Page 54 of Gave Proof Through the Night

“Looped and gorgeous.”

Zoe is three blocks away, parked in a van that says DC METRO WATER SERVICES on the side. Inside the van, she’s surrounded by more monitors than a NASA control room. She’s plugged into the security camera feed both inside the museum and the grounds outside and can see my every move. A crunch in my ear tells me she’s eating her fourth bag of pretzel M&Ms today. I can’t see her, but I know a pretzel M&M crunch when I hear it.

“Do you mind?” I say. “We can all hear you eating.”

“Ah the joys of being the girl in the van,” she says, taking another mouthful.

“It is a little distracting,” Tanya says.

Suri agrees. “It’s making me hungry.”

The BMAH doesn’t let visitors near the Friendship Jewel with anything sharper than a museum-issued golf pencil. No phones out. No bags past the second checkpoint. Which means we can’t waltz in with a laser scanner.

Rude.

That’s why Suri and Tanya are posing as regular, run-of-the-mill museum visitors. Suri went in dressed like a Manga college student complete with pleated skirt, knee socks, and a cardigan buttoned to the second-to-top button. I thought it was a bit much for a sweltering July morning, but she’s totally into the bit.

Tanya’s playing a chatty tourist with a guidebook and an alarming amount of enthusiasm for the gift shop. She’s wearing a plastic hair clip that Zoe spent an embarrassing amount of hours getting it to look just right. Inside the hair clip is a lens smaller than a poppy seed and an infrared burst emitter that pulses in patterns no human eye would notice and no metal detector would flag. Every time Tanya tilts her head, she’s taking another slice of the necklace, and every slice beams straight to Zoe’s laptop, three blocks away, assembling itself into a 3D file good enough for Suri to forge from without ever laying a finger on the real thing.

The only design flaw is the signal.

The hair clip broadcasts short-range, on a frequency built to look, to any security system scanning for anomalies, exactly like a hearing aid pairing with a phone, the least suspicious signal in the world, because nobody flags an old man’s Bluetooth as a threat to a national treasure. The trade-off is range. A hundred feet, maybe one-fifty on a good day. Plus, the museum’s walls are thick enough to eat most short-range signals whole. Something has to sit between Tanya and the van, close enough to the museum’s stone exterior to catch the signal and pass it along.

That is why I’m sitting here holding a paperback copy of Great Expectations with a signal booster sewn into its spine that Zoe MacGyvered into existence. (I wouldn’t be surprised if she made it out of floral wire and a foil gum wrapper.)

It’s very Ocean’s Eight of us. Tanya has said as much twice already and Zoe has agreed both times with the enthusiasm of a girl who has been waiting her whole life to be Cate Blanchett.

“Tanya, baby, a little to the left,” Zoe says now, and I hear it live in my earpiece.

“Your other left,” Zoe adds.

“There isn’t an other left, Zoe, there’s only one left, that’s the whole point of left.”

“There is when you’re a disaster who mixes it up under pressure. Tilt. Tilt. There. Hold it, hold it, gorgeous, hold it right there.”

I picture Tanya standing very still in front of a glass case, the top of her head pointed at the Friendship Jewel like she’s threading a needle with her skull. It should not be as funny as it is. I bite down on a laugh and keep my face in the book.

“I would like it noted for the record,” Tanya says, strained and cheerful at once. “That one of you ladies is going to buy me a spa massage session by the end of this.”

“You can have sixteen point five million massages if we all pull this off, so stay focused, ladies.”

I glance around to make sure that the security guard from earlier isn’t around to hear me.

“A massage costs more than a dollar,” I hear Ivy say.

“How did Ivy get in on this channel?” Suri says.

“I’m in the van.”

“Me too,” says another voice.

“Rue? Is that you?”

“The one and only. Who do you think keeps supplying Zoe with candy?”

Great. The whole gang’s here.

“Please tell me you bought it with cash money,” I say.