Chasing the White Lion

by James R. Hannibal

  Thet Ye imagined his parents wading through the underbrush to find him—following his trail. But he had never been in a truck before. How would they ever find him now? Sitting there with Aung Thu, he dropped his head into his hands. Thet Ye was lost. His mother would cry for sure.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-

  THREE

  RONALD REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT

  ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

  “WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HANGAR at Stafford Regional?” Talia leaned forward between Mac and Tyler after an armed security guard waved their cargo van through the general aviation gate at Reagan. In the side-view mirror, she watched the guard wave Darcy through in the second van.

  Tyler directed Mac toward a pair of hangars before answering. “New jet. New digs.”

  “New jet? You sold the Gulfstream?”

  “I traded up.”

  Mac drove out from between the hangars, and Talia caught her breath. There, on the open ramp, sat a gleaming red-and-white blend of business jet and space fighter, with a fuselage like a needle and stubby wings set back near the tail. “What is that thing?”

  “That’s the Aerion AS2, lass.” Mac eased the van to a stop near the rear of the craft. “They call her the boomless business jet.”

  “Boomless. As in a sonic boom? The AS2 is supersonic?”

  Tyler helped her out of the van, then walked along the wing, running a finger over the metallic flake paint at the leading edge. “Up to Mach 1.6 over water. Over land, where there are noise restrictions, she can run up to Mach 1.2 without generating a boom. She’s a revolution.”

  The other van pulled up next to them, and the team transferred the gear and crates to the cargo bay. Talia stayed close to Tyler while they worked. The two had argued extensively over his spending habits—the villas, the chalets, the jets. He claimed they were necessary for the circles the team worked in. She often reminded him how many children he could feed and clothe with that kind of money.

  The Gulfstream had been a sharp point of contention. And now he had traded up to the first supersonic business jet? She didn’t even want to guess at the price tag. She shouldered a black duffel from the second van and started toward the jet.

  Tyler followed with a matching bag. “It’s a lease, okay? More of a test project, really.”

  “Yeah. A test.” Mac lifted a massive hard-shell crate as if it were full of balloons. “Come to think of it, the lads at Aerion should be payin’ us.”

  She gave the Scotsman a skeptical look.

  Tyler backed him up, tossing his duffel into the bay. “I’m paying half of what I recouped when I sold the Gulfstream.” He paused to catch his breath. “More or less.”

  “How is that possible?” When his lips parted to answer, Talia stopped him. “And if you say, ‘I know a guy,’ I’ll drop this bag and shoot you where you stand.”

  His mouth snapped closed, and he headed to the vans for another load.

  She dropped her bag in the bay. “Fine. Say it.”

  “I know a guy.”

  TALIA WAS A FAN of neither heights nor aircraft, especially after her experience earlier in the year on a doomed mesospheric airship. The takeoff in the new jet didn’t help.

  “Two hundred forty kilonewtons o’ thrust, lassy,” Mac shouted, glancing back at her from the flight deck, “at twice the ratio of yer average Richie-Rich jet!”

  With all the G-forces, she had no idea how he’d managed to turn his head. “Eyes on the road, Mac!”

  Seconds later, thanks to seamless, real-time projections of the outside air covering the cabin walls, Talia watched a cat’s-eye vapor cone pass down the aircraft like an otherworld portal. She felt as if she could reach out and touch it—and be ripped right out of her seat. Five minutes later, they were over the Atlantic.

  Not until Mac settled the jet into a high-altitude cruise did Talia release her white-knuckle grip on her armrests, leaving handprints in the leather. At the press of a button, her chair swiveled to face Finn and Val. Darcy and Eddie were already up, exploring the high-tech cabin. “At—” She coughed and swallowed to gain control of her voice. “At this speed, when will we arrive in Bangkok?”

  “We’re not going to Bangkok.” Tyler stepped out from the flight deck, leaving Mac to drive.

  “But the kids—”

  “Will have to wait.” Val activated a table that rose from the floor between them. “You want to do this fast, or do it right?”

  “Both.”

  Logic and the look on Val’s face told her that wasn’t an option. Tyler slid into the seat next to the grifter. “Sorry. They don’t call it a long con for nothing.”

  “Exactly how long?”

  “One week. If we play this right, we’ll get an invite to Boyd’s Frenzy and nail him there.”

  “And find the kids.”

  “Yes. Exactly. And find the kids. Eddie, show her the plan.”

  In the aisle, the geek bounced his favorite cobalt-and-copper fidget spinner from one pinky to the other, as if trying to decide if supersonic flight affected its balance. His cold seemed to be fading. Talia wondered if he’d faked it to come on the mission, until a giant sneeze made him drop the toy.

  Darcy wiped a hand over her face. “Merci, mon chou. That was . . . quite disgusting, yes?”

  “Sorry.” He recovered the spinner and pressed a switch on the forward bulkhead.

  The chairs on the left side of the aisle spread apart, and the real-time wall projection of the clouds outside faded to a black screen. A flowchart appeared. “The plan has three stages. Three progressive cons, each with similar elements but bigger and with more flourishes than the last. All different. All connected. Stage One gets us into the Jungle network. Stage Two earns us an invitation to Bangkok. And Stage Three—”

  “Gets us into a room with the White Lion.” Talia sat back and crossed her arms. “I get it. But if not Bangkok, where are we going right now?”

  “Val?” Eddie gave her a Take it away wave.

  The grifter rested an elbow on the glossy oak table. “Stage One is the attention getter, elegant enough to raise the right eyebrows but just a taste of things to come.”

  “I still say we can do Stage One with a good burglary,” Finn said. “One night. In and out. Leaves us more time for the next two jobs.”

  Val rolled her head over like a big sister addressing an annoying little brother. “Did you not hear me say the first job has to be elegant?”

  “What I do is elegant.”

  “What you do are smash-and-grabs with unnecessarily dangerous showmanship.”

  “Hey.” Talia clapped her hands. “Finn, shut up. Val, get back on topic.”

  They both quieted down.

  Tyler shot her a glance that said Not bad.

  After a quick frown, Val tapped the screen’s control tablet. The Stage One balloon in the flowchart expanded and became a picture of silver coins. “This gag is called German Silver.”

  “So we’re going to Germany,” Talia said.

  “German Silver is not about the location, it’s about the alloy—a cheap alloy used in industrial products.”

  Eddie zoomed in on the coins. “Low-level grifters pass these off on auction websites as”—he made air quotes—“100 percent German silver. It’s a play on words. There’s not an ounce of real silver in the coins.”

  The whole idea sounded sketchy. Before Talia could protest, Tyler read her mind and waved her off. “We’re not planning to scam people on eBay. I promise.”

  Val gave him a thank you nod. “As I said. We have something more elegant in mind—and we’re ramping up the price using gold.” The pile of coins on the screen shrank away, replaced by a painting of an armored Cyrano de Bergerac look-alike, complete with curled mustache. “Meet Maximillian the Great, ruler of Bavaria.”

  “A German king,” Talia said. “But we’re not going to Germany.”

  Val rolled her eyes. “Would you let that go and listen? Maximillian the Great was a seventeenth-centu
ry duke. In the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, he got hitched . . . to Maria, wife number two . . . his niece.” She made a face and shrugged. “It was a different time. To legitimize this union, he had a horde of gold coins minted with her image at a Bohemian mine at the edge of his conquered territory.”

  “Let me guess. The coins went missing.”

  “Not just missing.” Eddie waved his hanky. “They were wiped off the historical map. A hundred wooden boxes of newly minted coins left the mine in a mule train guarded by twelve hundred Bavarian knights and their soldiers. But this was the Thirty Years’ War. The French and Swedes swept into the valley. Neither the knights nor the gold were ever seen again.”

  Lost treasure and lost artifact cons were something of a specialty for Valkyrie, like an old habit. Talia filled in the rest of the blanks. “So we pretend we found these missing gold coins—”

  “The Bavarian Thalers,” Eddie said. “The thaler is where the word dollar comes from.”

  “Whatever. We pretend we found these thalers, but in an inaccessible location. We throw out a coin or two as proof, and we con our first Jungle mark into helping us dig up the rest.”

  Val gave her a condescending smile. “Very good.” She flicked a glittering coin across the table. It had the ring of gold.

  Talia caught it and ran a thumb across a crude and unconvincing face imprinted on one side—the Bavarian niece-slash-duchess. “And you expect an experienced criminal to fall for this?” She offered the coin back to Val.

  The grifter pushed her hand away. “You go ahead and keep that one.”

  Talia did not miss the fact that Val failed to answer her last question. She hadn’t answered the first one, for that matter. “We’re running the German Silver con,” Talia said, pocketing the coin, “using the lost gold of a Bavarian duke. So, if not some town in Germany, where are we going?”

  They all answered at once, as if she were a complete and utter noob.

  “Prague.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-

  FOUR

  VILLA VÁCLAV

  RIVER VLTAVA

  PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

  “JUST ONCE”—Talia followed Tyler down a spiral stair that must have dated back to the fourteenth or fifteenth century—“I’d like to see this crew bunk down in a warehouse or a back-alley basement like honest-to-goodness thieves.”

  Tyler paused on the bottom step to look up at her, scrunching his forehead. “Why on earth would we do that?” He strolled off into a low passage. “If it helps, we are in a basement.”

  “The basement of a castle.”

  “The term is baronial hunting lodge.”

  “The term is castle.”

  The lodge-slash-castle straddled a branch of the River Vltava, which passed through the Czech Republic from north to south. Thus, the passage from the stairs opened into a combination boat dock and garage, entirely covered by the main house. Iron boat gates allowed the river through from both sides.

  Looking at the ancient stone dock, Talia imagined Bohemian barons and baronesses arriving under torchlight in unicorn-prowed boats or sneaking away in silent skiffs, depending on the century. But the garage portion had clearly been added in the last decade. The checkered epoxy floor gave it away, as did the halogen lights, electric doors, and aluminum worktables.

  She and Tyler crossed an arched bridge, passing over a gray runabout.

  Finn met them on the other side. He drew a red LED bulb from the cardboard box in his arms. “Hey, boss, you have any idea how to install these light globes?”

  Tyler thrust his chin toward a Mercedes van, rocking on its tires, under the weight of an unseen force. “Ask Mac. Vehicular lighting is his department.”

  A hot, acrid scent filled Talia’s nostrils. Near the dock’s wrought-iron gate, Darcy had set up a mad alchemist’s mini-lab. Bags of silver disks and gray powder lay open beside bubbling flasks. The chemist, wearing big orange gloves and a respiratory mask, poured molten metal into ceramic forms.

  Talia poked Tyler’s arm. “Is she transmuting lead into gold?”

  “Close enough.” He snapped his fingers, as if the joke had reminded him of some important task, and hurried off.

  Everyone moved with a sense of urgency and purpose. Everyone seemed to know what to do. Except Talia.

  “Yoo-hoo. Over here.”

  Talia heard Val’s call but didn’t see her.

  “You look like you could use some direction.” The grifter appeared at the door of a dressing room composed of cubicle panels. The red hair was gone, changed to a light golden brown, nowhere near her natural dark color—or what Talia assumed was her natural color. She wore jeans and a pink quilted biker jacket with leopard-print pumps and a matching belt.

  “And you look like you could use some fashion sense.”

  “Funny. I’ll admit I felt out of place at your little church. But this is a den of thieves. My domain. Better to save the jokes and put that eidetic mind in learning mode.”

  The new hair color and the Jersey Shore look were not the only things Talia found strange about Val’s appearance. Her features had changed. Her eyes looked larger, her nose and chin a little smaller. She opened a makeup case and flipped on a lighted mirror, and without so much as a by-your-leave, sat Talia on a stool and dabbed her cheek with cleansing cream.

  Talia caught her wrist. “What are you doing?”

  “I thought you wanted in on this job.”

  She did. For the little girl and her friends. “Yeah. Okay.” Talia let Val go to work.

  In short order, Val had Talia’s scant makeup removed and began applying a fresh coat. “We could be sisters, you and I.”

  That was a stretch. “Cousins, maybe. Or better yet, aunt and niece.”

  “What did I say about saving the jokes? Seriously, I think we could pull it off. You’re an old soul.” Val dropped a hand to her hip. “And I have a youthful face and figure. We could meet in the middle.”

  Talia would have nodded if Val hadn’t caught her chin to run a brush across her cheekbones. After reviewing the exchange in her head, Talia drew back. “Wait. Are you saying I don’t have a youthful face and figure?”

  “Not at all, darling.”

  The makeup application continued, with pointers along the way. Val showed Talia how to change every feature of her face, even her eyes from almond-shaped to round. Satisfied—eventually—she dragged over a rack of clothes and held dresses up to Talia’s shoulders, settling on a short velvety number. “Try this on.”

  “No.”

  Val sighed and returned the dress to the rack. “Well, we’re going to have to do something. We can’t stick with”—she gestured up and down at Talia’s jeans and blouse—“practical and rugged.”

  “Rugged? Now you’re just being mean. What’s going on?”

  “Eddie will explain. How’s your Brooklyn accent?”

  “Nonexistent.”

  “Then you’d better work on it. And then there’s your hair.” Val dug around in a box and brought out a light brown hair swatch. She held it next to Talia’s head, crinkled her nose, and tossed it back. Her next attempt was a little darker but not much.

  “I’ll be wearing a wig?”

  Val shook her head, trying a third swatch. “Wigs are a dead giveaway if the wind picks up. Dyes are better.”

  Talia had never dyed her hair, never in her whole life. “You’re not changing my hair.”

  She’d been successful in staving off the dress, but Val stuck to her guns on the hair. “Open your mind, darling. Get into the spirit of the grift. Besides, if I’m not mistaken, Jordan put a target on your back. When you were Vera Novak, did you change your appearance?”

  Talia’s puffed-up stance deflated. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Then guess what we have to do now.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-

  FIVE

  VILLA VÁCLAV

  RIVER VLTAVA

  PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

&n
bsp; THE NEW HAIR COLOR WAS NICE. Val had done good work. But looking at herself in the standing mirror, Talia found it a level of different for which she was not prepared. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The Farm class on disguises had taken less than an afternoon. No one took it seriously, especially not the instructors. Voice changers and masks were a Hollywood joke, not a real thing. The Agency depended on clothing changes, camera evasion, and fake IDs.

  With the addition of a skirt, blouse, and jacket combo Val called academic-chic, Talia didn’t look like the same person. But after two assassination attempts, that was the whole point.

  Out in the garage, Talia and Val found Eddie arranging keyboards and monitors atop a stack of cargo crates. He turned to see her coming and snapped the fingers of both hands. “Great. You’re ready. Give me a victory pose.”

  “A what?” Talia asked.

  “This.” Val locked her fingers in Talia’s and raised their hands together, tilting her hips and smiling at the camera in triumph. “Smile, darling.”

  Mac unfurled a green screen behind them, and Eddie snapped a picture with his phone. He checked the screen. “Not the best. But it’ll do.”

  An instant later, the photo appeared on the largest of the monitors. Talia and Val stood in their odd pose—Val triumphant, Talia less so—with the Brooklyn Bridge behind them. Once she saw the two of them together, Talia understood Val’s earlier comment.

  The grifter gave her a friendly-but-a-little-too-forceful shake of the shoulders. “I told you we could be sisters.”

  The photo shrank to become the main image in a webzine article. Eddie added a tilted headline.

  LOCAL TREASURE HUNTERS FIND PIRATE GOLD

  The geek made a Ta-da! gesture. “Meet the Macciano Sisters. Long Island’s treasure-hunting queens. The sisters happen to have a meeting on the books with our first mark this evening.”

  Talia squinted at the article, reading the first few lines—something about William Kidd’s lost gold. “Our first mark?”

  Eddie tried to answer but sneezed into his hanky instead. He tapped the keyboard with his elbow. Another article appeared beside the first, a legitimate news release touting the rapid rise of an Albanian broker in the Czech Republic’s financial sector. The photo was a power shot of a sharply dressed man in his thirties with green stock tickers flowing behind.