The Syndicate (Timewaves Book 1) (28 page)

“IS THIS A
bad dream?” I groaned. “Am I going to look down and realize I’m naked, too?”

“That would improve this situation exponentially,” quipped Gaige, though his trademark grin was nowhere in sight.

“Backdoor,” Cyrus said brusquely. “It leads to an alley. Let’s just hope the police don’t have people posted there already.”

Gaige shoved the leather book back into place. As he and I followed Cyrus to the rear of the store, my partner stowed the scanner in the toolkit attached to his belt. Crouching low to avoid detection, the three of us wound through the many obstacles on the path to our only viable exit.

“We need to lessen the chances of us all being caught. Once we reach the alleyway, split up,” Cyrus coached over his shoulder as we made it to the back room, careful to keep his voice just above a whisper. “You both know the drill. Avoid capture at all costs. There is an incendiary device built into the side of your toolkits—it’s the small metal disc that looks like an old watch battery. If you are caught, or believe you will be, activate it and toss the whole kit. You’ll have approximately ten seconds before the device detonates. Once activated, it can’t be deactivated, though. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Gaige and I answered as one.

From outside, the officer with the bullhorn repeated his command, this time tacking on a warning that we had until the count of ten to comply.

“Un…duex…trois…,” he began, pausing between the numbers, as if really expecting we might give ourselves up.

“Synchronize your watches. We’ll meet at the car in one hour. If you can’t make the rendezvous, head for the townhouse on foot as soon as you are able. If you do get caught, get word to Ines through customs and we’ll go from there,” Cyrus continued calmly, undeterred by the ticking clock the officers had just set.

Still in the lead, Cyrus reached the backdoor. He hurried through, Gaige close behind, just as the man with the bullhorn shouted, “Dix!”

The front door to Shakespeare and Company flew open with a bang.

Instinctively, I glanced behind me. Wrong move. My shoulder struck the corner of a table, causing a lamp to tumble over the side. I was quick, but not quick enough to catch it. The lamp shattered when it hit the floor.

“Stassi!” Gaige hissed, his voice so distant that I wondered if he’d actually spoken at all.

“Back there!” a man shouted.

“Go! I’ll catch up,” I whisper-yelled to my partner, unsure whether he heard me over the noise the officers were making.

Flashlight beams crisscrossed the room. While the contacts were adaptable, meaning the sudden brightness did not blind me, the constant switching on-and-off of the night vision was dizzying.

Heart thundering in my chest, I dove through the open doorway into the alleyway beyond. Gaige and Cyrus were nowhere in sight. Behind me, I heard the door to the back room slam open.

Crap.

There was no time to run. I needed to hide.

“I am sure I saw someone go out there,” I heard one perplexed officer say in French.

I dropped to my knees and slammed my back against the brick wall behind me.

“Did you hear that?” a man asked.

“I think it came from the alleyway,” a second one commented.

I swore silently. If they looked outside, I was done.

Or was I?

A window ledge protruded several inches from the wall, with trashcans sitting underneath. There was just enough space behind the cans for someone thin, someone like me. The noise I’d make getting back there would be a tipoff, but what choice did I have?

One other choice,
I thought, grinning as a plan developed in my mind.

I snatched the lid off one of the trashcans, and flung it as hard and fast as I could down the alleyway. It landed with a loud thunk, followed by several more thunks as it skidded across the pavement. Rats scurried from hiding places at the sudden commotion, adding their own soundtrack to the impromptu symphony I’d started.

Perfect.

I eased down to the ground and pressed my body against the brick wall beneath the window ledge, holding my breath.

“We’ve got one! We’ve got one!” an overzealous officer yelled excitedly from inside.

I dared a peek over my head. A mustached man was leaning out of the window above me, waving a baton back and forth like it was a butterfly net.

“I do not see anything,” the officer in the window declared dejectedly. “Where did he go? He was just here.”

“Move. Move. Let me see.”

A second man replaced the first. This one I recognized—Inspector Dumb Dumb. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disheartened. The guy was definitely incompetent, but he was also determined. If he caught me in another comprising situation, I wouldn’t be able to talk myself out of it.

“Rats, you imbecile. Your imagination is playing tricks on you, unless you want to tell me that our criminal has a long tail and whiskers? No? I did not think so. Finish searching the premises.” His voice grew fainter as he spoke.

I counted to thirty, and then eased from my hiding place. Sticking to the shadows, I jogged up the alley.

Shakespeare and Company was not the only establishment on this street with a backdoor. It seemed most of stores had an additional exit, whether for trash or in case of a fire, or just because. And most of them were labeled. That was how I ended up crouched in front of a green door with peeling gold lettering.

Bonheur’s: Fine Jewelry since 1435
.

I knew I shouldn’t. I
knew
I shouldn’t.

One close call per evening was more than enough. And yet, when was I ever going to get a chance to search the store at my leisure? Well, maybe tomorrow night. Or the next night, or the one after that. Still, I was already there. And though Gaige was onboard with me running a side mission while in Paris, Cyrus probably was not. With him staying at the townhouse, this might be my only shot at snooping without having to make excuses to my boss.

“Just do it,” I muttered.

After checking to make sure the door was in fact locked, I inserted a flat metal object with a small scanner on the end. The display lit up a moment later, depicting the lock schematic. I found the appropriate tools in my kit. Three seconds later, I was sliding through the backdoor to Bonheur’s.

Where to start? Records? Invoices? Sales receipts? I didn’t know. This was the farthest I’d ever come in the search for my necklace’s origins. Until stumbling across Bonheur’s the day before, all of my leads had fizzled.

This one might crack the case wide open
, whispered the eternal optimist in my head.

I smiled. That cheerful voice wasn’t my own; it belonged to the living, breathing, everyday bright spot in my life—Molly. Man, I missed her.

My own pessimistic nature, at least where all things family-related were concerned, began to creep in, overshadowing Molly’s influence.

Why am I here? What am I even looking for? Is this a mistake?

These questions were not new. Since joining the syndicate, I’d asked myself the same ones too many times to count. Chasing the past was in my job description. But that was someone else’s past, someone else’s coveted objects, someone else’s link to their ancestors.

Instinctively, my fingers closed around the necklace. The cool metal against my even colder palm felt good, reassuring.

Recent sales information might be kept near the registers, but anything older was more likely kept somewhere in the back. Nearby was a tidy alcove that looked promising.

Meticulously labeled file cabinets sat beside a rectangular desk with a pencil cup in one corner and a calculator in the other. A portrait of a man from a different era—a king, from the look of it—hung above the desk, appearing very out of place.

An hour later, I was dying. Searching electronic files was
so
much easier, and faster, than manually thumbing through paper ones. According to their records, Bonheur’s had not sold a necklace matching the description of mine in the last decade, nor had one been commissioned. Like our search of Shakespeare and Company, it occurred to me that my methods were too haphazard. I needed to approach this logically, though the sales records had seemed like a logical place to start at the time.

I stood in the center of the small office and tried to tune out the nagging worry that the information I sought wasn’t there. All I knew for sure was that a woman physically present in Paris sometime during 1924 had been wearing my necklace. That didn’t mean she bought it in 1924. Maybe it had been a gift. Maybe she’d been borrowing it from a friend. Maybe it wasn’t the same necklace at all.

No, I decided. Matthieu Bonheur had recognized the locket. He’d said it had no equal, whatever that meant. To me, his odd choice of words meant that the piece was a custom job. And from Matthieu, I knew for certain that Sebastian Bonheur, who’d been retired for several years, had crafted it. So maybe the real issue was that the records in the filing cabinets didn’t go back far enough.

“What do you think?” I asked the portrait above the desk. Dead, black eyes stared back at me, the full pink lips unmoving. “A lot of help you are.”

I leaned closer to read the signature on the bottom of the painting, down near the gilded frame. It was illegible. Frustrated by my inability to decipher meaning from anything in that fracking office, I pounded the wall beside the portrait. An almost imperceptible click sounded, and then the painting of some long-dead royal guy swung towards me.

“Whoa,” I breathed.

It only took me a second to get over my shock. I pulled the frame until the painting was perpendicular to the wall, revealing a safe. A quick search of the toolkit turned up the necessary instruments. I had the correct three-digit combination entered in under a minute.

The safe was relatively narrow, approximately two feet across, but deep enough that I needed to reach my entire arm up to the shoulder inside to brush the back wall with my fingertips. As expected, the contents were incredibly valuable. High quality round, marquise, and princess cut diamonds were sorted by size and placed inside clear plastic pouches in wooden boxes. Precious stones—rubies, sapphires, emeralds—were divided and stored according to the vibrancy of each colored stone. The semiprecious gems—aquamarines, pearls, amethysts, garnets, opals—were placed in labeled drawers of a miniature bookcase. They were all so beautiful, shining brilliantly out at me like a rainbow after a rainstorm.

Several velvet boxes were stacked in the center of the safe. I opened them one by one, crossing my fingers that just one of the necklaces, earrings, or broaches inside would provide me some insight. Gorgeous as those finished pieces were, none of them bore even a slight resemblance to my locket.

Beneath the stack, I found a black leather portfolio with Bonheur’s signature five-leaf clover on the front cover. I traced the clover with my finger, my heart pounding so loudly that I could hear the rush of blood in my ears.

This is it,
I thought, though I was unable to say why.

I hesitated, afraid to open the portfolio for fear the documents inside would prove a major letdown. Never in my life was I so happy to be wrong.

Inside there were four sheets of paper. The first was a repair order. From the black and white photograph, it appeared the damaged item was a pair of men’s sapphire cufflinks. An up-close inspection of the filigree border around the square perimeters sent my pulse spiking.

It’s a match. I’d bet my life on it,
I thought excitedly.

I scanned the repair order for a customer name. There, in the bottom left corner, was a name printed in precise block letters: M.L. Worchansky. Next to Worchansky’s signature was an address in France. And the pickup date was listed as February 17, 1925.

My heart was so light it could have been made of clouds. Worchansky, whoever he or she was, had those cufflinks in his or her possession at that very moment. This was a solid lead. I could go and actually speak with a living, breathing person with knowledge of…what, exactly? Well, I wasn’t sure. Worchansky’s cufflinks had to be part of a matching set with my locket. The overall design aesthetic—a large sapphire center stone surrounded by gold filigree—was not unique in and of itself, but the way the gold threads wove together to form a border of interlocking symbols was. It couldn’t be a coincidence.