by Ally Carter
“I said shut up.”
“Okay.” Macey took up the argument. “If you want to get shot coming over here to check on us, fine, but my debutante ball is this spring and I can’t show up with scars and stuff.” She cast a weary glance toward the massive wall of windows and French doors. “Besides, I’m cold. The least you can do is close that door.”
Hale watched the man consider this. His posture changed. His feet shifted. And when he turned and started for the window, Hale dared to whisper, “Kat, you hearing this?”
He didn’t get a reply, but as soon as the gunman reached the open door, a bullet burst through the glass, shattering it into a million pieces, spraying it across the floor.
It missed the gunman, though. It was supposed to. And what followed was chaos. Hostages bolted to their feet and ran. Others crawled across the floor, over stray bits of glass, struggling to free themselves from that place and that terror.
And when the dust and the panic settled, nobody even noticed that the boy and the girl who had mentioned the windows in the first place were gone.
WALKING DOWN THE ABANDONED HALL, Hale went through the list of all they had to do.
“First, we have to find out where they’re going and what they want. And keep your eyes peeled,” Hale ordered. “If we find a way of sneaking out some hostages, we should do it. And, Macey,” he said, stopping to catch her full attention, “don’t get caught.”
It was good enough advice, but Macey McHenry seemed to have other things on her mind.
“You’d better not be planning on looking up my dress.”
“I won’t look up your dress.”
“Because if you look up my dress, I will hurt you.”
“Yeah.” Hale laughed a little. “You can try and—”
But before Hale could finish Macey spun, knocking him against the wall. She had her fingers around his neck and his head poised to snap. It was all he could do to choke out the words “I won’t look up your dress.”
“Good boy,” she said, and let him go.
Without another word, the two of them eased down the narrow hallway that ran along the back side of the ballroom. Carts of food sat, abandoned. Bucketsful of ice were melting.
It felt to Hale like they were walking through a ghost town. And Hale couldn’t help himself—he worried. The whole job felt wrong. Too overt. Too obvious. Too physical and dangerous and risky. Whatever it was that had brought the men in the masks there, he didn’t like it.
“What are you thinking?” Macey tilted her head and studied him.
“It’s not a Gab and Grab—they’ve been here too long and they’ve gotten too entrenched. They’re big and they’re organized, but they aren’t set up for the Queen of Sheba.”
Macey looked at him oddly, so Hale added, “To run that con you need a set of triplets and a goat.” Then he shook his head and talked on. “They’ve got hardware and hostages, and that means…”
“What does it mean, Mr. Bored Billionaire–slash–Amateur Thief Guy?”
“I don’t know. I’m usually the heister—not the heistee. And I don’t work this way.” He walked a little faster. “You take hostages at a bank—someplace with lots of cash and lots of exits. And you only do it after you mess up and don’t get out. Seriously, no one in their right mind intends to take hostages. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless they intend to use them.”
The words washed over both of them, neither of them moving. Neither of them spoke until Hale glanced up at the air vent that opened overhead, and held out his hands in the universal signal for let me give you a boost. “Now I promise I won’t look up your dress.”
Macey wasn’t the type of girl to have regrets, but as she crawled through the dirty air vents that ran along the top of the Athenia’s highest floor, there were a number of things she would have changed about that particular evening if given the opportunity. First, she would have gone with the black gown instead of the red. (In those situations, you really need a dress with straps.) She absolutely would have brought one of the little travel-sized tear gas canisters her roommate Liz had perfected the previous semester. And perhaps most importantly, she would have done more than a little reconnaissance on W. W. Hale V before the evening took its covert turn.
Macey risked a look at the boy behind her. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was at home there, but nervous. Like a veteran athlete who has been asked to play a new position. He seemed a little off his game.
“Cammie’s going to be mad she missed this,” Macey said to fill the silence.
“Excuse me?” Hale asked.
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “I just…I have a friend who really likes air vents. And dumbwaiter shafts. And laundry chutes. Of course, the last time I was in a laundry chute, Cammie and I fell about a dozen stories….”
“Well, that sounds like fun.”
“It was either that or get kidnapped by terrorists, so I guess we got off easy.”
Macey glanced back to see Hale’s flirty grin. “Somehow I find that very— Wait!” Hale snapped, and grabbed her ankle, held her in place so that she couldn’t move another inch.
Macey jerked her head around and saw why Hale had stopped her. Narrow red beams crisscrossed the empty shaft, shining in the darkness.
“Lasers,” Hale sighed.
“Lasers,” Macey repeated.
They eased away from the red flickering beams that covered the shaft and blocked their way, inching backward until they heard voices below. Through a grate in the ceiling they could see the masked men lingering near a closed door, leaning against an antique table and smoking European cigarettes as if they had all day.
“Okay, so clearly they don’t have access to the target, which means—” Hale started, and Macey cut him off with a “Shh!” She leaned closer to the vent and listened to the foreign words that filled the hallway beneath them.
“What is that?” Hale asked, leaning close to the vents. “Russian?”
“Albanian,” Macey said, and again, motioned for him to be quiet.
“Now I suppose you’re going to tell me they teach Albanian at your school.”
“Only for extra credit.” Macey leaned even closer, listened harder. “It’s a job for hire,” she translated. “They don’t know how to get past the security system.”
Hale wasn’t impressed. “Of course they can’t get past the security system. You see that sticker by the door. That unit is protected by the new Sterling system. I can’t even get past that.”
Macey rolled her eyes and kept her ear trained on the men in the hall. “The boss—I guess that is whoever hired them—he said the system would be off, but it’s not.”
Below, the men talked on. Their frustration grew. “What are they saying now?” Hale asked.
“Cusswords.” Macey cut her eyes at him. “Bad ones.”
“What are they waiting on?” Hale asked almost like he wasn’t expecting an answer. But then, as if on cue, the air vent was plunged into darkness.
In the hallway beneath Hale and Macey, only the emergency exit signs emitted any light, and the hall was covered in an eerie red haze as Clinton shattered the IN CASE OF FIRE glass and pulled an axe from the compartment inside. With two long strides he walked to the door and swung. A minute later the men in the masks were walking inside.
The red laser beams disappeared and Macey glanced back at Hale and said, “Come on.”
Even with the power off, the air shafts were hot in the middle of winter, and sweat beaded on Macey’s brow and ran down the side of her face as she crawled along ahead of Hale, past the point where the lasers had previously blocked their way.
Inching along, she glanced down through the grates into the room below. It was gorgeous and luxurious with a silk-covered fainting couch and a balcony overlooking the park. But even for the Athenia, it was too nice to be a regular room.
“It’s an apartment,” Hale said. “Did you know the Athenia had residences?�
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Macey nodded. “They do for a few select clients.” But then something caught her attention. “Is that…” Macey started. She was staring at a painting on the wall.
“A Klimt?” Hale filled in, then sighed. “Oh yeah. But don’t get your hopes up. It’s a copy.”
“And you know this because…” Macey drew out the last word and looked at Hale even more skeptically than before.
“I saw the original at the Louvre last summer,” he said with a shrug.
“Oh,” she said, deflated.
The masked men were right below them, unloading gear and going to work on the opposite side of the opulent room, so Macey and Hale spoke in hushed whispers, pressed together in the tiny space. But Macey didn’t feel a charge, a spark. Handsome though he was, there was no doubt that W. W. Hale was otherwise engaged.
When the man in the Reagan mask pulled the Klimt from the wall, she felt Hale go cold and rigid as he studied the space behind where the print had been.
“Oh boy,” Hale whispered almost to himself.
“What?” Macey asked.
“The safe,” Hale said.
Macey looked back at the room, at the big metal box around which the masked men were gathered. “What about it?”
“It’s…good,” Hale admitted.
“Surely it’s not too much for a world-class art thief such as yourself?” Macey tried to tease, but Hale was already backing slowly away.
“No, Macey. It’s too good.” He shook his head. “Come on. We’ve got to find whoever lives here and figure out what these guys are after.”
“Don’t bother,” Macey said.
“Why…”
She looked at an oil painting that hung over the fireplace, a woman in a canary diamond necklace that was even more famous than she was. “Because she’s in the ballroom right now.”
Macey spoke slowly. “So if you were right and the necklace Mrs. Calloway wore to the ball was a fake…”
Hale nodded. “One guess where she’s keeping the real one.”
Macey peered through the vent at the place where the men were working. They were methodical as they unloaded their equipment, laying it all out on the coffee table like a surgical team preparing their tools.
There were a half dozen devices Macey hadn’t seen before but one small packet that was far too familiar.
“C4,” she whispered, and froze, staring down at the tiny but powerful explosive. “What will they do if they can’t crack the safe?”
“You don’t get it, Macey. They can’t crack that safe.”
“And what will they do?”
“Try to pry it open,” he said.
“And will that work?” she asked.
He shook his head and said, “No.”
“Can you blast into that safe, Hale?”
“What? Why are you asking?”
“Because I think we have bigger problems.”
“What kind of problems?” Hale asked, but Macey just pointed to the fireplace under the painting.
The gas-powered fireplace.
“The kind that go boom.”
Katarina Bishop had been many things in her young life. The daughter of a con man, the niece of a thief. (And once, during a particularly delicate operation in Hungary, the heir to an American ketchup dynasty.) But on that evening, she was something she had never, ever been before: helpless.
Needless to say, she didn’t like it.
“Kat,” Abby called, strolling in her direction. “Tell me about your boyfriend.”
“Well…I don’t know that he’s my boyfriend. I mean…he’s a boy. And he’s my friend. And there’s recently been the addition of kissing. But does that make us friends with benefits or—”
“Kat,” Abby snapped.
“Sorry,” Kat said. “What were you asking?”
“What is his training?”
“Oh…” And then, for an excellent liar, Kat had absolutely no idea what to say.
Abby seemed to read her face, because she inched closer and lowered her voice. “Look, I’m not a cop. And I’m not Interpol. I’m just someone who took an oath a long time ago to keep Macey McHenry safe, so whatever you can tell me…”
“He’s a con man. An inside man. He’s pretty good at short cons and street work. Picking pockets, sleight of hand—stuff like that—but what he does best is…lie.”
“Can he handle a safe?” Abby asked.
“What kind of safe?” Kat asked.
“A Scribner 9000,” Abby told her, and Kat couldn’t help herself—she laughed.
“I’m sorry,” she said, righting herself. “But that safe is drill-proof, hack-proof, and has an internal gyroscope with titanium shafts that bolt into place if anyone even breathes on it funny. Seriously. They don’t even install them in California because of earthquakes.” Kat watched the way Abby gaped at her. “Maybe I don’t know much about boys.…” Kat shook her head. “Doesn’t mean I don’t know about safes.”
“Can you pry your way into it?”
“You mean like with the Jaws of Life?” Kat thought about what Hale had seen hidden in the ballroom. “You can try, but it won’t work. Or…well…it didn’t work at the Israeli Diamond Exchange in 2009.” Kat thought about what she’d said, then quickly added, “Allegedly. There are only two ways into a Scribner nine series. Either you hire one of the half dozen or so safecrackers in the world who can work the tumblers or…” Kat cut her eyes up at Abby, who was totally not liking the answer. “You get someone to give you the combination.” Kat drew a deep breath. “Why?”
“I think we might have a problem.” Abby looked up at the high-rise. “What do you know about the new whole-house system from Sterling Security?”
“The new one?” Kat raised her eyebrows, impressed. “It’s good. I mean…really good. A friend of mine’s dad designed it, and there’s really no way around it unless…” Kat let her voice trail off, and Abby must have read her mind.
“Somebody cuts the power,” Abby said, and Kat looked up at the too-dark building. “The authorities turned off all electricity to the building five minutes ago.”
“What about—” Kat started, but Abby was already shaking her head.
“Backup generators too.”
“That’s why they needed the hostages,” Kat said, and in spite of herself she had to smile. “That’s why they weren’t in a hurry. This had to be big and public and scary enough to get the cops to black out the whole building. It’s genius.” She suddenly remembered who she was speaking to. “I mean it’s awful. But it’s also kind of genius.”
Suddenly, the hostages made sense. It wasn’t a holdup, Kat realized. It was a diversion. It had a purpose. And purposes made Kat happy.
Abby smiled and never asked how a fifteen-year-old girl could be so good at doing very bad things. “They’re past the security system, Kat. And now they’re working on the safe.”
“Whose safe is it?”
“Have you ever heard of the Calloway Canary?”
“Is Mrs. Calloway in there?”
“She’s in the ballroom now,” Abby said. “With a fake necklace that our gunmen evidently knew was a fake, because they went straight for the safe.”
“So someone is slipping them inside information,” Kat said, and Abby nodded. “What do you know about the gunmen?”
“Not much. According to our source—”
“You mean Macey?” Kat asked, but Abby didn’t answer.
“They’re Eastern European, probably muscle for hire,” Abby said. “There’s some big boss we haven’t identified yet. Someone’s calling the shots, but these guys are just here to do a job.”
But Kat was shaking her head. “There isn’t any honor among thieves, Abby. Not among that kind, at least. And right now they’re trying to get into a safe they can’t crack while holding on to over a hundred people they no longer need.” Kat watched the woman’s eyes, her worried posture and hasty glances toward an empty balcony.
“What is it?” Kat asked
. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Kat, can you blast your way into that safe?”
“Technically, yes,” Kat started slowly. “But in a private residence with close quarters and utilities you’d have to be crazy to try.”
“So we can’t let them try.”
“No.” Kat shook her head. “We can’t.”
Then Abby seemed to remember that she was the adult and Kat was the teen, the civilian, because she patted the younger girl on the back and said, “You don’t need to worry about it, Kat. You’ve done enough.” She turned away.
But there was something inside of Kat that was alive, thinking, planning, knowing that it wasn’t over and it wasn’t okay—that there were codes to her world and her life and anyone who would pick up an automatic weapon and take a hundred hostages wasn’t going to live by them.
Whoever these men were, they were not members of the family, and that more than anything made Kat yell through the darkness, “Abby!” The woman turned, studying her, as Kat said, “There’s something else that I can do.”
“STOP PACING,” Hale said in the manner of someone who was used to giving orders. Sadly, Macey wasn’t used to taking them.
“No thank you,” she said, and kept on walking. Too bad there was no real place to walk to. The storage closet they’d found was small and crowded with dirty laundry and old housekeeping carts. But it was also private and far away from the eyes and ears of the men in the masks.
“Macey, calm down. We don’t know why they brought the C4,” Hale said.
“Well, we do know that there is a gas line running behind the Calloway safe. The bad guys with the big explosives don’t seem to care that there’s a gas line. Let me do the math for you. Gas plus explosions equals boom!”
“Don’t look at me. I would be more than happy to offer a short course on How to Conduct a Proper Apartment Heist, but I doubt these guys are going to take my advice.”
“Abby,” Macey said, trying her earbud again. “Abby, do you hear me? How’s it going trying to cut the gas to the building? Did you do it? Is it done?”