Heist Society

“So . . . what? There’s some kind of finder’s fee?” Angus asked.

“It’s not quite like that,” Kat admitted.

“More like a promise that Taccone won’t drown Uncle Bobby in his moat,” Gabrielle said simply.

Kat gave a weak smile as she looked at everyone. “And I’ll owe you.”

Kat expected her friends to need a moment to think. They should have taken a walk around the grounds to clear their heads, put their thoughts in order. Kat expected half of them to do her family proud and slip away noiselessly into the night, but amazingly, that didn’t happen.

Instead, Hamish slapped his brother on the back and said, “We’re in. Whatever you need, Kat.”

Simon held his hand to his mouth, biting his nails as he stared into space. Calculating. “Is Uncle Eddie going to find out about this?”

“Come on, Simon,” Hale answered. “What are the odds he already knows?”

The Bagshaws looked at each other, spoke at the exact same time. “Two to one.”

Simon gulped. But eventually he said, “Okay.”

Kat looked at Gabrielle, who had started polishing her toenails. The girl didn’t even look up, but as Kat opened her mouth to speak, Gabrielle said, “Duh,” and Kat knew there was nothing else to say on the subject.

“Great. Thanks. I guess we’ll start casing the target tomorrow.”

“What is the target?” Angus said slowly. Hale looked at Kat. For a moment it seemed okay.

And then Kat said, “The Henley.”

6 Days Until Deadline

Chapter 18

If you lived in 1921, and if you had more money than time, and if you were a woman, then there were very few acceptable ways in which you were allowed to fill your days. Some played cards. Others played music. Most surrounded themselves with dresses and hats, perfectly tended gardens and expertly steeped cups of tea. But Veronica Miles Henley had not belonged in 1921 . . . not really. And so Veronica Henley had turned her great fortune to her great passion and almost single-handedly built the greatest museum in the world.

Or so Katarina Bishop’s mother had told her. And so Kat herself still believed.

“Better than the Louvre?” Hale’s voice cut through the sound of the fountain in front of the glass-covered main entrance.

Kat rolled her eyes. “Too crowded.”

“The Tate?”

“Too pretentious.”

“The Egyptian Museum in Cairo?”

Kat leaned back and let her fingers trail through the water. “Way too hot.”

The surveillance cameras mounted on the walls that circled the Henley saw all of this, of course. They were perfectly positioned and highly calibrated—the best they could possibly be.

The two guards who stood sentry by each gate no doubt noticed the boy and girl who lingered by the fountain, eating sandwiches, throwing crumbs to the birds that landed on the square—just like a thousand other teenage couples that gathered here each year.

The guards might have seen the boy throw his arm around the girl’s neck and hold a camera out in front of them, snapping pictures. They might have noticed how the couple paced from one end of the wall to the next. They didn’t, of course, see that the pictures were really of the positions of the cameras; that their paced steps were mapping out the dimensions of the perimeter wall.

They were simply two teens who appeared to be in the midst of a great autumn.

But, of course, the guards didn’t see a lot of things.

If the guards at the Henley didn’t pay much attention to the boy and girl who were lingering outside, they certainly didn’t notice the two brothers who stood in line by the café, goofing off, taking silly pictures of things like doors and vents as they waited for a table. They did not see the pale boy with the backpack and a small digital gaming device who wandered the halls aimlessly . . . until he actually ran into one of the docents on patrol, falling to the hard floor in the process.

The device in his hand skidded across the marble floor.

“No!” the boy cried, chasing it. But as soon as it skidded to a stop at the feet of one of the Henley guards, the boy froze.

The guard leaned down and picked up the device. If he’d been more focused on the boy than the toy, he might have noticed that Simon was holding his breath and was every bit as pale as the marble statue that stood behind him. But the guard was too captivated by the maze of grids and dots and lines that filled the screen to notice the boy. “What is this?”

“Nothing!” Simon blurted far too quickly, but his baby face was too innocent to cause any worry for the docent and the guard.

The docent looked over the guard’s shoulder. “That’s Underworld Warrior Two, isn’t it?” the docent asked, leaning closer to examine the screen.

“Hey, what’s this—” The guard started hitting the red button, and Simon winced.

“Don’t . . . Don’t . . . Please don’t . . .”

“It’s really different from Underworld Warrior One, huh?” the guard asked, still punching the button, not knowing the chaos he was causing in the guardroom twenty feet away as every motion sensor in the building began to flash. “What’s this do?” The guard moved to a different button, but before he could short-circuit every electrical device within a dozen yards, Simon lunged for him.

“It’s sort of a . . . prototype,” he said, snatching the device out of the guard’s hand before the man’s colleagues noticed that anything was wrong. It should be pointed out that this was in fact the truth, and so Simon had no trouble saying, “My dad designs these things.”