Perfect Scoundrels

by Ally Carter

  “Garrett can’t do this,” Hale was saying. “He can’t just…fire you. You—”

  “Created Genesis?” Silas filled in. “The product that didn’t work? The biggest embarrassment in the history of this company? Yes. I’m that guy. And I’m currently unemployed.” He gave an odd little bow, then added with a wink, “Of course, I’m also the guy who designed the security system, so they can’t keep me out. Yet.”

  “So Genesis had a glitch,” Hale said. “It will work eventually.”

  “No, Mr. Hale. It did work. It worked perfectly. In fact, the last time I spoke to your grandmother, it was to tell her that I was finished. I tested it myself. And then I put it in there.” He spun and pointed to a safe.

  “Silas,” Hale said, “are you saying…”

  “Whatever it was we saw at the launch, it wasn’t the prototype I made. No, sir. I just don’t know how anyone could have switched them. I kept the prototype locked up until the moment of the demonstration.” He walked over to the safe. “I just can’t figure out how they got inside this. It’s state of the art,” the man added.

  “Do you mind?” Kat asked, and Silas stepped aside.

  “What do you think?” Hale asked.

  Kat ran a finger along the inner workings of the lock. “It’s been tampered with,” she said. “By someone pretty good.”

  “And you know this because…” Silas prompted.

  “I have hobbies,” Kat told him. “Seriously, Silas, someone who knew what they were doing was in here.”

  “Well, at least I was robbed by a professional.” Silas dropped onto a stool almost as if his body couldn’t support the weight of his disappointment.

  “Can’t you make another prototype?” Hale asked.

  “Eventually. Maybe. But it wouldn’t do you or the company any good, Mr. Hale. That’s why I came to plead with Garrett. If the faulty prototype is unveiled at the gala, then I’m afraid of what will happen. To the company.” He leveled Hale with a look. “To all of us.”

  “I’ll get you whatever you need, Silas. Just make me another prototype.”

  “It’s not going to be that simple. After tonight I’ll no longer have a lab.”

  “I’ll get you a lab.”

  “And the plans are supposed to be stored on the company server, but they’ve been tampered with. My personal backup drives have been erased. Someone wants Genesis to disappear, Mr. Hale. And me with it.”

  “What if we can recover the plans?” Kat asked. Silas raised his eyebrows, doubtful. So Kat shrugged and added, “We know a computer guy.”

  “Oh, you do, do you?”

  “Yes,” Kat said. She got the feeling that Silas was a man who saw right through her and actually liked what he was seeing.

  “Your computer guy is welcome to try,” Silas said. “But it’s gone. Everything is gone.”

  Hale said nothing. Kat saw that he was studying the whiteboards. She wondered for a moment if he was reading the math and the formulas, trying to fix a problem she didn’t even understand. But then he pointed to a list in the corner of one of the boards.

  “That’s my grandmother’s handwriting,” Hale said, staring at the words.

  Silas nodded. “It is.”

  “She wanted this to work, didn’t she?”

  “Very much,” Silas said.

  “Okay,” Hale said. “He can fire you, but I can rehire you. Don’t worry, Silas. First thing tomorrow I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” Silas cut Hale off. “With all due respect, Scooter, Garrett is still the trustee and you’re still a minor. You’re a bright boy. Your grandmother loved you, so I love you, but until you come of age, I’m afraid there’s nothing you can do.”

  Silas thought it was over. Kat could see it in his eyes. His shoulders were slumped and his hands trembled. And Kat thought he was probably going to stay at that desk until morning and the guards came to carry him away. He was making his last stand in the only way he knew how.

  Fortunately, Kat and Hale knew another way.

  “We can get your prototype back,” Kat said, coming to stand next to Hale.

  “And how are you going to do that?” the old man asked.

  Hale smiled. “That’s easy, Silas. We can steal it.”

  The sun was not yet up over New York City when the owner of Hale Industries emerged from the building’s side entrance, a shorter-than-average teenage girl at his side.

  A chill had settled into the air overnight, and as they walked, he removed his jacket and placed it around her thin shoulders. And there, in the middle of the city, the two of them were almost alone. Two kids who were out far too late or far too early, walking down a cracked and vacant sidewalk like they owned it.

  “It was Marcus, wasn’t it?” Hale asked. “Who hired you?”

  “Don’t be mad at him. He was just—”

  Hale cut her off with a shake of his head. “He was right. You were right. These aren’t Hazel’s wishes.”

  He stopped and looked up at the towering building that bore his name. The faintest hint of sunlight was creeping over the horizon, and with it, the whole building seemed to glow.

  “We almost got caught, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah.” Kat laughed a little. “But we didn’t.”

  “You had a good point in there. Breaking in like that was stupid. I was stupid.”

  “Hale, stop it.” Kat reached out and grabbed his arm. “You are many things, but stupid isn’t one of them.”

  “I’m too close.”

  “You don’t get it, do you? Being close is good. Caring is good. I love that you’re emotional and passionate and can’t turn these things off.”

  “It makes me a bad thief.”

  “It makes you a good person.”

  Of all the things Hale had been told in his life, Kat wondered if anyone had ever told him that.

  He gave her his trademark grin. “So, what do you say, Miss Bishop? Want to steal a prototype?”

  “Re-steal,” Kat corrected. “These days I only re-steal. Besides, I’m not entirely sure you can afford me.”

  “Oh, I bet we can work something out.”

  “And there is the matter of—”

  But then Kat couldn’t finish because Hale’s lips had found hers. When they parted, he grew serious.

  “You will steal it, won’t you?”

  “We will.” She looked down the street. “Just as soon as we find it.”

  In a city of eight million people, it is easy enough to go unseen. Anonymity is perhaps the island of Manhattan’s greatest asset, and it came even easier for Garrett than for most.

  The residents of the high-rise apartment building on the Upper East Side knew only that he rose early and lived alone. He received no packages and, aside from a daughter, had no guests, and on the rare occasion that one of his neighbors might share the elevator with him either early in the morning or late at night, he would simply nod and study the newspaper that seemed perpetually tucked under one arm.

  He neither made nor complained of noise, did not decorate for any holidays, and the children of his building didn’t even bother knocking at Halloween.

  What Garrett did, it seemed, was work, and in New York City, this made him not the least bit special.

  The people at his coffee shop expected him at seven-fifteen; he bought his morning bagel promptly at half past.

  To all of these people (and then some), he was simply known as The Man in the Hat as he walked to and from the Hale Industries office in a gray felt fedora, rain or shine, in every month except July (during which time he wore no hat at all).

  The people at the coffee shop thought The Man in the Hat was some kind of throwback, an extra from a TV show, perhaps. But on this particular Friday morning, there was at least one person on the streets who knew better.

  Kat was quietly sitting in the shadows of a café window when Garrett’s doorman greeted him, but she didn’t bother to cross and follow. Gabrielle was in place at the corner, and besides,
they already knew the route. What they needed to know was the man.

  When he cut through the park, Gabrielle was a safe distance behind, and Kat was left alone to pull his trash from the dumpster and pick the lock on his mailbox. And when, twelve hours later, the man was still not home, even Kat had to admit that the day had basically come to nothing.

  He cleaned his own apartment, collected his own dry cleaning, and his bills and financial records were done exclusively online. He neither drank nor smoked, didn’t date or socialize. According to the building’s official records, the Garrett apartment had no safe and no storage lockers. What it did have was a state-of-the-art security system and a nosy neighbor who kept her hearing aids turned up as high as they would go.

  The one thing Kat knew was that she had to get into that apartment. Exactly how, however, was an entirely different story.

  So that’s why Kat was standing in the shadows of the building across the street, thinking, scheming, when a voice caught her completely off guard.

  “Kat?”

  She pivoted on the sidewalk, knowing exactly who she was going to find.

  “Hey,” Natalie said with a smile. “I thought that was you.”

  “Natalie, hi,” Kat told her. “What are you doing here?”

  “I live there.” Natalie pointed to the building Kat had been staring at for most of the day.

  “Wow,” Kat said. “Small world. I was just on my way…” But Kat didn’t bother to finish, because Nat was already crossing the street.

  “You wanna come up?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Kat said. “I’d love to.”

  It wasn’t the first time Kat had been invited inside a place she was trying to rob. Part of her knew she should have felt guilty about the invitation, but she couldn’t quite summon the emotion.

  Standing in the elevator next to Natalie, it wasn’t hard to see her as Hale saw her. She had an easy smile and a nice laugh, and Kat could imagine her as a little girl, running with a little Hale through Hazel’s big old house. Two children bringing life to that half-dead building. That is, before Kat came and took Hale away.

  “So…” Natalie seemed almost afraid of the question. “How is he?”

  The elevator doors slid open and Kat followed the girl toward apartment D, acting like she’d never been in the building before.

  “I’m not sure.” Kat shrugged. “He still seems…sad.”

  “Yeah.” Natalie put her key in the door but didn’t turn it. “Hazel was awesome. Scoot is awesome. And they seemed to be the only people in the whole family who knew that about each other. You know?”

  But Kat didn’t know. Hale’s family was an enigma. She’d never met Hazel. And “Scooter” was a stranger Kat couldn’t even start to reconcile with the boy she knew. She thought about the night before, about Hale’s arms around her, the way his fingers played with her hair. And she prayed she never had to. She hoped that maybe Scooter might be gone for good.

  “Oh well,” Natalie said. She pushed open the door and rushed to punch out a nine-digit code on the keypad.

  “Wow,” Kat said. “That’s a lot of numbers for a security code.”

  “Tell me about it. My dad is totally paranoid. He’s probably got cameras watching us right now,” Natalie teased, and Kat took a surreptitious turn around the room. She didn’t see any of the usual models, but in a private residence, with so many hiding places, a person could never be sure.

  “So, this is a nice place,” she told the girl.

  “It’s not mine,” Nat said. “It’s my dad’s, and he’s…well…we’re looking for some new school to take me.” She stretched out on the sofa. “Do you want a drink or something?”

  “No thank you.”

  “You’re so polite, Cute Kat. It’s sweet. Your mother must be very proud.”

  “She’s dead,” Kat blurted the words. It was so weird to talk about her mother with a stranger that she honestly didn’t know how. “I mean, she died. When I was little.”

  “I’m sorry,” Natalie said, taken aback. “Mine’s in Florida. Remarried.” She had the look of someone who thought her own mother might as well be dead but didn’t dare to say so.

  So Kat just kept studying the room. There was a utilitarian couch and chair. There were prints on the wall by American artists, a TV ten years out of date, which Kat guessed was never used.

  “I know why you’re here.”

  The words came quickly, like a slap. And Kat reeled with them for a moment until Natalie went on. “I don’t think you were just passing by, were you? I think you were hoping to run into me.”

  Kat blushed. “I guess maybe I was.”

  “I think you wanted to ask me about Scooter.” Nat placed her legs on the coffee table and crossed them. When she smiled, she had a particularly devious look in her eye. “After all, I know where all the bodies are buried.”

  Natalie laughed a little, but Kat just thought about the folders in Natalie’s father’s office. She wondered what the folder labeled Scooter might have had to say.

  “So there are bodies, are there?” Kat asked.

  Natalie nodded. “Lots of them. Poor guy couldn’t keep a pet if his life depended on it. That rose garden has got to have at least a half dozen gerbils.”

  Kat smiled at the thought. She herself had never had a pet, unless you counted the time the Bagshaws’ father had needed her to dog-sit Queen Elizabeth’s favorite corgi.

  “You want popcorn?” Natalie asked, standing up. “I want popcorn.”

  “Sure,” Kat said, moving on to a bookshelf full of classics, eyeing every one in turn; but nothing about the books was fake. The prototype was small. Portable. Great for hiding, hard for finding. At least now that Kat had the security code she could always come back later.

  “Butter?” Natalie called.

  “Absolutely!” Kat said.

  “Make yourself at home,” Natalie said, and Kat did as she was told, helping herself to the bathroom, joining Nat in the kitchen, then walking back to the living room, positioning it all within the framework of everything she knew.

  Garrett was a meticulous man, and as a result, he kept a meticulous house. In the bathroom, the towels were perfectly straight. What little food there was in the kitchen was carefully labeled. The whole apartment smelled of Windex and Lemon Pledge, and Kat could imagine that he’d spent so much of life cleaning up other people’s messes that he didn’t know when or how to stop.

  The only thing slightly out of order was a stack of papers on the coffee table. Kat could imagine him dropping them there after work one night. Some junk mail and a takeout menu, phone bill, bank statement…

  Passport.

  “Natalie,” Kat said, reaching for it, “are you going back to Europe already?”

  “What? Oh that.” Natalie glanced at the passport and pushed the thought aside. “No. That’s my dad’s. Has some business trip tomorrow.”

  “That’s cool. Where?”

  “Hong Kong,” Natalie said, then crinkled her nose. “I think.”

  And Kat couldn’t help herself: she peeked at the piece of paper tucked inside the small blue booklet, at the word Aviary circled in red. And the time: eight o’clock.

  Kat had never felt at home in Hong Kong. Sure, she and her father had lived there for eight months after her mother died. The two of them had spent hours walking through the massive tide of people that ebbed and flowed, beating like a pulse through the city’s center. But no matter what, her mother’s memory followed them everywhere. Despite their best efforts, they were never quite able to lose her.

  That was the thought that kept pounding in her head that afternoon. Gabrielle was at her back, Hale fifty feet behind her, and the three of them stayed on the crowded sidewalk, following the man in the hat. She kept her eyes forward and her pace steady. Gabrielle split off and took the other side of the street while Kat stepped out of the way of a bicycle. She got jostled by a food vendor moving a cart full of very strange-looking oranges. But she k
ept the man in her sights until, finally, he turned off the busy street and into Hong Kong Park.

  “Kat?” Hale’s voice was in her ear. “Where is he? Did you—”

  “She didn’t lose him,” Gabrielle said.

  “Where is he going?” Hale asked.

  “We don’t know.” Gabrielle sounded annoyed. “That’s why we’re following him.”

  “But—”

  “Hale, does someone need to go back to the hotel?” Gabrielle scolded him as if he were a little boy.

  But Hale didn’t answer, and Kat walked deeper into the park. Concrete gave way to mossy grass. She moved from the shadow of buildings to the shadow of trees, and a cool breeze blew across her skin, carrying with it a sound that was growing louder and louder with every step.

  “What’s that noise?” Gabrielle asked.

  “I don’t know, Gabs. I think…” But Kat trailed off as soon as she saw the massive net suspended within the trees and finally knew exactly what she was seeing.

  “Birds.” Kat thought of the note in the man’s apartment. “Garrett is going to see the birds.”

  That was as far as Hale could go, Gabrielle said, and Kat couldn’t argue with the logic. There was a reason clients never went on jobs, so Gabrielle waited outside with Hale, and Kat followed Garrett into the aviary alone.

  As Kat walked down the winding paths, the sound was overwhelming. Birds chirped and sang, filling the air. Kat couldn’t hear anything over their cries. Not the crunch of the gravel beneath her feet or even the sound of Hale arguing with Gabrielle in her ear.

  She was utterly alone in that huge faux forest until the trees parted, and she saw Garrett. He gripped the wooden railing of a footbridge, staring up at the skyline that peeked through the canopy of trees.

  “Okay, guys,” Kat said into her comms, “I found him. Looks like he’s waiting for something or…” She paused as another man stepped onto the bridge. “Someone.”

  The man greeted Garrett with a bow. He wore a dark suit and dark glasses, but their words were lost to Kat beneath the cries of the birds around them.

  A smaller path branched away from the main walkway, twisting through the trees and passing beneath the footbridge overhead, so Kat crept toward it. The birds squawked above. A brightly colored pair flew away when she approached their perch, but the men didn’t seem to notice, because they talked on, and eventually Kat could make out the words.