“You sure?”Josh asked, pulling out the last battery pack.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Liam said.“They won’t be able to track us through the Chunnel.I bought our tickets with our other IDs—”
“Not your Interpol other ID?”Josh asked, because hehadto, apparently.
“Yes, my Interpol other ID, because I’m as stupid as Grace accuses me of being,” Liam retorted.“Or maybe I was there during the planning sessions, and I used the handy first ID that Tienne fixed up for me that’s fully backstopped.Unlike yours, which should trigger Kadjic’s paranoia in about a day.”
“Sorry,” Josh muttered, embarrassed.“I micromanage everybody else too.”
“So I’ve been told,” Liam replied dryly.“Now on.We take the train, do a one-day walkabout in Paris, including the Louvre, anddon’tsteal theMona Lisa.”
Josh snorted.“Everybody wants to steal that fucking painting.Do you realize that itwasstolen for two years in the early nineteen hundreds and—”
“Spent two years underneath some guy’s stove while he had Italian nationals come peek at it and marvel that yes, they were a part of one of the greatest paintings on the planet.Yes, I know, because I was there when Danny told that story.”
“I wasraisedon that story,” Josh told him soberly.“Because the guy walked into the museum dressed like a schmo, then walked out of the museum through the back dock, and not a soul questioned him because he walked like he had the right to be there.”
Liam took a deep breath, and Josh could see him processing.
“We walk like we’ve got the right to be there,” he said softly.
“That’s right,” Josh said, setting the equipment down on the table.“We know how to disable the locks, the cameras, the security system, and when we leave, the attention’s not going to be on the perpetrators.”
Liam frowned, thinking about it, thinking about what they planned to do.
“No,” he said in surprise.“It’s not, is it?”
“Nope,” Josh said, spreading out the lockpicks, the faux frames, the alarm buzzers, and the practice canvases on the mostly clean coffee table.“The trick is,” he said, laying the equipment out in precise order, “to be so absolutely invisible that there’s only one place for the attention to go.Care to join me?”He glanced up and held out a lockpick.Liam hit Save on his laptop, folded it, and set it down beside him, then took the proffered tool.
“Why yes,” he said, “I’d love to play art thief Operation with you.”
“Yes!Let’s extract a kidney stone and replace a Rembrandt!”Josh told him happily, setting his phone up next to him.“Remember, we’ve got fifteen seconds to slip the canvas under the glass without activating the alarm.You ready?”
“Ready,” Liam said, getting comfortable.
“Set,go!”Josh hit the timer on his phone, and they were off.
When Josh’s family had been kiting around Europe when he was a child, they’d often stayed in second-tier hotels.Nice places, no bugs, no obvious drugs or prostitution, but the carpet wasn’t new, and they were off the main drags with less visibility.The primary reason for this was to avoid any contemporaries of Julia’s father—Hiram Dormer had his fingers in a lot of international pies, and the reason the family had escaped to Europe was to give them all a break from the constant implied violence of the mobster businessman.One of the unexpected benefits, though, was it turned out to be an excellent training and practicing ground for, say, a group of born grifters.
Josh remembered one time when a businessman had turned away from a woman at the base of the walkway leading into the hotel from the garage.The woman—while not a street-level prostitute was obviously a higher-class working girl—had been affronted.
“We had a deal,” she said in shock.“You had your evening.You need to—”
He’d slapped her before she had a chance to go on and then turned on his heel, muttering, “Greedy fucking whore,” as he marched away.
“Do we…?”Felix began, and then Julia had waved him off to track down the man’s hotel room number while she went to console the woman and get her number.
The next day, Felix stayed back at the hotel to break into the man’s room, get his information, and then put in a word with the man’s company and his wife, while Danny, Julia, and Josh followed him on the street.
Julia had gone first, coming from the opposite direction, making sure to keep her stride loose and her expression haughty—she’d done her makeup and worn a wig to be much like the woman from the night before, figuring the man had a type.
And he did.His attention went directly to her, following her to his left as he passed.
Then Danny had come up behind the man on his right, bumped into him, and extracted his phone from his breast pocket.
And Josh had extracted his wallet from his back pocket without brushing his fingers against the fabric of the man’s slacks.
They’d given the cash and credit cards to the woman—who had cried—and destroyed and disposed of the phone.When the man returned to his hotel, he found his reputation and finances in such thorough disrepair that he had to report to the American Embassy to avoid prosecution for trying to defraud an innkeeper.
