“Trust me.” And with that, Kat slipped away and went outside, felt Nick fall into step beside her. But something made her stop and turn and call, “Ten thirty.” Hale nodded but stayed silent, and Kat’s heart kept pounding in her chest, loud. Too loud. “I’ll see you at ten thirty,” she said again.
Hale smiled. “Oh, I’ll be there.”
Chapter 31
That Monday morning began as Monday mornings at the Henley almost always did. The person responsible for making the coffee made coffee. The person who kept track of birthdays brought cake. The staff briefing ran long as Gregory Wainwright talked about rising attendance levels and falling donations. But on that Monday morning, it seemed that fewer people whispered about Visily Romani than they had the week before. All in all, everyone concluded, it had been a most spectacular November.
Outside, the snow was nothing more than a light powdering, and guards and tourists alike watched it blow across the grounds like chalk dust. Or perhaps it was just the rows and rows of school buses lined up outside the main doors that brought this particular image to mind.
“Field trip season,” one of the guards told another.
“Blasted kids,” an old man complained.
No one would have ever guessed that seven of the world’s most talented teenagers were coming to the Henley that day for an entirely different sort of lesson.
“What’s wrong?” Katarina Bishop asked her dark-haired companion.
Nick stopped and let another long row of school kids pass, while a nearby docent lectured on the importance of light to the great Dutch artists of the eighteenth century.
“Nothing,” he said.
He didn’t look like the boy who had stood calmly in the kitchen that morning, the con artist who had picked her pocket on a Paris street. Nick seemed different as they walked down the main corridor. Scared? Kat wondered. Nervous? She wasn’t sure. But different he was, and as she stopped midstride in the center of the wide atrium, Hale’s warning echoed in her ears.
“If you want out, Nick—”
“I don’t want out.”
“—you say the word. Right now.” She pointed through the glass atrium toward the patchy rays of sunshine and the dry white snow. “You can leave.”
“I don’t want out.” He glanced around the crowded halls. The guards. The docents. The charming older couples with their sketchbooks and sack lunches. Just another day at the Henley. “It’s just . . . busier than I thought it would be.”
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.”