A Beautiful Heist (3 page)

As I got older I set challenges for myself. Like locks. One afternoon, home alone, I studied our back door lock by unscrewing it and taking it apart. After a couple of hours I had it figured out. I practiced picking the lock, over and over. After that, every chance I got, I tried other locks. And I became good at it.

Then I turned my attention to pickpocketing. It’s an art, really, lifting things from people without them detecting it. I grew up here in Seattle, and the best place to practice was Pike Place Market: a part-underground jumble offish markets and curiosity shops down by the pier. The market is always teeming with people, especially tourists (read: distracted and oblivious), so there were oodles of opportunities for an enterprising young crook like me.

Flexing my newfound skills—and getting away with it—made me feel special. I would never be ordinary or garden variety again. I was different than other people. And that gave me a place in the world.

I turned away from the stained-glass window in St. James, and pulled out my iPhone, anxious for a message from Templeton. Nothing. I circled the cathedral in an effort to soothe my nerves. I glanced at the time. Seven minutes late. I decided to wait three minutes more, and then I was out.

My circuit brought me to the ceremonial bronze doors. I gazed at the carvings, the likenesses of Mary, the saints, a handful of apostles. I looked at the faces. They appeared solemn, remorseful, and strangely . . . guilty.

Which is something I knew all about. As I’d honed my burglary skills when I was young, I felt increasingly guilty. This was not something good girls did. And I had always been a good girl. So one day I decided: that was it. No more. Things were getting out of control, and it scared me. I promised myself that I would never steal again. And, had things turned out differently, I’m sure I would have kept that promise.

I walked away from the bronze doors and slid into a pew by the side. I glanced at my watch. One more minute.

Then, there was a creak of wood as someone slid into the pew behind me.

“Good evening, my dear,” said a low British voice. “Anything to confess?”

Relief wrapped around me like a warm bath. “Jesus, Templeton. What took you so long?”

“Had to ditch a tail. Sorry, darling.”

“Sure you weren’t followed?”

“Lost them thoroughly. Nothing to worry about.”

Templeton was my handler. We usually arranged to rendezvous like this—strangers in a public place. It was the best way of maintaining the hush-hush of the Agency.

“You sure, darling? No sins to confess?” asked Templeton, a playful lilt in his voice.

I smiled. “I can’t think of a thing.”

“Anything to deliver, perhaps?”

“That, yes.”

“Excellent,” he said.

Templeton was fifty-nine and a lifelong bachelor, just the way he liked it. He was tall and distinguished looking, with the hands of a concert pianist and the carriage of an earl. Templeton took his tea with two lumps of sugar—lumps, not spoonfuls, mind you—and preferred his eggs soft boiled. Letting an egg boil for one second more than four minutes was a crime of the highest order as far as Templeton was concerned. And he would know about crime.

He used to work at Weatherspoon’s, the illustrious auction house in London, until he got sick of the endless lying, backstabbing, cheating, and politics. To escape all that—
ahem
—he came to work for AB&T.

That was thirty years ago. I’d known Templeton for five years and, together, we’d been through a lot.

I allowed the envelope containing the yellow diamond to drop to the floor. I slid it backward with my foot. Templeton leaned down to retrieve the envelope. The paper rustled faintly as he tucked it away. My numbered Swiss bank account would shortly reflect my commission for this job. A healthy figure—which was good. My account had been looking pretty ugly recently. Let’s just say I had received some exceedingly bad investment advice.

“Another job completed to marvelous perfection,” he said. “Wouldn’t you agree, my dear?”

I hesitated momentarily. “Sure.” I nodded, smiling, staring straight ahead. But my mood wasn’t quite as big and shiny as it should have been. My smile flattened a little and I fiddled with the ring on my finger.

“What? What is that tone about?” he asked.

“Nothing—what tone? Everything’s fine. The job was fine. And now it’s done.”

He sighed. “Oh no. Not that again.”

“What?”

“You thought this would be
it,
didn’t you?”

I said nothing.

“You thought this would be the job that finally brings you closure over your sister.”

I shrugged weakly. “You know, it was a ring. Like Penny’s. But . . . I don’t really feel any different.”

Templeton clucked his tongue. “Of course you don’t. And that’s because you can’t change the past, Catherine, my dear. You can learn from it, certainly. But you can also become consumed by it. Besides, what happened to Penny was not your fault.”

Shortly after I promised myself I wasn’t going to steal anymore, my sister came to me, begging me to help her. Penny was twelve and I was fourteen. She, unfortunately, had not been blessed with a natural physical ability. She tried figure skating, but sprained her ankle. She rode her bike, but fell off and sustained a concussion. She took ballet lessons, but ended up with a fractured nose. Penny had, however, been born a natural math whiz, which didn’t exactly make her the social star of the school. But it gave her an identity.

Penny had one other talent: she was great at keeping secrets. In fact, she was the only person I’d ever told about my little moonlight hobby. She never judged me. In fact, Penny had this idea that being a thief was simply my calling. “It’s your destiny, Cat,” she’d say. “Look how easy it is for you, how good you are at it.”

This usually made me feel better, and just a little less guilty.

Anyway, Penny had a lucky ring. A cheap trinket from a vending machine, but to her it was lucky. And she was very superstitious.

One day, one of the girls who bullied Penny on a regular basis stole her lucky ring. Penny came to me, begging me to steal it back for her. “Cat, I need it,” she said, her big brown eyes growing red and glossy with tears. She was sitting on the edge of my bed, her fingers clutching at my pink bedspread. “She just . . .
took
it from me, stole it out of my PE bag when I was getting changed, and put it in her locker. There was nothing I could do to stop her. Cat, I need it back. I have a really important math competition tomorrow. I can’t do it without my ring. I need you to steal it back for me.”

I looked at her sitting on my bed, so small and helpless, and I said gently, “Penny, you don’t need that ring for the competition. You’ll be amazing no matter what. You know that. It’s silly to think that something like that would make a difference.”

Her small face grew even more pointed and worried. “No, Cat, I really need it.”

Little demons tugged at my heart. Could I do it?
Should
I? But I’d only just promised myself—I couldn’t go back on it already. “Penny, I can’t,” I said, looking down. “It’s not right. I swore to myself I wouldn’t do it anymore.”

I ventured a look upward, into her face. Her normally flushed cheeks were pale, her mouth trembling. I stroked her hair. “Listen, why don’t you just get it in the morning? Go talk to the vice principal. They’ll open her locker, and then you’ll have it.”

She twisted her anguished fists into my pillow. “That’ll be too late! The contest is early in the morning, before school starts, and it’s at a different school. Please, Cat. I really need you. This is what you do. It’s who you are. You can’t just deny who you truly are.”

The thing is I knew I could do it. Breaking into the school would be no problem, and getting into a locker would be as easy as checkers.

I closed my eyes. “Penny, I just can’t.”

Penny was crushed. She wandered away, out of my room, without saying anything more.

What I learned later was that, out of desperation, Penny grasped at a reckless plan. She packed a backpack with the things she thought she would need, snuck out of the house, got on her bicycle and rode toward school.

It was a rainy, blustery night. I can imagine Penny, head bent against the cruel, slanting storm, pedaling hard, her small fists knuckled around the handlebars.

On North Silver Creek Road a blue Ford Explorer came around a dark bend too fast, and the driver saw Penny too late. I don’t actually know that it was a blue Ford Explorer, that’s just what I’ve always imagined, when I’ve gone over and over that image in my mind. The reason I don’t know the make of the car is because the driver didn’t stop.

It wasn’t meant for my ears, but I overheard the doctor in the hospital saying that Penny hadn’t died right away; she had likely been conscious for a while as she lay there, alone, cold, in the darkness, slowly bleeding internally.

In Penny’s backpack they found a ski mask, a pair of gloves, and a lock pick. Of course they didn’t know it was a lock pick. They said it was a sort of small screwdriver, maybe to tighten some part of her bicycle. But I knew.

“Listen, petal,” Templeton said, “this twisting yourself up in knots and flagellating yourself—no good can come of it. You’re never going to be happy or a complete person like that.”

A weight crushed down on my chest.
My fault.
Entirely my fault. Penny should not have been there. If I’d just done the job—done what has always come so easily and naturally to me, she’d be fine. Or, perhaps, I’d have been the one lying crumpled on the road. Except that my reflexes were much better than Penny’s. I could have avoided that Ford Explorer.

Or maybe not. But, truth be told, if someone was destined for that accident—I wish it had been me, not her. I snubbed the powers of the universe, thinking I knew better.
Hubris,
they called it in ancient Greek literature. And I had paid dearly for it.

“I’m quite serious, Cat. This endless quest for atonement—or whatever it is you’re looking for—can lead to serious self-destruction. You need to let it go, and move forward with your life. Besides, do you really think you would quit if you ever did manage to find atonement?”

“Yes. Of course,” I said without hesitation.

Templeton snorted. “Rubbish. It’s too much a part of you.”

I clenched my teeth. It drove me crazy when he said things like that. “You don’t understand, Templeton. She shouldn’t have been there. If I’d just done the job for her, she’d still be here today. I had the power to get her ring back. And I didn’t do it.”

“Yes,” Templeton said, his voice softening. “It was awful. I know. But, Cat, you need to forgive yourself. Or you’ll never be happy.”

I sat for a moment, staring up at the vaulted ceiling.
Maybe I didn’t really deserve to be happy.

“Listen, love, I know what might help. I’ve got a little tidbit I’ve been dying to tell you.” He sounded mildly breathless. “I really shouldn’t . . . . but, naturally, I’m going to.”

I turned slightly and glimpsed his flushed, open expression and gleeful smile.

“AB&T is considering you for the Elite level of their jewel department,” he said.

My eyes widened.

“That means, my dear, that you’d be getting a premium commission for all your jobs. And some perks. A car, an expense account. A
penthouse.”

I whispered, “Are you serious?” I licked my lips, in spite of myself, and my breathing quickened.

“Dead serious,” he said. “And I haven’t even told you the best bit yet.”

“What?” A gym membership? Contribution to my pension? I shouldn’t have been feeling so excited. But I couldn’t help it.

He paused for dramatic effect. “International assignments.”

“Get
out
!” I expressed my shock, here, at an apparently unsuitable volume, judging from the heads that snapped in my direction. A woman in the front of the nave—who possessed the pinched face of a constipated goat—speared me with a very nasty glare.

I smiled weakly, apologetically.

International assignments.
It was the dream of every thief. Why bother mucking about with small potatoes in the Pacific Northwest when you could be jetting off to New York, Hong Kong, Marrakech to pull off much more glamorous heists?

“Don’t get too excited, Cat. You haven’t got it yet,” Templeton said in a low voice. “They’re going to be watching you carefully over the next couple of jobs you do for us, and then confirming their decision.”

It was odd that he told me not to get excited. Sensible, sure, but that had never been a particularly strong feature of Templeton’s personality. Was he worried about whether I could pull this off? Naturally, as my handler, if I received a promotion, he would, too. He had a lot riding on my performance.

“So what do I have to do?”

“Just keep doing your job,” he said. His voice carried the hint of a warning. “No mistakes. And stay out of trouble. I’ll keep you posted.”

I decided to ignore Templeton’s peculiar mixed messages and focus on the positives. This was incredible. In my mind I saw the Hall of Honors at headquarters: the wall of plaques, each etched with an Elite thief’s name. Okay, well the thief’s name in the code we used at AB&T, of course, but the effect was the same. And no photographs. We tried to avoid that sort of thing.

The most recent inductee to Elite status was a thief named Ethan Jones, from the art department. I remember feeling terribly jealous. Mine would be the first female name up there.

I felt a warm billow of pride at that. And then I frowned. Why was I getting so feverish over this? I thought I wanted out. I thought once I had made amends for Penny I was going to go straight. Wasn’t that the deal I’d made with myself?

“One other thing,” Templeton said. There was a sudden wisp of smoke in the air as a side door opened and a row of candles was snuffed. “There’s been a new FBI agent assigned to the jewel theft desk in the Seattle office.”