Double Crossed (3 page)

A
S WORD SPREAD—AND WORD ALWAYS DID—
the streets outside the hotel eventually became clogged with police cars and fire trucks. News vans lined the barricades while uniformed men tried to keep the curious at bay. But
try
was all they could manage.

It was New York City, after all, and word that the mayor, a senator, a district court judge, and the most popular players in the Manhattan social scene were currently being held at gunpoint at the charity event of the season was sweeping through the city like a fire.

The SWAT teams shouted at the NYPD; the NYPD argued with the FBI; and the FBI demanded in the loudest voices possible, “Who let this happen?”

Only a smaller-than-average teenage girl stayed quiet in the dark, right on the edge of the barricade. Occasionally, a man in a gray suit would appear, place a cup of hot chocolate in her hands, a heavier coat around her shoulders, but it was as if the girl herself didn’t realize she was freezing. She just stood looking up at the high-rise as if wondering whether or not she should try scaling the walls herself, stealing her way inside.

“Are you Katarina Bishop?” Kat jerked her head away from the Athenia in time to see a woman walking toward her. She was tall and thin, with shiny black hair that blew behind her in the wind. And even in that crowd of chaos, there was something about the woman that demanded attention.

“You’re Kat Bishop?” the woman asked again, studying Kat, who wasn’t sure whether or not she should say yes. But answering, it turned out, was optional, because the woman raised the yellow tape and said, “Come with me.”

On the other side of the barrier, Kat struggled to keep up with the woman’s long legs and quick stride. And when a man with a walkie-talkie stepped in front of Kat, blocking her way, the woman flashed a badge Kat couldn’t read and ordered, “She’s with me.” No one asked the question again. The two of them walked undisturbed all the way to the opposite side of the street.

“So…I got your message,” the woman said once they were alone in that crowd of people. “Now I need you to tell me everything you know about Macey McHenry.”

It was then that Kat realized two things. First, this was the woman whom Macey had needed Kat to call. The second was that even though Kat hadn’t left her name or given her number, this woman had picked Kat out of the crowd as easily as if they’d met a dozen times before. Kat didn’t know whether to be scared or impressed, so she just focused on the only thing that mattered in that moment.

All up and down the sidewalks, uniformed officials shouted and spat and spewed. But this woman just kept her eyes glued to the Athenia’s balcony high overhead as if she, like Kat, were tempted to scale the walls and burst inside.

And that was why Kat said,
“You know her.”
It was more realization than whisper. She watched the way the woman stared up at the towering hotel. “You know Macey McHenry. And you love her—there’s someone you love in there. Well”—Kat drew a breath—“you’re not the only one.”

Before the woman could say a word, Kat pulled an extra earbud out of her pocket and held it out.

“Here you go,” Kat said. “You can talk to my friend on the inside. Well, technically, he’s more than a friend, but…” Kat remembered almost too late that she was talking to a woman with a badge. “Anyhow, you can talk to him. He’s with Macey.”

When the woman took the earbud, she didn’t ask another question. She was a woman on a mission as she placed the tiny device in her ear and said, “This is Special Agent Abby Cameron. Let me talk to Macey McHenry.”

There was only one gunman in the ballroom.

Macey watched the man walk around the people who sat in a huge circle on the floor, like a conga line that had gone terribly, terribly wrong. And she thought about what it meant.

There was only one gunman in the ballroom.

Wordlessly, she slipped off her shoes. Gently, she placed a palm on the floor, shifted to stand, but that was when Macey felt another hand pressing down on hers. Hard. Too hard.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” Hale hissed in her ear. His fingers burned into her skin. And Macey knew that if she was going to take out the gunman, she was first going to have to neutralize the boy beside her.

“Why don’t you let me go, and I’ll show you,” she said with only a modicum of flirt in her voice.

“Why don’t you put your fancy shoes back on and sit there like a good little girl?”

“First of all, I’m
good
at a lot of things. Taking orders from bored billionaires isn’t one of them. Second of all, he’s alone, and I can take him,” Macey said.

“No!” Hale said. “You don’t know anything about this guy.”

“I know he’s left-handed and has an old injury to his right knee—probably a torn ACL at some point but the details don’t matter. And the way he keeps his finger purposefully away from the safety of that gun means he’s never fired it. And he doesn’t want to.”

“You’re kinda scary.”

Macey leveled him with a glare. “My school offers a self-defense class. A good one.”

“How nice for you. Now I want you to promise me that if I move my hand, you won’t do something stupid.” Macey was just starting to protest when Hale stopped and brought his hand to his ear. “Besides, there’s someone who wants to talk to you.” He held out the extra earbud, whispering softly in the too-quiet room. “It goes in your ear and—”

But before he could finish, Macey rolled her eyes and placed the bud in her ear. “This is Peacock,” she whispered.

She watched Hale’s eyes go wide as she heard a very familiar voice say, “You’re not getting extra credit for this. Now”—Macey’s teacher took a long, easy breath—“what’s going on in there?”

“Five gunmen. Automatic weapons. Very organized. They’ve got all the hostages in the main ballroom. Looks like the gunmen have split up. I’m thinking I can pick them off one at a time.”

“No, Macey. Bad idea,” Abby said just as Hale gave her an
I told you so
grin. “We’ve got to protect your cover. There haven’t been any ransom demands yet, but when there are…”

“They’re not looking for ransom,” Hale said, interjecting himself into a conversation that was far above his clearance level. “They might ask for one, but it will be a distraction. That’s not why they’re here.”

Macey rolled her eyes again and told him, “Half the power players in the city are sitting on this ballroom floor.”

“Yes,” Hale agreed with a little too much vigor for Macey’s liking. “And as you pointed out, four out of five gunmen aren’t
in
the ballroom. So,” Hale said slowly, “whatever they want, it isn’t in here.”

Macey was just starting to argue when Abby asked, “What can you tell me about the gunmen?”

“They’re amateurs,” Hale said at the exact time Macey told her teacher, “They’re pros.”

Hale shook his head. “Just because you do something professionally doesn’t mean you’re a professional. And, trust me, these guys are just the type to get someone hurt.”

Abby was talking in Macey’s ear, going on about emergency extractions and contingency plans. She’d warned Macey to sit tight, not to blow her cover. But the clock inside Macey’s head was ticking, Hale’s words washing over her.

And she was tired of sitting on the floor, doing absolutely nothing about it.

Macey would have given anything to have her best friends with her, but Cammie and Bex were in London on not-so-official CIA business and Liz was…Well, Macey reconsidered. Perhaps having the most accident-prone girl in the history of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women far, far away from the men with the assault rifles was a good thing.

“What about lover boy up there?” Abby asked. “He’s walking around with a pair of comms units in his pocket—could he be useful?”

Macey looked Hale slowly up and down, then whispered, “I highly doubt it.”

Hale huffed and mouthed the words
I can hear you
.

Macey just eyed him. “But I guess he’ll have to do.”

The man in the Bush mask looked bored, or as bored as anyone with his face covered could possibly look. He kept his weapon on his hip and walked around the wide circle, staring down at the captives.

This man wasn’t the brains, Hale knew. He held no authority, made no decisions. He was there to wear a mask and hold a gun. And hopefully, Hale thought, make a key mistake.

“You should get us away from the windows,” Hale said when the man walked by.

“Shut up,” he ordered, his voice husky and deep and vaguely European.

“They’re gonna have snipers out there,” Hale said. “I watch movies. I know how this ends. We need to get away from the windows. Look, that one door is even open.”

“I said shut up.”

“Okay.” Macey took up the argument. “If you want to get shot coming over here to check on us, fine, but my debutante ball is this spring and I can’t show up with scars and stuff.” She cast a weary glance toward the massive wall of windows and French doors. “Besides, I’m cold. The least you can do is close that door.”

Hale watched the man consider this. His posture changed. His feet shifted. And when he turned and started for the window, Hale dared to whisper, “Kat, you hearing this?”

He didn’t get a reply, but as soon as the gunman reached the open door, a bullet burst through the glass, shattering it into a million pieces, spraying it across the floor.

It missed the gunman, though. It was supposed to. And what followed was chaos. Hostages bolted to their feet and ran. Others crawled across the floor, over stray bits of glass, struggling to free themselves from that place and that terror.

And when the dust and the panic settled, nobody even noticed that the boy and the girl who had mentioned the windows in the first place were gone.

W
ALKING DOWN THE ABANDONED HALL
, Hale went through the list of all they had to do.

“First, we have to find out where they’re going and what they want. And keep your eyes peeled,” Hale ordered. “If we find a way of sneaking out some hostages, we should do it. And, Macey,” he said, stopping to catch her full attention, “don’t get caught.”

It was good enough advice, but Macey McHenry seemed to have other things on her mind.

“You’d better not be planning on looking up my dress.”

“I won’t look up your dress.”

“Because if you look up my dress, I will hurt you.”

“Yeah.” Hale laughed a little. “You can try and—”

But before Hale could finish Macey spun, knocking him against the wall. She had her fingers around his neck and his head poised to snap. It was all he could do to choke out the words “I won’t look up your dress.”

“Good boy,” she said, and let him go.

Without another word, the two of them eased down the narrow hallway that ran along the back side of the ballroom. Carts of food sat, abandoned. Bucketsful of ice were melting.

It felt to Hale like they were walking through a ghost town. And Hale couldn’t help himself—he worried. The whole job felt wrong. Too overt. Too obvious. Too physical and dangerous and risky. Whatever it was that had brought the men in the masks there, he didn’t like it.

“What are you thinking?” Macey tilted her head and studied him.

“It’s not a Gab and Grab—they’ve been here too long and they’ve gotten too entrenched. They’re big and they’re organized, but they aren’t set up for the Queen of Sheba.”

Macey looked at him oddly, so Hale added, “To run that con you need a set of triplets and a goat.” Then he shook his head and talked on. “They’ve got hardware and hostages, and that means…”

“What does it mean, Mr. Bored Billionaire–slash–Amateur Thief Guy?”

“I don’t know. I’m usually the heist
er
—not the heist
ee
. And I don’t work this way.” He walked a little faster. “You take hostages at a bank—someplace with lots of cash and lots of exits. And you only do it after you mess up and don’t get out. Seriously, no one in their right mind
intends
to take hostages. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless they intend to
use
them.”

The words washed over both of them, neither of them moving. Neither of them spoke until Hale glanced up at the air vent that opened overhead, and held out his hands in the universal signal for
let me give you a boost
. “Now I promise I won’t look up your dress.”

Macey wasn’t the type of girl to have regrets, but as she crawled through the dirty air vents that ran along the top of the Athenia’s highest floor, there were a number of things she would have changed about that particular evening if given the opportunity. First, she would have gone with the black gown instead of the red. (In those situations, you really need a dress with straps.) She absolutely would have brought one of the little travel-sized tear gas canisters her roommate Liz had perfected the previous semester. And perhaps most importantly, she would have done more than a little reconnaissance on W. W. Hale V before the evening took its covert turn.

Macey risked a look at the boy behind her. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was at home there, but nervous. Like a veteran athlete who has been asked to play a new position. He seemed a little off his game.

“Cammie’s going to be mad she missed this,” Macey said to fill the silence.

“Excuse me?” Hale asked.

“Nothing.” She shook her head. “I just…I have a friend who
really
likes air vents. And dumbwaiter shafts. And laundry chutes. Of course, the last time I was in a laundry chute, Cammie and I fell about a dozen stories….”

“Well, that sounds like fun.”

“It was either that or get kidnapped by terrorists, so I guess we got off easy.”

Macey glanced back to see Hale’s flirty grin. “Somehow I find that very— Wait!” Hale snapped, and grabbed her ankle, held her in place so that she couldn’t move another inch.

Macey jerked her head around and saw why Hale had stopped her. Narrow red beams crisscrossed the empty shaft, shining in the darkness.

“Lasers,” Hale sighed.

“Lasers,” Macey repeated.

They eased away from the red flickering beams that covered the shaft and blocked their way, inching backward until they heard voices below. Through a grate in the ceiling they could see the masked men lingering near a closed door, leaning against an antique table and smoking European cigarettes as if they had all day.

“Okay, so clearly they don’t have access to the target, which means—” Hale started, and Macey cut him off with a “Shh!” She leaned closer to the vent and listened to the foreign words that filled the hallway beneath them.

“What is that?” Hale asked, leaning close to the vents. “Russian?”

“Albanian,” Macey said, and again, motioned for him to be quiet.

“Now I suppose you’re going to tell me they teach Albanian at your school.”

“Only for extra credit.” Macey leaned even closer, listened harder. “It’s a job for hire,” she translated. “They don’t know how to get past the security system.”

Hale wasn’t impressed. “Of course they can’t get past the security system. You see that sticker by the door. That unit is protected by the new Sterling system.
I
can’t even get past that.”

Macey rolled her eyes and kept her ear trained on the men in the hall. “The boss—I guess that is whoever hired them—he said the system would be off, but it’s not.”

Below, the men talked on. Their frustration grew. “What are they saying now?” Hale asked.

“Cusswords.” Macey cut her eyes at him. “Bad ones.”

“What are they waiting on?” Hale asked almost like he wasn’t expecting an answer. But then, as if on cue, the air vent was plunged into darkness.

In the hallway beneath Hale and Macey, only the emergency exit signs emitted any light, and the hall was covered in an eerie red haze as Clinton shattered the
IN CASE OF FIRE
glass and pulled an axe from the compartment inside. With two long strides he walked to the door and swung. A minute later the men in the masks were walking inside.

The red laser beams disappeared and Macey glanced back at Hale and said, “Come on.”

Even with the power off, the air shafts were hot in the middle of winter, and sweat beaded on Macey’s brow and ran down the side of her face as she crawled along ahead of Hale, past the point where the lasers had previously blocked their way.

Inching along, she glanced down through the grates into the room below. It was gorgeous and luxurious with a silk-covered fainting couch and a balcony overlooking the park. But even for the Athenia, it was too nice to be a regular room.

“It’s an apartment,” Hale said. “Did you know the Athenia had residences?”

Macey nodded. “They do for a few select clients.” But then something caught her attention. “Is that…” Macey started. She was staring at a painting on the wall.

“A Klimt?” Hale filled in, then sighed. “Oh yeah. But don’t get your hopes up. It’s a copy.”

“And you know this because…” Macey drew out the last word and looked at Hale even more skeptically than before.

“I saw the original at the Louvre last summer,” he said with a shrug.

“Oh,” she said, deflated.

The masked men were right below them, unloading gear and going to work on the opposite side of the opulent room, so Macey and Hale spoke in hushed whispers, pressed together in the tiny space. But Macey didn’t feel a charge, a spark. Handsome though he was, there was no doubt that W. W. Hale was otherwise engaged.

When the man in the Reagan mask pulled the Klimt from the wall, she felt Hale go cold and rigid as he studied the space behind where the print had been.

“Oh boy,” Hale whispered almost to himself.

“What?” Macey asked.

“The safe,” Hale said.

Macey looked back at the room, at the big metal box around which the masked men were gathered. “What about it?”

“It’s…good,” Hale admitted.

“Surely it’s not too much for a world-class art thief such as yourself?” Macey tried to tease, but Hale was already backing slowly away.

“No, Macey. It’s too good.” He shook his head. “Come on. We’ve got to find whoever lives here and figure out what these guys are after.”

“Don’t bother,” Macey said.

“Why…”

She looked at an oil painting that hung over the fireplace, a woman in a canary diamond necklace that was even more famous than she was. “Because she’s in the ballroom right now.”

Macey spoke slowly. “So if you were right and the necklace Mrs. Calloway wore to the ball was a fake…”

Hale nodded. “One guess where she’s keeping the real one.”

Macey peered through the vent at the place where the men were working. They were methodical as they unloaded their equipment, laying it all out on the coffee table like a surgical team preparing their tools.

There were a half dozen devices Macey hadn’t seen before but one small packet that was far too familiar.

“C4,” she whispered, and froze, staring down at the tiny but powerful explosive. “What will they do if they can’t crack the safe?”

“You don’t get it, Macey. They can’t crack that safe.”

“And what will they do?”

“Try to pry it open,” he said.

“And will that work?” she asked.

He shook his head and said, “No.”

“Can you blast into that safe, Hale?”

“What? Why are you asking?”

“Because I think we have bigger problems.”

“What kind of problems?” Hale asked, but Macey just pointed to the fireplace under the painting.

The gas-powered fireplace.

“The kind that go
boom
.”

Katarina Bishop had been many things in her young life. The daughter of a con man, the niece of a thief. (And once, during a particularly delicate operation in Hungary, the heir to an American ketchup dynasty.) But on that evening, she was something she had never, ever been before: helpless.

Needless to say, she didn’t like it.

“Kat,” Abby called, strolling in her direction. “Tell me about your boyfriend.”

“Well…I don’t know that he’s my boyfriend. I mean…he’s a boy. And he’s my friend. And there’s recently been the addition of kissing. But does that make us friends with benefits or—”