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“Right now you’re a bigger problem than Patton was, and you saw how my superiors handled that problem. The only way this can be over is if you—”
“This is never going to be over,” I shout. “Someone will always be after me. There’s always consequences. Well, BRING IT. I am done with being afraid, and I am done with you.”
With that, I stalk back to the house. But on the porch I hesitate. I look back at Yulikova. I wait until she walks back to the gleaming black car, gets in, and is driven away. Then I sit down on the stoop.
I stare out at the yard for a long time, not really thinking about anything, mostly just shaking with anger and adrenaline.
The government is big, bigger than any one person can game. They can come after the people I care about, they can come for me, they can do something that I haven’t thought of yet. They could make their move now or a year from now. And I’m going to have to be ready. Always and forever ready, unless I want to give up everything I have and everyone I love.
Like, they could go after Lila, who shot and killed someone in cold blood. If they ever managed to figure that out, to charge her with Agent Jones’s murder, I would do anything to keep her free.
Or they could go after Barron, who works for them.
Or—
As I’m thinking, I realize I am looking out at our old barn. No one’s gone in there in years. It’s full of old furniture, rusted tools, and a bunch of stuff my parents stole and then didn’t want.
It’s where my dad taught me how to pick locks. He kept all his equipment out there, including the supersecure box. I vividly recall my father, cigarillo resting in one corner of his mouth as he worked, oiling the gears of a lock. My memory adds in the spool pins, the mortis sets, and the bolts.
I remember that no one could get into that box. Even knowing there was candy inside, we were still hopeless.
The barn is the one place that Grandad and I didn’t clean out.
I leave the milk on the stoop and walk over to the big, worn double doors, then lift the latch. The last time I was inside was in a dream. It feels dreamlike now, dust rising up with my footfalls, the only light coming through gaps in the planks, and windowpanes shaded gray with cobwebs and dirt.
It smells like rotten wood and animal habitation. Most of the furniture is covered with moth-eaten blankets, giving everything a ghostly appearance. I spot a garbage bag filled with plastic bags, and several worn cardboard boxes overstuffed with milk glass. There’s an old safe—so rusted that the door is ossified open. Inside I find only a pile of pennies, greenish and stuck together.
Dad’s worktable is covered with a cloth too. Pulling it back with a single sweep of my hand, I see the piled mess of his tools—a vise, cylinder remover, sesame decoder, hammer with interchangeable heads, the supersecure box, a bundle of twine, and a bunch of rusted picks.
If my father had the Resurrection Diamond, if he wanted to keep it, if he couldn’t sell it, then I can picture him tucking it away where no outsider would think to look and no family member was skilled enough to get into. I cast about for a few minutes and then do what I never would have thought to do as a kid.
I clamp the box in the vise. Then I plug in a reciprocating saw and slice it open.
Metal filings are scattered across the floor, curled in glittering piles, by the time I’m done. The box is destroyed, the top cut completely off.
There’s no diamond inside, just a bunch of papers and a very old half-melted lollipop. I would have been extremely disappointed, had I ever managed to open it as a kid.
I’m disappointed now.
I unfold the papers, and a photo falls out into my hands. A bunch of very blond boys standing in front of a huge house—one of those old-money Cape Cod mansions with a widow’s walk and columns, looking right onto the ocean. I turn it over and see three names in a spidery hand I don’t recognize: “Charles, Philip, Anne.” Guess one of them wasn’t a boy after all.
For a moment I wonder if I’m looking at the research for an old con. Then I unfold another piece of paper. It’s a birth certificate for a Philip Raeburn.
Not Sharpe, a name I always knew was as fake as the prize in a Cracker Jack box. Raeburn. My dad’s real last name. The one he gave up, the one he hid from us.
Cassel Raeburn. I try it out in my head, but it sounds ridiculous.
There’s a newspaper clipping too, one about how Philip Raeburn died in a boating accident off the shore of the Hamptons at the age of seventeen. A ridiculously expensive way to die.
The Raeburns could afford to buy anything. Certainly they could afford to buy a stolen diamond.
The door creaks open, and I turn around, startled.
“I found the milk by the door. What are you doing out here?” Barron asks. “And—what did you do to Dad’s lockbox?”
“Look,” I say, holding up the lollipop. “There really was candy in there. Go figure, right?”
Barron gapes at me with the horrified expression of someone realizing that he might be the stable brother after all.
