A Beautiful Heist (20 page)

I was pulled out of a deep sleep by an odd, loud noise. My eyes opened and slowly focused. I saw Ethan’s face. Memory came surging back. My face heated up and my heart sang
hallelujah
! I didn’t remember every detail but I was quite confident that it involved some rather marvelous sex.

“Mmmm ...” I said. I tousled my hair and stretched kittenishly. “Hi, you ... What was that sound, just now?”

Ethan was propped up on pillows, looking bemused. “You, my dear. You were snoring.”

I froze. “You’re kidding.” I could feel the flush of mortification rise up my bare neck.

“Nope,” he said. “I was just considering flipping you over to make you stop.”

Which is exactly what one hopes a new lover says the morning after. Snoring? Excellent, Cat.

But I wasn’t going to let the humiliation ruin my afterglow.

Unfortunately, I noticed something else was threatening that. A subtle undertow: there was a small part of me that wished it had been Jack’s bed I’d woken up in.

I scolded myself. That could never be.

 

When I got home from Ethan’s apartment there was a large padded envelope waiting for me. More specifically, my neighbor Bradley was waiting for me, holding the envelope. At the precise moment I’d arrived at my apartment door, fumbling with my keys, his door had flung open and there he stood. The guy needed a hobby.

“Thanks, Bradley. You’re such a help,” I said tonelessly.

“No problem,” he said, with a condescending smile. “I noticed you didn’t come home last night, so I wanted to be sure you got this first thing. It’s not from the IRS, like the last one, though—”

Slam.
(My door, closing in his face.)

I glanced at the return address—my tech lab—and beelined for my bedroom. I opened my closet and pushed aside stacks of shoe boxes, scarves, and clothes, and burrowed my way to the very back of the closet. There was a small camouflaged touch pad here. It illuminated as I pressed my fingertip to it and the back of the closet slid open, revealing a hidden room. The lights clicked on automatically as I stepped through.

Creating this room involved sacrificing precious closet space, which had been a struggle. In the end I’d decided that staying out of prison would be worth it.

My room contained various tools, weapons, disguises, and a top-of-the-line safe. There was also a secret exit: a hole in the ceiling that connected with the building’s air vents. In the event of a raid I could lock myself in here and escape.

I shredded into the package and tossed the lab report aside; the scientific details were not what I was looking for. It was the product I was concerned with. From the envelope I carefully pulled out a pair of very special gloves. A small pouch was built into the index finger of each glove, containing a drop of fake blood. This was what, if all went to plan, would fool the biometric sensors.

I held the gloves gingerly and my skin tingled. I was almost ready. Now all I needed was the gas mask. I frowned, picked up my phone and called my tech guy.

“Sorry, Cat. Still not here,” said Lucas. “Something went screwy with the shipping people, and it looks like it won’t be here for another week, possibly.”

I closed my eyes. “I don’t have a week.” I only had three days to go before Sandor’s deadline.

“Sorry. There’s nothing I can do,” Lucas said.

I flopped down on my chair after hanging up. I had a decision to make. Option A: I could wait the week for the mask to arrive. But then it would be too late. I’d lose the job. All my work, all the risk, for nothing. Option B: do the job anyway.

I compressed my jaw. “Well,” I said quietly to myself, “I’ll just have to be perfect, and not trigger the alarm.”

When I exited my secret room into my closet, I immediately stopped. All the hairs on my arms stood up. There was someone in my apartment. It was a sixth sense, I was sure—it was something about the sound, the feel in the air. Either way, there was someone there, and I didn’t know who.

I stayed motionless, allowing my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the closet, considering my options. I then peered through a crack in the doorframe.

Sitting on the end of my bed, facing the closet expectantly, was Brooke.

I stepped out angrily. “Brooke, what the hell?”

“Ah, there you are,” she said. Her tone suggested I was a few minutes late meeting her for coffee. “You know, I’ve been admiring this piece of equipment of yours.” She picked up my fiber-optic bendy-wire from beside her on the bed. “I love this little thing—where did you get it? I really should get one myself. Although I must say, Cat, it’s a little sloppy leaving it lying around.”

My face burned with irritation. “Give me that,” I said. “Seriously, Brooke, do you mind? Also—what do you think you’re doing in here?”

Brooke shrugged and handed me the bendy-wire, ignoring my question. “So, Cat, what job are you prepping for, anyway? What are you cooking up?” She craned her neck to try to look past me, into my closet and the secret room behind. “I must say, it doesn’t seem like an AB&T-sanctioned job. In fact, I’m not sure they’ve got you on assignment right now. So what are you up to?” She applied an expression of mock concern to her face. “Would they be happy to learn you’re moonlighting?”

I panicked—was there any way she could have seen my special-order glove? No. Impossible. Still, this was a bad line of questioning. I could not have Brooke finding out about the Fabergé job.

But then something else occurred to me. I narrowed my eyes. “Brooke, how are you so in tune with what’s going on at AB&T anyway? Are you sleeping with someone there, or something?” The look on her face told me that was exactly what was going on. “Oh, Christ, Brooke, you are. Do you have any principles at all?”

She gazed at her fingernails with boredom.

It took me less than five minutes to eject her from my apartment. She grinned the whole way out, however. I suppose it was mission accomplished for her. She’d rattled me.

Locked inside my apartment again, I sent an urgent message to Templeton warning him that Brooke Sinclair was having inappropriate contact and communication with someone at AB&T. He needed to screen all his people carefully and give strict hush orders. I wished I could tell him more, but that was impossible. I could only hope Brooke would learn nothing else, until I’d finished the job.

One more day. Just one more day, and it would all be over.

 

The next morning I clipped along the sidewalk in the financial district of downtown Seattle in sensible pumps and a navy pencil skirt, my hair pulled back into a sleek ponytail. It was a bright Indian summer day with a warm wind and an apple-crisp sky. And I was trying hard to be positive about the task at hand. I was going to this interview solely for my dad, but I had to make a good show of it. Part of me said this was a completely ridiculous waste of time. But I was hoping that if I could just make this show of good faith for my father, it could be the first step to mending our relationship. I had to try. So I needed to get my head in the game. I needed to think: balance sheets, accounts receivable, taxes....

Nice building,
I thought, as my eyes were drawn up the sleek lines of a steel and glass tower that I was striding past. Reflexively, I started mapping out a way to scale it.

Stop, Cat. Focus
. I clenched my teeth.

A massive helmet of single-process blond sat atop the head of the receptionist at the accounting firm’s suite. She smiled pleasantly as the telephone bleeped insistently on her desk; several lines were flashing on hold as I introduced myself.

I sat on a fabric-covered chair in the waiting room that smelled of carpet cleaner and thumbed through an old copy of
Reader’s Digest.
I was eventually shown into another room, to stand in front of a panel of two men and a woman. They were all dressed in virtually identical gray flannel suits. After the initial polite introductions and firm handshakes, they offered me a seat.

“So, Catherine. We must tell you: before he retired, your father was one of the best. And now he tells us you’re interested in the accounting world.”

“Oh yes,” I said. “Very interested. I like money, anyway!” My attempt at levity fell flat. All I received were expressionless gazes peering over reading glasses.

Memo to self: Tax accountants and jokes are not a natural fit.

“Listen, we want you to know that this is a very dynamic place to work,” said the older gentleman. His jowls jiggled slightly as he spoke. “We pride ourselves on being a fun workplace. This isn’t your regular nine-to-fiver!” he indicated vaguely, sweeping around the office with a gesture.

“Mmm. Yes, I can see that,” I said, unable to resist shifting my eyes right and left, to see if I could make out what he was referring to. I had no idea.

No matter. All I had to do was get through the interview so they could provide a good report to my dad.

They began asking me questions about myself. Standard interview stuff about my strengths, my weaknesses, what I typically ate for breakfast, that sort of thing. And I must say, things were going very well. I caught an exchanged glance between the two men that consisted of pleasantly surprised smiles and a briefly raised eyebrow. I made no further joke attempts, and answered their questions pleasantly.

And then the woman on the panel asked me, “So, Catherine, tell us
why
you want this job. What is it that fascinates you about being an accountant, exactly?”

All three were smiling at me, expectantly. I got the feeling the job was mine if I wanted it. Silence was stretching out. The woman’s smile twitched ever so slightly. And I was staring at a stapler that sat atop the desk before me. It was a perfectly ordinary stapler. Heavy black metal, chrome trim,
Standard
engraved in script along the side. And that stapler, well, it belonged there. It made sense. It was fulfilling its destiny there. Doing exactly what it was best at doing; doing exactly what it was put on this earth to do.

At that moment, the reality of the situation hit me, square between the eyes like one of those toy arrows with suction cups on the end. This—me sitting here, wearing Clarks and panty hose and feigning interest in the responsible world of grown-up work—was all wrong.

“You know,” I said, looking at all three panel members, “I have to go, actually.”

More silence followed. All I could hear was the buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead and the faint rhythmic chugging of a photocopier in the next office.

The woman tilted her head like a bird, observing me quizzically. “Um, I beg your pardon—”

“Yes. Ah, I’m terribly sorry,” I mumbled. I grabbed my purse and briefcase and umbrella and hurried out of the room. As I closed the door behind me I caught a few confused murmurs following me out.

I burst from that office feeling like I could breathe again, like everything had bloomed into color, like I could fly into the sky if I wanted to.

And then a pinprick deflated it all. I had no idea how I was going to explain this to my father. I forcefully pushed the thought away. I couldn’t worry about that right now. Because I had something more pressing on my schedule at the moment. I had a casino to bust into.

Jack and Wesley strolled into the Starlight Casino. The warehouse-sized space was a writhing mass of flashing neon, bleating machines, and continuously chinking coins. Jack allowed a small smile and breathed deeply. The Fabergé was here somewhere.

But this was no leisurely treasure hunt. If those monks knew the location of the Egg, Jack was certain the Caliga did, too. And if they hadn’t already, they would soon be hiring a thief to carry out the job. Jack knew that the Caliga had lost the old art of thievery a long time ago.

He glanced around the casino floor—at the rows of permed hair at slot machines, the students gathered around the roulette wheel. Was the Caliga’s thief here somewhere? Staking things out, just as they were? He shuddered slightly. He hoped the contracted thief was valuable to the Caliga—otherwise he’d be dead the moment he turned the Fabergé over to them.

“So? What do you think?” Wesley asked.

Jack scanned the room. They needed somewhere to sit and discreetly watch. “I think we need to get a drink.”

The two men ordered whiskey at the bar.

“Okay, so where do we start?” Wesley said.

“Security center, control room, I’d say.” Jack sipped his drink and gazed out over the casino floor. “We’re going to need to know everything about their systems. That’ll be the quickest way.”

“How are we going to get in?”

“Good question.”

“Well, you’re not an FBI agent for nothing,” Wesley said, shrugging. “You don’t have that badge
for decoration
, do you?”

Jack turned to Wesley’s smiling face. He closed his eyes. “No. No way.”

“Come on, Jack, we need that info. It’s the best way. We can go in for some official reason or other, poke around, scope out the system, ask a few questions....”

Shit. Jack could envision a million ways this plan would end badly.

“You know what I’d like to know?” Jack said irritably. “I’d like to know how I ended up in this spot, exactly. Who was the genius, all those goddamn generations ago, who chose this nice little quest to pass on to his unsuspecting descendants?” He looked away, toward the endless rows of slot machines. A middle-aged couple in jeans and sweatshirts sat in front of “Pot of Gold” machines sipping draft beer from plastic cups. “But I guess nobody will ever know, will they?” He took a slug of his whiskey.

He felt Wesley’s eyes on him. He turned to see the man staring at him with surprise. “You don’t know? Your father didn’t explain this to you?”

“Explain what?”

“Jack, the lost Gifts of the Magi is the legacy of thieves. And we know exactly how it happened.”

“What are you talking about?”

Wesley put his drink on the bar. He lowered his voice. “The Bible doesn’t say what happened to the gold, frankincense, and myrrh that the Magi brought. But there’s a strong folk legend that it was stolen by two thieves. You’ve heard that there were two thieves crucified beside Jesus himself?”

Jack struggled to remember his Sunday-school days. “Yes, okay, that sounds familiar.”

“So after the thieves stole the Gifts, they argued and fought, because one thief began to regret what they’d done. He also didn’t believe what the other thief believed: that the Magi were Zoroastrian priests and astrologers, and they had charged their Gifts with great magical power.”

“Power?” Jack said, not bothering to hide the disdain in his voice. Of course he’d heard the idea that the Gifts had mystical power. It was something the Caliga believed. Jack hadn’t believed it the first time he’d heard it; he wasn’t about to be converted now.

Wesley shrugged. “Yeah, I know, cheesy right? Well, the unremorseful thief believed it—and it was one of those take over the world, total domination type scenarios. Anyway, the thieves betrayed each other. They tried to swindle each other and smuggle the Gifts away. They roped some of their shady colleagues into things—everyone’s lying to everyone else. But before you know it, people lose track of the Gifts in all that shuffle. Nobody knows who’s got them.”

Jack narrowed his eyes. “So you’re saying—that’s how they became lost?” He shifted on his bar stool and leaned forward slightly.

Wesley nodded. “In trying to screw the other guy, both thieves ended up screwed. And then,
ba-da-boom,
they’re both up for execution. Before his crucifixion, the remorseful thief made his family promise that they would retrieve the Gifts, and return them to the church. That group flourished. Honed the skills of thievery, ready for the opportunity to take the Gifts back.”

Jack was fascinated now. His whiskey sat forgotten on the bar. “And the bad guy?”

“Yeah, well, he gave his sons a mission also.”

Jack nodded. “To retrieve the Gifts.”

“You got it. And, by doing that, he gave rise to some real nasty pieces of work.”

“Ah. Caliga Rapio.” So that’s where they came from. It explained the Caliga’s crazed obsession with unlocking the Gifts’ power. Jack shuddered. He knew the Caliga’s plans to complete this task involved a ritual human sacrifice. His father had told him that much. That had been one reason to find the Gifts before the Caliga did.

“So how did they end up concealed in a Fabergé Egg, exactly?”

“It was your father’s generation that pieced this together, I believe,” Wesley said. “They’d managed to uncover the true path of the Gifts. They’d been smuggled, stolen, and traded on the black market, and finally made their way to imperial Russia. There, Fabergé himself transformed them into the Aurora Egg. After the Russian Revolution, of course, the Gifts were once again lost, underground, to resurface here.”

Jack was motionless, now, staring down at the rings of condensation on the bar’s surface. At once he felt aware of his own insignificance in the face of such a monumental concern.

The gears of his mind began to turn. And he came up with an idea to get them into the casino security room. Nicole had been doing an investigation involving several casinos about a month ago. The Starlight was one of them, if memory served. He could use that information as a pretext. And use his badge.

Would he get away with it, though? But what other choice did they have? He rubbed his face. “All right,” Jack said with resignation. “Let’s do it.”

 

The moment I entered the casino I was thrown into a carnival of blinking lights and glittering colors, electronic bleeping, and choking clouds of cigarette smoke. A spontaneous burst of cheering erupted from a far corner. Three men in Armani and a woman in a Vivienne Westwood cocktail dress and diamonds strolled across the floor toward the high-stakes room, martinis in hand.

And me? I walked in wearing mom jeans. You know—the high-waisted, pleated kind that make your butt look enormous and your legs like stumps? My white aerobics shoes squeaked on the marble floor of the lobby. My hair was buried beneath a mousy brown wig and my face was concealed behind oversize glasses circa 1983.

My first choice of disguise for tonight had been a hot, sequined minidress and glossy black china-doll wig: high-roller style. Or—better still—the arm candy of a high roller. On further reflection I had decided that such an appearance would be too conspicuous. Extra attention was not what I wanted tonight.

Which is why I was walking into the casino wearing a shapeless, silk-screened sweatshirt that read
Life is a beach in St. Petersburg, Florida!
Tonight I was the housewife escapee. A night out playing the slots. I must say, my strategy appeared to be working perfectly. Nobody spared me a second glance.

My heart pumped with excitement. This was the moment I’d been waiting for—the culmination of all my preparation and planning. Of course I’d have felt a little better if I had that damn gas mask, but I did not want to get into that again. For that, and many reasons, failure was not an option tonight. I would leave the casino tonight with the Fabergé or die trying.

I wound my way through the bonging, blinking slot machines, heading to the far end of the casino.

Then, turning a corner, I spotted someone who did not belong. Seated at a twenty-five-cent slot machine—Action Stacked Diamonds, to be exact—was Brooke.

I slipped back behind the row of machines. My mind raced: had she seen me just then? Then my shoulders dropped. Did it matter? Clearly, she was here because she knew I was here. Whether she’d seen me just now, or five minutes ago, made no difference.

My only hope—that she didn’t know exactly what job I was doing here. If she knew I was headed to the basement vault, wouldn’t she already be there, to catch me in the act?

If I was still going to do this job, I had to ditch her somehow. I immediately thought of the woman in the Vivienne Westwood and the men in Armani—who were, let’s face it, examples of much more logical targets for me.

A plan formulated in my brain.

I circuited back and strolled near where Brooke had been. I stayed visible, allowing her to see me, but not being too obvious about it.

Then I made my way to the high-stakes poker room, knowing that Brooke would follow and watch my every move.

I just needed one chance. I observed the sparkly people strolling in and out of the room, gauging who was likely to be a guest of the hotel, who’d had a few too many martinis....

And then I found a perfect mark. A woman, blowsy and rich, lots of hairspray, fumbling with her purse as she teetered toward the restroom. I made my move and bumped into her on a cross-path.

“Oh, pardon me!” I said, bending to help her pick up the sprawled contents of her purse.

She took in my outfit and glared at me with a pickled glower of contempt. I smiled into her heavily mascara-smudged eyes and pocketed the key card for her hotel suite.

I melted away into the depths of the slot machines and headed in the general direction of the elevators that went up to the hotel.

That should do it. Brooke would think I was going to hit the woman’s suite. It would be a tidy little job, actually, the sort of thing I’d done a hundred times. I snaked my way through the casino, losing myself—and Brooke—through the labyrinth of slot machines. I doubled back, again, and returned just outside the elevator lobby. I peered around a slot machine. Yes, there was Brooke, waiting for an elevator going up. She’d taken the bait.

Smiling, I slipped away to the far end of the casino, to the infrequently used elevators. Including the one that went to the basement. By the time Brooke figured out I wasn’t breaking into any of the suites upstairs, I’d be gone without a trace.

I pressed the call button. The elevator arrived. The instant before walking inside, I flicked a switch in my pocket, which activated my anti-CCTV sensor. A variant on my usual gadget, this one blocked the feed of cameras within range. Too many cameras in the casino—I couldn’t possibly deactivate them all manually. Would be too obvious, anyway.

I knew there was a camera inside the elevator car. It would now show a picture of an empty elevator. I casually strolled inside. These elevators weren’t used often, so I was alone.

Of course if anyone had really been paying attention in the control room and bothered to match up the two feeds of the elevator lobby and the interior of this elevator, they would have seen a housewife disappear into an elevator. But I was counting on my utterly dishwater appearance to cause the security staff to ignore me on the video feeds.

I attached my earpiece and clicked it on.

“Okay, ready to go, Gladys?” I said in a low voice.

“Ready, dear.” At that point, Gladys took over control of the elevator. She’d hacked in from her bungalow. I knew she’d disabled the car when it stopped, hovering in midair.

Which was my cue to move. I only had a few minutes before somebody made the call to the elevator company to fix the broken lift and I had things to do before then. I unpacked the climbing gear that had been concealed beneath my shapeless sweatshirt, wrapped around my body.

I used the railing of the elevator to hoist myself up toward the ceiling of the car; I stretched upward and clung on to the tiles, pushed the escape hatch up and away, then pulled myself up with all my strength, triceps and shoulders burning. I levered out and twisted, to sit on the roof of the elevator car.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I sat, surrounded by cables and the smell of pulley grease and brake smoke. I paused a moment, slowing my breath.

 

Jack folded his arms and squinted at the camera feed in the control room, but the screens were too far away—the staff in there wouldn’t let him anywhere near them. He probably could have pushed it, made a big issue out of it, but he didn’t want to draw attention to himself.

After a few minutes in this room Jack felt hollow with discouragement. There was nothing that was going to be easy about this job. How the hell were they going to get into the vault? This casino had rock-solid, tight security. And nasty aspects, too. Not that he’d gleaned much detail so far, just a hint of biometrics and booby traps.

Wesley had remained well away from the control room, continuing to scout the situation on the floor. Jack wondered about Wesley’s skill as a thief. Was he up to the job? His mind flashed to Cat. This would be the sort of challenge she would love. But there was no way he would ever call on her; no way he would want to get her wrapped up in this.

Jack strained again to see the CCTV screen. This was ridiculous. He wasn’t getting anywhere this way. He was going to have to probe deeper, which meant he was going to have to carry his bluff a little further.

A bulky supervisor with doughnut powder on his upper lip strode past Jack to stand beside a young man in shirtsleeves at a small workstation. “Elevator nine is out,” said the supervisor, snapping his fingers to get the man’s attention. “Call the repair company.”