by Nora Roberts
“Is that what you think of me? The rat who deserts the ship even before it starts to sink?” She pushed away. “Thanks a lot.”
“I don’t want her to touch you. I won’t have her touching you.”
The restrained violence in his tone, the bubbling frustration under it, defused her own temper.
“Why?”
“I care about you, damn it. Didn’t I say so?”
“Give me another four-letter word.”
He opened his mouth. His tongue felt thick. “Hell.”
She made a buzzing sound, snapped her fingers. “Wrong answer. Care to try again? You can still win the trip for two to San Juan and the complete set of Samsonite luggage.”
“This isn’t easy for me. I don’t like being in this position.” He jammed his hands in his pockets, paced restlessly in the confined space of Tia’s little office. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it. A man doesn’t have time to think under these conditions.”
“Yeah, yeah, blah, blah.” She pulled off the cap, shook out her hair. “I think I’ll grab a snack before we head out.”
He stopped her by snagging her hair, wrapping it around his hand and using it as a rope to yank her back. “Goddamn it, Cleo, I love you, and you’re going to have to deal with that.”
“Okay.” And that slow, liquid warmth inside her became a fast flood as she put her arms around him. “Okay,” she repeated, nesting into him. “Okay.”
Here, she thought. At last.
“Okay? If that’s the best you can do—”
“Shh.” She wrapped her arms tighter. “Quiet. This is like a Hallmark moment here.”
He let out a sigh. “I don’t know what you’re talking about half the time.”
“I’ll make it easy for you. I love you back.” She eased away so their eyes could meet. “You get that?”
“Yeah.” His grip on her hair gentled until his fingers were stroking through it. “That I got.” He brought his lips to hers, slid them both into a long, sumptuous kiss. “We’ll need to talk about this, eventually.”
“You bet,” she said and locked her mouth to his again.
“I want to tell the others we need to find another way.”
“No.” Now she pulled free. “No, Gideon. I do my part, just like Tia did hers this morning. Just like we’re all doing. I owe Mikey that. And it’s more,” she continued before he could speak. “I’m going to be straight with you. I’m a bust.”
“What the devil does that mean?”
“As a dancer. I’m a bust.”
“That’s not true. I’ve seen you.”
“You saw me strip,” she corrected. “A three-minute number where I shake it, peel it and sell it to the crowd. Big fucking deal.” She dragged her hair back, huffed out a breath. “I’m a good dancer, but so is every second kid who ever took dance class. I’m not great and never will be. I liked being part of the company when I could get the gig. I liked being part of something. I never had that with my family.”
“Cleo.”
“This isn’t some deep philosophical confession of my unhappy childhood. I’m just saying, I like to dance. I liked being with other dancers because we could make something together. Sort of like that tapestry Tia was talking about before, you know?”
“Yes.” He thought of his world in Cobh—family, the business, and the need to hold both together. “I know.”
“I spent nearly ten years as a gypsy, and the only real friend I made was Mikey. I gotta figure one of the reasons for that is I was never involved enough. I’d get bored. Same show, same routines, same faces, night after night and twice on Wednesday.”
He traced a finger along her eyebrow, over the little mole at its tip. “You needed more.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. But I do know that when you’re a good dancer with a mediocre singing voice, you better have plenty of drive and ambition if you expect to make a living onstage. I didn’t. So when that bastard dangled the idea of the theater in Prague, the chance to choreograph, I jumped. Look where I landed. I had a lot of time to think when I was scraping bottom in Prague. Kept focused on getting back to New York, even though I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do once I did. I guess I know now.”
She picked up the watch cap, twirled it. “I’m part of something now. I’ve got friends. Tia, especially Tia. I guess I’ve got family, and I’m not walking away from it.”
She blew out a long breath. “And that concludes the True Confessions portion of our entertainment.”
He said nothing for a moment, then took her cap, snugged it down over her head. “It looks good on you.”
The back of her eyes stung, but her voice was cocky. “You got that backwards, Slick. I make it look good.”
THEY TOOK SHIFTS monitoring Morningside. After seven, when the place locked down for the night, it was a boring, thankless job. But they would continue monitoring, listening for any change, any sound, until the job was finished.
At three, Malachi had heard Anita’s assistant, whom they’d dubbed Whipping Girl, remind her boss of a salon appointment and her evening’s dinner engagement.
Anita had left ten minutes later, after haranguing her attorney over the phone, and hadn’t come back.
At midnight, Rebecca was manning the listening post, from the rear of the van. When Jack climbed in the back, all she could drum up was a scowl.
“My brains are going to start leaking out of my ears if I have to do this much longer.”
“We leave in an hour.” He leaned down, his head close to hers, to study the readouts. Then sniffed the side of her neck. “What’s the perfume for?”
“To drive you mad with frustrated desire.”
“Could work.” He turned his head so his lips skimmed over hers, came back to linger. “Definitely could work. Do the run for me. Sector by sector.”
Could work, she realized, both ways. “I’ve done it for you, five hundred times already. I know what I’m doing, Jack.”
“You’ve never worked this equipment before. Practice makes perfect, Irish.”
She muttered curses, but obeyed. “I like the way you kiss me.”
“That’s handy because I plan on spending fifty years or so at it.”
“When I give a man an inch, that doesn’t entitle him to run the mile. Sector one. Alarms—silent and audible—up, motion detectors up, infrared up.” She keyed in codes she knew by heart now and scanned the readouts on her monitors. “Exterior and interior doors, secured and on-line.”
She continued through the sixteen sectors that comprised Jack’s security system for Morningside.
“Shut down alarms in sector five.”
“Shut them down?”
“Practice, baby. Take sector five down for ten seconds.”
She let out a breath, rolled her shoulders. “Shutting down sector five.”
He watched her fingers moving smoothly, briskly, over the keyboard. “There’s a beeping inside the sector. Should I—”
“That’s normal. Keep going.”
“Sector’s down.” She watched the clock now, counting off the seconds. At ten, she keyed in another sequence and watched the system come back up. “Alarm’s up in sector five.”
“I told you ten seconds.”
“It was ten.”
“No, it took four to bring the system back up fully. So that’s fourteen seconds.”
“Then you should’ve said—”
“I said ten, so ten’s what I needed.” He patted her head. “Success is in the details.”
She frowned while he opened his bag to give his portable equipment a final check. “If the whole place was shut down, how long to bring security back on-line?”
“Now there’s a question. Standard alarms, exterior doors and windows, are instantaneous. Motion, infrared, interiors come on level by level. Four minutes, twelve seconds to bring it up to full scope and capacity. It’s a complicated system, with multi-layers.”
“That’s too long, you
know. There’s a way to shave it.”
“Probably.”
“I wager I could shave a full minute off that four-twelve, had I access to the entire system and the time to play with it.”
“Looking for a job, Irish?”
“Just saying,” she replied as she angled her chair away from him, “timing matters, after all. In all manner of things.”
“Is that your way of saying my timing’s been off with you?”
“It’s my way of saying I like picking my own time.”
“Wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you shaved some of that off. I’m going to get the others.”
Twenty-three
“A parking place, on the street. Upper East Side.” Jack shook his head. He was driving the van, with Cleo riding shotgun. “We’ll have to take it as an omen.”
He maneuvered the van between a late-model sedan and an aging SUV.
She ducked down to look through the windshield at the streetlight. “Kinda in the spotlight here, aren’t we?”
“Your city taxes at work.”
“Yours, maybe. I’m not getting a paycheck these days.” Her eyes widened when he pulled a gun from under his seat. “Whoa, big guy, you didn’t say anything about armed B and E.”
“In for a penny,” he said. “Sit tight.” He climbed out, walked casually down the sidewalk, then, turning, shot out the streetlight with a muffled pop and a musical tinkle of glass.
“BB gun,” he told her when he slid back into the van. He reached behind him, knocked three times on the partition that separated the cab from the back of the vehicle.
Seconds later the van shifted and the rear door opened. Closed. In her side-view mirror, Cleo watched Gideon and Malachi step onto the sidewalk. Gideon headed east, Malachi west.
“And they’re off,” she mumbled.
They waited three long minutes, in the dark, in silence, before Jack’s walkie-talkie hissed. “For a city that never sleeps,” Malachi said, “it’s damn quiet out here.”
“Clear on the east as well,” Gideon reported.
“Stay on this channel.” Jack knocked twice on the partition, looked at Cleo when he heard the answering rap from the back. “Ready?”
“As canned ham.”
They got out on opposite sides. Jack slung his bag over his shoulder and, when he reached Cleo, slung his arm over her shoulders. “Just a couple of urbanites out for a stroll.”
“Cops tend to do a lot of drive-bys in tony neighborhoods like this,” she commented. “Just how many years in the pen can you get for what you’re carrying in that man-purse?”
“It’s a bag. Just a bag. Three to five,” he decided, “if the judge is a hardcase. Suspended. I’ve got connections.”
He palmed his walkie-talkie. “Crossing Madison at Eighty-eighth.”
“Good to go.” From Malachi.
“And here.” From Gideon.
“Base copies that,” Rebecca reported.
Jack took her hand as they walked by the entrance of Morningside, turned the corner. They worked their way around to the delivery entrance.
As rehearsed, Cleo took out her walkie-talkie while Jack opened his bag. “B and E Central,” she said quietly. “James Bond here’s breaking out his toys.”
“I’m at, what is it, Eighty-ninth between Fifth and Madison,” Malachi said. “Looks to be a party in a flat here. A number of people, fairly well pissed, are coming out.”
“I’m heading back from Park Avenue,” Gideon checked in. “Saw a few street people in doorways, and a goodly amount of traffic for this time of night. No problems.”
“Ready to go up?” Jack asked.
She nodded, craned her head to study the four stories. “There’s this really good door here. I just want to point that out.”
“Odds are she has the Fate in her office safe. It’ll make her more nervous if the break-in targets the upper floors.”
He aimed what Cleo thought of as a harpoon, shot out a three-pronged hook and length of rope. “Harness,” he said, and shot the second line while she shrugged into her harness. He clicked the safety, attaching her, then repeated the steps with his own.
“On three,” he told her. “You were square with me about your weight, weren’t you?”
“Just count, pal. One, two.”
“Three,” Jack said, and pressed the mechanism on his harness.
They went up smoothly, and a bit more quickly than Cleo had anticipated. “Jesus! What a rush.”
“Keep your eyes on the roof.”
“If that’s like telling me don’t look down, it’s exactly the wrong . . . Oh shit,” she whispered as she did, indeed, look down. Teeth gritted, stomach flopping, she fumbled for the ledge, skidding a little as her palms had sprung with sweat, and heaved herself over with no grace whatsoever.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. It just threw me for a minute. Four stories looks a lot higher when you’re up there, without a floor under you. I’m cool.” She remembered her next step and pulled out her two-way. “Base. We’re on the roof.”
“Copy that,” Rebecca answered. “Shutting down alarms in sector twelve in sixty seconds. Mark.”
“Mark,” Cleo echoed as Jack depressed the timer on his watch, nodded.
He tucked the two-way back in his bag, fixed on a headset. “All units copy?” He nodded again when he got affirmative responses. “Got your breath back?” Jack asked Cleo.
“Yeah. I’m solid.”
He gave his line, then hers, a last testing tug.
She eased off the ledge, took one huge breath, then let herself slide into the air.
The breath rushed out of her lungs, but she steadied the bag for him as they dangled. Following his directions, she braced her feet on the wall of the building, relaxed her knees.
Jack’s watch beeped quietly, and Rebecca’s voice came through his headset. “Sector’s down. Five minutes. Mark.”
A cab drove by on the street below, turned at the corner and headed up Madison.
He attached a portable scrambler to the window glass, punched in a code and waited while the numbers ran. When the display glowed green, he detached it, handed it off to Cleo.
“Window backup system off-line, silent alarm killed.” He fixed suction cups to the window, held out his hand like a surgeon. Cleo slapped the glass cutter into his hand. Despite the chill, a line of sweat dribbled down her back.
“Four minutes, thirty,” she announced while he meticulously cut through the reinforced glass.
The wail of a siren had her choking back a startled yelp.
“You steady?”
“As Gibraltar.”
“Take your end.”
She gripped the wire from the suction cup in her gloved hands while Jack mirrored the gesture with the second. At his nod, they lowered the pane inch by inch inside the building until it rested on the floor.