“Of course.”
“Then help me. Help me get your paintings back. You’ve got proof, you say?”
Taccone held his drink to the light as if toasting Kat and her courage. “Of course.”
Kat smiled, but her expression held no cheer. “Then show me what you’ve got.”
There would come a time—although Kat didn’t know it yet— when her conversation with Taccone that evening would be told and retold around Uncle Eddie’s kitchen table a thousand times. When the story of her crossing the drawbridge would involve not rain but bullets; when the tale of her asking Arturo Taccone for his help would include threats and windows and something involving a pair of antique dueling pistols (which, according to legend, Kat would also steal).
But Kat herself never told the story. Hale and Gabrielle lay in the darkness, staring down at the grounds when the drawbridge lowered and Kat left of her own free will, taking her sweet time.
As she walked through the rain and darkness, Hale and Gabrielle didn’t notice the way she kept the small disk from Arturo Taccone tucked under her arm. But, of course, they would see it eventually.
And, of course, eventually, it would change everything.
Chapter 10
The hotel suite was nice. Hale (or, more specifically, Marcus) didn’t know how to reserve any other kind. The couch was plush, and the television was large, but as Kat settled in to watch the disk Taccone had given her, she was anything but comfortable.
“There should be popcorn,” Gabrielle’s voice cut through the suite. “Am I the only one who thinks there should be popcorn?”
Kat pulled her dry sweater around her and tried to tell herself it was the rain and her damp hair that had chilled her.
“Milk Duds,” Hale said as he sank to the end of the sofa. “I, personally, am a fan of the Dud.” And Kat suddenly realized where the chill was coming from.
Hale hadn’t spoken to her in the car or looked at her in the elevator. Kat pulled a notebook from her bag and crossed her legs, wondering if Hale would ever forgive her for walking away from him. Again.
She reached for the remote control and pushed PLAY. The television flickered. Ghostly black-and-white images flashed across the screen: the long entryway that she had walked down only an hour before, a professional-grade kitchen, a wine cellar, a billiards parlor, Arturo Taccone’s private study. And finally . . .
“Stop.”
Gabrielle hit the PAUSE button, and the image froze on a room that Kat hadn’t seen—a room Kat could only assume very few people ever saw.
A bench was the only piece of furniture. The floors were solid stone instead of marble or wood. But the most remarkable thing was the five paintings that hung on the far wall.
“Blueprints,” she said, but Hale was already rolling the spare set of documents onto the coffee table between the sofa and the TV.
“Here.” Kat pointed to a room on the plans that had the same dimensions as the one on the screen. “Looks like it’s located underground, probably only accessible here.” She tapped the blueprints. “A hidden elevator in Taccone’s office.”
“How do you know that?” Gabrielle asked.
Kat thought about the dark wooden paneling behind Taccone’s desk. “Because I’m pretty sure I was standing right in front of it tonight.”
Hale tensed beside her, but he didn’t speak as he touched the remote. The black-and-white images played like an old silent movie without a star, until the video flickered back to Taccone’s office.
Floor-to-ceiling windows dominated one wall, so it was easy to see the bolt of lightning that flashed through the sky on the screen in front of them. A split second later, the screen went black. Kat could imagine the villa going dark, someone complaining about ancient wiring and a dislike of storms.
But in the suite, all Kat heard was the deep sighs of her companions and their simultaneous exclamation, “Benjamin Franklin.”
Having done it herself on more than one occasion, it wasn’t hard for Kat to imagine the thief scouting the old villa and formulating a plan. She imagined him taking a room in town—something that catered to tourists, perhaps. A place where he could be just another visitor to the countryside, while he watched and waited for a stormy night.
When the tape resumed, Kat leaned close and squinted. “How long until the generators kicked on?”
“Forty-five seconds,” Gabrielle answered.
“Not bad,” Hale said.
“For Taccone’s system or our guy?” Gabrielle asked.
He shrugged as if to say it was a toss-up.
“Everything else went black, but this room . . .” Kat pointed to the vaultlike space that filled the screen. “This room must be on a separate feed from the rest of the house. This room kept recording.” Kat glanced from the screen to the blueprints. “Looks like it’s directly under . . .”
But her voice trailed off as, on screen, water began dripping from the gallery ceiling.
“The moat,” they all finished in unison.
“Cool.” Hale’s voice was pure awe. “Benjamin Franklin with a side of Loch Ness Monster.”
“Eww!” Gabrielle exclaimed. “That moat is disgusting. Seriously. No way would I go near it.”
“From what I could see, there were at least five Old Masters in that room, Gabs,” Hale said. “You’d go near it.”
“Maybe,” Gabrielle admitted. “But if he cut a hole in the ceiling of a room under a moat, then why isn’t it flooded?”
Kat turned away, not needing to see the screen to know what was happening. “He rode a mini-submarine in from the lake and then sealed it to the room’s roof. After that, all he had to do was open the hatch, cut the hole, and . . . A minisubmarine,” Kat said again with a shake of her head, as if trying to cast aside a terrible case of déjà vu.
Her cousin looked at her. “How do you know?”
“Because that’s what Dad did.” A silence fell over them as Kat stood and walked to the windows that overlooked the quiet streets. “Two years ago. Venice. It was—”
“Beautiful,” Hale said, but Kat had another word in mind.
“Risky.”
“Well,” Hale said slowly, “at least now we know why your dad is Taccone’s leading suspect.”
“Only suspect,” Gabrielle corrected.
On the screen, a masked man in a plain black wet suit was easing through the fresh hole in the gallery roof, moving with silent purpose. There were no hurried or wasted steps as he neutralized the pressure switches on the individual paintings and removed them from the wall, packed each carefully in a watertight case, and slid them through the hole in the ceiling and into the craft Kat knew was waiting in the moat outside.
“Taccone said that when the power went out, someone looped the video feed to the guard’s station, so no one saw a thing. What we’re watching is from an off-site backup system that our guy either didn’t know about or missed.” Kat shrugged. “However it happened, no one even knew those paintings were gone until Taccone got home from a business trip.”
“What kind of business is he in?” Gabrielle asked.
“The business of being incredibly scary,” Kat answered at the same time Hale simply said, “Evil.”
The girls looked at him. When he spoke again, his voice was soft. “Arturo Taccone is in the business of evil.”
Something about the way he turned back to the TV told Kat there was something he wasn’t telling her—information obtained from private investigators or corporate gossips, from Manhattan socialites or high-ranking Italian officials. They were the kinds of stories told in smoke-filled rooms over expensive Cuban cigars.
But some stories make your hands shake. Sometimes too many details make you fidget in the dark. So Kat didn’t ask Hale to tell the tales. She looked at him, watched him toss the remote on the table and say, “So maybe I’m going to handcuff myself to you the next time you decide to take a stroll.”
“I was fine,” Kat insisted, desperate for him to understand. “He . . . likes me. I amuse him. He thinks I’m”—Kat hadn’t realized until now—“like him.”
“You’re not,” Hale blurted. For the first time in hours he looked into her eyes. “You are not like Arturo Taccone.”
There were times when Kat thought she knew everything there was to know about W. W. Hale the Fifth—with the single exception of his first name—and then there were times like this, when she felt that he was like one of the first edition novels in the library of his upstate house: she hadn’t even finished the first chapter.
“How deep would the river that runs to the moat be at its shallowest?” Gabrielle asked.
Kat shrugged. “Eight feet?”
Hale nodded. “I’d say ten at the most.”
“How small would the sub have to be?” Gabrielle asked.
“Small,” Kat answered.
“Note to self,” Gabrielle said. “When it comes to moats, deeper isn’t necessarily better.”
Then Hale asked, “How small?”
Kat heard the hum of a motorcycle on the street below, saw lights shining on the Coliseum in the distance. In the dim hotel room, a masked man stood frozen on the TV screen, caught in the act of stealing five priceless paintings and her father’s future.
“There’s one way to find out.”
10 Days Until Deadline
Chapter 11
The Mariano & Sons Dive Shop in Naples was a family-run affair and very proud of that particular fact. Mariano the Second had been the son of a fisherman, but he’d suffered from an unfortunate tendency toward seasickness and was forced to find a respectable career that could be safely conducted on dry land. So he built boats.
Mariano the Third built bigger boats.
And by the time a girl from a very different type of family business arrived at their shopfront on the Mediterranean coast, Mariano the Fourth had built and patented at least a half dozen of the most advanced (and justifiably expensive) watercrafts in the world.
Or so Kat’s father had told her right before he’d made a trip to Venice.
As soon as the receptionist at Il Negozio di Mariano & Figli saw the young man strolling through the double glass doors, she could tell he was from money—that almost anything in their showroom was something for which he could simply write a check. Maybe pay cash. Certainly charge on whatever ridiculously high-limit credit card he carried.
But that wasn’t why she smiled when the young man removed his sunglasses, leaned across the sleek glass counter, and said, “Ciao.” The woman felt as if every muscle in her body were starting to melt. “I was wondering if you could help me.”
Running a crew means delegating, knowing when to sit out and let others take the lead. Understanding what your best resources are and exactly how to use them. But as Kat stood across the busy seaside street, watching the young receptionist flirt with Hale, she began to worry that Hale might leave with a girlfriend and not a name.
The lack of a name worried her. The presence of a girlfriend, she assured herself, did not.