Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(88)

“Sullivan,” Caitlin said, choking back a fit of giggles. “You truly are a pathetic creature. Truly.”

Sullivan stared at the ring, dumbfounded. Ben just looked horrified.

“Yeah,” I added. “And by the way, that’s not the Ring of Solomon. We stole it first.”

“What?” Sullivan roared, “How? I told you, I never took my eyes off it! You couldn’t have swapped it for a fake, you never had the chance.”

“Well, that brings us back to the story of the real plan. See, Ben, your job was to feed misinformation back to Sully here, and you did a bang-up job of it. You had no idea what was going on right under your nose. Literally.”

? ? ?

“According to these specs,” Pixie had said, her face bathed in the blue glow of her laptop screen, “the security firm installed a Contender model 800-L behind a hidden panel in Lauren’s study. That was just last year, so unless she suddenly got an urge to upgrade out of nowhere, that’s what we’re up against. It’s the only place in the house secure enough to store something that valuable.”

“How tough is it?”

She shrugged. “Do I look like a safecracker? You need an expert.”

That was how we ended up in Nicky Agnelli’s office in the back room of the Gentlemen’s Bet, huddled around a sheaf of schematics on his desk. Nicky brought in a guy I’d worked with two or three times before, a willowy Southerner with a bleach-blond goatee. He called himself Coop. Wasn’t sure if it was his first or last name, didn’t care either.

“If time’s tight,” Coop said, “fastest way in is a jam shot. That or use a thermal lance, but then you’re risking a fire. Can we punch out the walls around it and just take the whole safe?”

I shook my head. “Out of the question. Whole house will be on you in five seconds. Besides, we can’t leave any sign that the safe’s been tampered with. At the end of the night, whoever ends up with the dummy ring—Lauren or Sullivan—has to believe they’ve got the real McCoy.”

“The 800-L is an electronic keypad model,” Coop said. “A good one, not the crap you find in most hotel rooms. There are autodialers out there, gizmos that’ll run through possible combinations faster than you can blink and brute-force the password, but they’re specific to the safe model. I don’t have anything like that for the 800 line.”

Pixie furrowed her brow. “What are they based on?”

“Specific algorithms, and the makeup of the circuit board you’re trying to talk to,” Coop said. “That’s all proprietary stuff. You’d have to have an inside guy at Paragon, or get into their company servers somehow.”

“Give me an autodialer for a safe like this one,” she said, “so I can see how they’re built. I’ll do the rest.”

Coop and Nicky both looked at me. I nodded.

“If she says she can do it,” I told them, “she can do it.”

? ? ?

“Remember the caterers who were already on-site when you got there?” I asked Ben. “Pixie and Coop were on that truck. They slipped out of the kitchen and were already stealing the ring when you showed up.”

“How?” Ben said. “How did you get people on both trucks?”

Emma half smiled, but it didn’t hide the anger in her eyes. “Nicky Agnelli owns Saguaro Catering. That’s why Daniel picked them. The hijacking was another layer of the lie. Those people were Nicky’s men, and they knew we’d be there. It was all a show to make you believe you were in on the real plan.”

“Didn’t it all go a little too smoothly?” I asked Ben. “In retrospect?”

“But how did they get out?” Ben said. “We left with the rest of the caterers when the lights went out, and we never saw them.”

“Remember the blueprints of the house?” I asked. “You pointed it out yourself. Lauren’s escape tunnel. The one that ran directly beneath the dining room.”

“But the alarms were wired to the house’s generator! They couldn’t have gotten through there without…” He fell silent as he figured it out.

Sullivan’s eyes narrowed. “The ploy with your little poker chip. It wasn’t your escape route. It was theirs.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I stalled until Pixie called me. Three rings and a hang-up was the signal that they were waiting under the house, ready to go. My spell killed the power, and they slipped right out. They’d already taken the ring and replaced it. What Meadow Brand removed from that safe—and you stole from her—is a nice little reproduction. My buddy Winslow made it for us. Jewelry’s kind of his hobby. You know, Ben, I told you this was going to happen. You were warned.”

He blinked at me, still clutching the worthless copy of the ring in his hand.

“How? When?”

I smiled and spread my hands.

“Think back to the meeting. What did I say? We were going to do a magic trick. When you’re looking at my left hand, all the action’s happening in my right. The audience always looks where the magician wants them to look. And if they think they’re the ones in control? That just proves they’ve already been fooled.”

“Fine,” Sullivan snapped. “Very clever. Very creative. It changes nothing. You have the ring. We have the guns. Hand it over. Now.”