Uncommon Criminals (9 page)

A
melia Bennett had not become the highest-ranking woman in Interpol’s lowest-ranking department by not being able to read between lines or connect dots. Most people would see working at the world headquarters as a promotion—a step up. To the outside observer, Interpol’s main office was the epitome of crime-solving for the twenty-first century, and yet to Amelia Bennett it was a like a prison.

But with a far more interesting basement.

Strolling through headquarters that Friday morning, she had a stack of dusty files under her arm and a look of steely resolve on her face, and when she reached her boss’s door, she walked right in without knocking.

“Bennett!” Artie Dupree snapped. “What are you—” But the sound of fifteen pounds of dusty files and logbooks hitting the desk cut him off. “What is all this?’

“Evidence,” Amelia said.

The man fingered one of the files in front of him. “The Turkish Dagger job? That happened in 1916, didn’t it?”

Amelia crossed her arms and smiled. “Yes, it did.”

Then it was her boss’s turn to smirk. “Well, thank goodness you’ve solved it.”

As a trained investigator and highly intuitive woman, Amelia heard the dismissal in her superior’s voice, but she chose not to acknowledge it.

“He did it, Artie.”

“Who?”

Amelia placed her palms on the desk and leaned toward him. “Visily Romani.”

Artie huffed. “The Henley investigation is in the hands of the proper authorities, Amelia. Unless the basement archives have a secret passage to London that I know nothing of, I’d recommend—”

Amelia moved a hand to one trim hip and looked down at the man behind the desk. “I really have to thank you, Artie. I mean, do you know what you get when you spend eight weeks going through boxes of dead files?”

Artie craned his neck upward in order to look at her. “Paper cuts?”

“History.” Amelia smiled as if the joke, ultimately, were on him. She picked up the file closest and tossed it onto the end of the desk. “Vienna in 1962. Paris in 1926.” Another file landed on top of the stack, and the man looked physically pained—as if that much dust and disorder were too much for his delicate senses.

“What do they have in common?” she asked like a professor challenging a student.

“Now see here, Amelia, I am a very busy—”

“All high-profile targets. All impeccably planned—almost elegant—jobs.”

“Amelia, really…”

“And in every file you can find one name:
Visily Romani
.” She rummaged through the files, pulling out flagged pieces of paper and showing them to her boss. “Shipping manifest from Berlin in 1935”—she pointed to a signature—“Romani. Witness statement out of Turkey. The witness’s name—”

“Romani,” Artie Dupree finished for her, then gave an exasperated sigh. “What’s this got to do with the Henley?”

“A dozen high-profile heists in a dozen cities over the course of the past ninety years. And who knows how long before that?”

And then it was her boss’s turn to grin. “Ninety years?” he said, sounding as if he might be considering taking the bait. “Mr. Romani has been a very busy man.”

“But that’s the thing, Artie. What if Romani isn’t a man?” Amelia said, leaning forward.

“Great. We’ll alert Scotland Yard and tell them they’re looking for a vampire. Or a werewolf. I’m assuming you’ve cross-referenced this with the lunar cycles.”

“What if it’s a
name
?” Amelia said, undaunted. She spread the files across the desk. “A name that has been used by a lot of people for a very long time.”

“Excellent.” Her boss pushed the files aside and returned to his order and his lists and his life. “You cracked it. Great work. I’ll call the Henley right away and tell them Leonardo’s
Angel Returning to Heaven
was stolen by a name.”

“These are some of the most famous unsolved crimes in history. Don’t you see that?”

“I see that they’re decades old, and the key word is
unsolved
.”

“It’s a common link. A thread. These crimes are interconnected, and if we—”

“Do you know where the
Angel
is?” he snapped, and Amelia gave an involuntary backward step.

“No.”

“Do you have information that will lead to the arrest of this Romani…” He stumbled, flustered. “Or Roman
is
?”

“If we launch an investigation…”

“Bennett! The last time we let you lead an investigation, you swore you would catch one Robert Bishop.”

Amelia crossed her arms and stared down. “Yes, I can see how that investigation would be such a disappointment. It only resulted in the arrest of an international criminal and the recovery of a million-dollar statue and four priceless paintings that had been missing for sixty years.”

“If you really want to solve what happened at the Henley, I’d suggest you talk to your son.” Artie Dupree slipped on his glasses. “After all, he was there.…Wait,
what was
he doing there, again?” The man asked the question that he and a few dozen others had already asked before.

“He told me he was there out of a deep love of art.”

“But you don’t believe him?”

“He’s a teenage boy. I’m sure what he really meant to say was that he was there to impress some girl.”

The man studied her as if this were all new information (it wasn’t). He sighed as if he could completely understand her predicament (he couldn’t). And he looked at her as if his smile could take the sting out of her current situation (it didn’t even come close).

“Then I’m going to assume there’s nothing else I can do for you, Agent Bennett?”

“No,” Amelia said, gathering the dusty files and clutching them to her black suit. “I have quite everything I need.”

Despite being a highly trained and deftly skilled observer, there were many things Amelia Bennett did not see on her trip back to the basement archives. After all, it looked like a typical morning with the sleepy-eyed masses swiping cards and coming inside. Workers pushed carts and people scanned papers, and it was a day just like any other, there on the banks of the Rhône.

Well, at least that was the way it seemed right up until the point when the bouquet of fresh flowers that was meant for the deputy director was carried from the main reception desk to the upper-level offices, setting off a half dozen biohazard detectors along the way.

A few moments later, on the second floor, a bottle of carpet cleaner began to bubble with seemingly toxic fumes. The head of Interpol’s internal security division was halfway to the mailroom when he heard that a brand-new espresso machine had spontaneously caught on fire. A recently serviced oven in the cafeteria began spewing smoke so thick no one could even see.

“What’s going on?” one of the guards in the security room wanted to know.

“All of the toilets in the men’s room on the fourth floor just…blew!” someone else exclaimed.

All throughout the building, sirens were blaring and sensors were tripping. And when the electronic voice began echoing through the building, saying, “THERE HAS BEEN A BREACH IN SECURITY PROTOCOL. PLEASE PROCEED TO THE NEAREST DOOR,” first in French, then again in Arabic, English, and Spanish, there was only one thing to be done.

To their credit, every single person at Interpol’s world headquarters reacted in the calm, orderly way that one would have expected. To anyone observing from across the river, it looked like nothing more than a minor inconvenience—a drill. Exploding toilets, after all, did not an international incident make. Many of the Interpol officials said later that if they hadn’t known better, they would have sworn they were witnessing the harmless pranks of kids.

Well, at least that was the way it seemed until the fire trucks appeared with their swirling lights and screaming sirens. The police, too, were quick to the scene—almost too quick, some might say—to throw up the barricades and block off the traffic.

But it wasn’t until they saw the big bus from the bomb squad that the people huddled on the sidewalks began to wonder if things might be more severe than some elaborate prank.

“Step aside!” the tallest of the masked figures in the heavy protective suits yelled. He barked orders at a man with a walkietalkie. “Your people are out of there?”

“Yes,” the man said. He looked vaguely confused and more than a little annoyed. “But it was just the toilets.…Can’t we go back inside and—”

“Now, you listen to me,” the masked man yelled. He had a deep voice, and when he spoke, the whole crowd seemed to stop and listen. “This facility has the best biohazard detectors that money can buy, and in the past twenty minutes, nine of them have gone off. We take that sort of thing seriously in my department. What about you?”

The man with the walkie-talkie stayed quiet, weighing the image of rogue espresso machines and malfunctioning toilets against the words of the masked man. “Do what you have to do,” he said, leaving the four masked figures to walk through Interpol’s gleaming, polished doors.

Katarina Bishop was not claustrophobic, or so she told herself with every breath she took inside the heavy mask. She’d once flown from Cairo to Istanbul locked inside a solid-gold sarcophagus, after all, so it wasn’t the tiny space that was causing Kat’s heart to pound or her face to sweat as she followed Hale up the big sweeping staircase, rushing to the mainframe that was housed on the second floor.

Hale stopped at the top of the landing, looked in both directions, and pulled the mask from his head.

“Simon, you’re down there.” He pointed to the long empty hall. “Gabrielle, you can—”

But then Hale couldn’t finish. Kat couldn’t move. None of them could do anything but watch when Gabrielle’s foot caught on the top step, and her ankle turned, and Gabrielle went falling, tumbling down the stairs, onto the landing below.

Kat and Simon looked at each other as if to verify that they had seen the same thing—that Gabrielle…had fallen.

Only Hale managed to rush toward her. “Are you okay?”

But even Gabrielle herself couldn’t seem to process what had happened. She looked up and found her cousin’s eyes. “Kat, did I just…fall?”

“Yeah,” Kat said. “I think you did.”

“But I never fall,” Gabrielle countered, as if there had to be some kind of mistake.

“Can you stand on it?” Hale asked, reaching for her, but Gabrielle just laughed.

“Of course I can—Ow!” The pain that flashed across her face was quick and intense, but it was a different kind of panic that bled through her voice when she said, “Kat, I can’t stand.”

“I know, Gabs. It’ll be okay. Just sit here on the steps and wait for us. Simon and Hale can take the mainframe. I’ll check the hard files in the archives and—”

“I’m cursed,” Gabrielle said, as if she hadn’t heard a word. “I sent the Cleopatra Emerald skidding across the floor and now I’m…cursed.”

“Don’t be silly,” Kat said, reaching for her cousin.

“Don’t touch me!” Gabrielle said. “It might be contagious.”

“Kat…” There was a tenor of impatience and fear in Hale’s voice. “We gotta move,” he said, and he was right.

“Go,” Gabrielle snapped. “I can keep an eye on the doors from here.”

“But…” Simon started.

“Go!” Gabrielle yelled, and Kat knew what had to be done.

“How long until the real bomb squad shows up?” Hale asked, risking a glance out the massive windows.

“Best-case scenario?” Kat asked. Hale nodded. “Hurry.”

So Kat was alone as she made her way into the depths of the building, past the division of counterterrorism intelligence, through an entire corridor marked with the portraits of past secretaries-general. It should have been the ultimate in trespassing—walking through those particular halls. But it felt like just another office building, and she ran faster, relying on the blueprints in her mind to lead her to the small door with the even smaller sign that read archives
.

She pushed her way inside, hurtling down the stairs, deeper and deeper into the belly of the building.

“Simon, what’s your status?” she heard Gabrielle ask from three floors away.

“Well, their encryption is really good, but I’ve managed to launch a worm into their—”

“English, buddy,” Hale reminded him.

“Almost there.”

“Kat?” Hale asked just as Kat reached the bottom of the staircase and pushed open another door. She stepped onto a small landing. “Kat?” He asked again. “What’s your—”

“Uh…guys…” Kat gripped the cold pipe rail. “You know how Interpol’s sort of a clearinghouse for information?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I think I just found…the house.”

From her place on the landing at the top of the stairs, Kat could easily see the room that stretched out before her, as vast and endless as a maze. Shelves and filing cabinets—thousands of filing cabinets—filled the space that seemed as long as the building itself. Dim industrial lights hung overhead, and the whole place smelled of dust and disuse. Looking down, Kat couldn’t shake the feeling that what she’d really found was the graveyard—the place where old jobs go after they die.

“Twenty-five percent downloaded,” Simon said from above.

Kat bounded down the stairs, following the faded signs through dusty aisles that felt light-years away from the sleek offices and modern fixtures that dominated the floors above. She ran until she finally reached the deepest, darkest part of the room and the cabinets dedicated to art and cultural crimes.

“Hey…guys…” Kat heard Gabrielle say. “What will the
real
bomb squad look like?”

“Us,” Kat heard herself say at the same time as Simon and Hale.

“Then it might be time to start heading for the exits,” Gabrielle warned, and Kat felt her heart beat faster.

“Okay, I got it. I’m good,” Simon exclaimed.

“Gabrielle, I’m coming to get you,” Hale said.

Kat could practically feel her crew working, acting, moving toward the exits in an orderly fashion, but she felt lost among the dozens of filing cabinets standing before her. It was like staring at a slightly less organized, highly abbreviated version of Uncle Eddie’s mind.

“Kat.” Hale’s voice was steady and even in her ear. “No crazy chances,” he warned.