by Ally Carter
No one shook hands or said hello. Kat's friends looked as if they were prepared to stay all night, planning. And even though they were essentially in a circle, Kat saw the way they
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watched her, and for the first time in her life, she knew what it felt like to be at the head of the table.
"Thanks for coming." She took a step closer, gripped the back of a Queen Anne chair. "I've got sort of a job."
"I knew it!" Hamish exclaimed. "I told Angus when we saw you at Uncle Eddie's that something was happening-- didn't I? So what is it?" He rubbed his hands together. "Jewelry store?"
"Maybe a bank job?" Angus guessed.
Hamish nodded. "You know I do adore a proper bank heist. They're so preferable to . . . improper ones."
"It's not a job like anyone here has ever done before," Hale said, giving the Bagshaws a look that said quite clearly there would be no need for anyone to interrupt Kat again.
In that moment, the room seemed to find a new energy. Simon's fingers twitched. The brothers leaned closer. Even Gabrielle seemed to be giving her cousin her full attention as Kat searched their eyes and drew a breath.
"Whatever we do next," she blurted, "we do without Uncle Eddie's blessing."
No one responded at first. Then Hamish looked at his big brother, smiling, as if waiting for permission to laugh. It had to be a joke, after all. But Gabrielle was stoic, and Simon was mumbling about Vegas, and growing pale. And, most of all, something had pulled Kat back into their world.
Hale dimmed the lights and turned on the television. The same black-and-white video that had been haunting Kat's dreams started to play.
"This is a private villa in Italy." The frame froze on
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the empty gallery-style room. "And I mean private"
"How do we get in?" Angus asked, inching closer to the screen.
Hale and Kat looked at each other. She shook her head. "We don't."
Then, as if on cue, the man they called Romani came onto the screen. "Someone has already done us that favor." They watched the artist work for a few moments. "Hey, Kat," Simon started, "is that--" "It's not my dad!'
"I was gonna say, is that a Degas?"
"Oh, yes," she said slowly. She thought of Mr. Stein. "There were five paintings in all. Old Masters."
"Who is this bloke?" Hamish asked.
"Does it matter?" Hale asked. Hamish shrugged, but every eye in the room was on Kat.
This was the time, of course, to tell them the whole story. It was also the time to lie. Kat asked herself what her father would do--what Uncle Eddie might say.
So Kat settled on the lie she knew was truest: "That guy is Visily Romani."
Kat wasn't surprised to hear their silence.
Simon was the only one who moved. "The Visily Romani who robbed five Swiss banks in one night in 1932? The Visily Romani who made off with half the crown jewels of Russia in I960?" Sweat gathered on Simon's brow. "The Visily Romani?"
Hale leaned back and crossed his legs. "Don't worry, Simon." He popped another sandwich into his mouth. "It's way worse than you think."
Kat could practically feel the Bagshaws' excitement.
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Hamish rubbed his hands across the tops of his thighs, warming them, getting ready for something--anything.
Angus seemed to be calculating something in his head. "If he did a job in thirty-two, doesn't that make him kind of. . .old?"
"Visily Romani is one of the Pseudonimas--the sacred names," Kat explained.
"So this guy..." Angus trailed off, but pointed to the man on the screen.
"He could be anyone," Simon finished.
Kat turned and stared out the window at the gardens and the grounds, the trappings of Hale's world, as she thought about the laws of hers. "He could be anywhere."
Simon was rising and starting to pace. "So we're all here because we've got to ..." he stammered, pointing to the screen. "You mean this is a . . ." He stopped and put his hands on his hips. His shirt was peeking out from underneath his sweater vest. His face was growing redder by the second. "I was under the impression that Pseudonimas are slightly..."
"Not to be messed with?" Gabrielle answered for him. Then she smiled. "Oh, they're not. Or, well, they weren't."
"You can walk away right now. All of you," Kat reminded them. "Uncle Eddie has already said it can't--or maybe that it shouldn't --be done." She drew a deep breath, wondering for a moment if there was a difference. "I won't blame any of you if you turn and leave right--"
"You kidding?" Hamish asked. "There's a few hundred million Euros on those walls. Easy." He glanced at his brother. "We're in."
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"Yeah," Kat said slowly. "Well, like I said, it's not a typical job." Kat didn't know what was harder--what she had to say, or the way everyone looked at her while she said it. "Mr. Taccone has"--Kat considered her words carefully--"asked for our assistance retrieving the paintings."
"So . . . what? There's some kind of finder's fee?" Angus asked.
"It's not quite like that," Kat admitted.
"More like a promise that Taccone won't drown Uncle Bobby in his moat," Gabrielle said simply.
Kat gave a weak smile as she looked at everyone. "And I'll owe you."
Kat expected her friends to need a moment to think. They should have taken a walk around the grounds to clear their heads, put their thoughts in order. Kat expected half of them to do her family proud and slip away noiselessly into the night, but amazingly, that didn't happen.
Instead, Hamish slapped his brother on the back and said, "We're in. Whatever you need, Kat."
Simon held his hand to his mouth, biting his nails as he stared into space. Calculating. "Is Uncle Eddie going to find out about this?"
"Come on, Simon," Hale answered. "What are the odds he already knows?"
The Bagshaws looked at each other, spoke at the exact same time. "Two to one."
Simon gulped. But eventually he said, "Okay."
Kat looked at Gabrielle, who had started polishing her toenails. The girl didn't even look up, but as Kat opened her mouth to speak, Gabrielle said, "Duh," and Kat knew there was nothing else to say on the subject.
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"Great. Thanks. I guess we'll start casing the target tomorrow."
"What is the target?" Angus said slowly.
Hale looked at Kat. For a moment it seemed okay.
And then Kat said, "The Henley."
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6 DAYS UNTIL DEADLINE
LONDON, ENGLAND
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CHAPTER 18
If you lived in 1921, and if you had more money than time, and if you were a woman, then there were very few acceptable ways in which you were allowed to fill your days. Some played cards. Others played music. Most surrounded themselves with dresses and hats, perfectly tended gardens and expertly steeped cups of tea. But Veronica Miles Henley had not belonged in 1921 . . . not really. And so Veronica Henley had turned her great fortune to her great passion and almost single-handedly built the greatest museum in the world.
Or so Katarina Bishop's mother had told her. And so Kat herself still believed.
"Better than the Louvre?" Hale's voice cut through the sound of the fountain in front of the glass-covered main entrance.
Kat rolled her eyes. "Too crowded."
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"The Tate?"
"Too pretentious."
"The Egyptian Museum in Cairo?"
Kat leaned back and let her fingers trail through the water. "Way too hot."
The surveillance cameras mounted on the walls that circled the Henley saw all of this, of course. They were perfectly positioned and highly calibrated--the best they could possibly be.
The two guards who stood sentry by each gate no doubt noticed the boy and girl who lingered by the fountain, eating sandwiches, throwing crumbs to the birds that landed on the s
quare--just like a thousand other teenage couples that gathered here each year.
The guards might have seen the boy throw his arm around the girl's neck and hold a camera out in front of them, snapping pictures. They might have noticed how the couple paced from one end of the wall to the next. They didn't, of course, see that the pictures were really of the positions of the cameras; that their paced steps were mapping out the dimensions of the perimeter wall.
They were simply two teens who appeared to be in the midst of a great autumn.
But, of course, the guards didn't see a lot of things.
If the guards at the Henley didn't pay much attention to the boy and girl who were lingering outside, they certainly didn't notice the two brothers who stood in line by the cafe, goofing off, taking silly pictures of things like doors and vents as they waited for a table. They did not see the pale boy with the backpack and a small digital gaming device who wandered the halls aimlessly . . . until he actually ran into one of the
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docents on patrol, falling to the hard floor in the process.
The device in his hand skidded across the marble floor.
"No!" the boy cried, chasing it. But as soon as it skidded to a stop at the feet of one of the Henley guards, the boy froze.
The guard leaned down and picked up the device. If he'd been more focused on the boy than the toy, he might have noticed that Simon was holding his breath and was every bit as pale as the marble statue that stood behind him. But the guard was too captivated by the maze of grids and dots and lines that filled the screen to notice the boy. "What is this?"
"Nothing!" Simon blurted far too quickly, but his baby face was too innocent to cause any worry for the docent and the guard.
The docent looked over the guard's shoulder. "That's Underworld Warrior Two, isn't it?" the docent asked, leaning closer to examine the screen.
"Hey, what's this--" The guard started hitting the red button, and Simon winced.
"Don't. . . Don't. . . Please don't. . ."
"It's really different from Underworld Warrior One, huh?" the guard asked, still punching the button, not knowing the chaos he was causing in the guardroom twenty feet away as every motion sensor in the building began to flash. "What's this do?" The guard moved to a different button, but before he could short-circuit every electrical device within a dozen yards, Simon lunged for him.
"It's sort of a . . . prototype," he said, snatching the device out of the guard's hand before the man's colleagues noticed that anything was wrong. It should be pointed out that this was in fact the truth, and so Simon had no trouble saying, "My dad designs these things."
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The guard eyed the device again, then patted Simon on the back. "Lucky kid. You watch where you're going, okay?"
"Will do," Simon said, and that, more than anything, wasn't a lie.
The docents at the Henley were used to seeing almost every sort of behavior from the thousands of guests who paraded through the museum each year.
But when a teenage girl in amazingly high heels stumbled through the halls that day, there was something about her that simply demanded the guards' attention. Some said later it was her short skirt. Others wisely observed that it was more likely the legs that protruded beneath it. Whatever the case, their eyes were most certainly not on her hands.
"Wow!" the girl exclaimed too loudly as she walked into the room that had recently become known as the Romani Room. She craned her head to look at the ornate ceiling overhead. "That's tall!"
The docents at the Henley did not know what every thief knows--that if there's no way to do something without being seen, then it's best to do it in a way that will be well and fully stared at.
"That," Gabrielle said, spinning on her high heels and pointing at the painting that hung at the center of the room, is pretty!
The guards who were monitoring the Romani Room that day had never been accused of being lazy or slow, of being dense or unaware. But that did not change the fact that they had never seen a seemingly intoxicated young woman teeter across a marble floor and lunge for a painting worth a quarter of a million dollars.
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The tourists, who, so far, had been far too proper to openly stare, had to hurry out of the way. The guards, who had been too busy studying the young woman's legs to notice where those legs were carrying her, could only gape.
Her hand brushed against the frame, and her legs immediately stopped being the most interesting thing about her.
A shock echoed throughout the room. Metal grates descended from the ceiling, blocking the doors in a split second while women screamed and children cried and a siren pierced the air so loudly that men dropped their children's hands to cover their own ears.
Even the guards cringed and bent over, the crackles of their walkie-talkies lost in the chaos of sirens and trapped tourists. When they remembered the girl with the long legs and the short skirt who lay on the cold marble floor, she was too unconscious and too pretty for anyone at the Henley to stay mad for long.
No one noticed the way Kat stood on the other side of the grates watching everything unfold, plugs in her ears blocking out the sound. Plans were already taking shape in her mind as she turned and walked slowly toward the exit.
If it hadn't been for the alarms and the grates, the trapped tourists and the unconscious girl, someone at the Henley might have noticed the two goons who appeared at Kat's side as if from nowhere.
They might have seen Kat and the men disappear behind the tinted glass of a stretch limousine and noted that Kat didn't scream.
They might have heard her say, "Hello, Signor Taccone."
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CHAPTER 19
The first thing Kat did, of course, was kick herself. She should have been expecting this. She should have heard them coming. But the alarms had been too loud and the earplugs too effective, and her mind had been too distracted by the serious work she had to do, and so Kat's guard was down that day. But she wasn't going to let Arturo Taccone know it.
He smiled frostily at her from the other side of the limo's backseat, and despite everything, she was almost glad for the warmth of the goonlike bodies on either side of her.
"Your efforts are entertaining, Katarina," he said with a slight laugh. "Ineffective, but entertaining."
Kat thought back to the sight of her cousin slumping to the cold floor of the gallery while the Henley's state-of-the-art defenses were put to the test by a sixteen-year-old girl. And her legs.
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"I told you I wasn't the right person for the job," Kat said. "Now, there's a Japanese crew that comes highly recommended. I could get you a name and number if you're interested."
Taccone's dismissive wave made Kat realize that he was enjoying this. She thought of his hidden bunker, and she knew somehow that the joy he got from keeping things so beautiful and precious under lock and key was nothing compared to the thrill of following them across Europe. Paintings are just things, after all. What Arturo Taccone really loved was the chase.
"So tell me, Katarina"--he jerked his head in the direction of the grand old building that was disappearing in the distance--"what are you going to steal? Da Vinci's Angel, perhaps? I would pay handsomely to add that to my collection, you know."
"I'm not a thief," Kat said. He looked at her. "Anymore," she added. "I'm not a thief anymore."
Taccone didn't try to hide the amusement in his eyes. "And yet here you are."
"I'm here to get your paintings, Signor Taccone, so technically I'm re-stealing." Again, Hale's voice echoed in her head. "Re-stealing is more like a double negative."
"You think your father has hidden my paintings inside the Henley?" Taccone scoffed, a cruel guttural sound. "And exactly why would he do that?"
"Not my dad," she said. "Remember?"
"Oh, Katarina," he said with a sigh. "If not your father, then who?"
She thought for a moment about Visily Romani--about a legend, a ghost. But he wasn't a ghost, not really.
Somewhere in the world there was a man--a very real man--with blood
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and bones and the necessary knowledge to break into the most secure museum in the world, and to use that particular name to do it.
So somewhere, yes, there was a man. And his name was not Visily Romani. But somehow Kat doubted that Arturo Taccone would understand.
"I did find them, Signor Taccone," Kat said, scooting closer, sitting up. "I can tell you where they are, and then I guess you won't need me anymore. After all"--she gestured behind them--"as you saw, my friends and I are not really suited for an opportunity of this magnitude."
"Ah, but Katarina, I think you're suited quite nicely."
He smiled at her, and Kat couldn't help herself: a part of her wondered whether this man had more faith in her than her own uncle, maybe even more than her own father. But then again, this man didn't care if she ended up dead or in prison as long as he got his paintings back, so maybe he wasn't the best judge of her abilities.
"We need more time." It was a statement, not a plea, and Kat was surprised by how steady her voice stayed as she said it. "This is the Henley. No one has ever robbed the Henley."
"If you're correct, then your father got through their security to place my paintings--"
"Look!" Kat didn't know she was reaching for him until she felt his walking stick in her hands. "You don't believe me when I say my dad didn't steal your paintings, fine. You don't believe me when I say they're in that building, okay. But they are. And believe me when I say no crew is going to take on the Henley in six days. It's not going to happen. It can't be done."