Diary of a Teenage Jewel Thief
Rosie Somers
For Lexi. Dream big; your reality is what you make of it.
Chapter One
Darkness covers my movements as I scale the stone facade of the museum. The jagged ridges threaten to cut into my skin, but I press on. I don’t have time to worry about a few scratches. The guard will be back around in forty-three minutes, and I need to be ready to make my descent as soon as he passes by. Otherwise, I will have missed my window and will need to wait an extra hour. That’s sixty minutes during which I could be discovered. The knowledge is a dark shadow threatening the edges of my concentration. My mother won’t be happy if I botch the timing of my first point job. It might even be enough for her to send me back to my usual position of lookout in the car while she takes point here. My stomach clenches.
I reach up and grab hold of the next protruding block, using my toehold on a lower block to heave myself up. I’m mid-move when the stone cracks and a large chunk breaks off in my hand.
Time slows to an inching crawl as the night tunnels in around me, the entire universe narrowing to the point where my center of balance is shifting away from the wall. The momentum from that one wrong move forces my opposite foot to slip off its own secure place. The threat of plummeting to the ground is a lump stuck in my throat.
I’m balanced precariously on the toes of one foot, against little more than an inch of what’s turning out to be very fragile stone.
I drop the fragment and scramble for a new handhold, any sliver of protruding wall that I might be able to cling to. Finally, my frantic fingers find purchase, and I grip the wall for dear life as I return the foot that slipped to its former place. I press my cheek to the wall while I catch my breath and calm my frazzled nerves, taking comfort in the feel of the cold rock against my skin.
But I don’t stay that way for long. I don’t have the luxury of time. Luckily, I’m close to the window I need to enter through, the one my mother deactivated from the security system during her visit earlier in the day.
Teamwork.
Two more well-placed moves later, I’m perched on the sill with my pick in hand, ready to let myself into the upper floor of the building. I make short work of unlocking the window and push the side-by-side glass panels inward to open it. Then I slide through smoothly. Slipping my pick back into the special pocket sewn onto my pants leg, I take stock of my surroundings. There’s nothing of importance up here. Sure, the paintings and sculptures and other odds and ends are culturally and historically significant, but none will fetch the price that my real prize will.
“I’m in.” I speak quietly. Now that I’ve scaled three stories in the dark of night and the dead of French winter, wearing nothing but a thin layer of clothes and glorified ballet slippers made for flexibility and ease of movement, not warmth, I can descend four floors into the basement where the duchy exhibit is. And the jewels.
“Bueno, Mari. Now the real fun can begin.” My mother’s heavily accented encouragement floats through my earpiece.
“Yeah, because climbing up the outside of a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old building without safety equipment is child’s play,” I return.
She laughs. Then her tone turns serious. “All right, I’ve already disarmed the motion detectors, so you’re good to go. When you exit the room you’re in, the stairs will be to the left. Descend to—”
“The basement,” I interrupt. “I know, Mother.” We’ve only gone over this a thousand times. I’ve memorized the layout. I’ve choreographed my moves, and I’m timing myself perfectly. “What do you think I am? A novice?”
Her sigh is a rush of frustrated air in my earpiece. “Very well. I’m just not used to being the one waiting in the van. I have faith in you, but I’m still worried.”
It’s a pain to have her trying to micromanage this job, but I’m touched by her concern for me. “I love you, too.”
She doesn’t say it back, but I know she loves me.
Back to business.
I check my watch. Twenty more seconds before I can leave the blind alcove of the window, the only place in the entire building that is hidden from the security cameras.
When the second hand hits the nine on my watch face, I make my move. If we’ve planned correctly, the camera feed just switched from the northwest corner of the room to the northeast. And in forty-five seconds, it will have looped fully around and returned. I only need five seconds to get to the outer hall, but the camera outside the room will be aimed at the doorway for another ten. So I wait, and I count.
I move as soon as it’s safe, jogging from the room on silent feet, and head for the stairs. A short wait there, and then I practically dance down them.
I grow more confident with every step I take that does not result in alarms sounding, and after several minutes of this stop-and-go progress, I prance into the duchy exhibit, straight into the room with the duchy jewels.
This room is darker than the hall outside, with what little light there is being used to cast visual interest and draw the eye toward the display cases lining the center of the large room.
My eyes adjust quickly, and I head for the case with the most duchy rings, necklaces, crowns. All the sparkly things I’ve been taught to covet my entire life. Part of me did ache to hold all the shiny pretties in my hands when my mother and I cased the museum, but that’s a side of me I don’t like to let out to play. Even now, a miniature war rages between my thieving nature and my moral side.