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“Hamish!” Kat snapped. The brothers shook their heads.
“After Luxembourg,” Angus clarified.
“What—” Kat started, but Hamish was already throwing his arm around her, saying, “You know what I love about you, Kat?”
“Besides your beauty,” Angus interjected, even though, to Kat’s knowledge, neither of them had ever noticed she was female.
“Besides that,” Hamish confirmed with a nod.
“And your mind,” Angus added.
“A truly great mind,” Hamish agreed.
“Guys. ” Kat felt her patience wane. “What happened ?”
“You see, Kat, it wasn’t so much what . . . ” Angus let the word linger.
“As who,” his brother finished.
Angus pulled away, then studied her. “You really haven’t heard?” As Kat shook her head, his gaze fell to the floor. “Wow, Kat, you really were gone, weren’t you?”
More than the feeling of walking back into Uncle Eddie’s kitchen, the look on the two brothers’ faces told her that it was true—she had done it. Katarina Bishop had really left the life. Once. For a little while. It hadn’t been a dream.
“What happened?” Kat asked.
“It’s not that bad, really,” Hamish said. “We shouldn’t have—”
“Am I going to have to call Uncle Eddie?” she threatened.
“We didn’t know they were nuns!”
There is a rule older than the Chelovek Pseudonima—a truth not even the greatest liar can deny: You cannot con an honest man. But if you do . . .
You’ll regret it.
“We’re blacklisted, Kat,” Angus admitted with a guilty glance at his brother. “Uncle Eddie says we can’t work for a while, but your dad’s always been good to us, so if you say leave, we leave. If you say we’re in . . . ”
Kat stood there looking at the very boys who had stolen the first tooth she had ever lost and tried to ransom it to the tooth fairy; the two young men who had once stolen a Tyrannosaurus rex from the Museum of Natural History—one bone at a time.
“Guys, Uncle Eddie doesn’t want anyone doing this job. ” Kat turned and started through the big sprawling house, calling behind her, “You’re in!”
Walking into the library a moment later, Kat knew something was wrong.
For starters, Simon was even paler than usual. Gabrielle lay on the sofa, her feet propped up, a damp rag on her forehead; her hair was significantly frizzier, and as Angus placed the bowl of ice beside her, neither Bagshaw even tried to look down her shirt.
“Welcome back. ” She noticed Hale leaning against a window seat on the far side of the room, not quite sitting and not quite standing. He pushed away from the wall. “So glad you could join us. ”
Kat felt the envelope slide against her stomach. She could have sworn she heard it scrape against the denim, as loud as a scream in the quiet room. But it was her ears playing tricks on her. Her mind. Maybe her cool was one more thing she’d lost at Colgan.
“Oh, I’m fine, Kat,” Gabrielle replied to the unasked question with a dramatic wave of her good hand. “I’m sure the burns on my feet are going to heal in no time. ”
But no one else said anything. They all just looked at Kat, none of them wanting to be the bearer of bad news.
“What?” Kat asked, looking around the room.
“Simon,” Hale said, dropping onto one of the leather couches and propping his feet up. He gestured for the boy to begin.
“The paramedics were quite sure the dizziness would subside eventually,” Gabrielle offered from the couch. Everyone ignored her.
“Well,” Simon said slowly. Three different laptops were spread out before him. The small device he’d carried through the Henley was plugged into one, and a three-dimensional schematic flashed across the screens. “It’s”—Simon looked as if he were trying to recall the right technical term—“complicated. ”
“They gave me this wonderful ointment for the scalded tips of my fingers,” Gabrielle added. No one heard.
“Do you want the bad news or the good news?” Simon asked.
“Good,” Kat and Hale said at the same time.
“The Henley has spent the last six months updating all of its security features—which were already good. I mean Henley good—so the new stuff is—”
“I thought you said this was the good news,” Hale said.
Simon nodded. “A change like this doesn’t happen overnight, so they’re doing it exhibit by exhibit, starting with the most valuable rooms, and . . . ”
“The Romani Room isn’t the top of the list?” Kat guessed.
Simon shook his head. “Not even close. So if the Henley is vulnerable anywhere, this is it. ”
Kat had spent hours wondering why that room of that museum. She knew it hadn’t been random. There was a reason a thief like Romani would pick that exhibit over the Renaissance room or any of the Henley’s other crown jewels, and this was it. She smiled. Somehow the world was starting to make sense again.
“And the bad news?” Hale asked.
Simon shrugged. “It’s still the Henley. ”
It took a moment for the words to sink in—for everyone to realize the magnitude of what had to be done. Success in Kat’s world depended so much on details that the big pictures were frequently lost. But Kat knew what they were doing. And as the moment stretched out, everyone else seemed to remember too.
“It’s totally a closed-circuit feed,” Simon went on, a moment later. “There’s no way we’re hacking in from the outside. But we knew that already. ”
“Why don’t you skip to the parts we don’t know?” Hale said impatiently.
“Right,” Simon said, pointing at Hale as if that were a brilliant idea. “They’ve already updated all the wiring in the whole building. Really state-of-the-art stuff. I mean, it’s awesome—”
“Simon,” Hale snapped.
“Well . . . that’s the bad news,” Simon finished. “There’s no hacking it. Even if I could tie into the mainframe, I couldn’t override their system. ”
“I’m really hoping there’s good news,” Hamish added.
Simon smiled. “Remodeling old buildings like the Henley is . . . awkward,” he said, his eyes shining.
“And . . . ” Hale prompted.
“And so sometimes when they put new systems in . . . ”
Simon started, but Kat was already nodding.
“They leave the old systems right where they are,” she finished. She looked at Hale, and together they said, “Like the Dubai job. ”
Simon nodded. “I’m not saying I can get it up and running, but if I can get into a high-security room for fifteen minutes, and if I’m right . . . that’s our way into the Henley’s inner sanctums. ”
“Do it,” Hale said, then stopped. He looked at Kat and waved, an after you gesture.
Kat turned to her cousin. “So, Gabrielle, what did we learn?”
Gabrielle glared at her. “We learned that the next time you want to find out what kind of frontline defense mechanisms someone has in place, you can . . . ” but she trailed off as she fell back on the pillow. “What was I saying?”
Kat looked at the brothers.
“Exhibit hall grates fell one point two seconds after contact,” Angus told her.
“The main hall was locked down less than five seconds after that,” Hamish added, crossing his leg. “We won’t be doing anything that requires a hasty break for the nearest exit, I can tell you that. ”
“Yeah,” Angus agreed. “Those Henley guards didn’t look like the sort who would let us walk out the front door with five paintings under our arms in the middle of the day. ”
“Even if they aren’t their paintings,” his brother said.
“Great,” Gabrielle said from the couch. “I ruined my nails for nothing. ”
“Not for nothing,” Kat said. “Thanks to you, Gabs, we just figured out a half dozen ways
not to rob the Henley. ”
* * *
“Mary Poppins?” Hale suggested four hours later.
“Do you know a way to make it rain between now and Tuesday?” Gabrielle replied.
“Five O’Clock Shadows?” Hamish asked.
“Backup generators only give us fifteen seconds,” Simon said with a shake of his head.
They’d been through every con they’d ever heard of, and a few Kat guessed the Bagshaw brothers had made up on the spot, but she didn’t notice the hour until she saw Gabrielle stifle a yawn. Kat was too consumed by a ticking clock in the back of her mind. A deadline. A plan. She stared at the lists and diagrams they’d drawn in Magic Marker, and after that had dried up, eyeliner, all over the glass of the library windows.
“It’s no use,” Hale said, dropping to one of the leather sofas. “If we had a month . . . maybe. ”
“We don’t,” Kat told him.
“If we had two maybe three more people . . . ”
Kat closed her eyes. “We don’t. ”
“Princess Bride?” Hamish offered, but his brother turned to him.
“Do you know where we can find a six-fingered man on such short notice?”
Kat could feel the air changing—the hope slipping away. Maybe they were too tired. Maybe they’d simply been closed up in that room for too long. But she actually jumped when she heard Hale say, “We need to call Uncle Eddie. ”
“No. ” Kat had thought it, of course. But it took her a moment to realize the voice that answered belonged to Gabrielle. “Uncle Eddie said no. Don’t you guys get it? If he said no, then . . . ” she trailed off. It seemed to take all of her energy to sit upright on the sofa.
“We have to do it,” Kat finished.
Simon looked at Kat. “What about at night? Romani did it at night. ”
If Romani did it, Kat thought but didn’t dare say. She didn’t want to remind anyone—least of all herself—that there might be nothing behind those five paintings but the most sensitive antitheft devices ever designed by man. That this might be, in every way, a ghost hunt, a fool’s errand. The greatest con the greatest con man to never live had ever pulled.
“You see these, Kat?” Hale gestured to the plan-covered windows. “One of these plans might work—maybe—for the best eight-man crew in the world. Except”—he turned, doing a quick headcount—“yeah, there are still just six of us. ”
“We can do it with six. ”
“Six makes it risky. ”
“Yeah,” Kat said, spinning on him. “So was serving as the grease man when Dad robbed the Tower of London when I was five, but I did it. ”
In the corner, Hamish and Angus were smiling. “Good times,” Angus said.
“You were late tonight. ” Hale’s voice was cool, even cold, and Kat knew this was the time to tell him about the photos. Either that or walk away.
“Gabrielle—” she turned and looked at her cousin—“thanks. And um . . . moisturize. Simon,” Kat said as she tried not to look at Hale, “while I’m gone, figure out how to get eyes and ears in there. ”