Wicked Stage

by Michelle Dayton

  “Now,” he gasped against her neck. “Come now.”

  She did. Waves and waves of pleasure rocked through her body. His too, if she understood his wordless shudders correctly.

  When she slid down onto unsteady feet, she cleared her throat and took a shaky breath. Then she straightened her dress and put her glasses back on. She picked up his jacket off the ground, and offered it to him with a bland smile. “Mr. Hale?”

  His eyes narrowed and glittered. Ah, Jess thought. He wasn’t sure he liked the idea of her being able to transition so easily back into cover. But he decided to play along too. He gave her a slap on the ass. “Now that was a quickie, Ms. Fox.”

  They walked along the side path to the front door. The smokers were coming back from down the street. She and Adam exchanged a quick glance of relief. They could go back into the house with the group and their little rendezvous would be a lot less obvious.

  Adam caught her hand until she stopped walking and looked up at him. He put his lips to her ear. “I love you, Jess.”

  And...now her heart was as warm as the rest of her body. He knew that in the midst of all this nonsense, this world of pretend and lies, that she’d needed both the visceral comfort of his body—and the words from his soul. He knew. She stood on tiptoes and cupped her hands over his ear. “I love you too.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Aw shite.” One of the smokers jiggled the front door. “It’s locked.” He looked up at the bright windows of the drawing room where the party was clearly still going on.

  Jess looked at the security panel next to the door and then at her watch. She pushed Adam a few stairs down so they couldn’t be heard by the smokers. “Webb uses a twelve-digit security code, along with a set of keys, to unlock the front door. I assume he turned it off earlier for the party since people would be arriving at all different times. But it’s turned midnight since we’ve been out here, so I bet it auto-reset back to its default condition.”

  Adam’s eyes widened. “So if Webb came out here on the porch right now and shut the door, he’d need to enter the code to get back in?”

  She cocked her head, not sure what he was getting at. “Yeah.”

  “Get out your phone,” he ordered her.

  “Ring the doorbell, mates,” he called to the smokers on the porch. “It’s fucking freezing.”

  “When Webb arrives, let these jokers back in the house.” Adam spoke quickly, pulling out his own phone. “Tell Webb you want to do an impromptu testimonial in front of the house while the party is going on. Then interview him for a few minutes. I’m going to pretend to be on a FaceTime call over here. Don’t pay any attention to me whatsoever. Got it?”

  She still had no clue what he was doing, but her instructions were clear enough. “Got it.”

  He brought up the FaceTime app on his phone and called Tony. Tony answered almost immediately—at the exact same time an irritated-looking Webb pulled open the front door.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Webb demanded.

  “Sorry, sir,” one of the youngest actor-smokers answered, sounding sheepish. “We left to smoke and got locked out.”

  Webb gave them a withering glare. “The party is almost over.” The smokers looked down at their feet and went through the door.

  A few steps down, Adam babbled into his phone’s camera, laughing drunkenly. “Such a great party. I can’t even tell you how many photographers were here tonight, man.”

  “Sir Webb? One thought,” Jess said quickly. “I have a great idea for a human interest slant on tonight. It’ll be fabulous on the webcast.”

  “What is it?” Webb asked, obviously ready for everyone to get out of his space.

  Jess raised her phone. “Let’s do a quick adhoc of you, right here on your front porch talking about the party going on inside.” She winked at him. “Maybe make a little joke about how you can’t wait for everyone to leave? You know, something cutesy that folks will go nuts for. If we hit the right note here, I feel like it could go viral.”

  Webb’s angry/weary expression morphed into one vaguely resembling interest. “Hmm. All right.” He let the front door close. He closed his eyes for a long moment, and when they opened, his face was warm and wry. Handsome but slightly tired and grandfatherly. Say what you will about the asshole, Jess thought, he’s a damned good actor.

  She nodded and started filming. “And how’s the Dial M for Murder cast party going, Director Webb. It’s now after midnight...”

  Webb gave her an adorable smile that Harrison Ford would have envied. “It’s my bedtime, but I can’t get these damn kids out of my house. They’ve drunk all my liquor, played all my music, and I’ve been reduced to squatting on my own front porch, just to get a second of peace...” Jess giggled; it was actually kind of perfect.

  She let Webb ham it up for another minute before giving him the thumbs up and stopping the recording. In less than a second, the humor on his face vanished. Without a word, he turned and began punching numbers into the keypad.

  Jess glanced over her shoulder. Even though Adam was still drunkenly mumbling away, Tony’s face no longer filled the screen. Instead, Adam had the camera turned selfie-style and had it raised above his head. Capturing every keystroke that Webb entered into the security pad.

  * * *

  “That was a nice bit of luck,” Adam said, as they wandered back through the party. “Good thing we were able to debrief. I found something pretty important too.”

  “When you were below decks with Kat?” Jess blinked innocently, and he wished he could chuck her under the chin.

  “Just so,” he answered. He lowered his voice even more. “There’s a hidden panic room on the lower ground level. Katrina said that there’s an identical one at the Cotswolds estate, and indicated that it’s where the important family valuables are stored in both places. They’ve got biometric protection, iris and voice.”

  “Wow,” Jess said. “Webb would go absolutely ballistic if he knew Katrina was blabbing that kind of data. Once you know how something’s protected, that’s half the battle.”

  She thought about the layers of protection, fiddling with her video camera so it didn’t look like she and Adam were having an important conversation. “It’s very ego-focused, isn’t it? So very Webb.”

  Adam grabbed himself a drink and leaned on the wall next to her, scanning the room with a lazy smile. “How do you mean?”

  She explained. “It’s his eye and some phrase spoken in his voice that’ll open the door. Only he can access the room. With his voice and appearance. As an actor and control freak, he must love that. But it’s kind of dumb.”

  She was about to go on, but noticed Webb determinedly escorting folks from the various rooms in the direction of the front door. The party was almost over. She spoke urgently to Adam. “We have one more thing we have to do before leaving. Please tell me you brought something like glue.”

  Adam raised his eyebrow, and casually reached into one of his jacket pockets. “I did bring some all-purpose toys, including a tiny tube of adhesive.”

  “Good.” She dropped to her knees, frantically digging in the side pocket of her massive equipment bag until her fingers closed around a voice-activated recording device the size of a quarter. With her thumbnail, she took it off the dormant setting. She made a flirtatious grab for Adam’s drink, placing the device in his hand. “Go attach that to the tapestry over the hidden door.”

  To Adam’s credit, he asked no questions and left immediately. He managed to dance around Webb’s latest gaggle of forced exits and shot down the stairs quickly and silently.

  Jess smiled. Now they had a lot to work with.

  * * *

  The next day was Sunday. Realizing that his cast and crew were not going to be at their most productive early in the morning after the party, Webb ha
d postponed rehearsals until midafternoon.

  By ten o’clock, Jess and Adam were knocking on the door of Tony’s apartment, ready to share their latest intel and FINALLY (in Adam’s opinion) ready to put together the plan for stealing the Bulgarian Blue.

  Tony, Frank and Jonno sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by huge cups of coffee and bakery bags of pastries. “What do we know?” Tony asked. He’d already uploaded all the photos he’d taken of Webb’s Cotswolds estate to Jess’s laptop, which sat on the breakfast bar.

  Jess began. “First, Webb appears to use the same security method on the external entrances of both properties.” She pointed at a photo Tony had taken of a keypad next to the Cotswolds front door. “This is identical to the one next to the front door of the Chelsea town house.”

  She continued. “Webb opens his front door by entering in a twelve-digit code and then using two separate keys for the knob lock and the dead bolt. So, just to enter his home, we need the code and copies of his keys.”

  She gave a cheeky grin. “Thanks to Adam, we have a video taken at a perfect angle. We can see the numbers he punched in! I also think we can feasibly grab his keys during the rehearsal one day and get copies made before he notices.”

  “Brilliant,” Tony said, smiling ear to ear. “Just brilliant.”

  Adam stepped forward. He hated to rain on everyone’s parade, but there were some huge holes in their knowledge. “Dim those smiles a little,” he cautioned. “Yes, we’ve made progress, but we’re still working with a number of questions and assumptions. First: where is the Bulgarian Blue? London or the Cotswolds?”

  He opened a new browser window on the laptop and brought up the picture of Katrina at the red carpet event wearing the Blue. “This premiere actually occurred in Bath, not London. Bath is practically equidistant from the two properties. We don’t know if the Webbs traveled to Bath from London or the Cotswolds or where they went home after. The Blue could feasibly be in either place.”

  Tony’s brow furrowed, but he gave an accepting nod.

  “Second,” Adam went on. “The security systems are the same, but we can only assume that the twelve-digit code for London is the same code for the Cotswolds, which is a fairly dangerous assumption to make. Webb has no plans to travel until after the play though, so it’s not an answer we’d have anytime soon. Same with the keys. The residences probably have different keys, but they might both be on the same key ring. We’re not sure though.

  “So,” he summarized. “Those are our questions on gaining entry to the buildings. We have a whole separate set of worries on where the jewels are actually stored.”

  Jess took over again. “From Katrina’s blabbing, we now know that Webb has a panic room in each estate and this room is where he chooses to store his valuables.”

  Frank and Jonno exchanged glances. Frank took a toothpick out of his mouth. “Panic room? Like the movie with Jodie Foster and that Twilight kid?”

  She smiled at him and shrugged. “A little. Since that movie, a lot of people associate them with protection from intruders. But more commonly, they’re built to withstand hurricane and tornado-force winds. Depending on how fancy you build it, it can be a space to protect people against biological and nuclear attacks, or home invasions.” She cleared her throat. “But in this case, I think Webb is using his panic room to protect things, not people. It’s very common. Some people hide artwork or computer hard drives. My guess would be that Webb uses his like a custom safe. It’s probably a climate-controlled environment with surveillance capability.”

  “What we know is...” Adam prompted her, although he was amused by her lecturing.

  She flicked her eyes in his direction. “What we know is that Webb has chosen to use biometrics to lock his panic room.”

  “You’re gonna need to break that down for us, chickie,” Tony said, shoving another pastry in his mouth.

  “Katrina said that the panic room is protected by voiceprint and iris scanning,” Jess said enthusiastically. “Iris scanning is huge right now. It uses mathematical pattern-recognition techniques on video images of the irides of a person’s eyes, and—”

  Adam interrupted, gesturing at the blank stares coming from the men at the breakfast table. He could listen for hours when she got on one of her geeky techno-rolls, but it wasn’t the time. “Seriously, Jess?”

  She flushed. “Sorry. So, one part of the ‘key’ for opening the door, is Webb’s eye. It’s scanned by a camera and compared to the security company’s database to make sure it’s him. The other part of the ‘key’ is a kind of voiceprint recognition. Webb will have to speak and the security system will compare his voice against a voiceprint stored in a database.”

  She leaned back against the breakfast bar. “The tricky thing is that there’s all different kinds of voiceprint security. There’s active, which means that Webb would have to say some sort of particular, predetermined phrase, like ‘My voice is my password’ into a speaker. Or it could be passive, where he could just be standing in front of the speaker and chatting into his cell phone for ten seconds and the system will just know it’s him.” She glanced over at Adam. “Given what we know of Webb, we assume he’s chosen the active version. He’s probably chosen a specific phrase.”

  Tony looked downright discouraged. “Biometrics,” he muttered. “Well, shit. We didn’t run into much of that before I went in.” He looked up at Adam hopefully. “Could we just skip that shit and bust through the door?”

  “No,” Adam said sharply. “The minute the door senses any sort of forceful entry, the alarm goes off.”

  Jonno swallowed and pointed at Jess. “You’re good with computer stuff. Can you, like, go into the security company’s computers and change Webb’s eyes and voice so it matches one of ours?”

  She blinked at him. Adam suppressed a smile. It was, after all, a surprisingly good question coming from someone who rarely formed full sentences in her presence. “I wish I could,” she said apologetically. “But this security company is top-notch. Their entire reputation is based on the security of their vault and I can’t get through their firewalls.

  “But,” she said, “we have some ideas on how to beat the biometrics. At the party last night, Adam attached a tiny, voice-activated recording device to the tapestry next to the panic room. When words are spoken near it, it will transmit a file to one of my servers. If Webb enters the panic room, we should be able to hear the phrase he speaks to open the door.”

  Tony’s eyes gleamed and he clasped his hands together. “What about the eye-thingy?”

  Jess grinned. “This is where Webb’s ego is going to get him into trouble. He wanted his little palace here to be reliant solely on his voice and eye, when he should have gone more low-tech. Iris scanning is perfect for something like immigration control, where the eyes can be scanned from a distance and an actual person is watching people walk through. But it’s not really supposed to be used for things that aren’t supervised, like door access-control systems. With iris recognition, the problem is live-tissue verification—”

  And, there she went again. “Jess,” he groaned, but gently.

  “Sorry,” she grumbled. “Most of the commercially available iris scanners can be fooled by a high quality image of an iris or face instead of an actual eye.”

  Tony clapped his hands, a loud smack. “You’re sayin’ we can hold up a picture of Webb’s eye to the scanner and it’ll open?”

  Adam stepped in again. “She said most scanners can be fooled by a picture. Most. We can try it, but there’s no sure way of knowing. And you can bet that if you try a picture on one that isn’t fooled, the alarm goes off.”

  “Still,” Tony argued. “The odds are good with the stuff you got. For the Blue? I think it’s worth the risk.”

  Adam didn’t allow the frustration he felt to show on his face. After all, he’d known Tony would stil
l want to proceed, even though there were a lot of holes. The best he could do was architect the plan himself and hope to God everyone stuck to it.

  Tony got up and started to pace. “So, we need the recording of Webb’s voice and the copies of his door keys. I’m assuming Jess can print a good quality image of his face from all the video footage?” She nodded.

  He looked at Adam. “Once we have everything we need, when should we do it? Which property should we try first?”

  Adam had lain awake half the night trying to answer those very questions. When the sun rose, he’d settled on the only plan that made sense. It was aggressive and risky, but so was the entire situation.

  He took a deep breath. “We divide up and hit both properties at the same time on the same night. New Year’s Eve—during the play.”

  Chapter Nine

  Adam watched poor Tyler Ryan butcher another Wendice scene and counted down the days in his head until he wouldn’t have to spend any more time in this wretched theatre. Of course, that was also the same amount of days until he might be caught red-handed stealing the Blue, so he probably shouldn’t be hoping the time passed too quickly.

  They were almost done with the second full week of rehearsal. Starting tomorrow, everyone had a two-day break for the Christmas holiday, then it was Tech Week, the dress rehearsal and boom. New Year’s Eve and the grand performance.

  “For the love of Christ!” Webb roared. “You’re terrified she’s going to screw up your plan,” he shouted at Ryan, gesturing at Olive. “Stop looking at her like you’re a puppy and she’s your owner!” He swore aloud for almost a full minute. Adam agreed that Ryan wasn’t doing well, but he also wondered why Webb didn’t give him any constructive feedback instead of just screaming at him. The poor kid wasn’t an instinctual actor and had no idea how to improve. Webb was a great actor, but Adam was unimpressed with his directing capabilities. He couldn’t coach to save his life.