A Beautiful Heist (28 page)

We could see five security guards posted there, just outside the vault doorway. All five were fully armed, large as black bears, and ready to use whatever force necessary. I quailed; it would be impossible to take out five guards at once, without having one of them raise an alarm—or worse, fire up at us.

But this was where Ethan came in. I flicked my earpiece and spoke softly “Okay, we’re in place. Over to you.”

There was a crackle and I heard Ethan’s voice. “Check.”

I held my breath and waited. Everything inside me was wriggling and jumping and sparking, but I had to hold it all back. Would this work? I wondered. Would we get caught?

And then, the silence was pierced by the high-pitched whine of an intruder alarm.

My heart leaped.
Perfect.
Right on cue. There was a cacophony beneath us—guards barking into walkie-talkies, orders being shouted, rapid boot steps. I hoped Ethan would be able to make a clean escape, as planned, after setting off the entry alarm, and make it up to the Clock Tower.

Brooke had the better vantage point. She signaled to me: three guards left. Okay. We could deal with that.

Brooke was the better shot. We agreed, using sign language, that she’d take out two guards and I’d do one. For this, we were using tranquilizer darts. They were microlight darts loaded with an ultrafast tranquilizer. Virtually painless and unnoticeable by the target.

We aimed for the neck and fired. Brooke shot her two in rapid succession. I missed on my first try.

“Shit.” I aimed again, and got him. But now there were going to be several seconds of time lag.

Brooke’s two guards went down. Mine shouted in alarm. “Hey, what the—”

He glanced around urgently, then looked up, eyes wide, and raised his gun. We backed off in panic. I cringed and squeezed my eyes shut. And then . . .
flump.
We peered over the edge. He was out cold on the marble tiles.

We dragged the grate away, and Brooke dropped silently down. I waited above, watching as she approached the massive steel vault door. The iris scanner was embedded in the wall beside the door.

There were various ways of bypassing an iris scanner. A fake was naturally the best—a printed contact lenses. But a super-high-resolution photograph could do it, too.

Unfortunately we did not have the time nor the opportunity to make either of these things happen. So Brooke was going with an old-school method: disabling the control panel. She assured me she could do it.

I held my breath as she attempted it. It takes a watchmaker’s touch to penetrate a control panel. She lifted the cover of the sensor. I could see her shoulders tense. She exhaled smoothly, controlling her breathing, and examined the exposed panel. My stomach tangled and twisted like a rope. But I watched with admiration as she manipulated the wires with a deft touch. She was doing a good job.

But good was suddenly not good enough.

A piercing alarm blared. A steel cage ripped up through the floor, surrounding Brooke. My heart choked as the bars of the cage rose straight up and crashed into the ceiling, plugging into steel receptacles, locking with a sickening clunk. Brooke was frozen. Her face was pale and turned upward, registering her utter entrapment.

Boot steps thundered a rapid approach. I frantically replaced the grate that covered the air duct, concealing myself from view. I peered down through the thin slats and my breathing was shallow. I tasted coppery blood in my mouth; I must have bitten my tongue when the alarm went off. Half a dozen guards burst into the foyer and aimed a bristle of Heckler & Koch MP7s at Brooke. “Freeze! Hands up!”

My heart pummeled my rib cage as I watched, hidden, unable to do a thing. Brooke stood unmoving, facing the squadron. She held her hands up, face impassive. They all stayed like this for a minute in a horrible tableau. Then Sandor arrived. He strolled into the room with a face that was murderous and hard. He cast a disgusted glance at the unconscious guards and stepped over them. He approached the steel cage and fixed those hard eyes on Brooke. I could see his face clearly; I imagined that it was me he was looking at with that vicious gaze. It was the stare of a man who could snuff a life with a finger snap.

Sandor’s nostrils flared as he crossed his arms. His posture was ramrod. He cast a completely different picture than when I’d first met him. My memory slid back to the loose-spined, round-shouldered, geeky and earnest boy-man I’d first met in the diner. How could one person be so elastic? It was like witnessing the metamorphosis of a soft, furry caterpillar—but not so much into a butterfly as a dragon.

Except it wasn’t a transformation. The innocent Sandor had been a fake. And the fact that I hadn’t seen that made me feel angry—and very stupid. I thought I was better than that. My guts twisted with fresh doubt about my capabilities.

“What the fuck is this?” Sandor said. His tone was quiet, seething. Like a tarp pulled taut over a writhing vat of scorpions.

Brooke stared at him without blinking. She folded her arms deliberately over her chest, then shrugged. It was a slow, deliberate movement. She was the picture of indifference, which was the polar opposite of how I felt at the moment. I noticed, however, that her fingers, tucked beneath her crossed arms, were stick straight. With this I knew she was as distressed as I was.

Sandor narrowed his eyes. They were locked like this a moment, then he placed a call. With curt instructions, biting off each word, he commanded the cage be released.

After a moment’s pause the cage unhinged with several metallic clunks and sank down under the floor. He reset the security system by gazing into the biometric eyepieces. The vault was armed once again.

“Well, it was a nice try,” he said to Brooke. He smiled, showing his teeth. I’d never noticed just how pointed his canine teeth were. The back of my neck prickled. “Bait and switch, was it?” he asked. “Too bad you weren’t so adept at escape as your partner.”

At this statement I felt a slight softening of the muscles in my shoulders and back.
Good.
Ethan hadn’t been caught. That was something, at least.

The guards were shifting, murmuring. “What do you want to do with her?” one of them asked. I was desperate to know the very same thing. Panic rose in my chest as I wondered what was to stop them from killing her on the spot.

At that moment I heard a faint click in my ear, as Ethan returned to the line. “Stay calm, Montgomery,” he said. He’d resumed a safe position, somewhere inside Westminster.

Sandor examined Brooke. “Tell me, Miss Sinclair—how did you decide who would be the decoy and who would do the job, between you two? I’m surprised Miss Montgomery didn’t insist on being the one down here doing the dirty work.”

Brooke said nothing, but she showed a flicker of a frown.

Sandor smiled. “Yes, Brooke, I know you’re working with her. I know the decoy was Cat Montgomery. Please do not deny it.” He paced a small, slow circle around Brooke. “Although I must say, I’m surprised she recruited
you
for this job. I was under the impression you two were rivals.”

Brooke shrugged. “You seem to have a lot of questions about Cat Montgomery,” she said. “Interested in her whereabouts, by any chance?” Brooke loaded this question with meaning. She raised an eyebrow.

Sandor stopped pacing. My heart was slamming itself up my throat. Sandor stood still and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Are you proposing a deal, Miss Sinclair?”

She examined her fingernails. “Maybe. It seems to me we have some things to discuss.” She looked at him. “Is there somewhere we can go? This vault room is lovely, of course, but I’ve had a hard night and I wouldn’t mind a drink, someplace to put my feet up, perhaps. You must have somewhere more comfortable than this place. Oh, and I’m starving.”

The other men shifted, watching their boss for a signal. Sandor scowled, apparently weighing his options. “All right,” he said at last. “Let’s go.”

Sandor turned and strode from the room. The guards handcuffed Brooke and frog-marched her away through the steel double doors. I watched, frozen in place, as the entire party exited, boots echoing on the marble floor.

I allowed myself to breathe. And smile. Everything was going exactly according to plan.

“No Sandor,” I whispered as I gingerly lifted the grate away once more. I heard Ethan chuckle softly in my earpiece. “Not the old bait and switch. The bait, switch . . . and switch.” I flicked on my anti-CCTV device, lowered my rope and dropped silently to the floor.

Brooke’s capture had been part of the plan. In the old warehouse, she’d laid it all out. “They’ll think I used a decoy to distract their attention. They’ll think I then made a mistake, which triggered the alarm. Once they’ve cleared me away they’ll feel secure about having foiled our plot. And in you go, Cat.”

I chewed a fingernail as I listened to her plan. “You’ll be putting yourself at major risk,” I’d said.

“I can handle myself.”

Brooke assured me she would be able to stay alive. “Sandor will want you dead, Cat,” she’d said. “If he thinks I can help find you—it’ll be worth keeping me alive.”

Even now, as I approached the vault, this part of the plan felt shaky. How long could she sustain the bluff? I had to work fast; I didn’t want to leave Brooke with them too long.

I faced the biometric lock and took a deep breath. Fortunately, I now had an ace in this department. While everyone had been standing beneath me, I’d been able to train a military-grade microcamera on Sandor’s eyes and snap a high-resolution digital image of his irises.

I located that image within the memory of the camera. I zoomed in on the eyes. Brooke had been confident this would replicate an iris and I’d called my tech guy Lucas to corroborate that opinion. He’d agreed. The digital image would capture all the points and pigments of an iris’s fibrous and vascular tissue, the pattern unique to each of us—much more detailed than a fingerprint.

Lucas and Brooke were both confident we could fool the sensor this way. As I held the screen in front of the scanner, my palms sweaty inside my gloves and my mouth dry, I wished I shared their confidence.

There was a second of silence. Everything seemed suspended. And then—
beep.
A pinpoint LED light on the sensor turned green and there was a sharp
click.
Steel slid over steel with a slick metallic sound and the door disappeared into a deep pocket. I exhaled with relief and slipped silently inside the vault.

The vault itself was a steel chamber, lit with spot halogens in the ceiling. It was empty except for a safe embedded in the far wall. The cold air carried a stale, metallic smell.

“I’m in,” I whispered to Ethan.

I heard nothing through the earpiece. “Ethan? Can you hear me?” Still nothing.

Shit.
I fiddled with my earpiece. Silence. What did that mean? Had something happened to him? Or was it just a malfunctioning communication line? I squeezed my eyes tight. Not good.

Could I go on? Or should I abort, right now? Indecision wrung my insides. How could I stop now? I was so close. Maybe he was just having trouble with his receiver. I couldn’t scrap the whole thing because of that. I paused, thinking it out. Nothing had changed; we all knew the plan, we all knew what to do next.

I jammed my teeth together.
Do it, Cat.
I turned to my next task: cracking this safe.

And it was a mother. I stood in front of it, arms folded, surveying the lock mechanism. The technology of this safe was shiny and new. It matched the specs Ethan provided. A month ago I would have been tripped up by this safe, big time. However, thanks to a very helpful workshop, I was entirely up to speed.
Thank you,
Twelfth Annual Conference of the Museum Security Alliance.

I pulled my gloves taut about my fingers and cleared my mind. I had to forget about Sandor in his bloodlust, Brooke trapped with the Caliga, Nicole creeping along somewhere in the building, Ethan God knew where, and Jack . . .
no.
I shut it all out. All that existed was this safe. I heard blood pulsing in my ears and I breathed slowly, shutting out all other thoughts and images and focusing only on this safe.

I turned the wheel pack, feeling for the slightest amount of give. It would be a barely perceptible sensation. But this was just the first step.

Every safe can be cracked. You just needed to find the right rhythm, the right music. Safes are unique, each with its own resonance. Even factory-made, externally identical models.

Twenty minutes later pearls of sweat were materializing on my forehead. A prickly discomfort crept up my spine—what if I couldn’t do this? I blocked out the doubt and keep going, head bent, eyes closed.

And then, everything gelled. It was like sensing that infinitesimal moment when the tide changes. I found the rhythm, and one by one, the tumblers fell into place. I had it. I’d crossed the Rubicon. Just one more connection—

There was a glorious
click
and the safe swung open. I was in. And there was the Aurora Egg. Gold filigree shimmered across the surface of the perfect egg shape, winking with the secret within. I’d seen this Fabergé before, of course, but now I knew what it contained. A chill traced through my body.

At once, I felt whole. I didn’t need to touch the ring on my finger, concealed beneath my glove, to know it was there. This Fabergé Egg, this one thing, was like the final shard of a shattered vase—the fragment that flew far and became trapped under the sofa, lost and forgotten, condemning the repaired vase to incompleteness.

But finally, I’d found my lost shard.

It must have been because this thing, this Fabergé, had been taken so many times—first, as the original Gifts, taken from their rightful owner. Then smuggled, stolen again, transformed and concealed. Now at last I could return it, bring things full circle and correct that old, ancient wrong.
You can’t change the past,
they’d said. But here, looking at this, I knew that I could.

I reached out and cradled the Fabergé in my gloved hands. My fingers tingled where they touched the jeweled surface of the Egg. I felt the sharpness of the metal scrolls encrusted on the Egg’s shell. My hands and arms felt the weight of the Egg—heavy, but not nearly heavy enough.

It was time to finish it, and get the Egg back to those who rightfully owned it. My original plan had been to return it to the true Romanovs. They did have a claim. But the rightful claim, knowing what was inside, was with the church. With the monks who were murdered. Later, we would need to contact their monastery and get the Gifts back in the right hands.

But for now, I had to get out of here.

I looked at my watch. Right about then, Ethan was making his way to the Clock Tower from his hiding place. As long as everything had gone according to plan.

Also, at that moment, Brooke was enacting her escape. This, as long as she got a sliver of a chance. It should be all she needed. Her special talent was performing Houdini-like escapes. But if she couldn’t do it? “Go without me,” she’d said when we were making the plan. “Don’t wait. If I don’t get my chance before you get the Egg, I’ll find a chance later. I hope to meet you up at the Clock Tower, but the most important thing is getting the Egg out of there.”

I closed the safe door, exited the vault and reset the alarm. It was with great effort that I restrained the urge to race out of there.
Don’t rush, Cat. Just get it done quickly and silently.

Once inside the ventilation shaft I pulled up the rope and replaced the grate. I’d left everything exactly as I found it, spiriting the Egg away.

I crawled, holding the blueprint in mind. Rivets and metal edges pressed into my knees and elbows, which were bruised now and groaned at me with a sore, gnawing pain. The only light in the dark and dusty shaft came from periodic vents, and even then it was weak and filtered.

My emotions were under lock and key; I couldn’t get too excited yet. But, even still, a small measure of satisfaction slipped through. I had the Egg. I’d almost done it.

The ventilation shaft narrowed. My pulse quickened because this meant I was getting close. The space was tighter now, confined, and my progress slowed. I gritted my teeth, trying to ignore the closeness of the walls. I pushed forward and thought eagerly of getting out to fresh air, to freedom, to the lights of the city from the top of Big Ben.

At last, I reached the end of the shaft. I pushed away the grate and dropped down. It was just one stairwell now between me and freedom. The limestone steps would take me up to the belfry of the Clock Tower, to Big Ben. At each turn I methodically paused to listen, to ensure nobody else was there.

I reached the door at the top of the stair. If everything had gone according to plan, Brooke, Ethan, and Nicole would be up here already.
If.

If all the levers and gears of this clockwork plan came together, then it would all be worthwhile. But if someone was missing—what then? My chest constricted at the thought of leaving someone behind. Because it would be my fault. I had dragged everyone into this and it was my responsibility to get everyone out.