A lightning glance down told her that it was eight minutes, twenty-five seconds until midnight. Her breathing quickened along with her pulse. She mentally clamped down hard on both.
“My dress.” Bianca started shaking out her skirt at the same time as she began to edge unobtrusively toward the restrooms. Near-instant response to the airborne droplets: more space around her as everyone drew farther away.
“I have a hankie.” A white-haired gentleman with a plummy British accent leaned forward to proffer it.
“Thank you.” Accepting the monogrammed linen square, Bianca used it to dab at the splotches on her dress as she took a few more steps closer to her goal.
“Mademoiselle, que puis-je faire…?” What can I do? The waiter, sounding agonized, followed her.
“Range ce désordre.” Clean up the mess. She just managed not to say it through her teeth. The last thing she needed was him calling attention to her movements.
The alcove where the ladies’ room was located was maybe ten feet away on her left. She had to get past the alcove where the men’s room was located to reach it. Still applying the handkerchief to her dress, she took care to keep as many of her fellow guests as possible between herself and the bodyguards as she edged away.
A stirring in the crowd nearby caught her and everyone else’s attention. Some of the staff hurried toward them. One pushed a mop in a bucket. In a bit of good news, the bodyguards were distracted, glancing away from her in response to the bucket’s rattling wheels.
Bianca broke for the restroom.
“Je suis vraiment désolé,” the waiter called after her. I’m really sorry.
Bianca’s shoulders tensed. His raised voice, to her at least, made it obvious that she was now some distance from him.
King Kong apparently caught the verbal cue, too. His head snapped around. His face tightened as he saw where she was, and that she was walking away. “Miss Ashley—”
Damn it. Bianca picked up the pace. Now she was fast-walking away.
“I can’t possibly appear before His Highness like this. I’m going to duck into the ladies’ room for a tiny moment and see if I can’t do something about my dress,” she called to King Kong over her shoulder. The man’s pit-bull eyes widened.
“I do not think—” His tone made it clear that he was getting ready to object.
Bianca didn’t give him the chance. With a bright “I’ll be right back,” she ducked into the alcove.
She walked so fast as she made for the white-painted ladies’ room door that her long skirt swished behind her like an angry cat’s tail and her legs flashed in and out of the thigh-high slit. A hand on the knob, a turn, a push, and she was inside and pivoting to face the door.
“Miss Ashley, wait—” King Kong barreled into the alcove after her, looking big as a semi, his hands outstretched to grab her even as she put her weight into closing the door. Approximately three long strides away, he was coming after her like a heat-seeking missile and closing fast.
Not quite fast enough, turkey.
The door thunked shut practically in his face, blocking him from her view. Securing the laughably flimsy lock with a twist of her wrist, she ignored her racing heart as she called through the heavy panel, “I’ll be quick.”
She was pretty sure she couldn’t really hear him leaping across the last few feet of floor space, or the sound of his breathing as he fetched up on the other side of the door. Imagining him doing so, or standing there with his hand on the outer knob, only served to ramp up the stress hormones that were already pouring into her bloodstream.
She was under no illusion that he would have any real difficulty breaking through the door—one good kick would do it—but not without making it obvious, to her and any observers, that she was being taken to the prince under duress as opposed to being escorted courteously to rejoin him. Which she didn’t think King Kong was prepared to do, at least not without clearing it first with his superiors. In any case, whatever he was or wasn’t going to do, she’d bought herself some precious time.
It was exactly seven minutes, forty-nine seconds until midnight.
Oh, God, this was going to be close. When the empty vault was discovered, all hell was going to break loose. She needed to be long gone by then.
A comprehensive glance around confirmed what she already knew: it was a single-user restroom. No windows, no obvious way out except for the door she’d just closed and locked. If King Kong knew that, the lack of alternate exits should make him feel better because in theory he had her trapped. There was no way she was getting past him.
The room was about twelve by fourteen feet, as large as a decent-size bedroom and as opulent as everything else in the palace. The white porcelain fixtures were modern. The amber-veined marble walls and floor, the pink velvet fainting couch and the intricately carved gilt-framed mirror that took up most of the wall above the sink were not. Neither was the crystal chandelier that hung by a gold chain from the twelve-foot ceiling.
The room was cold as a refrigerator. The sandalwood-laced smell of potpourri—there the aromatic stuff was, in a little open-weave gold ball on top of the toilet tank—was strong.
Crossing to the sink, Bianca dropped the wine-stained handkerchief in the nearby trash can, then quickly turned on the taps so that King Kong, if he had his ear to the door, would think she was busy tending to her dress. For a moment Jennifer Ashley’s reflection looked back at her: deep red waves framing a high-cheekboned, square-jawed, porcelain-pale face in which Bianca’s own delicately chiseled features had been altered just enough so that if her picture should happen to be run through facial recognition software the only hit would be to the fake but extremely convincing identity of the Yale-educated art expert she was pretending to be. Wide bottle-green eyes. Slight, sexy overbite. Dainty ears and long neck dripping diamonds. Fragile-looking collarbones and narrow shoulders above the curved neckline of her frothy dress.
Nothing but sweetness and light here, folks.
The only identifying mark that she was not able to change from identity to identity was a two-inch-long, fishhook-shaped scar on the underside of her jaw near her ear. It was faintly puckered and pinkish still, even though she’d had it for as long as she could remember. Covering it with makeup helped but wasn’t foolproof. What made it a nearly nonissue was its location. Surveillance cameras were routinely positioned looking down on a scene. The scar was so far under the edge of her jaw that she had to tilt her head back to see it in a mirror. No lens was going to be picking that angle up.
All along, the intention had been for tonight to be Jennifer Ashley’s swan song. The fact that the job had gone so monumentally wrong didn’t change that. She would not be sorry to see Jennifer Ashley go. Holding the prince at arm’s length while giving off enough of a sexual vibe to keep His Highness interested had been exhausting.
This wasn’t the time to think that it had all been for nothing, or to dwell on the fact that they were going home (always presuming they got home) empty-handed.
She set her teeth against the gut-wrenching knowledge that, for the first time ever, they had failed.
So cry me a river. Only, do it later.
The doorknob rattled ominously.
“Miss Ashley—”
Turning her back to her reflection, Bianca snatched up a handful of the linen guest towels that were stacked near the edge of the sink and headed toward the fainting couch, which was against the opposite wall from the sink.
“Blast this red wine!” she exclaimed, confident that King Kong could hear both her raised voice and the water that still rushed from the taps through the door. “My dress is ruined.”
The gilt-framed fainting couch was shaped like a wave, with a low curled arm leading to an arching back ending in a high curled arm that at its top was approximately three and a half feet off the ground. Reaching the
couch, surprised at its weight, she put her back into it and tilted it so that she could insert a guest towel under each leg (to make moving the heavy piece of furniture easier and to cut down on the noise as the legs slid across the floor) before dragging it into the position she needed: a few feet to the right.
“I will take you to one of the maids. They can see to your dress,” King Kong called through the door.
“I’m handling it, thank you.”
With the couch in place, Bianca reached up through the slit in her skirt to free the small but serviceable screwdriver concealed inside one of the narrow ruched straps of the black satin-and-lace garter belt she wore. A garter belt, she’d found, made an excellent tool belt for a woman in her line of work. Properly constructed and equipped, it was an indispensable aid to defeating X-ray machines, metal detectors and pat downs. Male security personnel were instantly agog when they discovered a garter belt, and the ridiculous amount of sexual steam the silly scrap of lingerie engendered in them seemed to fog their brains. The result was classic misdirection: their attention was focused on one thing, while something entirely different was going on right under their noses.
She had her garter belts specially made by a woman in Macau she’d found through a serpentine tangle of connections. Officially the owner of a busy tailor shop that sold cheap custom-made clothes to tourists, SiuSiu Tseng had a select list of highly confidential clients with more exacting requirements. SiuSiu called them spy clothes, although to Bianca’s knowledge none of her customers were actual spies. They all just operated on the wrong side of the law. Bianca’s garter belts were lined so that an X-ray machine couldn’t pick up the tools inside. The tools themselves were made of plastic polymers as strong as steel that were undetectable by even the most hypersensitive metal detector. Besides the screwdriver and lock pick, other custom-designed items included a combination hacksaw/pry bar and a stun gun, all wand-thin and miniaturized to fit in the straps that clung to her thighs. The stun gun’s metal-containing battery was hidden inside the open metal clasp that fastened her evening bag; no surprise when a metal detector detected that. She removed the battery from the clasp and inserted it into the weapon once she was through security as needed, which tonight had been when she was on her way down the cellar stairs, because one never knew where one might encounter a stray security guard who needed to be instantly silenced.
The clips at the end of the dangly straps on her garter belt, the ones that fastened to the tops of her black fishnet stockings, also concealed essential items: a button-size flashlight, a locator beacon to be used only in case of extreme emergency because when turned on it obviously could be tracked, and two hundred feet of dental-floss-thin, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound rated cord that would spool out from a hook (the clip itself, which among other things was designed to serve as an anchor) so that she could rappel down as much as nineteen stories if necessary, a length arrived at by space considerations coupled with the theory that if her exit needed to encompass more than nineteen stories she could break through a high-rise window or find some other alternate means of descent by the time she, um, reached the end of her rope.
The fourth clip contained a tiny switchblade with a wicked, lethal blade.
Whoever it was who’d said Never bring a knife to a gunfight was dead (probably literally) wrong. It was more like Never bring a gun to a knife fight. A gun was a distance weapon. By the time it was drawn, aimed and fired, she could gut its owner like a fish. Not that she went around gutting people. But she could.
She liked to think her garter belts gave the Girl Scout motto of Be Prepared a whole new meaning.
An air-conditioning vent was now located directly above the repositioned fainting couch. As it was the only alternate means of getting out of the room, she was going into that vent if there was any possible way of squeezing herself inside.
CHAPTER 5
Bianca knew where the vent ended up: the men’s restroom in the alcove next door, a distance of twenty-two feet.
Clambering up onto the top of the high arm, she evaluated what she had to work with even as she flipped her small screwdriver into Phillips mode and started in on the screws.
The vent was not large, maybe a foot high by eighteen inches wide, but she was slim and agile and had no choice, which was the most important part of the equation. A slight additional degree of difficulty was added by the fact that the lower edge of the vent was about two feet above her head when she balanced on the high arm of the fainting couch in her four-inch heels, which meant that getting herself inside it was going to require some major acrobatics.
Fortunately, she was good at acrobatics, major or otherwise.
The air-conditioning system had been installed nine years previously. She knew that, just like she knew where the ductwork ran, just like she knew the location of every vent, just like she knew where the restrooms were and the exits and all about the warren of secret passages beneath the palace and every other thing she could possibly learn about the building, because it was her job to know. Her life, and the lives of her team, could hang on the minutest detail—see her current situation as a case in point.
The screws came out of the metal grate without much difficulty. Dropping them in her purse and tucking the grate beneath her arm, she scrambled down, slid the screwdriver back into its slot and, careful to make no telltale noise, hid the grate inside the toilet tank. Ideally she would have replaced the grate once she entered the vent so that it would be harder for anyone coming into the restroom after her to figure out how she had escaped from the locked room with the big beefy guy plastered against the door outside, but once she was inside, there wasn’t going to be room to turn around. Hopefully she would be out the other end and gone before King Kong decided to burst through the door, but there was no way to be sure. Hiding the grate might keep him from instantly realizing where she’d disappeared to. At some point he undoubtedly would notice the grate-less opening, but it might take a while. In her experience people rarely looked up. It might buy her a little more time, and at this point time was the name of the game.
She was backing away from the vent to give herself a running start at it when King Kong rattled the doorknob again. Her heart kicked up a notch. With the goal of harnessing her body’s natural reaction to danger and making it work for her, not against her, she exhaled. Mindfully.
Feel the air leaving your lungs…
It was a classic calming exercise that she did more as a result of her training than because it actually worked, which, in general, for her, it didn’t. Patience, as it turned out, wasn’t her strong suit.
“Miss Ashley, His Highness is waiting! We cannot spare any more time!”
Whoosh. Okay, she was officially airless. A glance at her watch told her that it was six minutes, thirty-two seconds until midnight. Go.
“I’m almost finished!”
Muscles already bunched in preparation for takeoff, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror.
Wait, stop.
Poised to run, quivering with the force of hastily aborted momentum, she looked down at herself in dismay. No way was she getting through that narrow metal chute in the gown she was wearing. While the bodice was sleek and formfitting, the skirt was as wide around as a Hula-Hoop. Crawling through the duct in it would be impossible.
A lightning flash from her fog-shrouded past hit her. Herself at maybe three years old huddled with her mother under a blanket on the well-worn couch in the living room of their small apartment. It was cold and dark outside, the curtains were drawn and the two of them were watching a Winnie the Pooh cartoon. She was giggling hysterically because poor Pooh, crawling headfirst through a hole, had gotten stuck when his backside had proved too big to fit.
Remembering made her mouth go dry, made her dizzy, as remembering anything from the very earliest years of her life always did. Much of it was a blur. She had vagu
e recollections of being called something else—Beth McCoy or Mulloy, something like that. Blinking, she shook her head in an effort to clear it.
Never look back: another of the rules. She mentally grabbed on to it with both hands.
Wallow later. Survive now.
Given the size of her skirt and the size of the vent, she’d been on the verge of doing a Winnie the Pooh.
Bottom line: death by poufy dress just wasn’t going to happen.
Swearing silently, one eye on the doorknob, which was twisting as King Kong tested the lock, Bianca ignored her still-elevated heart rate as she shimmied out of her gown. Everything else she left on. Her shoes were specially designed to leave footprints that misled about her shoe size, height, weight and the provenance of her shoes, because footprints could be almost as telling as fingerprints, which her gloves were intended to prevent. Plus the spike heels were specially hardened so that they could be used to, say, kick out a high-rise window or deal a kneecap a crippling blow.
“Please unlock the door.” Frustration was obvious in King Kong’s tone.
The wooden panel rattled ominously as she snatched her dress up off the floor.
“I have my dress off.” Which had the advantage of being true. If he was thinking about bursting in, the thought of catching her in her underwear should be enough to give pause to a man whose view of women was as deeply conservative as she was guessing King Kong’s had to be. “I’m rinsing it out.”
Dress in hand, she sprinted on the proverbial little cat feet to the couch. Leaping back up on the arm, she crammed the dress and her purse into the vent, shoving them as far inside as possible.
She couldn’t simply leave the dress behind. If all went well, she would be exiting the ballroom shortly. Doing so in elbow-length black satin gloves, skimpy black bikini underwear, a matching strapless bra, a garter belt, fishnets and heels would definitely attract attention, which was the last thing she wanted to do. Anyway, when she came out on the other side, the gown would serve a purpose. Like all the clothes she wore on a job, it was made to be functional in case a situation went south and a quick getaway was required. To that end, the gown was lined in lavender silk. Once through the vent, she would turn it wrong side out and put it on again, and anyone scanning the crowd for the redhead in the billowy black ball gown wouldn’t find her.
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