Uncommon Criminals (14 page)

P
erhaps it was the crisp wind and the clear sun that greeted them on the deck early the next morning (though Kat chose to credit Marcus’s excellent coffee), but the fact remained that by seven a.m., Kat and her crew were especially…awake.

Nick sat beside Simon, who was at his computer. Marcus stood at attention beside the food. Hale had his feet on the table, reading the morning paper.

And someone had given the Bagshaws a gun.

“Pull!” Hamish yelled, and Angus pulled a cord and sent a skeet flying across the deep blue water.

A split second later, a loud crack was reverberating across the deck. Kat jumped. Hale sighed. The shot went far wide, and Marcus never moved a muscle.

Kat took the seat on the other side of Simon. “Good morning,” she told him and risked a glance at the screen, but Simon said nothing. “Simon…” she tried again, but Hale cut her off with a slight shake of his head.

“Thinking,” he whispered.

Kat waited.

She didn’t sip the coffee. She didn’t take a bite of the fluffy roll. She just sat watching Simon’s eyes.

“Yes!” he yelled and pumped his fist in the air while, behind him, Angus took the gun and yelled, “Pull!”

“So, Simon…” Kat leaned over the table, and Simon finally seemed to realize he wasn’t alone.

“Hey, Kat.”

Kat chuckled. “Hey. So what’s new?” She eyed the computer and the smile that spread across Simon’s face.

“Well…see…you know the bug we put in LaFont’s phone yesterday?”

“The one that made Kat blow our cover?” Gabrielle asked, strolling onto the deck and over to one of the chaise longues.

“Yes, that one,” Kat conceded.

“PULL!”

Crack
.

Again, the shot went wide, and again, the brothers hardly noticed.

“What about it, Simon?” Hale asked, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, and yet Kat was certain that his gaze never trailed from where Nick sat on the other side of the table.

“Yeah, well, the new phones are really more like little computers and…”

“Simon. Buddy,” Hale prompted.

“We didn’t just bug his phone. This morning, LaFont synced his phone to his computer.”

“So we…” Kat prompted.

“We have everything.” Simon turned the screen around. “‘Today, three o’clock, photo op at the Prince’s Palace,’” he read. “‘Four forty-five, interview with Maggie and the Associated Press. Seven p.m., polishing with the royal jeweler.…Tomorrow, nine a.m., VIP brunch with’ what…three CEOs, the Russian ambassador, a delegation from Egypt. Ooh, Princess Ann of Astovia—I hear her plastic surgery was very effective.”

Nick gave a low whistle, then settled back in his chair. “This is a very busy emerald.”

“Looks like it all culminates Thursday night with a big ball or gala or whatever,” Simon said, and Gabrielle looked offended that galas and balls could ever be
whatever
ed away. “The emerald is going to be there so all the potential bidders can see it up close. Then Friday morning, they auction it off.”

“You’ve got locations?” Kat asked Simon.

“Oh, yeah. We’ve got everything.”

“Security?”

“If LaFont knows it, we know it.”

It felt as if maybe the curse had lifted, the tide had shifted, but then the breeze picked up and a skeet took a very unfortunate turn. Seconds later, Angus was pulling his shot far to the right, shooting a large hole in the second-story galley not ten feet above Marcus’s head.

“Give me that!” Gabrielle bolted to her feet and jerked the shotgun from Angus’s hands.

“Excellent plan,” Nick said with a smile at Gabrielle.

“By the way, Nick,” Hale said, “I’m sure someone can take you to shore now. Thanks for stopping by and—”

“Hale,” Kat said, cutting him off. “We need him.”

“To do what, exactly?” Gabrielle wanted to know.

“Maggie,” Kat said softly. “Someone’s got to keep an eye on Maggie.” She stood and walked tenderly to the rail. The coastline didn’t seem so distant, but the details were still clouded in a fog. So she stared out at the water and tried to focus on the few things she truly knew. “We need to know where she goes, whom she talks to. If she buys anything, I want to hear about it. If she makes any calls, I want to know to whom and for how long.”

“Okay, okay. I got it.” Nick plopped a grape into his mouth and turned for the door, but Hale was already up and blocking his way.

“I don’t think you do.”

“She’s not just some old woman,” Kat said, taking her place at Hale’s side. “She’s not a mark or a chump. She’s been on the grift longer than any of us have been alive.”

Nick laughed a little. “I seem to remember another lifelong con I managed to successfully tail one day in Paris.”

“I mean it, Nick. She’s good.”

“So were you.”

“I’m serious,” Kat warned.

Nick wasn’t smiling when he finished, “So am I.” Then he stepped around Hale and went inside, leaving the crew to watch him go.

The Bagshaws had stopped shooting. Simon wasn’t fiddling with any wires or keys. Even Gabrielle sat perfectly still, back straight, when she asked, “What are
we
going to do?”

“Simon, I want you to stay with the Interpol files. If there’s something in there about Maggie, I want to know what it is. Angus, you and Hamish stay with LaFont. I want to know if he’s in on it or if…”

Kat trailed off, leaving Hale to guess, “If she’s using him like she used us?”

“Yes,” Kat admitted.

“So what about us?” Gabrielle asked from under the brim of her hat.

“It sounds like the Cleopatra is taking over the town, right, Simon?” Kat asked.

“Right,” Simon said.

Kat allowed herself one last look out across the blue water and the distant coast. “Then I think it’s time we see the sights.”

Fortress
was a word that, in Katarina Bishop’s opinion, was severely overused and overrated. It does not, for example, adequately describe a jewelry store or most banks. It is a serious misnomer for the vast majority of domestic military bases (with the obvious exception of Fort Knox). Even half of the royal residences in the world would not be best described in such a way. But not, Kat knew, in Monaco.

“You know, Marcus would have driven,” Hale said as the two of them followed Gabrielle up the long winding road that led to the palace walls of the Grimaldi family home.

“Teens today don’t get enough exercise, or haven’t you heard?” Kat said, reaching to pat Hale’s nonexistent gut. What she found were flat, hard abs, and her face blushed a little.

“You know, about a half dozen armies have tried to take this place over the years,” Hale said, huffing slightly as Gabrielle picked up the pace and the cobblestone street grew even steeper.

“Well then, it’s a good thing we aren’t an army, isn’t it?” Gabrielle said.

The wind was clear and almost cool as it blew from the Mediterranean up through the cypress trees that lined the winding road.

“So if the ball is Thursday night, and they’re auctioning it off at the palace on Friday…” Hale started.

Kat pointed to the tall walls in the distance. “Then the Prince’s Palace is our last shot—which is a bad thing. Though it gives us the most prep time. Which is a good thing. But it’s the palace…”

“Which is a bad thing?” Hale guessed, and smiled in her direction. For a split second, Kat almost forgot about the curse and the stone and what she was starting to think of as the most awkward kiss in the history of awkward kisses.

She pulled her camera from her pocket and scanned the bay below with its acres of yachts and motorboats. The palace sat atop a massive plateau that surged out into the water, raised that much closer to heaven by the rocky cliffs.

Gabrielle crossed her arms and stared out at the jagged limestone wall that rose up from the breaking waves. “I could totally scale that.”

“Those cliffs are a hundred and fifty feet tall and eighty degrees steep,” Kat said, with barely a glance in her cousin’s direction.

Gabrielle was insulted and didn’t even bother to hide it. “Oh, and I suppose you think your dad was alone when he free-climbed the Kyoto Banking Tower on a windy day last September.”

“Cliffs mean many, many chances to fall, Gabrielle.”

“So?” Gabrielle countered.

“So catch,” Kat said, tossing a coin underhanded, sending it hurtling through the air in her cousin’s direction. Gabrielle lunged to catch it, but her ankle turned and as she fell, her purse toppled open, sending two wallets, three IDs, two bottles of fingernail polish, and a stun gun skidding across the cobblestones.

“Ow,” Gabrielle said, then looked up at her cousin. “What did you do that for?”

Hale bent down, put a hand under each of Gabrielle’s arms, and pulled her effortlessly to her feet.

“No cliffs,” Kat said a final time.

Gabrielle sighed and admitted, “No cliffs.”

Kat stood with one hand over her eyes blocking out the sun, staring at the stronghold in the distance. “So we can’t go over, and it’s sitting on solid stone, which means we can’t go under. But if we get through”—she eyed the gates—“we’d still have to get to the stone and get it out.…” She turned and looked at them. “We have to get
out
.”

“Maybe Charlie could make another fake?” Hale suggested, but Kat shook her head.

“No time.”

“Maybe…” Gabrielle started, but Kat had already turned.

Gravity seemed stronger than normal, pulling Kat down the hill and over the cobblestone streets toward the sandy beaches below.

“What else does the emerald have planned, Hale?”

“You’re not gonna like it,” he said with a shake of his head, and Kat kept walking. She didn’t like any of it.

Over the next five hours, Kat and her companions looked like most tourists who come to the French Riviera on any given year. But looks can be deceiving.

Standing outside La Banque Royale Nationale, very few of the passersby could hear the shorter girl say to the boy, “LaFont’s safe-deposit box is a part of the bank’s platinum package?”

“Yeah.”

“And the stone is being kept here whenever it isn’t making official appearances?”

“Yes.”

“And our last shot at it here would be Thursday night?”

The boy nodded. “Before the auction Friday morning.”

“And don’t tell me”—the girl pointed to the cameras that hung at regular intervals around the perimeter—“those are the Decanter 940s with the heat-sensitive imaging?”

“Yes,” her companions answered in unison.

The girl slid a pair of dark sunglasses from the top of her head and pulled them over her bright blue eyes. She didn’t look back as she said, “Next.”

Walking through the front doors of the Cathedral of Monaco,

Kat had to look around.

“What is going to happen here?” she asked.

“Publicity photos,” Hale said.

“Okay…” Kat glanced at the doors and the cameras, the places where she could imagine the guards and the stone. “This could actually work if we get the right—”

“
With
the Palace Guards…” Hale added, and Kat turned on her heel and started for the door.

“Next!”

Standing outside the hotel suite where Maggie was set to host an afternoon tea for a visiting delegation of Egyptian dignitaries, Kat had an all-too-familiar reaction. (Too many hired goons, too few exits.)

The scene was no different on the street corner where, according to Simon, it might be possible to delay the armored car for five additional minutes as the stone made its way to or from the Prince’s Palace. (But there were too many bystanders and too little cover.)

There was a point somewhere between the bank and the royal jewelers, where the gem would receive its official polishing, when the group allowed themselves a little hope; but soon Kat was shaking her head and walking away from that possibility, too (entirely too little time to prep, and besides, no crew under a curse should even consider a job requiring scuba gear).

So it was with a heavy heart and very low expectations that Kat turned to Hale. “And that leaves Thursday night.…”

They had walked off the main thoroughfare. Simon was somewhere scanning the Interpol files, and Nick was still tailing Maggie. Marcus had appeared in a limo as if by magic and carried Gabrielle away. The Bagshaws were on the other side of the city, scouting LaFont’s private home. So Kat and Hale were alone as they turned onto a small winding street lined with elegant boutiques and expensive sports cars.

“Do they have a location for the ball yet?”

“They do.”

“Do we want to head over there now, or—”

“First, we make a stop.” Hale turned toward a long glass window with a blue awning. The door chimed as he strolled inside.

Kat knew there was a trick—there had to be. Maybe the bank backed up to the store and the vault could be accessed via the basement. Maybe Maggie’s stylist worked there and it would be possible for Gabrielle to impersonate her, switch the stones, and then escape in a trunk filled with couture.

Kat’s mind was reeling in a way that young girls’ minds almost never reel when inside elite boutiques on the coast of the Riviera. She was so busy, in fact, that she almost didn’t see the salesgirl who was approaching Hale, smiling.

“I’m sorry,” Kat told the girl. “We’re not really shopping for—”

“Welcome back, Mr. Hale,” the girl gushed, and kissed Hale on each cheek as if Kat hadn’t spoken at all. “I believe we have…” She trailed off, glancing at an equally tall, equally tan, equally gorgeous girl who was carrying a least a dozen bags from the back room.

“Yes, we have some beautiful things for you, Hale,” the second girl said, handing him the bags, her hand lingering a little longer than necessary on his.

“You always do, Isabella. My love to Renée, okay?”

“
Bonjour
,” Isabella said.

“
Bonjour
,” Hale said back. They were halfway to the door when he finally looked at Kat. “
Now
we’re ready.”

Kat tested the weight and feel of the garment bag he’d handed her. “I don’t suppose there’s a heat-resistant black cat-suit in here with built-in harness attachments?”

“Nope.”

“Then I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what
is
in here?”