A Magnificent Crime (26 page)

We followed Reilly onto the Metro and all the way to his final destination, the Palais Garnier, the Paris opera house.

The Palais Garnier was an opulent building adorned with gilded statues and sweeping carriage ramps, topped with a grand copper dome. Guests had gathered on the staircase outside. Evidently, there was a matinee performance. I glanced down at my outfit, jeans and a sweater. Not exactly opera material, but it would have to do.

Reilly climbed the steps, and we lingered at the bottom. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a ticket.

This could be a problem. We didn't have tickets.

Could we steal some? Often at a theatre entrance, people struggled with umbrellas or jackets, couples argued, and women applied final swipes of lipstick . . . various opportunities for pickpocketing.

I scanned the crowd and couldn't see any such openings. We moved to Plan B.

We darted around the outside of the enormous theater and ducked in close to the back, then picked the lock and snuck in through the backstage door. Once inside, we moved quickly to the lobby, where the sounds of clinking champagne glasses mixed with the general hum and press of people waiting for the performance to start. I glanced at Brooke, who was frowning at the crowd. She turned to me and gave a slight shrug, bewildered. Reilly wasn't anywhere to be seen.

“Let's split up and search,” I said.

Moving freely through a theater, looking for someone, is often tricky. There's always a helpful usher hanging about, offering to help you find your seat, asking to see your ticket. I needed to steer clear of this type.

As I slipped through the crowd, I passed a middle-aged woman with a pair of opera glasses dangling from her purse. On impulse, I surreptitiously snatched them and kept walking through the crowd.

I climbed a staircase to the mezzanine level and ducked into a private box. From here I had a clear view of the entire theater. Strains of the orchestra warming their instruments floated upward.

I scanned the seats and balconies through my pilfered opera glasses. I bit my lip, worried we'd lost Reilly for good.

And then I spotted him. Across the theater, he had just entered a private box. And he wasn't alone—there was a woman seated there, evidently waiting for him. It was difficult to make her out, however, as her face was partially obscured by a red velvet curtain. I needed to get a better view. I sent Brooke a text.

 

Private box—second gallery, stage left.

 

I sharpened the focus on the opera glasses as I stared at the woman. She was speaking to Reilly. A waiter entered the box to take their drinks order. The woman shifted to speak to the waiter, and her face came more clearly into view.

My mouth dropped open. This was the woman I'd sat beside on the flight to Paris—Madeleine York, the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

My brain tilted with confusion, like my head was taking a ride on the Zipper. What was Sean Reilly doing meeting Madeleine York? Maybe it was his cover, working for the Smithsonian. Maybe he had tricked her and was gathering intel. Maybe they were having an affair.

But it was no good guessing. I had to know. I needed to listen to their conversation.

I scanned the galleries surrounding theirs. A box sat open to their left. I judged the distance. It should be close enough.

I slipped out and made my way around to the other side of the theater. In the mezzanine corridor, I passed Brooke, who fell into step beside me. She followed my lead, unquestioning.

We strolled into the private box, owning it, looking to all the world like this was exactly where our seats were located. A carved wall separated this box from Reilly's. I sat in the chair nearest the wall, while Brooke kept watch by the entrance to our box. I switched on my phone.

If you think your phone has a lot of nifty apps, just imagine all the possibilities for those of us in the underworld. Lucas, my tech guy, had installed all manner of sneaky tools in mine. Including one of my favorites, an eavesdropping microphone. I switched it on, popped the earbud into my ear, and aimed the phone at the conversation I wanted to hear. Brooke did the same thing, her phone similarly outfitted.

There was brief crackling, and then the microphone connected and sharpened on Reilly's and Madeleine's voices.

“Yes, it can be terribly unpredictable in Paris this time of year. Rain one moment, sunshine the next,” Madeleine was saying.

“I've noticed,” Reilly said. “But it's better than home. In Killarney we get rain one moment, rain the next.”

They were talking weather? I shifted and kept listening.

There was silence for several moments. Then Madeleine said, “I need to know if you anticipate any trouble. I cannot afford any screwups.”

“Well, it's a tight system at the Louvre,” Reilly said. “But I think it can be done, if that's what you want.”

“What do you mean, if that's what I want?” Madeleine said, her voice flinty. “You know there's no choice here. I need it, and I must have it. If you're not up to the job, I will find someone else.”

“Relax,” Reilly said. “I didn't say I couldn't do it. But the Hope isn't some grandmother's pearls. It takes a little planning.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. I looked at Brooke, and her face showed as much shock as I'm sure mine did. Reilly was working for Madeleine? It was Madeleine herself who had commissioned the theft of the Hope?

“Fine. It's a tricky job,” Madeleine said. “Of course it is. Are you saying it can't be done?”

“No, I'm not saying that. But I have another idea.”

“What is it?” Her voice was sharp with impatience.

“I could take it while it's on the way back to the Smithsonian from the Louvre.”

There was a pause. “Now, that's interesting,” she said. “Tell me how that would work.”

“Well, it would be an easier thing to do, to trash the security measures while the stone is in transit. We could have one inside man, right?” he asked.

“Yes. I could probably arrange that.”

“Then all we have to do is be sure nobody else steals it in the meantime.”

“Shouldn't be a problem,” Madeleine said.

“I wouldn't be so sure. You remember the thief I told you about?”

“The Montgomery girl?”

“Proving a little more resilient than I'd thought.”

“Hmm. So is she any good, as a thief, I mean? Does she actually have a chance?”

Reilly paused. I could hear him exhale. “She's good. Very good.”

At this, I felt a ridiculous flush of pride.

“But probably not
that
good,” he added, deflating my balloon with a barb.

Madeleine paused, perhaps thinking. “Even so, it sounds like we're going to have to take care of her,” she said. “I cannot have her interfering with my plans.”

Alarm bells clanged in my ears. What did she mean, take care of her? I didn't like the sound of that one bit.

“And you don't think the Pont des Arts thing will be enough?” Reilly said.

“Probably not.”

What the hell were they talking about? I looked to Brooke for some form of clarity, but she shrugged her shoulders. The Pont des Arts was one of the bridges that spanned the Seine, a pedestrian bridge, specifically. But I had no idea what that had to do with anything.

Whatever it was, I didn't like the direction this conversation was taking. A creepy feeling of dread traced my limbs, and I suddenly felt very uncomfortable and vulnerable.

“Failure here is not an option,” Madeleine was saying. “You understand that, yes, Reilly?”

“Of course.”

“My buyers are getting antsy. They each want their piece of the Hope, and they do not want to be kept waiting.”

“So you're planning to break it up?”

“Of course,” Madeleine said dismissively. “The Hope itself, intact, would be next to impossible to move on the black market. Entirely too recognizable. But if we break it up, it'll be harder to identify officially, and many more underground collectors can have a piece of it. Plus, because of the notoriety, they'll be willing to pay close to what the Hope is worth as a whole. Especially with all this recent talk about the curse.”

I cringed. How could she break up the Hope Diamond? It was a sacred thing. The Hope, with its history through the ages . . . just broken up for money. It was unthinkable.

So now I had something else at stake. If I didn't succeed, the Hope itself would be destroyed. It struck me as more than a little ironic that now stealing the Hope Diamond for a psychopathic collector like Faulkner was a bid to save the stone itself.

I had five days to go before the Hope left the Louvre. It was time to get down to business. But first, before I did anything else, there was somebody I desperately needed to talk to.

When you overhear people speaking about you in the terms Reilly and Madeleine were tossing about, and your brain starts imagining how you might be unceremoniously
taken care of
. . . who do you call to learn how to protect yourself?

A trained assassin, that's who.

Luckily, I happened to know one of those.

“So, Atworthy, question for you. Say someone, hypothetically, of course, is trying to kill you. How would you defend against that?”

Silence on the other end of the phone line.

“Catherine, are you in trouble?”

“Well,” I said, chuckling lightly, “I'm always in trouble. I'm a professional crook, you may be aware. . . .”

“Catherine,” he interjected sharply.

I sighed. “Yes. I'm concerned that some of the other interested parties may be a little
too
interested in seeing me out of the race.” I was walking back to my hotel from the opera, under my umbrella. A light rain had started, but I didn't care. The fresh air felt soothing, and the walk was good for my mental state. Besides, I wanted to talk to Atworthy about this as soon as possible.

“I see. Well, do you have any idea how they might attempt to harm you?”

“Nope. I heard something about the Pont des Arts, but I don't know if they were still talking about me at that point.”

I could hear Atworthy shutting the door to his office and settling back into his desk chair at the university. “It's not going to be easy to describe these things over the phone, you realize. It would be much better to show you—”

“Not an option. And it really can't wait.”

He sighed. “Okay, here's what you need to know. Whatever you do, don't let yourself get captured. . . .”

For the next thirty minutes he recounted all manner of counter-assassination tactics, from room surveillance to bomb detection. Some of it I knew, of course. I already had the basics down, like being able to recognize when I was being followed and never sitting with my back to the entry point of any room. Still, it was a good review.

The stuff I didn't know was fantastic. I walked and did my best to commit it all to memory.

“It would be exceedingly helpful if you knew the method they might use,” Atworthy said hopefully.

“You're right. It would,” I said. “But I don't.”

Another sigh from Atworthy.

We discussed methods of breaking out of a choke hold, if someone decided to attempt to strangle me. We discussed how to prevent being thrown out of a building or off a bridge.

I was particularly interested in the bridge tips.

We discussed poisons—the kind you can taste and the kind you can't.

“Should I carry poison antidotes with me, do you think?” I asked.

“It would be impossible for you to carry the antidote to every known poison. There are too many. However, having a supply of charcoal wouldn't be a bad idea.”

“Charcoal?”

“That's how you treat most orally given poisons in an emergency. Charcoal binds with the poison and flushes it from the digestive tract. Of course, that's not going to help you if it's an injected poison. Remember that case many years ago . . . of that Bulgarian dissident injected with ricin through the tip of an umbrella on a London street? Beautiful job, that. Truly elegant work—”

“Atworthy? Focus, please.”

“Right. Where was I?”

He moved on from poisons to sniper attacks. A tricky thing to prevent in the best of circumstances, but I took his suggestions to heart. Never sit near open windows, stay close to crowds, that sort of thing.

He poured as much wisdom into that conversation as he could, and I gobbled it down.

I hung up the phone and scraped a hand through my hair. Would his advice be enough to keep me safe?

I returned to my hotel. I needed to think. I had some figuring to do about this job. But when I got back, Jack was there with files and papers spread out on the desk, working on his case.

“Hey, hon. I just ordered room service. Are you hungry?”

I shrugged. “I could eat, I guess.” Truth was, all this talk of assassination methods and my life under threat had somewhat killed my appetite. But I couldn't get into that with Jack.

I gave him a quick kiss and went where I could do some solitary thinking and clear my head: the shower. As hot water poured down on my head, sending up goose bumps on the rest of my skin, I replayed everything I'd heard. Reilly thought it was possible to take the Hope from the Louvre. And yet he wasn't going to attempt it.

Was I crazy to attempt it?

I was just getting out of the shower when my phone, which was sitting on the bathroom counter, bleeped with a waiting message. I wrapped a fluffy towel around my torso, picked up the phone, and scrolled through the screen. There it was, a message from Faulkner.

 

Respond at your earliest convenience.

 

Which meant right fucking now.

I hesitated for a moment, though. And then there was a knock on the door to the suite.
Perfect. Room service.
I was hungrier now. A little food first, and then I'd make the call. I tucked in the towel edges and left the steamy bathroom.

I walked out just as Jack reached the suite door and opened it.

But it wasn't room service. It was Ethan, standing in the hallway, holding a bottle of wine.

At the sight of Jack, Ethan's eyes went wide and his mouth opened just slightly. “Jack! What a . . .
surprise.
When, er, when did you get to town?”

I winced. I had been so distracted in the past twenty-four hours with planning this job, I'd completely forgotten to tell Ethan that Jack was in Paris.

The look of shock on Ethan's face was matched by Jack's own stunned expression. Which was quickly replaced by a look of open contempt.

“What are you doing here, Jones?” His voice was low, vaguely threatening.

Ethan hesitated. He appeared unsure about what to say, about how much he actually could say. He glanced at me. “Well, there's some planning Cat and I need to do. For a job, if you have to know.”

“With wine?”

Ethan looked at the bottle of wine, as if he'd forgotten he was holding it. “Well, sure. Everything is better with wine, isn't it?”

“I think you'd better leave,” Jack said. His right hand curled around the door frame.

I frowned. On one level, of course, I understood Jack's point of view. On the other hand, he was demonstrating some fairly unappealing qualities just then.

Plus, he was interfering with my ability to do my job. “Jack, just hang on,” I said, placing my hand on Jack's chest in a gesture intended to soothe. Rather like how you'd calm a wild horse. “Ethan
is
helping me with this job.”

“I'm sure he is,” Jack said with tight control.

Ethan, wisely, stayed quiet throughout this. I looked at him apologetically. “Maybe we can do this a little later?” I said.

Ethan shrugged. “Sure. Give me a call.”

The door closed firmly.

Jack turned to face me. His mouth was hard. “So much time spent together . . . Is it really all about work? And why was he surprised I was here? Maybe I'm right. Maybe there
is
something going on.”

I could tell then that Jack and I were headed down a very ugly path. Where we would reemerge on the other side, I didn't know.