by Robin Benway
And then she leaped up.
“I get it!” she cried.
“Jesus, babes,” Ames said, clutching at his chest. “Warn a lad, will you?”
“Get used to that,” Jesse told him. “Roux doesn’t exactly keep her feelings to herself.”
“Shut up, Jesse. I still have your Transformer, by the way. Anyway—”
“You do?” Jesse cried.
“ANYWAY,” Roux continued, ignoring him. “Angelo’s always saying this thing to me whenever we play chess: A knight on the rim is grim. And usually I’m all ‘Angelo, what are you smoking?’ but I get it now!” She looked absolutely delighted with herself.
The rest of us stared at her. “Well?” Élodie finally asked. “Are you going to tell the rest of us?”
“Look,” Roux said, then picked up her knight. “Don’t tell Angelo I’m doing this or he’ll try to forfeit the whole game. So here’s the knight, and he can only move in a certain way. Either one square, then two, or vice versa, right?”
We all nodded.
“Okay, so when he’s in the corner of the board, he can only move in two directions.” Roux demonstrated with Angelo’s beautifully carved knight piece. “So that’s bad. And then if he’s on the edge of the board”—she slid him halfway down the board—“he can only move in four directions, which is better but not great. But if he’s in the center, then he can move eight different ways. Eight different escape routes, so to speak.”
Roux moved the knight to the center and set him down. “If you stay on the edge where it seems safe, you’re more easily captured. But if you’re in the middle of everything, even though it seems less safe, you have the most options. God, that was driving me insane!”
I just looked at her in astonishment. “Remember when you used to just call the knight ‘the horsey guy’?” I asked.
“There’s no shame in having a steeper learning curve than others,” Roux said primly. “So wherever we meet needs to be open, in public, something like that. There’s going to be seven of us; we need ways for all of us to flee without getting, you know, captured.” She made air quotes around the last word, then dramatically dragged her finger across her throat to illustrate her real meaning.
Ames looked at her adoringly while the rest of us winced.
“Thank you for that, um, delightful interpretation of our fates,” I said. “But good work, Roux.”
“I aim to please,” she replied. “But now we just have to figure out where.”
We had Élodie’s iPad on the table in front of us, a picture of the double-eagle gold coin blown up on the screen. It looked better in person, but the picture was still accurate, and I locked eyes with Victory once again. It felt like years since I had stood under her protection at Grand Army Plaza, but in reality, it had only been three days ago. Her engraved arms were spread out like wings and—
“Oh my God!” I cried, and Roux screamed and clutched at her chest.
“Sorry, sorry,” I told her. “Actually, no, I’m not. That was payback for earlier.”
“Fair enough,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I was just thinking too hard. I think. What’s wrong?”
“I know where we can meet!” I cried. “This coin was designed by Saint-Gaudens, right?”
Five blank faces looked back at me.
“Okay, just trust me, it was. He also designed the statue of General Sherman at Grand Army Plaza in New York—”
“Manhattan or Brooklyn?” Roux asked.
“Manhattan.”
She nodded in approval. “Go on.”
“That statue has the same figure on it, the figure of Liberty just like on the coin. But his original inspiration was in the Louvre.” I grabbed Élodie’s iPad and typed in a few key words, then flipped the screen around. “It was this.”
I had pulled up the Winged Victory of Samothrace on the screen, one of the major exhibits at the Louvre. It sat at the base of a stairway, its huge marbled wings spreading throughout the atrium. Her head was missing, but you barely noticed that fact against the sheer size of the statue.
“We tell Dominic that if he wants these coins, he’ll know where to meet us.”
Ryo looked doubtful. “You really think it’s a good idea to toy with him like that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t care. He tried to kill me and my family. You know he’s done his research on these coins. If I know that little fun fact, so does he. I guarantee it.”
Roux wrinkled her nose, then nodded. “I like that it has Victory in its name,” she said. “That’s a good sign, right?”
“A good sign for someone,” Ames said. “Hopefully it’s us.”
Chapter 34
Everyone was on edge the next morning. Roux sat at the kitchen, picking all the chocolate pieces out of her pain au chocolat, while Ames stirred his coffee again and again until it resembled more of a dirty whirlpool than a beverage.
Élodie and Ryo were packing up their things, getting ready to move out. “Where are you going?” I asked them. It was clear we couldn’t come back to the apartment, even if our plan went according to, well, plan.
“Sydney, maybe?” Élodie shrugged. “Ryo hasn’t been home in quite a while. Or perhaps London. Or maybe even—”
“Élodie, love.” Angelo poked his head out of the office, where he had been working all morning. “May I speak with you for a moment?”
Ryo picked up the conversation after she left. “Élodie hates Australia,” he said with a laugh. “I doubt we’re going there. Maybe we’ll just stay in Paris.”
“So jealous.” Roux sighed at the table. “I want to stay here, too.”
Ames hid a smile. “Careful what you wish for, darlin’,” he said.
“Seriously,” I added, remembering when I told Angelo that I just wanted something to happen, right before too many things started to happen. “Let’s just make it through the day, okay? Then we’ll discuss jetting off to nowhere.”
“Not to be negative,” Jesse began.
“Oh, here we go,” Roux muttered. “Mr. Positive.”
“But do we have a plan if things go wrong?”
Ryo and I looked at each other. “It’s not going to go wrong,” we both said at the same time, even though I wondered if he fully believed that statement. I knew I didn’t. I had been through enough over the past week to know that things could definitely go wrong.
I also knew that even if things went wrong, they could still work out.
“All we have to do is stick to the plan,” I told Jesse, sitting down in his lap. He reached up to play with the necklace he had given me, the tiny knifepoint sharp against the pad of his thumb.
“This looks really nice on you,” he murmured. “Very cool.”
“This one guy gave it to me,” I said. “I might keep him around for a while. Use him for his body, you know.”
Roux pretended to make barfing sounds next to us.
“He sounds like a keeper,” Jesse agreed, winding his arms around my waist. “Probably good with the alphabet, too. He could put U and I together.”
There was a pause, and then—
“That was terrible!” Roux cried as I started to laugh.
“So terrible, Jess, oh my God! Pass me some crackers for that cheeseball!”
“Really awful, mate.” Ames sighed, even though he was chuckling. “Mine aren’t even as bad as that.”
Jesse just smiled and kissed the secret spot on my neck. “Tension diffused,” he whispered against my skin, and I hugged him.
“Yeah, I think I’ll keep him for a while,” I murmured.
A few minutes later, I went to get a sweater (the Paris apartment was beautiful and drafty) and heard Élodie and Angelo talking. The office door had popped open just a crack and I stopped, even though I knew I shouldn’t eavesdrop.
But hey, I’m a spy. Eavesdropping is pretty much the first item in the job description.
Élodie and Angelo were whispering together in front of a huge computer screen, clicking through p
assport photos one by one. I saw Markus, Mathieu, Zelda, my parents, Ryo and Élodie and Ames. Then Angelo clicked something again and the screen filled with dozens more photos, all of them people I didn’t recognize.
“Not for your eyes, my love,” Angelo said suddenly, then turned around and smiled.
“But—”
“And shut the door behind you, please.”
I did as I was told, but all I could think about were my parents’ pictures, and why Roux and Jesse hadn’t been included at all.
***
A few minutes before three, the cars arrived for us. All the tension that Jesse had managed to crack was back now, plus more. I couldn’t see the drivers’ faces as we piled in, and I wondered if Mathieu was one of them. The windows were all tinted, though, and I noticed Angelo breathe a tiny sigh of relief once the cars pulled away from the curb.
“Bulletproof?” I asked, pointing to the window, and he nodded.
“Of course. We’re currently in the safest place in Paris,” he replied, then glanced out at the street. Ames, Élodie, and Ryo were in the car behind us, gliding as smoothly as we were, and Roux kept looking over her shoulder, keeping an eye on Ames.
“He’s fine,” I whispered to her, taking her hand. “Ames could probably survive a nuclear fallout.”
“Oddly not comforting, but thank you, Maggie.”
I patted her hand in response.
Behind closed doors, I had argued with Angelo about using Jesse and Roux as part of the plan. “We can’t involve them anymore!” I protested, my voice low enough so that they wouldn’t hear me. “They’ve done more than enough! They’re just civilians!”
“They’re not civilians anymore,” Angelo replied, which stopped me in my tracks. “Dominic knows who they are. The Collective knows who they are and, more importantly, what they know about us. Do you honestly think they’re safer alone than without our protection today?”
I paused, thinking about his words and realizing he was right. “I hate that I brought them into this,” I said. “I really do.”
“Sometimes, my love, we don’t get to choose our team,” Angelo said. “And Roux and Jesse are becoming seasoned professionals at this point. Jesse, especially, would do anything to protect you.”
“That’s the problem,” I admitted. “I don’t want him to do anything.”
“Like I said, love,” Angelo repeated, then bent down to kiss the top of my head, “sometimes we don’t get to choose.”
Now that we were in the car, I could see his point.
Still, I didn’t feel any better.
We had arranged to meet at the Louvre at three, mostly to avoid the first rush of morning tourists and the last rush of evening crowds. It was still packed, of course, with the end-of-summer tourists crowding through the doors and into the halls, and most were Americans.
The six of us all had badges that designated us as a tour group from a local school. Angelo had a docent badge, which let him lead us past the heavy lines at security and into the museum.
Ryo just shook his head after we made our way inside. “Do you see?” he whispered to me. “Security is so lax. They didn’t even check the badge.”
On my other side, Roux had more pressing concerns. “If anyone asks,” she whispered to me as she and Ames walked hand in hand, “I’m French.”
“Got it,” I whispered back. “I’m not sure anyone will be asking, but I got it.”
Their voices rang up to the high ceilings and through the corridors, and my heart started to race. This wasn’t my area of expertise. I needed something to open, to crack, to unlock, in order to feel better. All I had instead, though, were five friends and ten gold coins in my pocket.
We all had ten gold coins in our pocket, actually. It’s just that mine were the real ones. Angelo had produced some amazing-looking fakes and distributed them to everyone else that morning. “We’ll have about five minutes before the police arrive to keep Dominic at bay,” he said.
“Assuming they don’t decide to go on strike,” Élodie grumbled. I could tell she had been in Paris for too long.
“We just need to keep Dominic in the museum,” Angelo said. “As soon as you hear the police arrive, get out. Go, take the car, take the tunnels, I do not care. But go.”
Ames looked around the room. “I’ll just say it,” he announced. “We’re going to play keep-away with a criminal mastermind in the Louvre? That’s our plan?”
“Yes,” Angelo said.
“Deadly,” Ames replied with a smile. “I love this game.”
As Angelo led the six of us up the stairs toward the Samothrace, I hurried to catch up to him. “Angelo,” I whispered, “this doesn’t feel right. I think this is a bad idea.”
“Don’t worry, darling,” he said. “This plan has many facets. And faces, actually.” He smiled down at me. “Are you ready for a new adventure?”
I looked up at him, trying to read behind the secrecy. There was something big happening behind his eyes, bigger than a stupid plan of keep-away with Dominic and a bunch of fake gold coins.
“Third rule of being a spy?” Angelo asked me as we continued to climb.
“Don’t look back,” I answered.
“Good girl,” he said, then looked past me at someone in the distance.
“Let the games begin,” he said, and I turned to see Dominic Arment making his way into the museum.
Chapter 35
We stood on the stairs as Dominic approached, fanned out in front of the Samothrace. Angelo was in front and the rest of us were a few steps behind him, almost like he was our shield into battle. People shoved past us on the way to see the statue, their cameras out and ready, but none of us moved. It was as if the tourists weren’t even there.
Dominic was wearing a suit. I suspected that he was one of those men who always wore a suit, even in these types of situations. It was hard to imagine him in an actual appropriate outfit, like maybe track pants and running shoes, but he looked clean-cut and like any other well-dressed Parisian. There were four men behind him, but I couldn’t tell if they were security or henchmen or hired ankle-breakers. Maybe they were even part of the Collective.
“Hello, Dominic,” Angelo said, as if he were greeting him over coffee at a café. “Lovely to see you, as always.”
“You are always so smooth, Angelo,” Dominic replied, his voice so deep and soft that it gave me shivers. “Except in your plans, of course. I see you’ve assembled quite the ragtag bunch.” He nodded in my direction and smirked. “Maggie and Her Merry Band of Criminals. Where are my coins?”
“Ah, yes, the coins,” Angelo said, adjusting his watch a little as he glanced at it. “They’re very important to you, aren’t they? Suddenly everybody wants them: you, me, Maggie, our friends.” Angelo paused for a few seconds before adding, “A few gentlemen in Russia are also quite interested, from what I hear.”
Dominic blanched only a tiny bit. “Stop with the nonsense and give them to me,” he told Angelo. “And we can all go home.”
“You tried to kill me in my home,” I spoke up, and Angelo didn’t make a motion to stop me.
“You took what wasn’t yours,” Dominic replied. “Very naughty, Maggie.”
I felt Jesse tense up behind me, but I didn’t look back.
“Maggie has a point, though,” Angelo said, still so calm and steady that it was eerie. “We give you the coins and … what? You call off the Collective and let us go? Or you hunt us all down and make sure we never talk again? I know what I would do if I were you.”
“Lucky for us, you are not me,” Dominic said through gritted teeth.
Angelo pulled his phone out of his pocket and pressed a button. “I’ve just sent you three drafts of an e-mail,” he said. “One to Interpol, one to my contact at the Secret Service, and one to the Associated Press. Don’t you think that they would all be interested in this story? International intrigue, scores of years spent slowly building one of the most secretive organizations in the world, only to ha
ve it fall to corruption? I name quite a lot of people in these e-mails. Everyone who attempted to use our good deeds for their own malicious intentions, in fact.”
My heart started to pound faster. What was Angelo talking about? He was bluffing. He had to be bluffing.
“I think this would make a wonderful story,” Angelo said. “The Collective finally revealed, along with all of its dirty misdeeds and indiscretions. Very naughty, Dominic.” Angelo’s voice ran cold as he repeated Dominic’s words back to him.
“You would never reveal the Collective.” Dominic laughed. “You are part of it. All of you are.” He narrowed his eyes at Roux and Jesse, which made me twitch. “You all are,” he repeated. “You reveal one of us, you reveal all of us.”
“Well, that might not be true,” Angelo said, then looked up and waved a couple forward. “Let’s see what my cohorts have to say about that.”
I followed Angelo’s gaze and then let out a small sob because dashing up the stairs, slightly out of breath and hair tousled from the rush, were my dorky, ridiculous, wonderful parents. Behind me, Roux made a tiny sound that sounded like “meep!” but I didn’t turn to look at her. I just watched as my parents came closer and fought the urge to hurl myself straight into their arms.
“Sorry we’re late,” my mother said. She sounded easy and breezy, but I was her kid. I could tell from her face that she was pissed and ready for a fight. Every kid could tell that about his or her own mom.
“Traffic, strikes, you know,” my father said. “Dominic, hello. I think the last time I saw you, we were all in school together. And then you tried to kill my family.”
Dominic looked from them to Angelo. “This is your plan? What, do you want to trade them for Maggie?” He began chuckling to himself. “Why have one useless person when you can have two, is that the logic?”
“Not quite,” Angelo said, still looking a little bemused. “The Collective has become infested with people like you. We think it’s time to remedy that.”