Thieves Like Us 01 - Thieves Like Us (17 page)

Jonah just grunted.

Patch staggered out of the car and threw up into an empty bucket standing beside a Land Rover, doubtless placed there for just that reason. ‘You need a hand getting to your room?’ he muttered, wiping his mouth.

‘I can manage it,’ said Jonah. He wasn’t at all sure he really could, but he decided he’d already shown himself up enough today.

A suited doctor was waiting in his apartment in the castello grounds to stitch him up. He asked no questions, worked swiftly and in silence then got the hell away. Jonah felt the sudden urge to ask him for a lift out of here.
I can pay you
, he wanted to say.
I have this diamond, you see
.

He looked at it now, nestling in his sweaty palm. Then he hurled it into the cold stone fireplace.

Take it. It’s worth a hell of a lot more than I am
.

Tye wished Coldhardt would up the lighting a little
for these debriefs. She was dog-tired, both from the long flight back and the partying the night before – and they hadn’t even had time to grab a shower before being summoned to the hub. Con sat beside her, a touch of pink about her skin from the sun they’d caught in Aqaba. Shame that was about the only thing they’d managed to bring back with them.

‘You found no trace of the car with the fake plates?’ Coldhardt enquired.

Con shook her head. ‘A no-show in the car park, and no record of it ever having been there. Not in the visitors’ log, anyway.’

‘Oh, right, I can see them signing in to the building,’ said Motti sourly. ‘“Name?
Masked Pseudo-religious Maniac
. Organisation?
Cult of Ophiuchus
. Car registration?
Shit, one of yours, actually
–”’

‘Thank you, Motti,’ said Coldhardt heavily.

Tye rolled her eyes at Motti, but she was smiling. He was always noisy after he got away with something. Like Patch, the buzz kept him going for days. Jonah, on the other hand, seemed quiet and withdrawn, staring at the blank screens on the wall like he could see something there. She doubted it was just the disappointment that, so far, his code-cracking programs had turned up nothing on the mysterious cipher.

‘Tye,’ said Coldhardt suddenly, ‘what news of the lekythos?’

‘It was there maybe twenty-four hours. Samraj’s assistant booked a top level courier the morning after the black Chrysler showed up.’ She glanced at Con. ‘According to the dispatch boys, a “package” was
transported by the courier to an address in Rome.’

‘Well, well. I wonder why she kept it there for twenty-four hours?’

‘I don’t know. There was nothing special about the labs at Aqaba,’ Con told him. ‘Just boring foodstuff research. We think it may have been a drop-off point, the nearest Serpens offices.’

‘The nearest by car, perhaps,’ Coldhardt agreed. ‘By plane, the Turkish and Italian facilities would be far easier to reach.’

‘They might not get the vase through customs,’ Patch argued.

‘Yeah, and can you imagine their passport photos?’ Motti snorted. ‘Any distinguishing features?
Big black veil-thing over face
.’

‘I think we can assume that their resources might stretch to bypassing traditional routes in and out of the country,’ Coldhardt surmised. ‘But since you’re feeling so loquacious, Motti, please give Tye and Con your field report.’

Jonah stiffened.

Motti explained that they’d photographed the fragments as instructed, and went on at length about how his ingenious plan of entry had been executed. When he got on to the snakes they’d braved in the hothouse and the gory discovery in the lab, Tye turned up her nose.

‘The fragments are of a manuscript written in Ancient Greek, unencrypted, allegedly from the pen of Ophiuchus himself,’ Coldhardt announced. ‘I’ve attempted a preliminary translation. “The root of the snake” is mentioned – possibly as an ingredient of the Amrita.’

Patch nodded. ‘Is that why Samraj is torturing the snakes, then – she’s looking for their roots?’

Coldhardt paused and smiled. ‘She’s doing many things in her quest for this secret. She is a first-class biologist.’

‘First-class bitch, more like,’ Con whispered. But Tye was more interested in the way Coldhardt had carefully evaded the question. What was it about Samraj that made him so secretive?

‘Well, Samraj was there when we did the place,’ Motti went on. ‘Coulda turned us into one of her specimens.’

Coldhardt frowned deeply. ‘You didn’t mention this before.’

‘Some woman was talking to her in one of the rooms we passed.’

‘You
saw
Samraj?’

‘No, the door was closed,’ said Jonah, breaking his silence.

‘Then it’s possible you misheard,’ said Coldhardt thoughtfully. ‘I understand the atmosphere there was rather highly charged. Jonah, Motti mentioned you thought you actually saw somebody watching you.’

Jonah glanced at Motti, swallowed hard. ‘Yes. I’m sure I did.’

‘And do you believe, as he does, that it was this person who activated the alarms upon your attempted escape?’

Tye noticed Motti staring at Jonah, nodding his head a fraction, encouraging him to agree. You didn’t need uncanny instincts to know that something bad had kicked off at the mansion, and that it involved Jonah up to his cute choirboy’s neck.

‘I don’t know,’ Jonah faltered, blushing. ‘I s’pose it’s possible …’

‘All things are possible.’ Coldhardt smiled, leaned back in his seat. ‘The important thing is, you got away safely with a record of the contents of that safe, as instructed.’

Tye was watching Coldhardt closely. Motti wasn’t the only one covering something up. Coldhardt didn’t believe that Samraj was in that house for a moment, or that this mystery woman had hit the alarms – but for whatever reason, he had decided to keep his opinions to himself. She supposed that was his prerogative. A boss spared his workforce the details of how the business was run, and a parent didn’t tell his children everything …

Why then did she feel so uneasy?

Once they were dismissed, Jonah walked back to the hangout with the others. But while the four of them chatted and caught up, he kept a stony silence.

Motti swung open the double doors into the hangout and led the way inside. ‘Hey, geek. How you feelin’?’

‘The lengths some people will go to get out of training,’ said Tye.

Still Jonah kept silent.

‘Hey, I’m talking to you,’ said Motti, tapping on Jonah’s head. ‘Or did the doc stitch your mouth up along with your arm and leg?’

‘Why’d you lie back there, Mot?’ Jonah demanded. ‘You know it was me who set off the alarms.’

Con frowned. ‘You did?’

‘I screwed up climbing the wall.’

‘He was badly hurt,’ said Patch quickly.

Motti nodded. ‘Geek had some kind of panic attack –’

‘Look, you don’t believe me about seeing –
hearing
– that woman in the house,’ said Jonah hotly. ‘And yet you told Coldhardt that
she
was the one who hit the alarms.’

‘So sue me.’ Motti shrugged. ‘I was just trying to save your sorry ass from a roasting. Anyways, it’s done now, so forget it. Coldhardt don’t care – we got what he wanted and got out ourselves. Next time it’ll come easier, and you won’t louse up.’

‘There won’t be a next time,’ said Jonah quietly.

It was as if his words crushed every sound in the place. There was just silence and staring.

Motti glared at him. ‘Say what?’

Jonah shrugged. ‘I can’t live my life like this. You’re all brilliant at what you do, but …’

‘C’mon, Jonah …’ Patch looked at him uncertainly. ‘You’re still new to it. Mot’ll tell you, I screwed up enough when I –’

‘I don’t want this,’ said Jonah. He looked at Tye but she was staring at the floor. ‘I should just go before I let you down again. I could have got all of us caught last night. It could have been one of you who got hurt, not me.’

‘Let
us
worry about ourselves, Jonah, yes?’ said Con.

‘Yeah, come on, mate,’ said Patch, smiling hopefully. ‘You’re just tired and upset. We had a rough old night – it happens. But we still got what we –’

‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ Jonah rounded on
them, felt his cheeks flushing. ‘I can’t hack it the way you all can. I’m no good to you.’

Motti’s face soured further. ‘Aw, save us the bullshit self-pity!’

‘It’s not just that. I really like you guys, but …’ He looked away from them. ‘I never wanted to be a thief.’

‘This is not about being a thief,’ said Con. ‘There
are
no thieves like us.’

‘This is your only shot at being somebody, Jonah,’ said Motti quietly. ‘You wanna go back to how you had it in jail?’

‘Your life isn’t for me. I wish it was, but –’ He shook his head, miserably. He knew he sounded like some whining little kid but he just couldn’t help it. ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more. OK?’

Tye was looking at him. She looked like she was about to say something.

But then a vintage black phone rang close by, with a big old-fashioned ring.

‘It’s the Bat-phone,’ said Patch, nervously. ‘D’you think he –’

‘This place is clean, man,’ Motti told him. ‘Coldhardt don’t listen in on us.’

Con answered the phone. ‘Yes, Coldhardt?’ She listened for a few seconds, then put the phone down and looked over at Jonah. ‘He wants to see you.’

Jonah raised his eyebrows. ‘Well. I s’pose I want to see him too.’

‘Don’t tell him you’re leaving us, Jonah,’ said Patch. He rubbed furiously at the leather patch over his eye. ‘We ain’t never had no one leave us. It’s – it’s bad luck!’

‘Aw, save your breath, man.’ Motti gave Jonah a look that was part scorn, part pity. ‘He ain’t worth it. Let Coldhardt handle him.’

Jonah turned away. Told himself he didn’t care what they thought. He was used to being on the outside. Used to not belonging.

Besides, this wasn’t who he wanted to be, he reminded himself. This was a million miles away.

Just one more situation that hadn’t worked out.

It seemed to take him an hour to reach the door. He felt the eyes of the others on his back, but nobody said a word.

Perhaps the ones Motti had uttered were enough.

‘
Let Coldhardt handle him
.’

Jonah spent the whole way to the junior hub rehearsing his reasons for quitting. He was dreading what Coldhardt would say.

The old man was hunched over his computer when Jonah arrived. ‘I think you’ve done it,’ he announced. ‘The cipher has been cracked. Look here.’

Jonah hurried over to the screen, a little excitement and the old attitude sweeping him along.
Please Coldhardt and he’ll like you better. Make this work out for him and he’ll let you go
. ‘God, look at that! The message put up a hell of a fight – multiple encryption to disguise character frequency …’

‘You mean the way that Es and As occur more than Zs and Xs.’

‘Yeah. But this level of encryption, without a computer it would take you, well …’ He shrugged. ‘I s’pose they didn’t have TV in those days – whenever
those days were, precisely.’

‘Maybe they attempted to be too clever,’ said Coldhardt gravely.

Jonah studied the legible words in between the garbled random characters a bug in the program still threw up. ‘Head of snake, dog of the shepherd… hand before… the preceding …’ He frowned. ‘It’s gibberish. Like that Spartan scytale you got me to decrypt – what was that again?’

‘Catacombs … north … stars buried in patterns.’

‘Doesn’t give you much to go on, does it? What does any of this have to do with the Amrita prescription?’

Coldhardt looked at him, impassive. ‘There couldn’t be a glitch in the translation software?’

Jonah shook his head. ‘Sometimes the order of the words gets a bit messed up – like, “hand before” could be “beforehand”, I s’pose. But for this job I programmed the decryption engine to hack into ancient language translation databases when sorting out the characters.’ He smiled –
Like me! Like me!
‘I targeted the best, put together by professors at Oxford and Yale, for academic use only.’

‘Most impressive,’ Coldhardt murmured.

Jonah peered at the results more closely. ‘It came up with numbers too?’

‘Indeed. My first thought was that they were coordinates. But with no reference point from which to start …’

‘We could translate the words
back
into Ancient Greek, see if they correspond to any place names?’

‘I have done so,’ Coldhardt looked at him, his blue
eyes pale and chill. ‘No match – not to any known geographical site on any map, from classical Greco-Roman well into medieval times.’

‘These place names could be coded in some other way. Or based on local nicknames, not official ones.’

‘And without that knowledge, we can’t construct a key.’

Jonah nodded slowly. He felt a crushing sense of anticlimax. ‘It doesn’t make sense. Why encode information so carefully if the plaintext is meaningless to all but a few locals anyway?’

‘The parts of the lekythos that Samraj now holds must contain further information,’ Coldhardt surmised. ‘We need to reclaim them from that address in Rome. That must be our next mission.’

‘I …I need to talk to you about that.’

‘Oh?’ Coldhardt looked at him expectantly.

He couldn’t meet the force in those icy eyes, looked down at the floor. ‘I don’t want to stay with you. I want to go back.’

‘To what?’ said Coldhardt, quite unruffled, like he’d been expecting as much. ‘The Young Offenders’ Institution?’

‘If I have to.’ Jonah paused, chanced his arm. ‘Though if you don’t want your rivals to know I’m back on the market, maybe you could place me somewhere a little less obvious.’

A soft, cold chuckle. ‘Clever, logical and self-serving. I like that, Jonah.’

‘I’m grateful for the opportunity you’ve given me,’ he said carefully. ‘But this life isn’t for me. I
don’t belong here.’

‘Are you so sure? I pride myself on my instincts in these matters.’ Coldhardt paused. ‘Perhaps I’m getting old.’

‘I’d like to get old myself,’ said Jonah. ‘I can’t see that happening if I live at your speed.’

‘It’s not only old that you’ll grow, Jonah. You’ll grow bitter, dissatisfied. You’ll look back on this moment as the biggest mistake of your long, pointless life.’