Kat didn’t know if it was nerves or stress or the heat of the sun in that glass room, but the first beads of sweat were starting to appear on Nick’s brow. And so she asked herself the simple question: What would her father say? Or Uncle Eddie? Or her mom?
“Busy,” she said, citing every great thief she’d ever known, smiling as if she were just another girl and this was just another day, “is very, very good.”
Pretend and it will be true. Gabrielle would never know which member of her family had said it first, but that was the thought that filled her mind as she put one foot in front of the other, sashaying through the Henley’s largest room.
“This way.” Her voice was clear and smooth like the modern sculpture that twirled overhead, catching rays of sunshine and sending them spinning around the grand space. “The Henley’s famous promenade was designed by Mrs. Henley herself in 1922.”
No one in the group of tourists that trailed behind her seemed to notice that her skirt was a little shorter than dictated by the Henley’s official handbook. Or that her heels were slightly too high.
“If you’ll follow me, I’ll show you to the Henley’s magnificent Impressionist gallery, which is home to the largest collection of Renoirs in the world. Thanks to a generous contribution from one of our benefactors, we will be able to offer you sole use of this space for the entire afternoon.”
The guards who manned the security room that morning were veterans. Collectively, the team assembled behind the bank of monitors had seen almost everything in their day, from couples kissing in elevators to mothers scolding children in dark corners, businessmen who picked their noses when they thought no one was looking, and a very famous movie star who had been caught on camera making a most unfortunate decision about a pair of seemingly uncomfortable underpants.
So when the two workmen from Binder & Sloan Industrial Heating and Air arrived at the service entrance, this same security staff looked at the two young men with a skepticism that comes from years of practice.
“Morning, gents,” Angus said as he climbed from the driver’s seat of the large van that Hale had secured for that very purpose. “We hear someone’s got a”—he made a show of reading from the clipboard in his hand—“faulty Windsor Elite furnace. We’re here to fix it.”
The guard in charge took a moment to closely examine the two men. They didn’t look much older than boys. Their blue coveralls seemed to bulge as if they had looked at the snow that morning and put on an extra set of clothes to protect against the chill. Something about the pair was odd, to say the least. But the memo about the faulty furnace had been sent from Gregory Wainwright himself, so the guard saw nothing wrong with pointing toward a large set of double doors and saying, “Furnace is in the basement—right down there.”
“Basement?” Hamish cried, then glanced at his brother. “You hear this fellow? He thinks we can just go on down to the furnace and start tinkering?”
Angus laughed. “He probably wouldn’t care at all if the whole place went boom, he wouldn’t.”
At this the guard bristled and stood up even straighter. “Now see here—”
“No, you see, my good man. Out here, see, we’ve got snow. So in there, I’d bet, you’ve got heat. And where there’s heat there’s gas; and where there’s gas there’s . . .”
Angus trailed off while his brother said, “Boom.”
“So where do you need to go?” the guard asked in disgust.
Angus tapped the clipboard in his hand. “First floor. Main corridor.”
The guard looked at the Bagshaws one final time. He did not see the boys hold their breath as they waited to hear him say, “Well . . . all right.”
In such a public place, on such a busy day, it was no surprise at all that no one worried when a smaller-than-average boy with curly hair and a shirt that never stayed tucked in, slipped into the men’s room on the second floor. Of course, they also didn’t hear the same boy say, “Kat, I’m in position in my . . . office.”
As offices went, sadly, Simon had seen worse. The bathroom stall was larger than the closet he’d been locked inside in Istanbul. The toilet was far more comfortable than the tree stump he’d been forced to use as a desk in Buenos Aires.
He sat perfectly still, waiting for his laptop to start up, and as he looked down at the video image of Gregory Wainwright asleep in his office, Simon had to smile and think that he had been in far worse situations indeed.
Kat had been right fifteen days before when she’d sat in the library of Hale’s upstate house and asked if his family owned a cell phone company. Fifteen days. Somehow, to Hale, it felt longer.
When his phone rang, Hale answered but didn’t say hello. He stood outside the Henley, braced against the cold, and listened to Uncle Eddie’s gruff “I heard from Paris. You were right about him.”
And that was all either of them had to say. Hale slowly slipped the phone back into his pocket and stared at the big glass door.
“Well, are we getting on with this, or aren’t we?” Marcus’s voice brought Hale back to the moment. “Be mindful of the”— the sound of the thump cut him off midsentence—“bump.”
As Katarina Bishop walked down the long hallway toward the Romani Room, she didn’t seem to notice the two boys in the blue jumpsuits who were busily working around an open vent and several large machines. She skirted around the temporary barriers and nodded politely at one of the uniformed guards who stood nearby.
The man nodded back and said, “Sorry about the work, miss. Can I help you find something?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Kat looked at the art-lined hallway as if she were seeing it for the first time. “I’m just . . . looking, I guess.”
“You go ahead and look all you want. But don’t touch.” The guard chuckled.
And as Kat stepped into the Romani Room, she smiled and thought, Oh, I wouldn’t dare.
Sometime in the past week, the Henley’s least impressive collection had become Katarina Bishop’s favorite. Maybe it was the simple brushstrokes, the subdued use of light. Or maybe Kat was simply drawn to the other paintings that hung in that room—the ones the tourists couldn’t see.
Collectively, Arturo Taccone’s paintings were worth more than half a billion dollars . . . and her father’s life.