Sapphire

by Sophie Lark

  He kept this boat ready for all sorts of tasks: reconnaissance, pickup and delivery of certain kinds of items, disposal of unwanted evidence, storage of things he wouldn’t want to keep around his flat. It was registered under a completely different name, so it was another layer of protection between himself and his actual identity.

  And of course, it could be used for a quick exit from Venice if all else failed.

  The afternoon was strangely flat and hot, so he used the motor for most of the distance. He put down anchor at the closest spot he could without attracting too much attention. He put out some lines to make it seem like he was fishing. He always let his sails get a little tattered and left the paint on the hull dull and chipped, so his boat would look like a working rig.

  He spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in observation. This was the part of the job he did not particularly enjoy, because it was so tedious and involved holding in your pee for so many hours.

  He set up a telescopic lens amongst the sails, half covered in netting. Using his stopwatch, he timed all aspects of the Kasperian household routine that he could observe.

  Near dark, when the rest of the fisherman started hauling in their catch, Luca did the same. He had actually caught a couple of crabs, which would have been nice to eat, but he knew he wouldn’t have time to cook that night, so he set them free.

  He docked his boat, then hiked up the hillside on the opposite side of Kasperian’s estate. There he watched what he could see from this new vantage point, noting all his observations in a log.

  The first point of interest was that the bulk of Kasperian’s security seemed to center around his own person. It was obvious that he feared violent retribution much more than a simple break-in. He was a little man, bald and lean and as watchful as an owl. It was hard to get a glimpse of him at all within the constant hedge of his bodyguards.

  Luca was glad he was only a thief, not an assassin, because as far as he could tell, Kasperian was never alone. Even when he took his evening swim in his private pool, two of his guards walked back and forth alongside him, keeping pace with his laps.

  The second piece of good news was that Kasperian didn’t seem to have anyone else staying at his house at the moment. Guests would have been a complication, and Luca didn’t like to do any sort of job with children around. Kasperian wasn’t married and didn’t appear to have a girlfriend in residence.

  Third, and best of all, Kasperian didn’t work from home. As far as Luca could tell, he spent most of the day at his high-rise office in Venice proper, only returning late in the evening on his armored helicopter.

  However, in Kasperian’s absence, his remaining guards continued their regimented sweeps of the perimeter.

  Around 1:20 in the afternoon, Luca saw a possible opening: a delivery van from the local grocer. It drove up to the gates, was waved through, and headed straight back to kitchen entryway, where the cook unloaded the fresh foodstuffs.

  Judging from the size of Kasperian’s staff, Luca suspected this truck probably came every day, or close to it. It probably brought the fresh catch from the docks, farm produce, baguettes, cream. The sort of thing Italians wanted daily.

  Luca continued to wait and observe until long into the evening. He wanted to be sure there wasn’t a better option. He wanted to gather as much information as possible, but the delivery seemed the optimal method of entry.

  Luca had previously considered more dramatic routes onto the estate. Resurrecting his scuba equipment. Scaling the cliffs behind the house. Finding a blind spot along the walls. But he didn’t have a proper schematic of the perimeter defenses. There could too easily be cameras or motion sensors he had missed.

  The safest route seemed the one through the front gates, by subterfuge rather than stealth.

  Luca slept the night in his little boat, ready to start early the following morning. It was peaceful, the chop of the water rocking him to sleep.

  He knew most people would have been awake half the night from stress, or the need to run the plan over and over through their minds. But he could shut that off when he wanted to. It was the only way to do what he did. You had to close off the parts of your brain that were screaming unhelpful things, things that would distract you if you allowed it. Things like:

  You’re going to get caught

  You’re going to get killed

  You’re going to fail

  There was no use in allowing thoughts like that. They were exactly the thing that would get you killed.

  The following morning, he waited to ensure that Kasperian was leaving for work as usual. If the arms dealer stayed home, Luca would have to put off his break-in for another day, because there would simply be too many guards around.

  As the minutes ticked by, Luca began to think the man would never move. But at last, at 9:38 a.m., the security team completed their examination of the helicopter, and Kasperian came out of the house, dressed nattily in a gray suit and purple silk tie.

  As soon as the helicopter disappeared off across the water, Luca sailed his boat back to the town. He had a little moped that he’d brought on board, and he drove that over to the local grocer that provided Kasperian’s delivery each morning. Luca assumed the order was due to be delivered at 1:20 p.m., as it had been the day before.

  At 12:30 p.m., Luca snuck into the loading dock of the grocer. He found a pair of coveralls hanging from a hook, and a cap reading “Giovanni’s.” He put those on, then found the closest van that had already been loaded for a different delivery.

  It only took him a minute to hot-wire the ignition.

  New cars, those built in the 2000s, had all kinds of security features to prevent tampering. The electrical components were better hidden, with failsafes in place. But an old beater like the van might as well have been a child’s tinker toy set.

  Using a screwdriver, Luca simply popped off the plastic covering on the base of the steering column, then pulled out the wiring harness connector. Locating the red battery wires, he stripped off an inch of insulation and twisted them together. Then he connected the ignition wire. The dash lights and radio lit up at once. Luca flipped off the radio before the noise could bring an employee running over. Finally, he stripped the starter wire and sparked it against the battery wires. The engine roared to life.

  He had deliberately taken a different van than the one loaded for Kasperiean’s house. That would buy him a little extra time before an alarm could be raised, though it meant he would have to risk arriving early.

  That was the most ticklish part of the plan. He had no way of knowing if the same person delivered each time, or if there was some kind of code he’d be expected to provide to security at the gate. All he could do was hope that they waved him through. If not, he’d have to try and reverse the bulky van back the way he’d come before somebody shot him.

  He drove slow and steady through the town, taking care not to speed. Then he headed up the long, tree-lined drive to Kasperian’s house.

  He tried to keep his breathing and his heart rate steady. He knew that security personnel were trained to spot signs of nervousness. The slightest sheen of sweat on the brow, licking your lips, too much blinking, a flush to the skin—all these subtle signals would tip the guards off that something was amiss.

  Luca pulled up to the gate, giving the guard a little two-fingered wave. Friendly, but casual.

  The guard stood at attention next to the control box. He was a military-looking man like the others, hair kept short, bulletproof vest over his uniform. Gun at the ready.

  “You’re early,” he said to Luca, craning his neck to check the empty passenger-side seat.

  “Fishing boats came back quick this morning,” Luca replied.

  The guard walked around the rear of the van, pulling open the doors to glance over the crates of groceries inside.

  He slammed the doors and gave the van two slaps on the side with the palm of his hand to indicate that Luca should drive on.

  Luca breathed out slowly,
to hide his relief. He kept driving, the same route he had seen before, around the back of the estate to the kitchen doors.

  He parked out back, then picked up one of the crates of groceries to carry in to the kitchen. Poking his head through the kitchen door, he glanced around to make sure there were no extra staff members inside other than the cook.

  “Buongiorno,” the cook said, dusting off her floured hands. She was rolling out dough on the butcher block countertop, perhaps to make cornetti. She was in her mid-40s, plump as a good cook ought to be. She peered through her glasses at Luca.

  “I haven’t seen you before,” she said.

  “We’re so busy now,” Luca said, “we had to hire two new drivers.”

  “That’s good,” she said distractedly, already heading out to the van to see what Luca had brought.

  Luca set his crate down on the counter, then quickly unwrapped the packet on top that looked like raw bacon. Inside sat a bundle of explosives. He set the timer, popped it inside the oven, then reached around the stovetop to cut the gas line with his penknife.

  He hurried back out to the van.

  The cook was rifling through one of the crates, looking confused.

  “This isn’t right,” she said. “We didn’t order any pork. And I don’t see the coffee, or the apples I wanted.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Luca said. “Let me get the list, I’ll figure it out. One moment, please.”

  The cook waited impatiently, flustered at the mix up.

  Luca rummaged around in the front seat of the van, pretending to be looking for his list. Really, he was counting down the seconds.

  “Oh, I think it’s in the crate inside the kitchen,” Luca said.

  He pretended to walk back in that direction. As soon as the cook started rifling through the crates once more, he nipped around the other side of the building instead.

  An explosion ripped through the kitchen, throwing a fireball upward through the ceiling. Luca might have overdone it by cutting the gas line, because the cook was blown off her feet and knocked into the side of the van. Chunks of roof tile rained down around her.

  The cook seemed to be alright, however. She was already picking herself up, looking dazed.

  Luca had no time to check on her. He knew it was only a matter of seconds until most of the guards in the place came running over to see what was happening. Had Kasperian been home, they would have clustered around him, expecting an attack—the diversion only worked because he was safely out of the way.

  Luca hoped that he had bought himself a little extra time by pretending to go into the kitchen. The cook might think he’d been blown up. However, the guards weren’t idiots. They’d soon put two and two together that the new delivery driver and the kitchen explosion were related. Then they’d fan out and start hunting him down.

  Luca was already scaling the side of the house, out of the line of sight of the nearest set of cameras. He climbed the drain pipe, grasped the bottom of the second-floor balcony, and pulled himself up. From there, he jumped to the next balcony over and then inched along the wall, digging his fingertips and the toes of his shoes into the gaps between the protruding bricks like a mountaineer.

  Luca might be tall, but he had an incredible level of agility, honed by continually getting himself in and out of trouble from a young age. At ten years old, he got a library card. The first book he signed out was a biography of Harry Houdini. After reading Houdini’s bizarre training regimens of holding his breath for four minutes at a time in freezing water, running ten miles around the park, racing up and down staircases for hours, and undoing knots with his toes, Luca began to subject himself to the same torture.

  Later he tried to imitate the physical exploits of Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee, Lance Armstrong, Alex Honnold. He attempted it all: jump rope, wind sprints, heavy lifting, grip-training, two-fingered pull-ups… In Italy, where it was rare even to see people jogging on the street, his friends thought he was mad. But Luca knew that if he wanted to be a thief like no other, he had to be prepared for anything.

  So now, scaling the wall and squeezing himself through Kasperian’s tiny bathroom window did not strike him as particularly difficult.

  Luca had made a note in his little book the previous afternoon when he saw that window left open. He had also stuffed a packet of raw meat down the front of his shirt, remembering Lex’s warning about Kasperian’s pets.

  He hadn’t yet observed any dogs running around the grounds, but he assumed that on an estate this size, with a man as security conscious as Kasperian, there were likely to be at least a few Pitbulls or Rottweilers on hand.

  However, as Luca slipped into Kasperian’s suite, he found himself face to face with a completely different sort of creature.

  He saw a large hump, like an overstuffed divan or maybe even a beanbag chair. Perhaps with a fur rug thrown over it.

  Then it stirred in the dim, cool light of the room, lifting its massive, shaggy head.

  Luca saw whiskers. Golden eyes. And a hint of fangs.

  It was a tiger. Ten feet long, six hundred pounds, and heavily furred. Across the room lay a second one.

  The tiger by the bed seemed to be sleeping. But the one closest to Luca was regarding him sleepily, having just lifted its head up off its paws.

  And what massive paws they were. Luca had never appreciated the actual size of a tiger, having never seen one outside of a picture book or a nature show. The paw alone was bigger than a dinner plate.

  The tiger yawned. Its mouth opened extraordinarily wide. Luca saw two saber-like, yellowed incisors on the top, and two smaller but no friendlier-looking fangs on the bottom, bracketing a long pink tongue.

  Luca still had the tranquilizer-laced meat inside his shirt. He very much doubted that the volume of tranquilizers he had used would be sufficient to take down an animal that weighed ten times as much as a dog. Still, a snack might make the tigers a little friendlier.

  Luca slipped the ground beef out of his shirt, gently tossing it in the direction of the nearest tiger. The pat of meat landed with a wet splat on the tiles in front of its paws.

  The tiger regarded the meat. It extended its nose slightly to sniff at it. Then it gave it a lick. Then it completely ignored it.

  Luca let out a sigh.

  Well, that didn’t work.

  He could feel the seconds ticking by. He had to start searching, because the foolhardiest part of this whole plan was that he didn’t actually know where the cross was being kept—not for certain. He assumed that Kasperian was keeping it inside his personal suite, but even that was only a guess based on the fact that Kasperian hadn’t had much time to move it anywhere else.

  There was no way forward except past the tigers.

  Luca took a deep breath, trying to portray the most calm and natural demeanor he could to the two beasts. He walked between them, thinking at any moment that one of them might swipe out a paw and claw off his leg.

  Here he learned an amazing thing. While tigers might be excellent animals for intimidation purposes, it seemed they were not particularly good at guarding things. Or at least, these tigers were not. They were so fat and lazy, and so used to all the visitors coming through Kasperian’s house, that they hardly blinked an eye in Luca’s direction. The one next to the bed kept sleeping, and the other just laid his chin back down on his paws.

  Luca walked rapidly through the five linked rooms of Kasperian’s suite. This included the bathroom where he had entered, the bedroom, a massive walk-in closet, a sitting room, and an office. Luca did a quick scan of all five, looking for places where a safe might be concealed.

  He checked the obvious places first—behind artwork and mirrors, under the area rugs, tucked away in the walk-in closet. Then he spotted a vent cover that he was quite certain did not cover any vent at all. From its position below the ceiling, on an interior wall, it couldn’t be attached to the air system.

  Sure enough, when he pulled on the vent, it swung away from the wall, revealing an
embedded safe.

  Now, a sense of calm and purpose washed over him. Safe-cracking was Luca’s greatest skill as a thief. He had never encountered a safe that he’d failed to break open.

  Lex had teased him about his overgrown size. It was true, his height made it more difficult for him to blend in or hide. But for a safecracker, when technology and finesse fail, sometimes what is required is pure, brute strength: boring through heavy metal, forcing hinges, and good old-fashioned smashing.

  Even with a basic safe, drilling through a lock is no easy task. It needs an iron arm, plus a lot of endurance. And then you have the mental component, the strategy. Each safe is a unique puzzle. Your job is to break in, but it wants to keep you out. It fights back.

  The safe Kasperian had in his wall was not particularly high-tech. It was only a digital Magnum 7-346, at least seven years old. However, there were still the four 1-inch bolts to contend with, the pry-resistant hinges, and the case meant to withstand a drop of a thousand feet or a hit from a sledgehammer.

  If Luca had been able to pull it out of the wall, he could have threaded a wire through the back bolts and fished around for the reset button. But that was a tricksy maneuver that took time, and in any case, the safe had been sunk into solid concrete.

  Luca calculated that it had been about four and a half minutes since he blew up the kitchen. He probably had at best two to five minutes more, until the guards performed a full sweep of the house, including Kasperian’s rooms.

  He could hear the fire truck rolling into the yard. Though Burano only had the one truck, the blaze he set wasn’t that large. The firefighters would likely extinguish it quickly.

  Back to the safe. Luca could have drilled through the door—he had a small portable drill in his backpack—but that was too time-consuming. There was a quicker strategy. He would only get one chance to try it, and it was touchy.

  The weakness of the Magnum safes was their cheap nickel solenoid, used to activate the locking mechanism. With an old magnet, one made of samarium-cobalt before 1970, he could find the solenoid and slide it from the exterior of the safe.