Priceless

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THE PLATINUM ROLLS-ROYCE WITH BULLETPROOF windows glided east onto the Palmetto Expressway toward Miami Beach, six stolen paintings stashed in its armor-plated trunk.

Great works by Degas, Dalí, Klimt, O’Keeffe, Soutine, and Chagall were piled rudely in the rear, wrapped individually in thin brown paper and clear packing tape. In the driver’s seat, a Parisian millionaire named Laurenz Cogniat pushed the three-ton beast hard. He entered the left lane approaching eighty, then ninety miles an hour, the vehicle’s menacing stainless-steel grille leading the way.

At Interstate 95, the glimmering Rolls turned south, hurtling down the raised concrete ribbon, the Miami skyline rising ahead. Laurenz took the Martin Luther King Boulevard exit, made a sharp U-turn, and jumped back on to the interstate, still southbound. His cold green eyes flicked from the road to the rearview mirror and back again. He craned his neck and searched a cobalt Florida sky. Every few minutes, Laurenz stabbed the brakes, dropping down to forty or fifty miles an hour and slipping into the right lane, then abruptly punched the gas again. In the passenger seat, a plump shaggy-haired fellow with a warm round face, a Frenchman who called himself Sunny, sat stoically, an unlit Marlboro between his lips. He, too, searched for suspicious vehicles.

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