The Conspiracy of Us

by Maggie Hall

  We sat on the edge of one of the courtyard’s many reflecting pools, waiting for the guard to get us—and Jack’s gun—past the metal detectors. I pulled up the Louvre website, hoping it would give us some kind of clue about what we were looking for. I stopped on a picture of the Mona Lisa. How ironic that we were this close to one of the most famous paintings in the world but wouldn’t have time to see it.

  “It’s not that impressive in real life,” Jack said, like he was reading my mind. “It’s much smaller than you’d think. I have always wondered what she’s smiling about, though.”

  I trailed my fingers through the reflecting pool, sending ripples across its surface. “She’s pretending,” I said. “That’s not a real smile. It’s what she wants people to see. It’s how she gets by.”

  Jack looked at the phone for a long second. “Why?” he said. “Why does she have to pretend?”

  “Because it’s easier that way,” I said. To me, it seemed obvious. “Then she doesn’t have to get involved with people.”

  For once, Jack didn’t study the face of every person who walked by, or scan the crowd for danger. He kept looking at the phone, then cut a glance to me. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think she knows being independent doesn’t always have to mean being alone.”

  I became very interested in the tangled ends of my hair. “So you and Mona were friends?” I teased, hoping it sounded light. “You knew her well enough to know her deepest secrets?”

  He bit his lower lip. “I think I’m getting to know her better.”

  I was saved by a Louvre security guard in navy blue. He escorted us past the line and inside the pyramid.

  I wasn’t expecting it to look like this. The pyramid acted like a giant skylight, flooding the Louvre lobby with sun.

  I glanced at the brochure we’d picked up. There were three massive main wings, all with some permanent and some rotating collections, plus a temporary exhibit.

  “Since that bracelet said ‘my twin,’ I wonder if we’re looking for jewelry,” I said. “That would have to mean it’s something that’s been here since Napoleon’s time. But if Fitz had this clue and then planted something for us, it could be anything.”

  Jack’s eyes darted over the list of collections. “We’ll just have to search as quickly as we can for anything that seems like a possibility.”

  As we started down the wide spiral staircase, something caught my eye, and my heart clawed into my throat.

  Scarface, the redhead, and the rest of the Order crew marched past the pyramid outside.

  I grabbed Jack. He stiffened.

  “How did they find us?” I said. “We ditched our phones. We’re in a whole other city.”

  A school group pushed and giggled and scrambled around us down the stairs. Jack pulled me to the side, something more like worry than surprise on his face.

  “What?” I said, and then I thought of something. “Wait. Could one of the other families track your plane? What if they’re not Order after all?”

  “The other families can track our plane,” he said under his breath, and then, “They’re Order. But if they can track our plane . . . that wouldn’t be good. I don’t know. We don’t have time to think about it now.”

  We hurried into the lobby, and Jack stopped short at the bottom of the stairs. “Or maybe them showing up here was a lucky guess.” He pointed to a cheerful black, white, and red banner hanging down into the atrium.

  NAPOLEON HALL

  Temporary Exhibit:

  Alexander the Great and the Ancient Greeks

  “Think this might be where we’re going?” Jack said.

  “It does seem like an awfully big coincidence if it’s not.” I darted a glance back outside, where the Order was cutting the line.

  “It has to be,” Jack said. “In Paris. In Napoleon Hall. In an Alexander exhibit, for God’s sakes. The Dauphins put this exhibit together searching for information about the mandate. What better way to find ancient Greek artifacts than encourage every small museum in the world to submit artifacts to the Louvre? And Fitz could hide it the same way he did at the Hagia Sophia.”

  I glanced around. We couldn’t do anything about the banner, but a standing sign at the bottom of the stairs had an arrow pointing in the right direction. “This is officially the cheesiest, most cliché distraction ever, but hopefully it’ll buy us a few more minutes.” I spun the arrow so it pointed the opposite way. “Let’s go.”

  We hurried down the stairs and merged with the crowds, darting glances behind us the whole time. When we got to the exhibit, Jack and I split up.

  I found a bust of Alexander the Great, a slab of marble under a thick pane of glass, a head wreath made of golden vines. Next were various metal tools, and I got excited when I found a display of jewelry, but the pieces and their corresponding descriptive plaques didn’t look out of the ordinary, and on the ring and the gargoyle, the symbol had been obvious.

  I glanced across the room to see Jack, hands in his pockets, interested in some ancient coins, then part of a stone wall. When he turned, I raised my eyebrows at him, and he shook his head.

  The next piece would take a minute to check, so I read its plaque first. Ivory Sarcophagus, depicting scenes from the life of Alexander the Great. On loan from the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.

  Istanbul. And in the plaque’s bottom right corner, the swirling symbol I knew so well.

  “Jack,” I whispered loudly. He strolled over like we were normal tourists, but his eyes danced with excitement.

  I crouched in front of the sarcophagus, studying the mural, and Jack crouched beside me. “It’s Alexander. And Aristotle, I think—he was Alexander’s tutor.”

  I glanced over my shoulder, expecting to see Scarface at any second. I liked to think he wouldn’t try to kill us in a public place, but that hadn’t seemed to bother him in the Istanbul market.

  Jack peered around the back of the sarcophagus until a guard across the room barked a warning and he had to step away.

  The crowd of little kids we’d seen earlier came into the room, their shrill voices echoing off the vaulted ceilings. No Scarface yet.

  “It’s got to be something more than the scenes carved on here.” Jack stared at the plaque. “Wait. The Istanbul Archaeological Museum. Fitz volunteered there, too. Did you read all the info?”

  “What info?”

  Jack grabbed a laminated sheet from a stand that held details on the piece in six languages. We both scanned it.

  “There,” I said. The middle of the second paragraph read: “This is an especially interesting sarcophagus,” says Emerson Fitzpatrick, volunteer docent. “The false bottom was unique for the time, likely used to smuggle goods under the guise of a funeral procession.”

  “False bottom,” I whispered.

  The sarcophagus was raised on four squat, round legs, so there was about a foot and a half of space underneath. If the Louvre had been as deserted as the Hagia Sophia had been, it would have been easy to get under it.

  It wouldn’t be easy here.

  My eyes darted around, searching for an answer. The group of kids was making their way to the golden crown.

  “Trust me?” I asked Jack. Without hesitation, he nodded.

  I wondered what it would be like to be able to put your trust in somebody that easily. I couldn’t deny that from this side, it felt pretty good. And it made me really not want to mess up.

  As the group of kids moved between me and the guard across the room, I dropped to the floor and slid under the sarcophagus.

  It was lucky I wasn’t claustrophobic. The tons of stone hovering over me was bad enough, plus it was too dark to see. The rough stone caught on my fingertips as I felt around. So far, the bottom was uniform aside from a sticky spiderweb in one corner.

  But here. Near the center. A long crack that, when I followed it with
my fingers, made a square. And on one edge, a shallow trough. It felt like an old jewelry box I had. Rather than being on hinges, the top had slid open, using the same kind of fingerhold.

  I put all my fingers in the hold and pulled as hard as I could.

  It didn’t budge.

  The shadows changed, and I glanced to the side to see dozens of little feet headed toward my hiding place. I pulled on the sliding door again.

  Nothing.

  Frantically, I ran my fingers around the edge. Was there a latch?

  Yes. Here was something. I moved the bit of stone as far as it would go, then grabbed the little door again.

  “Regardez!” a child’s voice said. “Que fait-elle?”

  Jack said something in French and crouched in front of me, his hand on my ankle.

  I yanked on the slider. This time, it flew open with a screech.

  “My girlfriend’s hurt!” Jack said loudly, in English now, obviously trying to cover the noise. “She’s fallen!”

  Despite everything, I couldn’t help but notice he’d said girlfriend. He could easily have said I was his friend, or his sister.

  A couple of little faces peered under the sarcophagus.

  I stuck my hand inside the opening. Nothing to my right but cold, rough stone. I felt to the left.

  Footsteps pounded the floor.

  My fingers found something. I yanked a leather pouch out of the hole, along with quite a bit of dust. I stuffed the pouch into my bag and tried not to sneeze.

  An adult face appeared, silhouetted against the light. “Mademoiselle! Miss. Are you okay?”

  I edged out from under the sarcophagus, heart racing double time. Jack crouched beside me, helping me sit up, and I clung to him like I’d just passed out. He leaned in close. “Did you find anything?” he whispered, tucking my dusty hair out of my face like the perfect concerned boyfriend.

  I nodded, and his whole face lit up, so much that I barely noticed the whole class of children and their teacher, all staring and whispering. And then the guard loomed over us, barking something in French.

  Jack put an arm around me and replied, and I grabbed my head and winced as convincingly as I could.

  “Like I said, my girlfriend has a heart condition,” Jack said, and I dropped the hand hastily to my chest.

  “She’ll be fine, though,” Jack said. “Thank you for your help.”

  The guard frowned, gesturing to the sarcophagus and looking me up and down. Even though I had a jacket wrapped around me, I was still in the tiny cocktail dress, with scratched-up legs and bloodied bandages.

  “I don’t know how she fell underneath it,” Jack said in English. He helped me to my feet, a little roughly, considering I’d supposedly just fainted. “We’re sorry to inconvenience you. We’ll get her back to our hotel now. No! No, we don’t need a doctor.”

  The guard frowned and raised his walkie-talkie—and a familiar accent came from the other side of the room.

  Scarface, the redhead, and the others strolled into the Alexander exhibit, so raucous that the guard turned to look at them. Jack grabbed my hand, and we darted in the opposite direction.

  “Arrêtez!” I didn’t have to turn to know the guard had seen us run.

  “There they are!” So had the Order.

  CHAPTER 28

  Jack pulled me past a pair of tall, red-headed tourists in too-short shorts, and farther into the museum.

  The shouts followed us.

  I looked frantically for the green SORTIE sign that signaled an exit, but there were none this way. Only bathrooms.

  “Too obvious,” Jack said, and made a sharp left turn through an open door into an office. He slammed it and locked it behind us.

  A few moments later, the doorknob jiggled, then fists pounded an angry beat. “Open the bloody door!” Scarface yelled. I backed away, searching for another exit.

  “They’ve got to have it or they wouldn’t’ve run,” Scarface’s muffled voice came from outside.

  More pounding. A kick to the door that bowed the bottom inward. That was the only door, but there was a window.

  More footsteps, running toward us. Mumbles, curses. “Security guards,” said one of the Order, and I thought I heard something about “the Commander” again. Finally, Scarface raised his voice enough to be heard.

  “If you change your mind about letting the old man die, you have one day,” he said. “Call this phone number in the next twenty-four hours with the name of the One, or he’s dead. We won’t give you this chance again.” He rattled off a number, and I scribbled it on a scrap of paper I found in my bag.

  A rush of pounding footsteps retreated. I stared at the phone number in my hand, but another set of steps reached us and the door handle rattled, much less violently. “Sécurité!”

  Jack shook his head and gestured to the window. I stuffed the paper into my bag. Luckily, we were on the first floor, near some kind of employee exit. Jack helped me out, and vaulted out after me. He grabbed my hand, and we sprinted up a ramp.

  “What was in the sarcophagus?” Jack asked, breathless, as he pulled open the wrought-iron gate leading off the Louvre grounds.

  “Some kind of leather pouch. It felt like it might have a book—”

  Down the block, an emergency exit flew open. The Order piled out. We skidded to a stop.

  “Watch for them, you arse!” Scarface yelled, pointing away from us. “One of you go to the front, the other to the side. Girl’s in a white coat, that little git’s in a black one. They can’t be that hard to find.”

  I dug my fingers into Jack’s arm. There was too much traffic to run across the road, and they’d see us anywhere else.

  Scarface started to turn.

  Jack propelled me back down the ramp we’d just run up. It curved back on itself, so we ended up just off the street but down one level, next to a bike rack. We shrank back into a recessed doorway. I jiggled the doorknob frantically, but it was locked.

  Jack gestured for me to pull off my jacket, and tossed it under a helmet in one of the bike baskets. He put his own jacket around my shoulders, then plucked a straw fedora off the ground. It looked like a tourist had lost it over the fence. Jack made a face, but it wasn’t dirty, and he popped it on his head and pulled it low over his eyes. “Take your hair down,” he whispered. I pulled out my ponytail holder and let my hair fall over my shoulders so I’d look as little as possible like the girl they’d just seen.

  Scarface and another man’s voices moved closer. If they looked down when they walked by, we were finished. We weren’t hidden very well. Jack backed me as far into the shadows as possible, trapping me between himself and the wall. “Don’t move,” he whispered. His eyes darted behind him. “They’ll think we’re . . .”

  I nodded. I was dressed pretty strangely for this time of the day, but it made it look like we could be coming home from an especially late night, trying to find a place to make out.

  Jack stood so close that his forearms brushed my shoulders, so close that his cologne, or his skin, or whatever that musky sweet smell in the crook of his neck was, would have overwhelmed me if I hadn’t been so scared.

  The footsteps drew nearer. I tensed. I wouldn’t put it past them to actually kill us to get this stuff. My pulse pounded wildly, and I glanced up at the street.

  Jack’s lips were in the hair at my temple, his breath warm at my ear. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “We’ll be okay. They’re almost gone.”

  My shiver then was only partially from fear.

  The voices got louder, came right alongside our hiding place and paused—then kept going. I let out a breath and stood on tiptoe to see over Jack’s shoulder. Nothing. Gone. I collapsed back down, a bubble of relief expanding in my chest—and then I stumbled. I flew into Jack’s arms, and the beer bottle I’d tripped over flew back against the door behind me with a l
oud clink.

  The voices stopped. I clutched Jack’s shirt in both my fists. For a second, they didn’t move, we didn’t move, the whole world held its breath. Then footsteps, hurrying back toward our hiding place. Jack turned to see. I had the better vantage point, and watched as a shadow fell across the gate at the top of the ramp. If Jack turned any farther, he’d be exposed.

  He started to crane his neck, and I grabbed his face and yanked it back around. His skin felt hot, his light stubble scratchy under my fingers.

  He opened his mouth, but I shook my head violently, nodding above us. Just two kids making out in a dark corner. They wouldn’t care about us then.

  The shadow stopped. The wrought-iron gate squeaked on its hinges, and the shadow leaned over the railing.

  I did the only thing I could think of.

  I kissed Jack.

  I yanked his face down to mine, holding it between my hands, hoping his hat was blocking our faces.

  Oh God, please don’t let him come down the ramp. Oh God, please don’t let Jack freak out and pull away.

  Oh God. I was kissing Jack.

  Kind of. Our lips were mushed together but frozen, our eyes wide open and staring at each other in terror. I was holding my breath. I was pretty sure he was holding his, too.

  A second went by, or a minute, or a week, and his eyes went midnight black and shining.

  Over the noise of the traffic, I heard a sniff. “Just a couple of kids snogging in some grotty old stairs,” the retreating voice said. It sounded like the redhead. “Not them.”

  “Then go find them, you wanker,” Scarface said, and the voices faded away.

  My hands fell away from Jack’s face, and our lips came apart. I collapsed against the wall, limp with relief.

  Jack still hovered over me, glancing over his shoulder. When he seemed satisfied they were gone, he turned back, and instead of saying anything, instead of even looking at me, he closed his eyes with a long, shaky sigh.