Sapphire Read online

  She slipped the buffer into place, redirecting the field back onto itself.

  Now the only thing between her and the cross was the time-delay lock. He assumed she would pick the lock, as she had down in the utility room. He knew that no matter how talented she was, this would take a long time. Probably longer than they could count on the guards being distracted by the football match.

  His astonishment was complete when the girl pulled an actual key out of the same pocket and fit it smoothly into the lock. Only one person in the whole museum had a copy of that key: the museum director. Luca knew he kept it safely on his person at all times.

  Luca absolutely had to know how she’d accomplished that. The director was a crotchety old stick-in-the-mud, immune to bribes as far as Luca could tell, and so devoutly religious that he doubted a simple seduction would work either.

  There was no time to try to puzzle it out. As soon as the three-minute time delay elapsed, the girl opened the case.

  Luca stepped forward.

  Without turning around, the girl said, in perfect Italian, “Oh, there you are. I thought you were just going to watch.”

  Luca couldn’t help grinning beneath his mask.

  This goddamn girl.

  “You’re very impressive,” he said.

  “Wish I could return the compliment,” the girl said, turning around to face him. Her eyes were a brilliant shade of blue, looking out from the dark material of her mask.

  “I saw you down in the Armoury,” she said. “Maybe next time, try hiding inside the suit of armor?”

  “I might if I was a little midget like you,” Luca said.

  “It’s useful,” the girl said calmly. “Do you like being a clumsy ogre? I suppose you think it’s intimidating?”

  “It has its moments,” Luca said. “Like right now, for instance. I’m taking that cross.”

  There wasn’t a trace of fear in her bright blue eyes. He couldn’t see her face, of course, but he got the impression that she was beautiful beneath the mask. Her Italian really was flawless. Still, he didn’t believe she was a native. French, maybe?

  “Robbing the robber,” she said. “No professional courtesy?”

  “Not with this job, I’m afraid,” Luca said.

  “Well,” the girl said, “I guess I have no choice, then.”

  She made as if to step away from the case.

  But as she moved aside, she deliberately knocked the buffer out of the path of the magnetic field. Instantly, the alarms started to wail.

  Luca looked wildly toward the doorway.

  In the second his attention was turned away, the girl scampered up the nearest set of heavy velvet curtains, as limber as a monkey. She climbed to the window and smashed it with her elbow, heedless now of setting off any additional alarms.

  Cursing himself for his stupidity, Luca turned back to the case, thinking the girl must have grabbed the cross. But it was still sitting there, on its dais. He snatched it up and stuffed it in his pocket.

  That delayed him another moment. Now the guards were streaming into the room, fumbling at their holsters. Luca gave up on the idea of finesse. He barreled into the nearest guard, knocking him into his neighbor. Then he pelted out of the chamber as fast as he could.

  There was no time to go back down to basement to retrieve the scuba equipment. He’d have to find another way out. He had a backup plan, an alternate exit route. It wasn’t as neat, but it would have to do.

  He sprinted up the stairs, heading for the topmost level. He could hear the guards yelling for him to stop as they chased after him, but he was fairly certain they wouldn’t start shooting, especially not without a clear target. Half the security guards in Italy didn’t even carry guns, and those who did weren’t free-shooting cowboys like the ones in Dubai or the States. They wouldn’t want to risk damaging all the artwork he was running past.

  Most of the guards were old and slow. He left them far behind. But the three youngest guys were still pounding up the stairs, hot on his heels.

  Luca ran into the Doge’s apartments, right into the bedroom. It was a monastic space, with a small, hard bed, and a plain copper wash-stand. However, as Luca had assessed before, the room’s large windows led straight out of the museum.

  With no time to bother forcing the latch, Luca charged through the shutters. The wood splintered around him, scraping his arms. He landed on top of the Bridge of Sighs and ran across it, leaping onto the rooftop of the old prison cells on the other side of the canal. From there, he dropped onto the roof of the Montclair hotel. He jogged down the fire escape, taking the steps three at a time, then dropped down to the motorbike he had stashed in the alley behind the hotel.

  The fastest of the security guards was just in time to see the taillights of the motorbike disappearing down the end of the alley.

  Luca drove around for thirty or forty minutes to make sure no one had followed him.

  He chuckled to himself over the cheekiness of the female thief. He’d never been so intrigued by someone. If only he could have seen her face. Or even spoken to her just a little longer.

  He almost wished that he hadn’t had to take the cross from her. As much as he respected her skill, but he couldn’t let it go. He was stealing the cross on commission, for someone he couldn’t afford to disappoint.

  Once he was sure that he hadn’t been tailed, he pulled into the garage of his safe house. He took off his helmet and the balaclava underneath.

  He unzipped his backpack and took out the bandana in which he’d hastily wrapped the cross. He hoped, in his mad escape, he hadn’t knocked any of the pearls loose.

  Something bothered him about the look of it, even in the dim light of the garage. The color of the gold seemed garish, the weight too light. The ruby in the center looked flat and dull.

  In disbelief, he turned the cross over.

  There was a small sticker on the base:

  Made in China.

  The girl had swapped the cross.

  With a replica from the museum gift shop.

  4

  Byron Black

  Stockholm

  Agent Black walked around the top floor of the cash handling depot. The floor was littered with shingles, chunks of plaster and wood, and the tactical-grade rope the thieves had used to rappel down through the ceiling.

  They had hovered over the roof of the building in a stolen helicopter, then demolished their way inside with explosives. Armed with machine guns, they killed guards and employees alike, hauling out over a hundred million dollars’ worth of krona.

  The remaining guards had called the Piketen task force, the Swedish version of a SWAT team. But the thieves had lain down caltrops on every road leading to the depot, so the incoming vehicles had been delayed with blown tires.

  When the police tried to follow the escaping chopper with their own helicopters, they found what looked like a bomb at the entrance to the air hanger. By the time they realized it was only a bundle of cardboard and wires attached to an alarm clock, the perps were long gone.

  Now the Swedes were cooperating with the FBI, since this was one of a string of recent high-profile robberies across Europe.

  Black was part of that FBI task force. They had a pretty good idea who’d done it, though that was about as far as their intel went. In fact, that’s why Black had been brought in. This was his fourth run-in with the crime ring at the top of the suspect list. He’d tracked them through three similar smash-and-grabs at a jewelry store in Berlin, a diamond cutter’s shop in Antwerp, and a bank in London.

  Investigating the London heist had been unpleasant. He’d been liaising with some of the officers from his old unit. They vividly remembered his humiliation of two years prior. The jokes and snide comments began immediately, asking him if his girlfriend was behind this job too, or if he’d been fucking any of the other suspected thieves.

  It only took one cold, furious look to shut them up.

  Black had spent the better part of the last two years punish
ing his body over and over at the gym, at his boxing club, and taking long, rage-driven runs that lasted late into the night. The frame that had always been imposing in height and breadth was now thick with the muscle he’d built out of pure anger and bitterness.

  None of the cops wanted to tangle with him.

  Black hadn’t forgotten what happened with Lex. Not a day went by that he didn’t think about it.

  It was why he didn’t work for the Metropolitan Police Service anymore. While he had received some credit for recovering the stolen diamonds, he received much less for having brought the thief to the Home Secretary’s house in the first place, and worse, taking her all the way into the study that held the hidden safe.

  In fact, he was put under investigation himself, while on unpaid probation. It hardly helped when the internal review team decided, at last, that he wasn’t an accomplice, only an idiot too infatuated to notice that he was dating an international criminal.

  Despite that, he was well-liked and well-respected in his department. They would have kept him on, if he accepted his disciplinary hearing and his demotion.

  He resigned instead.

  He bounced around for six months, working freelance security details. Then he took what amounted to a private detective job, hunting down an oil painting by Vermeer that had been stolen from Sotheby’s. He tracked it down, returning it unharmed, and busting a ring of shady art dealers in the process. That made something of a name for him in the art world.

  Soon he was on to bigger cases of the same type. Art theft had increased all across Europe. There was no end to the galleries and museums and insurance companies who needed his services. This eventually brought him to the attention of the international task force headed by the FBI.

  They had been tracking the largest of the crime rings for the past three years. The group called themselves the Bratsvo, or the Fratellanza, depending from which country their members hailed. The FBI called them by the English translation: the Brotherhood.

  They were highly professional, organized, well-funded. Many of the members had obviously received paramilitary training, perhaps during the Balkans conflict of the 90s, or during the later skirmishes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  The real difficulty in catching them lay in their network of connections for fencing the stolen items.

  Most art thieves were caught when they tried to sell the goods. Without a wealthy buyer lined up, it was difficult to dispose of something as recognizable as a famous painting or jewel. Stolen art often sold for a fraction of its market value. Desperate thieves had even been known to throw their artifacts in a canal, or burn them, when the pressure and publicity overwhelmed them.

  The Brotherhood, on the other hand, had a web of smugglers, dealers, and wealthy buyers lined up from Europe to Hong Kong. The art ended up in the hands of Russian oligarchs and Chinese billionaires who couldn’t care less how it was obtained and feared no legal consequences.

  It would be satisfying, Black supposed, to bring down the Brotherhood. They were a massive organization. He disliked their violence and their recklessness.

  The art he didn’t care about at all. Half of it had been gotten in dubious ways to begin with, through war and imperialism. He hardly felt it belonged to the wealthy elites anyway.

  He had his own reasons for moving into this line of work. And it had very little to do with the art itself.

  Once they had wrapped up their examination of the scene at the cash depot, Black and the rest of the task force headed back to their temporary office at the Piketen headquarters.

  As soon as Black came into the room, he saw Johnson giving him a nod from behind his computer screen. Black hurried over to see what he had for him.

  “I’ve been following the Interpol bulletins, like you asked,” Johnson said.

  Johnson, part of the tech team, was a skinny kid who liked Black because he never reprimanded him about his sweat pants, or how he liked to take naps under his desk during his lunch break.

  “What did you see?” Black asked.

  “There was a theft from the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Cameras cut, only one piece stolen.”

  Black went very still. He recognized that M.O.

  “It was a guy though, not a woman.”

  “How do they know?”

  “The security guards saw him leaving. He attacked two of them and escaped out an upper story window, over the rooftops.”

  “Hmm,” Black said.

  It didn’t fit then.

  He was about to turn away, but Johnson continued.

  “There was one report, though, of a woman at the scene.”

  Black paused, listening.

  “Well, they weren’t sure if it was a woman or a child. A witness said they saw someone climbing out a window, someone very small. They said the person climbed down a drain pipe and ran away in a different direction than the other guy. But the witness had been drinking. So, I’m not sure if their statement was reliable.”

  Black’s stomach clenched.

  Could she have been with someone else? A partner? She always worked alone, as far as he knew.

  “What is it?” Johnson said.

  “Nothing,” Black said, shortly. “What was taken?”

  “This necklace thing,” Johnson turned his screen so Black could see an image of it. “It’s called the Romanov Cross.”

  Black looked at it. He read the description.

  The elegant design, the tragic history, that blood-red stone.

  It was just her style.

  “Send me all the information they have,” he said to Johnson.

  5

  Alex Moore

  Venice

  Usually, after a successful theft, Lex would have left the city quickly and gone to a secondary location before heading back home with her prize. The stop in the middle was to make sure that no one was following her. She would never risk burning her one safe place.

  However, the encounter with the rival thief put a wrench in her plans. She thought it had only been coincidence that they were at the Doge’s Palace on the same day, at the same time, to steal the cross. But she couldn’t be certain.

  What if he had been following her while she set up the theft? What if he already knew where she was staying, here in Venice?

  She couldn’t risk going back to her hotel room on Calle de Vin.

  So, she did something that she really hated to do: she contacted an old friend.

  She disliked working with anyone else.

  Her mother used to say, “Two people can keep a secret, as long as one of them is dead.”

  It was a mistake to trust to people, or to rely on them for favors.

  However, she needed a good safe house on short notice, and a new form of transportation out of the city. So, she called up Angioletto.

  He was only too happy to help, probably hoping that she’d throw him some money for his trouble.

  He came and picked her up a dozen blocks from the museum. He stuck his round face out the window of his battered little Fiat, beeping the horn to get her attention, though she was already looking at him.

  “Jesus, Angioletto,” Lex said, rolling her eyes. “Let’s not wake up the whole neighborhood.

  “Lexa, my love!” he cried, kissing her on both cheeks. “So good to see you.”

  “It’s been a long time,” Lex said.

  When Angioletto’s mother first nicknamed him “Little Angel,” it’s possible that he did indeed look like a cherub, with his masses of dark curls and his round, babyish face. The intervening years had not been kind. Now he was round and chubby all over, with bloodshot eyes from drinking too much, and a missing tooth in the front from an unfortunate encounter with some creditors.

  His appearance hadn’t been improved by the late-night wake-up call. He had pulled on an old jersey and a pair of torn sweatpants, as well as some pink slippers that likely belonged to somebody else. A fresh black-eye bloomed on the right side of his face.

  “What happened to you?�
� Lex asked.

  “Ugh,” Angioletto said, rolling his eyes. “My girlfriend has a bit of a temper.”

  He wasn’t exactly Lex’s favorite person in the world. But she’d done him a favor in the past, so she figured that giving her a place to stay for the night, and lending her a car the next day, would be an easy way for him to repay her.

  He drove through the nearly empty streets to his flat on Calle del Carbon.

  “You’ll just have to be quiet,” he said, leading her up the stairs to his flat. “Martina is a light sleeper.”

  Actually, Martina was already sitting on the couch when they came in, hair up in curlers, arms folded over the chest of her housecoat, looking highly annoyed at the interruption.

  She was hardly more pleased when she saw that Angioletto had brought home a girl.

  “Oh, you’re awake!” Angioletto said. “Can I make you some tea?”

  “Of course I’m awake!” his girlfriend spat in rapid Italian. “First your phone is ringing in the middle of the night, then you’re thundering up and down the stairs, and now you’ve brought a houseguest home with you!”

  Lex didn’t bother to apologize. She went into Angioletto’s kitchen to make the tea herself, leaving the couple alone in the living room to fight to their hearts’ content.

  It was a tiny kitchen, crowded and dirty. A cockroach darted out from under a plate and dashed down the drain. Lex sighed, rinsing out a few mugs and setting the kettle to boil.

  As she waited, she wondered who the other thief had been at the Doge’s Palace.

  It was so rare that she came across someone in the same line of work. Particularly someone who seemed to operate with a reasonable level of ingenuity.