The man’s thin lips broke into a smile. “I was told you had your father’s sense of humor.” His dark eyes remained cold as he studied her. “And that you have your mother’s eyes.”
Despite the circumstances, that was what caught Kat off guard. “You knew my mother?”
“I knew of her,” he corrected. “She was a very talented woman. I’m told she too was like a cat. That is what you prefer to be called, is it not, Katarina?”
His English bore a faint accent she couldn’t place—not entirely Italian—as if he were a citizen of the world.
“You have very good sources,” she said.
“I have the best of everything.” The man smiled. “My name is Arturo Taccone.”
“What do you want?”
“I thought I might give you a ride to the airport.” He gestured around the interior of the beautiful antique car, but Kat merely shrugged.
“I’d planned on taking a cab.”
He laughed. “But that would be such a waste. Besides, this way, you and I can have a nice talk. And along the way we can even pick up my paintings if you’d prefer.”
“I don’t have them,” she blurted before realizing how the words might sound. “My father doesn’t have them either.” She leaned toward him, hoping that proximity might equal believability. “Look, he didn’t do it. You’re staking out the wrong guy. He was doing a gallery job in Paris that night. Stop. Get a paper. It’s on the front—”
“Katarina,” Taccone interrupted, his whisper more terrifying than a shout. “These paintings are very important to me. I came to Paris to explain that to your father, but at the moment he is a bit too popular for my taste.” Kat thought about the Interpol officers watching her father’s every move. “So it is most fortunate that I should meet you. I want my paintings back, Katarina. I am willing to go to a great deal of trouble—to take a great many pains, if you will—to get them back. You will tell your father this for me?”
As Kat sat across from Arturo Taccone, sandwiched between the two massive men who never left his shadow, she had yet to hear the stories. She was ignorant of his dealings in the Middle East. She hadn’t heard about the explosions at his warehouse near Berlin or the mysterious disappearance of a bank manager in Zurich. She knew only what she saw: a well-dressed man, an antique walking stick with an ornately carved pewter handle, two guards, and absolutely no way out.
“He can’t return what he didn’t steal,” Kat pleaded, but the elegant man only laughed a slow cold laugh and called to the driver.
“Two weeks should be enough time, don’t you think? Of course, it should take less, but out of respect for your mother and her family, I’ll be generous.”
The limo slowed to a stop. The goons opened the doors, and as Arturo Taccone stepped out into the sunshine of the Paris street, he said, “It was a pleasure meeting you, Katarina.” He laid a business card on the seat beside her. “Until we meet again.”
It wasn’t until the door slammed and the car started through the busy streets toward the airport, that Kat felt herself begin to breathe in slow ragged breaths. She stared down at the white card that bore Arturo Taccone’s name printed in plain black letters. And the handwritten words: Two weeks.
“He didn’t do it.”
Kat spoke from the doorway of a dark room, toward the silhouetted figure in the massive bed. She saw it jump upright, felt the lights flash on, stinging her eyes. But she was far too tired to blink against the glare.
“Kat,” Hale groaned, then fell back onto the pillows. “Funny, I didn’t hear a doorbell.”
“I let myself in; hope that’s okay.”
Hale smiled. “Or the alarm.”
She stepped inside, tossed a pocket-size bag of tools onto the bed. “You’re due for an upgrade.”
Hale propped himself against the antique headboard and squinted up at her. “She returns.” He crossed his arms across his bare chest. “You know, I could be naked in here.”
But Kat didn’t allow herself to think about what Hale was or was not wearing underneath those Egyptian cotton sheets. “He didn’t do it, Hale.” She dropped into a chair by the fireplace. “My dad has an alibi.”
“You believe him?”
“Normally?” Kat asked. “Maybe.” Then she shrugged and admitted, “Maybe not.” She looked down at her hands. “But I’m pretty sure he couldn’t have been pulling a big job in Italy on the same night he was pulling a small job in Paris.”
Hale let out a slow whistle of admiration, and Kat remembered that, for all of his resources and talent, the most dangerous thing about W. W. Hale the Fifth was that, when he grew up, he really wanted to be her father.
“He’s still in Paris?” Hale asked. Kat nodded. He swung his bare feet to the floor and looked at her. “So . . . what? He’s got the loot stashed somewhere and a twenty-four-hour tail keeping him from recovering it and leaving town?”
“Something like that.”
“What’s he gonna do?”
“Nothing.”
Hale shook his head. “You Bishops . . . one of you won’t leave”—he cut his eyes at her—“and one of you won’t stop running away.”
Without even realizing she’d done it, Kat pulled a card from her pocket and ran a finger across the heavy paper. “What’s that?” Hale asked.
Kat looked toward the dying fire and felt herself tremble. “Arturo Taccone’s business card.”
In a flash, Hale had thrown the covers aside and moved toward her. Part of Kat couldn’t help but notice that no, he wasn’t naked, but other parts—the thief part and the daughter part and the part that had seen the darkness in Taccone’s eyes— barely noticed the Superman pajama pants. “Please tell me you found that on a sidewalk somewhere,” Hale said.
“He was probably there following Dad, but then he saw me and . . . he gave me a ride to the airport.”
“Arturo Taccone gave you a ride to the airport?”
Hale’s hair was sticking up at strange angles, but even as Kat said, “Nice pants,” she knew there was nothing funny about the situation.
“Kat, tell me you weren’t alone with Arturo Taccone.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re fine?” Hale snapped. “I’m telling you, Kat. Uncle Eddie says this guy means business, and Uncle Eddie—”
“Ought to know. I know.”
“This isn’t a game, Kat.”
“Do I look like I’m playing, Hale?”
Hale kicked at the fallen covers, and to Kat he looked like a man who was scared and a little boy who hadn’t gotten his way. Both. After a long silence, he said, “Well, did you at least tell him he’s after the wrong guy?”
“Of course I did, but he wasn’t exactly in the mood to take my word for it.”
“Kat, you’ve got to—”
“What?” Kat cut in. “Hale, what am I supposed to do? My dad doesn’t have the paintings. There’s no way this Taccone guy is ever going to believe he doesn’t have the paintings, so what? Should I tell my father to go into hiding so he’ll have a nice head start when the biggest goons money can buy start chasing him in two weeks? I don’t know about you, but the fact that he’s got an Interpol surveillance detail watching him twenty-four-seven feels pretty good to me right now!”
“This guy really wants his paintings back.”
“So we’re going to give him his paintings back.”
“Great plan. Except we don’t have the paintings.”
“We will,” Kat said as she stood and started for the door. “Just as soon as we steal them.”
13 Days Until Deadline
Chapter 6
An odd thing tends to happen on the cusp of winter. Ask any better-than-average thief and he’ll tell you that the best time to pull a con is when the weather should be changing—but isn’t. People feel lucky. Marks get careless. They look at the sky and know the snow is up there somewhere, and so they think about how they’ve already cheated Mother Nature. Perhaps they could get away with much, much more.
If Kat had any doubt about this theory, all she had to do was glance around Madison Square Park as she and Hale strolled down Fifth Avenue. The sun was warm but the wind was cool, and children played without their hats and scarves. Nannies chatted beside expensive strollers, while businesspeople took the long way home. And that was when she saw him.
Kat would not have described him as handsome. She’d been raised by Bobby Bishop, after all, and had spent entirely too much time around Hale. Handsome isn’t a synonym for attractive; and while the man walking through the square wasn’t the former, he certainly was the latter.
His hair, for example, was slick and gelled. His suit was the kind of expensive that would be out of style far too soon, and his watch was the only thing about him that was as shiny as his teeth. And yet, for the purposes of Kat’s world, he was—put simply—perfect.
“Oh boy,” Kat heard herself mutter as the man traipsed forward, his gaze glued to his cell phone, and ran right into a bumbling old man in a long trench coat and mismatched socks.
“Oh boy,” Hale echoed.
“Are you okay?” Kat overheard the slick man ask. The old man nodded but gripped the lapels of the other man’s expensive suit, steadying himself.
As the two men parted ways, one stopped after only a single step. But the perfect man—the perfect mark—kept walking. He was well out of earshot by the time Kat waved at the rumpled vagrant and said, “Hello, Uncle Eddie.”
If Kat had stayed at Colgan long enough, a teacher might have eventually told her what her family had been saying for generations: It’s okay to break the rules, but only sometimes, and only if you know them very, very well. So maybe that was why, among the world’s great thieves, Uncle Eddie and Uncle Eddie alone was allowed the luxury of a permanent address.
Stepping inside the old Brooklyn brownstone, Kat felt the sun disappear behind a heavy wooden door, blocking out a neighborhood that had spent the last sixty years morphing from trendy to shady and back again. But inside, nothing ever changed. The hallway was always dim. The air always smelled like the Old Country, or what she’d been told the Old Country smelled like: cabbage and carrots and things simmering for long hours over slow heat in cast-iron pots that would outlive them all.
It was, in a word, home, and yet Kat didn’t dare say so.
Uncle Eddie shuffled down the narrow hallway, stopping only long enough to pull the slick man’s wallet from his pocket and toss it onto a pile of nearly identical loot that sat unopened. Forgotten.
“You’ve been keeping busy.” Kat chose one of the wallets and thumbed through the contents: one I.D., four credit cards, and nine hundred dollars in cash that hadn’t been touched. “Uncle Eddie, there’s a lot of money in—”
“Take off your shoes if you’re coming in,” her great-uncle barked as he continued down the narrow hall. Hale kicked off his Italian loafers, but Kat was already hurrying behind her uncle, trailing him into the heart of the house.