Perfect Scoundrels (Heist Society #3)(23)

Though the management of the Henley would never say so aloud, no one was really certain what had happened that afternoon. Of the two dozen school groups that had been scheduled to visit, not a single teacher seemed to know where the children got the items they eventually carried through the Henley’s halls. A staffer had handed them out, somebody said. It was some kind of free promotion gone wrong, others assumed.

But the truth remained that of the hundred children who walked through the Henley at the close of business on that particular day, approximately half of them were carrying helium-filled balloons in a variety of colors. The other half had small whirligigs, the kind depicted in a sculpture by a new Swiss artist of much acclaim.

And absolutely no one knew exactly how or why the doors at either end of the long hallway opened at the same time, sending a massive gush of wind rushing through the Henley.

The small toys began to spin. Wild splashes of color and flashes of light filled the corridor. Balloons flew free of their owners’ hands, blinding the cameras and popping against the hot lights overhead. The noise must have been in the same frequency as breaking glass, because the sensors in the control room went haywire. And even the Henley guards, with their highly expert surveillance videos, could see nothing beyond the glare.

They didn’t even notice when a very tall, very hot cup of coffee went flying over the velvet ropes and landed on the leather-covered desktop that had once belonged to the Hale family’s London estate.

And when the chaos finally ended, all that remained were broken balloons and a stained desk, and the security experts who agreed that things could have been far, far worse.

Workmen appeared.

Dollies were ordered.

But no one noticed that the desk was heavier than it had been when they’d moved it onto the exhibit floor only a few days before.

They never even looked in the small pass-through compartment, where Katarina Bishop hid, clinging for dear life.





Kat was beginning to think that Simon was right: it was absolutely no fun being blind. But true to her name, her eyes adjusted to the black as she stayed perfectly still in her hiding spot beneath the desk.

If Nick and his blueprints were accurate, there was one room where there were no cameras. In the center of the basement, with no exterior access of any kind, there was one place where no guards would ever have to patrol. So Kat stayed hidden, and when the desk stopped moving, she listened as the sound of work boots on concrete faded in the distance. And once certain she was alone, she dropped to the floor, rolled out from under the desk, and surveyed the dim and empty room.

There were tall shelves with jars of varnish and paint in every shade, long tables lined with tools and brushes. It was a place where meticulous people did meticulous work, and part of Kat couldn’t help being impressed.

She stepped around the room, studying the works in progress. There was a pair of portraits by Matisse, a sculpture by Rodin. The piece of DNA she shared with Uncle Eddie tugged at her, and her mind flashed with exit strategies and all the ways that one might carry a twelve-hundred-pound Greek relic out of the fifth-most secure building in Britain. But then the beam of her favorite flashlight shone across the ornate desk, and Kat knew what she had to do.

There, without the velvet rope, Kat was free to feel the intricate carvings. She ran her fingers over acorns and trees, bows and arrows. Kat examined every inch. It was exquisite. But there was one part that seemed wrong. On each of the desk’s four corners there were markings, like needles of a compass, and one of them pointed in the wrong direction.

“Well, hello there,” Kat said. “What do you do?”

As soon as Kat turned the arrow, she heard the tiniest of clicks.

“I got it,” she whispered. “Did I get it?” she asked, then looked to see a narrow piece of the baseboard that had popped free from the rest of the desk. She sank to her knees and shined her light inside, stuck a hand into the dusty space until she felt a single piece of paper.

But wait. It wasn’t paper. Not really. Kat held it against the light. It was carbon paper, black with faint white letters—the kind offices used to make duplicates of important documents in the days before computers and even copy machines. The carbon had probably been in the desk for years. And it was only one page—

“It’s not here,” Kat said, defeated. She crumbled the carbon and put it into her pocket.

“Wait, Kat.” Simon’s voice was in her ear. “Petrovich didn’t put just one compartment in his pieces. There would be two or three at least. Keep on looking.”

“It’s okay, Kat,” Nick said. “You have all the time you need.”

So Kat went back to work. She opened drawers and felt inside shelves. She ran her delicate fingers beneath the lip of the desktop and along all four legs. There was a nick on the top right-hand corner, but it was just a flaw, Kat realized—not a clue.

She had all night, Kat had to remind herself. Come morning, she could slip outside and into the crowds that filled the Henley. All she had to do was think and feel and see.

So Kat stepped away from the desk, walked to the far corner of the room, and studied not the carvings but the desk as a whole. It was gorgeous. At least three different kinds of wood had been used, and they blended together beautifully. Seamlessly. Alternating one with the next. It was almost like…

“A chessboard,” she whispered, the words only for herself.