31

THE GRAB

Christopher shows a slight concern when the elevator takes us to the second floor without my pushing a single button. That concern hitches up a notch when I walk up to the alarm panel, slip a pair of gloves on my hands, and extract a key card from the front of my dress, swiping it through with a cool efficiency.

When I extract the UV flashlight and hold it up to the keypad, he even goes so far as to attempt to stop me. It’s not a surprise; I assume he’s being careful not to give too much of his interest away yet. Until he can actually see the necklace, it’s smart to have an exit strategy.

“Uh, what are you doing?” he asks as I lean in to see what trace I can make. The oval road maps of Pierre’s prints glow an eerie purple under my light thanks to the chemical, faint but visible. As expected, the two is the darkest, and an eight is so faint it’s almost invisible. First and last, no problem.

Unfortunately, the middle three numbers are a problem. From the smudged prints, I can tell that both the one and the seven have been pressed—which would be fine, except we know the code is five digits long, so one of them had to be pressed twice.

It’s figuring out which one that’s slowing me down. With my light held close, I can see they’re about equal in terms of visibility, which tells me nothing except that I’m stuck.

Gah. Repeated digits. Why didn’t we think of this?

“Penelope? Are you sure we should be up here?”

“It’s fine,” I say. “Will you look at this and tell me what you think? Does it seem like the seven is fainter than the one, or is it the other way around?”

He leans in, his head next to mine. “The seven is fainter, but only because the one covers a wider area,” he says after a slight pause. “Like, ah, the seven came first, maybe? And then the one was doubled up. But I’m not—”

A professional? I beg to differ. I’m running out of time, so I go with his gut. With only a minor wince of anticipation, I press the code 2-7-1-1-8 and hold my breath. Even though only a fraction of a second passes, it feels like an eternity before the familiar whir and click fills the air, and the door opens easily under my hand.

I release a breath. That was a close one.

Now that Christopher sees the collection for himself—even if it is in the dark—he’s starting to lose the feigned innocence. Just as I planned, the excitement of the heist is getting the better of him. It’s not long now until he reveals himself. He takes a large step forward, as if to plunge right in, but I fling up my arm to stop him.

He’s heavy—all these tightly packed FBI agents are—and I grunt as I force him to remain in place.

“Not yet,” I say as I put all my strength into preventing him from setting off every alarm in the place. “We have to make sure the lasers are off first.”

Crouching low, I reach into my brassiere trove and pull out a compact of face powder, which I brought for this sole purpose. Time to touch up my makeup in the ladies’ room wasn’t put on the schedule. My gentle breath over the surface of the powder sends a cloud of particles into the room, where they catch the light of the network of lasers, all of which are still hot.

“Dammit,” I say. “She was supposed to have them off by now.”

“Who was supposed to have them off?” Christopher asks.

I wave him off and press the chip on the back of my ear. “Are you there?” I ask in a hushed voice, not wanting to crackle too loudly on Jordan’s end of the line. “I’m ready for the lasers to go down.”

The crackle of her response comes through. “They are down.”

“No, they’re not. I’m looking at them right now.”

“Well, they were down. Mariah confirmed it. Hang on a sec.”

Jordan’s end of the line goes silent for a moment, and I use the opportunity to study Christopher, who’s watching me with an unreadable look on his face. Ah, the unreadable look. So familiar to me, especially through those eyes. I imagine he’s contemplating all the ways he can smuggle the necklace out of here while leaving me behind to take the blame. A bullet in the back, perhaps? Or a neat blow over the head?

“She says they were down five minutes ago, as planned. They must be on an automatic cycle. Are you behind schedule?”

“There were some complications with the password, but I’m in now,” I say, unwilling to go into more detail while I’m still crouched and staring at lasers. “Can she shut them down again?”

Another pause, another long look from Christopher, even more sweat building up on my brow.

“She says no, not without it triggering a fail-safe hardwired into the system.”

“Well, shit.” I rock back on my heels. “So that’s it? The mission is over?”

“Not yet—hang on—”

I expect a lengthy pause as Mariah tries to come up with a backdoor plan, but it’s only a few seconds before another voice takes over the conversation. “Pen? Do you still have that compact? The one with the mirror?”

I groan at the sound of Riker’s ill-contained glee. “Yeah. I have it.”

“Excellent. It looks like we’re going to have to do this my way, after all.”

He pauses expectantly.

“We don’t have time for you to gloat,” I grumble, but I know him well enough to accept that gloating will need to be worked in. “Fine. You’re a genius criminal mastermind, and I can’t do this without you. Happy now?”

“Getting there,” he says with a cackle. “Now. I need you to count how many detectors there are. They’re what the lasers are pointed at, the trigger that will go off if the flow of light is interrupted in any way. Can you do that?”

I scan the room and grimace. It’s big and dark, and without a steady influx of face powder, we can’t see the lasers to trace their path. As much as I hate to admit it, some of Riker’s smoke would come in handy right about now.

“No, I don’t think I can,” I admit. “What do they look like?”

“It depends on how sophisticated the system is. Most likely they’re small black boxes along the base of the wall.”

Small black shadows are everywhere. “I can’t. It’s too hard to tell in this light.”

“What about the reflectors? Can you see those?”

“Yes. Maybe. No.” This is starting to feel futile. I don’t even know what a reflector is. “I’m not good at tech systems. You know that. You’re the one who handles this sort of thing.”

A gentle cough sounds from behind me. “May I?”

I turn to find Christopher standing over my shoulder, taking in the same scene with a much calmer, almost distinguished air. Finally. Gone is the bumbling pretense—no more do we have to pretend he’s going to stop me from going through with this. The Peep-Toe Prowler is ready to act at last.

“Do you know a lot about disabling laser alarm systems?” I ask.

“I assume you have someone on the line to walk you through it?” He doesn’t wait for me to reply before beckoning. “Give it to me.”

Since there isn’t much else I can do short of crawling on my hands and knees and hoping I don’t trigger the network, I comply. Pulling the earpiece—which I’m sure he recognizes as one of the FBI’s own—from behind my ear, I step back and wait, curious to see what he’ll do next.

“There’s one detector,” Christopher says in a clipped voice, his normal volubility controlled for once. There’s a pause while I assume Riker adjusts to the change before Christopher speaks again. “No, not lasers specifically, but I’m a fast learner.”

Another lengthy pause ensues before Christopher shifts position and tries again. “From what I can tell, there’s just the one near the back of the room. Eight reflectors—three on the left, five on the right. We can’t see the pattern of the lasers, but I can make a good guess based on the angles. You think it’s as easy as redirection?”

Redirection doesn’t sound easy to me, not by a long shot, but Christopher is already playing with the mirror in his hand, flexing it on its hinge until it separates from the powder half. Regret at wasting this man’s talents by sending him to prison twinges in my stomach until I remind myself what he’s done. He might play well, but he doesn’t play fair.

“I see what you’re saying, but I’d need a second reflective surface to make that work,” Christopher says over the earpiece. He turns to me. “I don’t suppose you have another mirror down the front of your dress, do you?”

Alas, even my bag of tricks comes to an end. I shake my head.

“I could try breaking it in half,” he says doubtfully.

Shattered shards of glass seem like an unstable resource—not to mention a safety hazard—so I shake my head again, this time with meaning. Hitting a dead end this far along is the worst. It’s a door slammed in the face, a knife stabbed in the gut—

“Oh, wait!” I cry, louder than I intend. More moderately, I add, “I do have this,” and reach for the bottom hem of my dress. I feel another pang that it’s Christopher here with me instead of my husband, because I have never felt sexier or more badass than when I expose the length of my thigh and unstrap Cheryl’s shiny letter opener from my leg. God bless that woman’s foresight. “Here. Will this do?”

Christopher smiles in full dimple mode. “Oh, yeah. That’ll do fine.”

My role after that is to occasionally blow a puff of compact powder into the air when Christopher requests it, watching as the particles dance and shimmer in the light of the laser beam. It’s pretty in a dangerous, this-could-be-the-thing-that-sends-me-to-jail-forever sort of way.

“Okay, I think I have it calculated.” He hands me the mirror. “On my mark, you’re going to place this on top of that display case at this exact angle. We’re going to redirect the laser to this knife, which will then bypass the laser beam straight to the detector. But we have to time it perfectly, or it won’t work. There can’t be a delay.”

“That sounds hard.”

“It is hard, but no more so than any of the other tasks you’ve pulled off this evening. I assume you have a plan for getting the necklace out of here undetected?”

I can’t help but grin. “Did you see the magician outside the bank getting ready for his show? He’s got all cameras blocked. We’re clear.”

His glance is sharp but admiring. “You set that up?”

He pauses as I assume Riker corrects him as to the true power behind that piece of work. Another one of those deep, dimpled smiles greets my eyes, and Christopher holds up his fingers.

“On my count of three. Ready?”

I nod.

“Okay, here goes nothing. One. Two. Thr—”

We place the mirrors, our movements swift and sure, our hands steady in a way that belongs solely to surgeons and jewel thieves. There’s no way to see the lasers being redirected, so all we can do is stand and wait for the inevitable alarm. When it doesn’t come, I pull out the compact and give the powder one final blow.

The lasers sparkle and shimmer…a good five feet away from the center of the room.

“It worked,” Christopher says in a stunned voice.

“Of course it worked.” I lead the way to the Starbrite Necklace with a confident step, borne mostly of the fact that I’m just as stunned by our success as he is. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Knowing firsthand what an ugly piece of craftsmanship the necklace is, I offer the compliment to encourage Christopher to make the first move at smashing through the glass.

Which is why it comes as such a surprise when I finally look down to see it.

“Wait—where’s the necklace? Why is the case empty?” I look to my new partner in alarm. He’d been within eyesight all evening, so there’s no way he could have already snuck up here and stolen it.

An accomplice? An earlier heist? A setup?

My heart thuds heavily. No. It can’t be.

“Are you sure it’s supposed to be in here?”

“Yes, I’m sure!” I look around the rest of the room, eyes narrowed as I try to pick out the glint of jewels in the dark. The rest of it appears to be there—the jade and the emeralds, the chunky metalwork I remember so clearly from my last visit—but when I whirl back to the Starbrite case, it’s still very much empty. “Did they move it? It has to be there! I need it to—”

I glance at Christopher, hoping to find some sign of guilt on his face. But if he feels any, it’s well hidden. “Yes, Penelope?” he prods. “You need it to what?”

To put in his pocket so I can send him out the door and into Simon’s waiting arms. To end this thing once and for all.

As if on cue, the overhead fluorescent lights turn on in a bright flash of white. The laser system, so neatly bypassed by Christopher’s adept ministrations, goes off in a whirlwind of sirens and warning lights. I don’t have to look to know that Pierre is standing in the doorway, flushed and frantic at having found himself relieved of his key card, flanked by heavily armed guards on both sides.

“You!” he cries, striding forward as if he’d like to waltz me into oblivion. “Little Lily Dupont! How could you do this?”

I moan, wishing I had an answer other than stupid pride and even stupider folly. Grant warned me that this would happen, that Christopher Leon only wanted a fall guy and would go to any lengths to secure one, but I, in my stubbornness, refused to believe that such a disaster could befall me.

But here I am. The necklace is gone. I’m standing in the room where it went missing, where it’s only my word against a federal agent and the museum curator that I didn’t do it.

And in this damnable red dress, about a hundred people saw me come up here.

“I didn’t…” I begin feebly, but no one is listening to me.

What happens next is a blur, emotion and panic combining to overwhelm me, but there are two things I know to be true. The first is that Christopher Leon, the man who shot my husband and set me up as the Peep-Toe Prowler, inexplicably inserts himself between me and the security guards. The second is that with the sudden illumination, I can now see a panel cut into the wall opposite the pedestal—the faint outline of an opening carved into the drywall, into the insulation, into the metal siding, layer after layer painstakingly cut away to provide an alternate access route. That must have been how Christopher’s accomplice got in.

I’m screwed.

Or so I think until Christopher speaks up. “Stop right there,” he says. “I’m FBI.” And then, harsher, “Penelope, go.”

I spin, confused by the sound of that command. It’s Grant but not Grant, his voice of authority and concern in a place he can’t possibly be.

He lifts his hands as the guards move forward, shifting to keep his bulk between me and them. “You need to go,” Christopher says, shattering all my expectations. Saving me. “Now.”

I don’t hesitate the second time around. With no more thought than my own selfish, cowardly survival, I fly to the panel someone else cut into the wall and pull it aside.

And then I do what Penelope Blue has always done best.

I squeeze myself into the smallest shape possible and crawl.