on the floor. Not the bed — the floor, the hard wood against my spine, grounding the vertigo that still pulsed behind my eyes. The Modigliani's case sat propped against the wall beside the window.
A hundred and eighty thousand dollars. Plus the existing reserves. The math had finally crossed the threshold — Viktor's debt was payable. Three weeks of scrambling, five copied skills, one successful heist, one operational clone deployment, and an Interpol description still floating through European databases like a mine in shipping lanes.
My phone buzzed on the counter.
Alex: I have a buyer for your Modigliani. Also, Adelaide Marsh wants to see you again — says she has something "specific" to teach you.
I typed a response with one hand, the other still pressed against my aching forehead: Send me the buyer details. I'll be at Adelaide's Tuesday.
The sunflowers on the kitchen counter had started to wilt — petals curling inward, the yellow dimming toward brown. I'd bought them outside Kate's neighborhood four days ago, holding something alive while processing the mathematics of her death. They were dying now, on schedule, the way everything did when you stopped paying attention.
I closed my eyes on the apartment floor and let the headache run its course.
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