by Ally Carter
Kat felt the goons on either side of her shifting. She knew that in the game Arturo Taccone was playing, she had just
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changed the rules, and that the goons, for all their might and muscle, had never considered that anyone would ever touch their boss--much less a shorter-than-average fifteen-year-old girl.
"Did you know they've got at least a hundred guards working three eight-hour overlapping shifts?" Kat asked. "And they're not cheap rent-a-cops either. Most are former law enforcement. All are well trained, and there's a five-week waiting period for background checks before they hire any new people, so there's no getting anyone on the inside."
She felt her momentum building, and Taccone let her talk.
"Did you know they've got the same kind of surveillance cameras the CIA uses on their annex buildings at Langley? And that's not even counting the pressure-sensitive floor panels or the electrified frames that my dear cousin was kind enough to point out. And did I mention the pressure switches? Of course, I don't know anything about them ... because it's the Henley.. . and they don't exactly post their security specs on the Internet, but you can bet your friends' weight in gold that they've got sensors on the backs of those paintings so sensitive that if a fly landed on one, the whole place would lock down before you could say 'Renaissance.'"
He smiled again, slower this time, and it sent a chill through Kat as sharp as any winter wind.
"I'm going to miss our little chats, Katarina. You should know that it's out of respect for your mother's family that I have tried to do this in the most honorable way possible. I've told you what I want. I've given you more than enough time to comply. And yet no one has returned my paintings." He sounded genuinely surprised--as if he'd been waiting every day for them to come in the mail.
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Kat leaned closer, and now there was no disguising the fear in her voice. "I. Can't. Do it."
"Don't worry, Katarina. Six days from now, if I still don't have my paintings, I'll simply pay your father a visit and ask him myself."
"He doesn't know," Kat shot back, but Taccone continued.
"Perhaps, by that time, his friends from Interpol will be gone and then I can speak to him myself. Yes"--he nodded slowly--"when the time comes, your father will get me what I need."
Kat started to speak, but before she could say a word, Taccone turned to Goon 1. "Aren't you hot in those gloves?"
But it wasn't hot--not at all. Kat held her breath as the large man pulled the glove from his left hand and rested it on his left knee, inches from the walking stick that she was holding. When Kat had first seen the stick's pewter handle, she had thought the ornate pattern was pretty. But that was before she saw the identical pattern on the hand beside her, a scar--a warning--seared forever into flesh.
"When the time comes, I'll simply ask your father." Tac-cone's voice was cold and cruel. "Don't worry, Katarina. I can be quite persuasive."
The car slowed. Kat felt something land in her lap, and glanced down to see a large manila envelope.
"In the meantime, Katarina, I do wish you luck in your endeavors." Again, he didn't mock. He truly seemed to believe in her as he took back his walking stick and said, "You have so many reasons to succeed."
Goon 1 opened the door and stepped from the car. With his scarred hand, he gestured for her to follow.
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Kat stood perfectly still for a long time on the sidewalk of Trafalgar Square--the envelope too heavy in her hands. She held her breath and looked inside. Photographs. But not just photographs. There was a very different word that came to Katarina Bishop's mind: Leverage.
She felt sick. The cold wind froze her to the bone. Red double-decker buses and bright neon lights surrounded her, reflecting off the black-and-white images in her hands. Of all the pictures in Arturo Taccone's life, probably few had brought him as much enjoyment as the ones she held now.
Gabrielle boarding a train in Vienna, her hair blowing in the wind.
Hale striding through the lobby of a Las Vegas hotel.
Her father sipping coffee, crossing a crowded Paris square.
Uncle Eddie sitting on a park bench in Brooklyn.
The people she most cared about were depicted there in black-and-white and the message was clear: Arturo Taccone knew how to find the people and things that were important to her, and if Kat didn't do the same, he wouldn't be the only one to lose something he loved.
For the first time in Katarina Bishop's life, she truly understood that a picture is worth a thousand words.
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CHAPTER 20
Kat was late coming home. To the Hale family's country home, that is. Kat's only home was a brownstone in New York, and the man who ruled that household had strictly forbidden her from doing what she was doing.
She felt the envelope of photographs rub against her bare stomach, where she'd tucked it beneath the waistband of her jeans. Hiding it. The foyer was big and cold and empty. Paintings of Hales long since dead and gone lined the hall. Kat imagined them keeping watch, waiting for some living breathing member of the family to come home.
Kat missed Uncle Eddie.
She suddenly craved soup.
She wanted to talk to her father.
She took a step and felt the envelope against her stomach
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again, and instantly, she wanted to call everyone she ever knew and tell them to scatter--to hide. But the only people she knew were professional thieves. They never stopped hiding.
"Angus, she's back!" Hamish Bagshaw's voice had changed, Kat was sure of it. He sat at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for her along the way.
As he chomped his gum and grinned, his brother stepped into the hallway, carrying a bowl of ice. "Brilliant," Angus said.
Kat wanted to keep walking, but Angus stepped in front of her.
"We were hoping we might have a minute of your valuable time," he said.
Hamish cast a quick glance down the empty hall and then added, "Alone."
Angus was eleven months older than his brother, and slightly taller. They both had hair that was somewhere between red and blond, and skin that looked as if it might burn even on a cloudy day. Their shoulders were broad but their arms were scrawny, and Kat realized that they were still growing--that they were still a long way from being men.
"What is it?" Kat asked.
"We've been meaning to talk to you for a while about . . . well . . . recent unfortunate events, and we just wanted to say--
"Wait." Kat stopped him. "What recent unfortunate events?"
"Well ..." Hamish started. "We had a bit of trouble on a job a while back."
"In Luxembourg?" Kat asked.
"Did ol' Hale tell you about that, then?" Hamish asked. "That was a right good con, that was--"
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"Hamish!" Kat snapped. The brothers shook their heads.
"After Luxembourg," Angus clarified.
"What--" Kat started, but Hamish was already throwing his arm around her, saying, "You know what I love about you, Kat?"
"Besides your beauty," Angus interjected, even though, to Kat's knowledge, neither of them had ever noticed she was female.
"Besides that," Hamish confirmed with a nod.
"And your mind," Angus added.
"A truly great mind," Hamish agreed.
"Guys." Kat felt her patience wane. "What happened?"
"You see, Kat, it wasn't so much what ..." Angus let the word linger.
"As who" his brother finished.
Angus pulled away, then studied her. "You really haven't heard?" As Kat shook her head, his gaze fell to the floor. "Wow, Kat, you really were gone, weren't you?"
More than the feeling of walking back into Uncle Eddie's kitchen, the look on the two brothers' faces told her that it was true--she had done it. Katarina Bishop had really left the life. Once. For a little while. It hadn't been a dream.
"What happened?" Kat asked.
"It's not that bad, really," Hamish sa
id. "We shouldn't have--"
"Am I going to have to call Uncle Eddie?" she threatened. "We didn't know they were nuns!"
There is a rule older than the Chelovek Pseudonima--a truth not even the greatest liar can deny: You cannot con an honest man. But if you do . . .
You'll regret it.
"We're blacklisted, Kat," Angus admitted with a guilty
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glance at his brother. "Uncle Eddie says we can't work for a while, but your dad's always been good to us, so if you say leave, we leave. If you say we're in . . ."
Kat stood there looking at the very boys who had stolen the first tooth she had ever lost and tried to ransom it to the tooth fairy; the two young men who had once stolen a Tyrannosaurus rex from the Museum of Natural History--one bone at a time.
"Guys, Uncle Eddie doesn't want anyone doing this job." Kat turned and started through the big sprawling house, calling behind her, "You're in!"
Walking into the library a moment later, Kat knew something was wrong.
For starters, Simon was even paler than usual. Gabrielle lay on the sofa, her feet propped up, a damp rag on her forehead; her hair was significantly frizzier, and as Angus placed the bowl of ice beside her, neither Bagshaw even tried to look down her shirt.
"Welcome back." She noticed Hale leaning against a window seat on the far side of the room, not quite sitting and not quite standing. He pushed away from the wall. "So glad you could join us."
Kat felt the envelope slide against her stomach. She could have sworn she heard it scrape against the denim, as loud as a scream in the quiet room. But it was her ears playing tricks on her. Her mind. Maybe her cool was one more thing she'd lost at Colgan.
"Oh, I'm fine, Kat," Gabrielle replied to the unasked question with a dramatic wave of her good hand. "I'm sure the burns on my feet are going to heal in no time."
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But no one else said anything. They all just looked at Kat, none of them wanting to be the bearer of bad news.
"What?" Kat asked, looking around the room.
"Simon," Hale said, dropping onto one of the leather couches and propping his feet up. He gestured for the boy to begin.
"The paramedics were quite sure the dizziness would subside eventually," Gabrielle offered from the couch. Everyone ignored her.
"Well," Simon said slowly. Three different laptops were spread out before him. The small device he'd carried through the Henley was plugged into one, and a three-dimensional schematic flashed across the screens. "It's"--Simon looked as if he were trying to recall the right technical term--"complicated."
"They gave me this wonderful ointment for the scalded tips of my fingers," Gabrielle added. No one heard.
"Do you want the bad news or the good news?" Simon asked.
"Good," Kat and Hale said at the same time.
"The Henley has spent the last six months updating all of its security features--which were already good. I mean Henley good- --so the new stuff is--"
"I thought you said this was the good news," Hale said.
Simon nodded. "A change like this doesn't happen overnight, so they're doing it exhibit by exhibit, starting with the most valuable rooms, and ..."
"The Romani Room isn't the top of the list?" Kat guessed.
Simon shook his head. "Not even close. So if the Henley is vulnerable anywhere, this is it."
Kat had spent hours wondering why that room of that
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museum. She knew it hadn't been random. There was a reason a thief like Romani would pick that exhibit over the Renaissance room or any of the Henley's other crown jewels, and this was it. She smiled. Somehow the world was starting to make sense again.
"And the bad news?" Hale asked.
Simon shrugged. "It's still the Henley."
It took a moment for the words to sink in--for everyone to realize the magnitude of what had to be done. Success in Kat's world depended so much on details that the big pictures were frequently lost. But Kat knew what they were doing. And as the moment stretched out, everyone else seemed to remember too.
"It's totally a closed-circuit feed," Simon went on, a moment later. "There's no way we're hacking in from the outside. But we knew that already."
"Why don't you skip to the parts we don't know?" Hale said impatiently.
"Right," Simon said, pointing at Hale as if that were a brilliant idea. "They've already updated all the wiring in the whole building. Really state-of-the-art stuff. I mean, it's awesome--"
"Simon," Hale snapped.
"Well . . . that's the bad news," Simon finished. "There's no hacking it. Even if I could tie into the mainframe, I couldn't override their system."
"I'm really hoping there's good news," Hamish added.
Simon smiled. "Remodeling old buildings like the Henley is . . . awkward," he said, his eyes shining.
"And ..." Hale prompted.
"And so sometimes when they put new systems in . . ."
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Simon started, but Kat was already nodding.
"They leave the old systems right where they are," she finished. She looked at Hale, and together they said, "Like the Dubai job."
Simon nodded. "I'm not saying I can get it up and running, but if I can get into a high-security room for fifteen minutes, and if I'm right . . . that's our way into the Henley's inner sanctums."
"Do it," Hale said, then stopped. He looked at Kat and waved, an after you gesture.
Kat turned to her cousin. "So, Gabrielle, what did we learn?"
Gabrielle glared at her. "We learned that the next time you want to find out what kind of frontline defense mechanisms someone has in place, you can ..." but she trailed off as she fell back on the pillow. "What was I saying?"
Kat looked at the brothers.
"Exhibit hall grates fell one point two seconds after contact," Angus told her.
"The main hall was locked down less than five seconds after that," Hamish added, crossing his leg. "We won't be doing anything that requires a hasty break for the nearest exit, I can tell you that."
"Yeah," Angus agreed. "Those Henley guards didn't look like the sort who would let us walk out the front door with five paintings under our arms in the middle of the day."
"Even if they aren't their paintings," his brother said.
"Great," Gabrielle said from the couch. "I ruined my nails for nothing."
"Not for nothing," Kat said. "Thanks to you, Gabs, we just figured out a half dozen ways not to rob the Henley."
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"Mary Poppins?" Hale suggested four hours later.
"Do you know a way to make it rain between now and Tuesday?" Gabrielle replied.
"Five O'Clock Shadows?" Hamish asked.
"Backup generators only give us fifteen seconds," Simon said with a shake of his head.
They'd been through every con they'd ever heard of, and a few Kat guessed the Bagshaw brothers had made up on the spot, but she didn't notice the hour until she saw Gabrielle stifle a yawn. Kat was too consumed by a ticking clock in the back of her mind. A deadline. A plan. She stared at the lists and diagrams they'd drawn in Magic Marker, and after that had dried up, eyeliner, all over the glass of the library windows.
"It's no use," Hale said, dropping to one of the leather sofas. "If we had a month . . . maybe."
"We don't," Kat told him.
"If we had two maybe three more people ..."
Kat closed her eyes. "We don't."
"Princess Bride?" Hamish offered, but his brother turned to him.
"Do you know where we can find a six-fingered man on such short notice?"
Kat could feel the air changing--the hope slipping away. Maybe they were too tired. Maybe they'd simply been closed up in that room for too long. But she actually jumped when she heard Hale say, "We need to call Uncle Eddie."
"No." Kat had thought it, of course. But it took her a moment to realize the voice that answered belonged to Gabrielle. "Uncle Eddie said no. Don't you guys get it? If he said no, t
hen ..." she trailed off. It seemed to take all
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of her energy to sit upright on the sofa. "W&have to do it," Kat finished.
Simon looked at Kat. "What about at night? Romani did it at night."
if Romani did it, Kat thought but didn't dare say. She didn't want to remind anyone--least of all herself--that there might be nothing behind those five paintings but the most sensitive antitheft devices ever designed by man. That this might be, in every way, a ghost hunt, a fool's errand. The greatest con the greatest con man to never live had ever pulled.
"You see these, Kat?" Hale gestured to the plan-covered windows. "One of these plans might work-- maybe --for the best eight-man crew in the world. Except"--he turned, doing a quick headcount--"yeah, there are still just six of us."
"We can do it with six."
"Six makes it risky."
"Yeah," Kat said, spinning on him. "So was serving as the grease man when Dad robbed the Tower of London when I was five, but I did it."
In the corner, Hamish and Angus were smiling. "Good times," Angus said.
"You were late tonight." Hale's voice was cool, even cold, and Kat knew this was the time to tell him about the photos. Either that or walk away.
"Gabrielle--" she turned and looked at her cousin--"thanks. And um . . . moisturize. Simon," Kat said as she tried not to look at Hale, "while I'm gone, figure out how to get eyes and ears in there."
"Sure," Simon said. "We could run a . . . Wait. Where are you going?"
When Kat reached the doorway, somehow Marcus was
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already there, a suitcase in his hand. "I believe you'll be needing this, miss."
Hale sighed. "Paris?" He looked away. "Say hi to your dad."
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