Uncommon Criminals

by Ally Carter

  Katarina Bishop was not claustrophobic, or so she told herself with every breath she took inside the heavy mask. She’d once flown from Cairo to Istanbul locked inside a solid-gold sarcophagus, after all, so it wasn’t the tiny space that was causing Kat’s heart to pound or her face to sweat as she followed Hale up the big sweeping staircase, rushing to the mainframe that was housed on the second floor.

  Hale stopped at the top of the landing, looked in both directions, and pulled the mask from his head.

  “Simon, you’re down there.” He pointed to the long empty hall. “Gabrielle, you can—”

  But then Hale couldn’t finish. Kat couldn’t move. None of them could do anything but watch when Gabrielle’s foot caught on the top step, and her ankle turned, and Gabrielle went falling, tumbling down the stairs, onto the landing below.

  Kat and Simon looked at each other as if to verify that they had seen the same thing—that Gabrielle…had fallen.

  Only Hale managed to rush toward her. “Are you okay?”

  But even Gabrielle herself couldn’t seem to process what had happened. She looked up and found her cousin’s eyes. “Kat, did I just…fall?”

  “Yeah,” Kat said. “I think you did.”

  “But I never fall,” Gabrielle countered, as if there had to be some kind of mistake.

  “Can you stand on it?” Hale asked, reaching for her, but Gabrielle just laughed.

  “Of course I can—Ow!” The pain that flashed across her face was quick and intense, but it was a different kind of panic that bled through her voice when she said, “Kat, I can’t stand.”

  “I know, Gabs. It’ll be okay. Just sit here on the steps and wait for us. Simon and Hale can take the mainframe. I’ll check the hard files in the archives and—”

  “I’m cursed,” Gabrielle said, as if she hadn’t heard a word. “I sent the Cleopatra Emerald skidding across the floor and now I’m…cursed.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Kat said, reaching for her cousin.

  “Don’t touch me!” Gabrielle said. “It might be contagious.”

  “Kat…” There was a tenor of impatience and fear in Hale’s voice. “We gotta move,” he said, and he was right.

  “Go,” Gabrielle snapped. “I can keep an eye on the doors from here.”

  “But…” Simon started.

  “Go!” Gabrielle yelled, and Kat knew what had to be done.

  “How long until the real bomb squad shows up?” Hale asked, risking a glance out the massive windows.

  “Best-case scenario?” Kat asked. Hale nodded. “Hurry.”

  So Kat was alone as she made her way into the depths of the building, past the division of counterterrorism intelligence, through an entire corridor marked with the portraits of past secretaries-general. It should have been the ultimate in trespassing—walking through those particular halls. But it felt like just another office building, and she ran faster, relying on the blueprints in her mind to lead her to the small door with the even smaller sign that read archives.

  She pushed her way inside, hurtling down the stairs, deeper and deeper into the belly of the building.

  “Simon, what’s your status?” she heard Gabrielle ask from three floors away.

  “Well, their encryption is really good, but I’ve managed to launch a worm into their—”

  “English, buddy,” Hale reminded him.

  “Almost there.”

  “Kat?” Hale asked just as Kat reached the bottom of the staircase and pushed open another door. She stepped onto a small landing. “Kat?” He asked again. “What’s your—”

  “Uh…guys…” Kat gripped the cold pipe rail. “You know how Interpol’s sort of a clearinghouse for information?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I think I just found…the house.”

  From her place on the landing at the top of the stairs, Kat could easily see the room that stretched out before her, as vast and endless as a maze. Shelves and filing cabinets—thousands of filing cabinets—filled the space that seemed as long as the building itself. Dim industrial lights hung overhead, and the whole place smelled of dust and disuse. Looking down, Kat couldn’t shake the feeling that what she’d really found was the graveyard—the place where old jobs go after they die.

  “Twenty-five percent downloaded,” Simon said from above.

  Kat bounded down the stairs, following the faded signs through dusty aisles that felt light-years away from the sleek offices and modern fixtures that dominated the floors above. She ran until she finally reached the deepest, darkest part of the room and the cabinets dedicated to art and cultural crimes.

  “Hey…guys…” Kat heard Gabrielle say. “What will the real bomb squad look like?”

  “Us,” Kat heard herself say at the same time as Simon and Hale.

  “Then it might be time to start heading for the exits,” Gabrielle warned, and Kat felt her heart beat faster.

  “Okay, I got it. I’m good,” Simon exclaimed.

  “Gabrielle, I’m coming to get you,” Hale said.

  Kat could practically feel her crew working, acting, moving toward the exits in an orderly fashion, but she felt lost among the dozens of filing cabinets standing before her. It was like staring at a slightly less organized, highly abbreviated version of Uncle Eddie’s mind.

  “Kat.” Hale’s voice was steady and even in her ear. “No crazy chances,” he warned.

  “No crazy chances,” Kat said, and started throwing open drawers. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she moved like lightning, scouring files for any mention of jewel heists, con artists, or particularly conniving older women who might know enough to call upon the name Romani.

  “Okay,” Gabrielle said, “it looks like the security head is fighting with the bomb guys. We’ve got to go.”

  “Already on my way,” Hale said, and Kat slammed another drawer.

  She turned, her gaze sweeping along the filing cabinets to her right, then sliding across the tall metal shelves on her left. She stood there, knowing she could never search it all, fearing the truth might be there, rotting away with the rest of the dead files.

  And that was when she saw it—a file box on a dusty shelf just above her head. There was an old photo taped to the label. The picture itself was black-and-white—no color of any kind—but Kat knew the stone in the picture was a vivid, vibrant green. She knew because just a week before she’d held it in her hand.

  “Kat!” Hale’s voice echoed through her ear.

  “Coming!” Kat yelled, and pulled the box from the shelf. She was already racing back through the stacks and rows when her phone began to ring, the sound as loud as a siren in the massive echoing space.

  She dropped the heavy box onto a small wooden table and began rifling through the pockets of her bomb squad suit, looking for the phone. But it had stopped ringing, and suddenly Kat found herself looking down at a mountain of old logbooks and dusty folders. On top of it all lay a yellow legal pad, hasty scribbles covering the page. Arrows pointed from every corner, linking every thought to a single name.

  Romani.

  “Kat, we’re almost to the rendezvous point. I don’t see you.” Hale’s voice echoed in her ear, but the pile of folders kept pulling her closer.

  “Kat!” Hale snapped, but the files were right there, full of secrets that only a handful of people in the world had ever known.

  They were right there.

  She could wait. She could look. She could—

  “Kat,” Hale said again, “are you coming?”

  “Just one minute.”

  “I don’t think we have a minute,” Hale said just as, three floors away, the sirens began to wail. The basement lights flickered. And Kat knew she had no choice but to turn away from the table and say, “I’ll be there soon.”

  She’d just picked up the box and started to run when something made her stop dead in her tracks.

  “I know, sir,” a voice said behind Kat, hidden deep within the maze of shelves. “Well, the alarms don’t s
ound in the subbasement, do they? I’m sorry, I must have missed them.” There was a long pause with nothing but the sound of high heels on the concrete floor.

  That voice, Kat thought. Those heels. She looked at the worktable once again, the careful circles and pile of files all bearing the name Romani, and Kat knew exactly who was heading her way.

  “Yes,” Amelia said. “Of course I’m going to the emergency exit right now,” she lied. Kat heard the woman turn the corner through the stacks, so she shoved the box under a nearby desk and followed it, realizing too late that someone else was already under the table.

  “Kat?” an all-too familiar voice said. “Is that you?”

  Kat felt her phone vibrate, and she jerked it from her pocket before it could ring again, cursing her own carelessness and…well…curses.

  “Kat, are you there?” her father echoed over the phone.

  But Kat…Kat sat staring into the eyes she hadn’t seen in months and said, “Dad, I better call you back.”

  In the thief’s lexicon, there are many different words for busted. Made. Blown. They all applied right then, of course, but those were not the words that came to Kat’s mind.

  “Nick?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. “What are you doing—”

  “Shh.” He pulled her tightly to him, and in the silence, Kat heard the woman walking closer.

  “So…” Kat whispered when the woman had turned down another aisle, “your mom got transferred. I guess finding four priceless paintings and getting an international criminal off the streets does wonders for a woman’s career.”

  “Not as much as having your son locked in a room at the Henley will do.”

  Kat shrugged. “Sorry about that.”

  “No problem.” Nick glanced from Kat to the dusty file box with the big green stone on its label. “Doing some research?”

  “Article for the high school paper. You?”

  “Take Your Son to Work Day.” His lie was just as quick and almost as easy as her own.

  “Kat!” Hale was screaming in her ear. “Kat, where are you? I’m coming back in to get you.”

  “No,” Kat said, and the look in Nick’s eyes told her that he knew exactly what she was thinking.

  “Time to go?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Kat said, pushing the box out from underneath the desk and starting to follow. But just then, Nick reached out and held her arm.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Away,” Kat said, as if the answer should be obvious.

  “Don’t use the main stairs,” he warned, then pointed to a dark corner in the distance. “There’s an emergency exit back there. I think someone disabled the sensors and rigged the lock this morning.”

  “Oh, someone did?” she asked.

  Nick nodded, crawled from under the desk, and turned in the direction his mother was heading.

  “Nick?” Kat risked the extra second and the noise. She lifted the box. “What file were you looking for?”

  He shrugged. “Yours.”

  CHAPTER 17

  It was relatively easy to get to the plane. Customs was no problem. What was difficult, Kat realized, was staring through the windows of the New York–bound private jet and seeing for the first time that the world was a totally different place than you had ever thought it to be.

  “What about her?” Simon asked. He’d taped a white sheet to the bulkhead at the front of the cabin, and Kat turned back to it, looked at the image on the makeshift screen of a gorgeous woman dressed exactly like the Crown Princess Anastasia. “Of course, this was taken fifty years ago, but—”

  “No,” Kat said, and shook her head.

  “Her?” Simon asked, and the image changed to a young woman in a sarong, riding an elephant.

  Another “No,” this time from Hale.

  “What about her?”

  “That’s Uncle Felix in drag, Simon,” Kat told him.

  “Oh, yeah,” Simon and Hale said, tilting their heads and staring at a surprisingly striking figure in an equally striking hat at the royal wedding of Charles and Diana.

  Hale was systematically shifting through the mound of files that Kat had carried from Interpol’s basement. Simon had his computers and wires and screens, and soon data from Interpol began flashing through the cabin at 32,000 feet.

  Kat herself was left to stare out the window at the tiny towns and green countryside that eventually gave way to deep blue ocean, thinking that it wasn’t such a small world after all. Sure, it was an odd thing to realize for the first time at the age of fifteen, but the brownstone’s kitchen was no more than a twelve-by-twelve room.…With the exception of three short months the previous fall, Kat had never known a world where everyone didn’t know her father and hadn’t loved her mother, where Eddie wasn’t “Uncle” to every soul she knew.

  So Kat stared out at the vastness and whispered, “The world”—she reached to touch the glass—“is big.”

  “And cursed,” Gabrielle added, maneuvering her bruised body awkwardly into the plush leather chair across from Kat’s. She plopped her swollen ankle onto her cousin’s lap. “So, Katarina, back at Interpol…you were late.”

  Even the best cons eventually meet someone to whom they cannot lie, and like it or not, Kat realized, for her that person was Gabrielle. In the deep silence that passed between them, both cousins seemed to know it.

  “Got delayed,” Kat answered.

  “I see.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Kat tried.

  “I’m sure it’s not.”

  “There was a hitch.” Kat shrugged.

  “There always is.” Gabrielle leaned closer and whispered, “Just tell me, does this hitch have a name?”

  Kat started to answer, but just then her cousin’s eyes went wide, and Kat knew, without looking, that Hale was standing behind her. She felt his hands settle on her shoulders as he leaned over the seat.

  “Hey.”

  She looked up at him. “Hey.”

  “You okay?” he asked, taking the seat beside her. He felt big and warm and safe and…terrifying. Yeah, terrifying was definitely the right word, because he leaned close to examine Gabrielle’s ankle, and all Kat could do was think, I kissed you. I kissed you. I kissed you!

  “Kat?” Hale asked again.

  “I’m fine,” she said, a little too quickly.

  Hale looked at Gabrielle, who crossed her arms, stared at her cousin, and said, “Okay. Now the real answer.”

  “Nothing. It’s just that…” Kat shook her head and turned back to the window. “The world is big.”

  In the reflection of the glass she saw Hale. He reminded her of her father, full of charm and hope. “Not so big, right?” he said. “There are…what? Six major families?”

  “Seven,” Kat and Gabrielle answered together.

  Hale pointed to one of Simon’s computers. “But this says six.”

  “The Australians sort of split in the eighties.”

  “Nasty business.” Gabrielle shivered. “Never get between two brothers and a sunken ship from the Spanish Armada. Trust me.”

  “Okay, good.” Hale stood and strolled to where Simon sat with his computers. “Seven families. That’s a start. What else do we have?”

  “Well,” Gabrielle said with a sigh, “we know she was smart enough to find Kat and play her—no offense.”

  “None taken,” Kat said.

  “And…” Gabrielle spoke slowly, emphasizing every word, “she’s a woman.”

  “Very good, Gabrielle,” Hale tried to mock, but then he read the expression on Kat’s face. “What?”

  “How many girls do you know in this business?” she asked him.

  “Well…I know you two…” He trailed off, utterly stumped.

  “Exactly. It’s a boys’ club, big guy.” Gabrielle crossed her good leg over the other as if to say she wouldn’t have it any other way. “There can’t be that many women who—”

  Simon looked up from his keyboard. “According to I
nterpol, there are nine hundred and seventy-six.” He pointed to the images on the screen that were flashing through at regular intervals. “These are just the ones they have pictures for—which isn’t saying much. Most are just names—a lot are probably aliases. It would help if we had an age.”

  “Fifty?” Hale guessed at the exact time Kat said, “Eighty?”

  “Or a range…” Simon said, putting the data into the computer. “What about a nationality?”

  “She used a British accent, but…” Hale started.

  “She could be from anywhere,” Kat went on. “She could be on her way to anywhere. Let’s face it, guys” —Kat shook her head—“this woman could be anyone.”

  “Not anyone,” Hale said. “I mean, I’m fairly certain she isn’t my aunt Myrtle.”

  Kat felt her hopes falling. “And even if we know who she is—it doesn’t give us a clue where she is or why she…and her grandson…did it.”

  Hale laughed. “Even on the black market, the emerald’s got to be worth millions of dollars, Kat. That’s plenty of reason right there.”

  “But why do it this way?” Kat had to ask. “Why risk the wrath of Eddie and tick off an entire family if you can help it?”

  “Easy.” Hale sat down and kicked his feet up. “They couldn’t help it.”

  “But…why?” Kat asked. It felt good to fixate on the question, the puzzle. “Why risk having us do their dirty work when anybody who’d know the name Romani would also know a half dozen crews just as good? This woman…” Kat trailed off, words failing, as if she couldn’t even trust herself to speak.

  “What?” Gabrielle asked, inching closer.

  “It was nothing. Just…for a second I thought—”

  “You knew her?” Gabrielle guessed.

  Kat thought about the moment in the park—the look in the woman’s eyes when she’d called to Kat and said thank you.

  “No. It was more like she knew me. Like she was appraising me and the job. Like she knew better than some little old lady from Loxley, and so I should have known better.” Kat felt herself trying to find the right words. “She looked at me like Uncle Eddie looks at me.”

  “The female Uncle Eddie.” Gabrielle’s voice was full of awe and fear in equal measure, like the woman was a cross between a dragon and a unicorn—just as mythical and twice as deadly.