Uncommon Criminals (7 page)

T
here are several lessons every thief learns early on. Or dies.

Never turn your back on an angry guard dog (no matter how nice he seemed on your scouting trip). Don’t leave home without a spare set of batteries (regardless of the guarantee you got from the guy at the store). And never, ever get attached to anything more valuable than you are.

Katarina Bishop was an excellent thief, and she had learned these lessons well, but riding through Midtown Manhattan in the back of a long black limousine, she couldn’t stop thinking that the people who had made that last rule had never touched the Cleopatra Emerald.

“Do you want to hold it?” she asked, dangling the padded envelope in front of Hale with two fingers.

“No.”

“Do you want to touch it and kiss it and wear it around your neck?”

“Don’t be silly,” he told her. “Everyone knows green isn’t my color.”

Gabrielle had been right, Kat realized. There is a rush—a thrill—that comes after a hard job, and Kat couldn’t help herself. She’d held that green stone with her bare hands, and now she was drunk on adrenaline, high on life.

“You”—she scooted close—“were fabulous.” She placed her head on Hale’s chest and stared into the distance. “I see great potential in you…Wyatt?” He should have laughed; he should have teased, and when he didn’t, she bolted upright. “Is that it? Is your name Wyatt?”

He gripped her arms and held her there, staring into her eyes as he said, “No.”

Then Kat laughed and tossed back her head. “We did it, Hale.”

Suddenly, she couldn’t stay still. She wanted to stick her head out of the sunroof and scream, roll down the center divider and tell Marcus to drive and drive and drive—she didn’t care where. They could go anywhere—do anything—and for the first time in a long time, Katarina Bishop stopped thinking. And maybe that was why she found herself climbing onto her knees.

“We. Did. It!” she screamed, and when the car jolted to a stop, Kat didn’t care that she was falling, landing across Hale’s lap. She didn’t think twice about the way her arms fell around his neck. When her lips found his, she didn’t pull back, she just pressed against him, sinking into the kiss and the moment until…

The high was over. Kat jerked back, two thoughts pounding in her mind, screaming,
I kissed Hale
.

But it was the second thought that made her panic:
Hale didn’t kiss me back
.

“Sorry. I…” She sat up straight, and when she moved, she kicked something on the floorboard, looked down, and saw the bag that sat at his feet.

“What’s that?”

“Paraguay.”

She felt her heart sink. It was harder than it should have been to say, “It’s smaller than I thought it would be.”

She waited for Hale to laugh and tell her that it wasn’t a very good joke. She wanted him to do anything but reach for the bag and pull it easily onto the seat beside him.

“Eddie says they need all the help they can get. I’m gonna head down there now that we’re finished.” He stopped. He didn’t look at her when he asked, “
Are
we finished?”

Kat knew there was more to the question—that there was something else she was supposed to say. But Kat had always been good at telling lies. The truth, she realized, was a much harder thing to part with.

“You were right, Kat.” There was a weight to Hale’s voice. A gravity. “I should go.”

Don’t go.

“I know you still have to deliver the package, but…it’s not like you need me.”

But maybe I want you.

His hand was resting on the door handle. He took a deep breath and moved.

“Hale—”

“You could come,” he said, spinning toward her.

The rush she’d felt before turned to panic, and Kat was frozen, no clue what to do or say.

“Your dad’s already there. Gabrielle says Irina is coming. I mean, I know it’s no Cleopatra job, but you could come. You could come if you wanted to.”

“I want to, but I don’t…steal…anymore, Hale.”

His voice was part whisper, part sigh, as he turned to the window and said, “You could have fooled me.”

Before Kat could protest, Hale was reaching for a button on the limo door and saying, “Marcus.” The car slowed and the center partition slid down. “Take her wherever she wants to go.”

“Hale, wait!” She reached for him, but the car stopped, and he was already opening the door, stepping out onto the busy sidewalk.

“You be careful out there.” He pulled the large duffel onto his shoulder as if it weighed nothing at all. “I mean it, Kat. Take care.”

Her hand was in his, resting gently. “Hale…”

“Good-bye, Kat.” His voice was almost lost against the sound of honking cars and distant sirens. And just that quickly, he was gone. Out onto the street, coat collar turned up, disappearing into the traffic and the crowds.

It did not look like a clandestine rendezvous, not with the old woman and young man on the park bench and the teenage girl walking toward them, looking as if she’d just lost her very best friend.

“Is it true?” the woman asked.

The first time Kat had seen her, she’d guessed her age at somewhere over eighty, but that day Constance Miller looked younger by at least ten years. Maybe twenty. Her face was full of something. Kat breathed out, watched her breath fog in the chilly air, and knew that something was hope.

“Do you have it?” Constance Miller asked. “Is that why you called?”

“No, Grandmother. A theft like that would have been on the television.” The man reached awkwardly for the old woman’s hand.

“TV is overrated,” Kat said, pulling the envelope from her pocket and tossing it onto the man’s lap.

He stared down as if it were a tiny bomb and might explode. Only the woman dared to reach for it—carefully, tentatively.

“Is it really…”

“You can look,” Kat said, glancing at the two uniformed police officers who stood twenty feet away, sipping coffee. “But I wouldn’t touch.”

“Oh, I believe you,” the woman said, grabbing up the package and holding it tightly against her chest. “It’s in here. I know it. I can feel it,” she said, and Kat knew she wasn’t talking about the weight or shape of the heavy stone in the padded envelope. She hadn’t felt it with her fingers—she could feel it in her soul. Kat knew that sensation. She’d found it once on a school bus in London with four priceless paintings. She had seen it in Mr. Stein’s eyes every time she returned one of the missing Holocaust pieces to him so he could take it on the final leg of its journey home.

“Oh, thank you, Katarina. Thank you. If it hadn’t been for you and Mr. Hale—” The woman stopped and looked around. “Where’s your friend?”

Kat couldn’t help herself; she looked too.

“I’m afraid he had another obligation.”

“Oh,” Constance Miller said. “Do thank him for me, please. I just can’t tell you how much…” But the words got caught.

“Grandmother, are you all right?” The young man’s hand was on the woman’s shoulder as it shook and she cried, clutching the precious package to her heart.

“I’m fine,” the woman choked out. “I’m perfect.”

The job was over. Her work was done. So Kat turned and started through the park.

“Katarina,” the woman called one last time, and Kat stopped and turned back to the priceless gem she’d just stolen and given away without a second thought. “Thank you, Katarina. Thank you,” the woman said, and Kat couldn’t help but notice that the tears were gone. It was a different sort of smile. “We never could have done this without you.”

Kat had often heard it said that asking a good thief to stop thinking would be like asking a shark to stop swimming, so she couldn’t help herself as she walked away from the park that day, through the coming dusk of the city streets.

But that didn’t mean she didn’t try.

She didn’t want to remember the feeling of the stone in her hand or the air rushing past her, zooming toward the light at the end of the shaft. She had absolutely no desire to think about Hale and her father and Paraguay. Or Uruguay. But more than anything, Kat, a girl who had been good at most things she’d ever tried, did not wish to entertain the notion that she might simply be a truly heinous kisser.

No. Kat shook her head. She wasn’t going to think about that.

Not when there was a Klimt in Cairo and a Manet somewhere in Spain. Not when Mr. Stein had left her a message regarding a long-lost Matisse that might be surfacing any day somewhere on the Mexican Riviera.

She wasn’t going to think about how much colder it was when Hale’s arm didn’t periodically drape across her shoulder, when his broad shoulders weren’t there to block the wind. She was the last person to care about Paraguay—or Uruguay—and whatever it was her family had decided to steal.

No, Kat had more than enough work to do on her own, she told herself, walking a little faster, feeling a little surer. She was starting to consider calling Mr. Stein and making her next plan when she passed by a bar and heard the clink of glasses and the blaring television inside.

“The Cleopatra Emerald is one of the most famous gems in the world,” the anchorwoman was saying. “Famous for its size, its tragic legend, and—more recently—the drama that has followed it into the courts of the world. The private woman behind one of the most public court battles of recent years joins us tonight for her very first interview. Constance Miller, thank you for being here.”

And that was when Kat stopped. The world around her seemed to freeze as she stood, listening to the story of how Constance Miller’s father and mother and
not
Oliver Kelly the First had found that stone among the sands of Egypt. She’d heard the story before, of course. Once in legend, and once from a woman in the back of a diner in the rain. And now she heard it again, from a woman with a tweed jacket and a British accent.

From a woman whom Kat had
never
seen before.

It wasn’t really an earthquake, Kat was certain. And yet it felt as if the buildings were shaking. She stood stock-still in the flow of the sidewalk. People washed over her like the tide, and yet she didn’t move.

“Excuse me,” someone said, brushing against her, but Kat didn’t register the words. She didn’t feel a thing. Her mind was still hearing the same story from two faces, knowing at least one of them was a lie. A con.

Her phone rang, but the sound was coming from the other side of the world. Kat felt like she was moving in slow motion when she put her hand into her pocket and found the simple white card with the plain black letters that spelled the name
Visily Romani
.

With one touch, Kat knew it was different from the card she and Gabrielle had seen in the Millers’ hotel room. The paper was softer, the lettering thicker. And there was no doubt in Kat’s mind that
this
card was real. Despite her training—her blood—Katarina Bishop couldn’t help but shiver as she turned the card over to read the handwritten words:
Get it back
.

S
tanding at the threshold of the Brooklyn brownstone, Kat watched the light from the street drifting down the long narrow hall that led from the front stoop to the ancient kitchen. She knew what she’d find inside: the old staircase and office, the sitting room and a powder bath. Kat saw it all with her thief’s eyes. She knew which floorboards moaned and which door hinges squeaked, and yet she stood for a long time, staring into her great-uncle’s home as if it were the one place on earth she no longer had the right to tread. It felt as if a laser grid lay inside. A minefield. But also, answers.

And what Kat really needed was answers.

“Uncle Eddie!” she called into the dark house. The card was in her pocket and her heart was in her throat, pounding. She swallowed hard and tried again. “Uncle Eddie!”

She crept past the sitting room, where no one ever sat, and down the hall, but the kitchen was empty and the stove was off and Kat knew without looking any farther that her uncle wasn’t there. She felt alone in the big house, trying to decide what to do. If Uncle Eddie had been there, he could have told her to sit or run, to eat or to cry. She wanted someone to do her thinking for her because she didn’t trust her own mind anymore. So she stood in the hallway, her thoughts on a constant loop, thinking…

I got conned.

I got conned.

I got…

“Kat?”

Kat jumped. The lights flickered on, and Kat spun to take in the boy behind her.

“Jeez, Simon, you nearly scared me half to—”

She stopped and studied him—he had on blue pajamas and his feet were bare. His black hair stood up at odd angles, and he didn’t look like a computer genius right then. No, he looked like a fire truck.

“Did you get some sun, Simon?” she asked.

Simon nodded. “Don’t ever set up an observation post on a water tower.”

“Okay,” Kat said softly. She wanted to reach out and pat his back, but she didn’t know how far the burn went, and—more than that—she couldn’t quite forget that she was the one who needed comforting.

“Where’s Uncle Eddie?” Kat heard her voice break. She sounded and felt like a little girl when she told him, “I need Uncle Eddie.”

“He’s gone,” Simon said. “Left a couple of hours ago.

Uncle Felix was trying to run a Groundhog
with
a Black-eyed Susan and…well…”

“Gas lines?” Kat guessed.

Simon nodded. “Gas lines. Eddie left for Paraguay as soon as he heard.” He glanced up and down the empty hall. “Where’s Hale?”

There was an emptiness in Kat’s gut, a dizzy feeling in the back of her mind. Uncle Eddie had left. Hale was gone. Constance Miller—whoever she really was—was a whole different type of missing, and suddenly, Kat couldn’t take it. She had to do something, find something, be something other than the mark, so she pushed past Simon and into the office that she had seen used once or maybe twice in her entire life.

There was only one small window in that tiny room, and the light from the street barely broke through the heavy blinds, so Kat reached for the switch. Filing cabinets lined one side, topped with boxes and old envelopes, half-finished crossword puzzles and magazines from decades long since past. Behind the desk sat a wall of bookshelves filled with papers and tools, and dusty maps of the sewer system under the Louvre.

“What are you doing?” Simon asked while Kat pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet closest to the door. The drawer was rusty and squeaked, but Uncle Eddie was a continent away, so she pulled harder, pushed through the files faster.

A shoe box full of old IDs.

Blueprints for a very large bank written almost entirely in Japanese.

Background information on every guard at the Tower of London in 1980
.

“Do you know if Uncle Eddie keeps anything about the other families?” She slammed the top drawer shut and jerked open the next.

Shipping manifests for a tanker out of Stockholm.

“What about them?” Simon asked.

Blank letterhead from the ambassador to Ecuador.

“Names? Addresses? Any information about the other families—how to track them down.”

A ring of keys labeled Property of Montreal World’s Fair, DO NOT DUPLICATE
.

“I don’t know,” Simon said. He sounded almost afraid, standing there, watching Kat slam the second drawer then step back and look at the piles and the boxes and the dust. Looking for answers.

“Simon, I need you to tell me if Uncle Eddie keeps a computer anywhere. Have you ever built him any databases or an address book or—”

“Kat.” Simon cut her off. “This is Uncle Eddie you’re talking about.”

She pulled the chair out from behind the desk, pushed aside a perfectly-to-scale model of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and took a seat.

“Kat, what is going on?” Simon said in the manner of a boy who had given up on trying to understand anything that wasn’t made of ones and zeros. “What are you looking for?” Kat pulled open a desk drawer and ran her fingers through a million dollars in fake chips from a hotel that had never existed in Las Vegas. “What’s wrong?” he asked as she thumbed through a book about the catacombs and passageways that still ran beneath Vatican City.

“Kat!” Simon yelled this time. He pulled the book out of her frantic hands. “Kat, where is Hale?”

And suddenly Kat knew she couldn’t hide. Couldn’t run. Couldn’t lie.

“Hale is…” she started slowly.

“I’m right here.”

And there he was, standing in the hallway at Simon’s back. When Gabrielle appeared at his side, Kat didn’t know what she was feeling: relief or embarrassment. Shame or guilt.

She tried to smile. “I thought you were heading to Paraguay.”

He dropped the duffel bag to the ground and leaned against the door frame. “Yeah, but then I saw the most interesting thing on the news.”

There was only one chair in the dusty office, little light, no food, but those weren’t the reasons why they left. The kitchen was simply where these things were discussed, so the kitchen was where they went. Well, all of them but Katarina. Kat stayed by the door.

“So how was Paraguay?” Gabrielle asked as she and Hale and Simon took their places at the table.

“There were mosquitoes. I hate mosquitoes.” Simon scratched at his leg, but his gaze drifted from Gabrielle to Hale and finally to Kat. “What happened?”

Hale and Gabrielle looked at Kat. Kat looked away.

“We have a sort of…situation,” Hale said.

To Hale’s right, Simon winced. “Here,” Gabrielle said, reaching for the burn cream Uncle Eddie kept over the stove. She grabbed the younger boy by the top of the head and said, “Hold still.”

“Was it the Russians?” Simon asked. No one answered. “Brazil?” His voice was rising higher. “Don’t tell me someone from the Henley finally—”

“It’s Romani.” Kat’s voice cut him off. “Or…we thought it was Romani—
I
thought it was him. But then…”

“Kat.” Hale was up and crossing the room. In a split second he reached her. “I believed them too.”

“But I should know better.”

“So it’s okay if
I
get taken?”

She could tell she’d hurt him, and she hadn’t even tried. “You wanted to leave, Hale. You tried to get
me
to leave.”

“Um…can someone please tell me what happened?”

When Kat turned back to Simon, his face was oozing and covered with cream.

“We stole the Cleopatra Emerald,” Gabrielle said simply, and Simon’s face turned an even deeper shade of crimson.

“You stole the…
You
stole the…You
stole
the…How? Why? How?”

“Alice in Wonderland,” Gabrielle said simply. “Kitty here swapped the real for a fake and zoomed right out the rabbit hole without anyone suspecting a thing.” She smiled at her cousin as if she were finally starting to approve. “It was beautiful.”

“No.” Kat shook her head. “It wasn’t.”

“But…” Simon’s eyes were wide. His voice was cracking. “But Uncle Eddie says that the Cleopatra Emerald is—”

“It’s not cursed,” Hale said, but Kat couldn’t shake the feeling that she wasn’t so sure.
Cleopatra jobs always end badly
.

She fingered the card in her pocket and took her place at the table. “They said Romani sent them,” Kat explained. “They said they were the stone’s rightful owners and that Romani had sent them, and I…”

“What are you saying, Kat?”

She laughed at the joke that wasn’t funny at all. And then Katarina Bishop, teen wonder thief and criminal It Girl finally told them, “I got conned.”

The world didn’t end when she said it. Kat had been expecting the brownstone’s walls to crumble, the old kitchen table to crack in two beneath her palms. But what followed was nothing but an eerie, empty quiet, and Kat knew the girl she’d been two hours before was dead.

“So what?” Hale said after what felt like an eternity. “So we messed up. We learned. And it’s over.”

“No.” Kat stood and put Romani’s card on the table. She saw the three of them stare down at it, felt something in the room shift, the kitchen come alive as she whispered, “It’s only just beginning.”