Unearthed Treasure (3 page)

It would be a delicate balance. She needed to concentrate.

“Atchison,” Kent answered. “You with Greer?”

“Yes, we’re both here,” she replied. “What the fuck is going on? This was not in our plan, Phillipe. I wasn’t even close to having things set up. We weren’t going through with this until later tonight. I’d barely even entered the Gallery when all hell broke loose. You could have compromised me, blown this whole thing out of the water. I need some answers—”

“Cool it, things went exactly according to plan,” Phillipe snapped, cutting her off mid-sentence.

Chelsea cast a curious glance to David. He looked equally surprised and shook his head to indicate he had no idea what the man was talking about.

“I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing—” she began hotly, getting annoyed now.

Again he cut her off. “Come back to base, you and David both. We’ll discuss it there.”

Before she could get a word further, Kent hung up on her.

She pressed her lips together, annoyed, frustrated and concerned. Kent Phillipe was not some elegant gentleman with impeccable manners. But he had never spoken so briskly to her, or with such disdain, either. She worried that maybe they really were compromised.

“Last chance,” David reiterated. She shook her head firmly.

“No, I want to stand with you on this,” she repeated. “Not just to protect you, but I don’t run from slime like him. If a few harsh words scared me off I’d never recover my pride. Sometimes, I have so much fun with this sort of work I forget it’s not all sunshine and laughter, that batting my eyelashes and wiggling my arse isn’t always the answer.”

“I dunno,” mused David, a wicked gleam in his eye. “I bet if you wriggled your arse at me there’s very little it couldn’t answer for.”

She laughed, leaned over and pressed a kiss to his cheek.

“I’ll remember that,” she warned him.

David laid his hand on her thigh, the connection sizzling between them. “I hope you do.”

Chapter Two

They’d arrived at a dingy business park. A long row of factories, many of them evidently abandoned, sat on an enormous concrete slab. Kent Phillipe had organised for their crew to use one of the empty warehouses as their main base of operations.

Chelsea and David crossed the street and made a beeline from the car to the hideout. Knowing they would be heavily scrutinised once they entered, and that only visual security was outside the building, she spoke quickly, moving her lips as little as possible. “Do you want to take the lead here, or should I?”

“I’ll remain the quiet, observant security expert,” David replied. “Besides, it was you they tapped initially to work with them. It would make more sense for you to be the more offended party here.”

Casting him a quick, curious glance, Chelsea pondered his reply. They were a few hundred yards away when another reason he preferred to play the quiet, unobtrusive character in front of these people illuminated her mind.

“You’re going to take the heat if they think we’re traitorous,” she said with an furious tone. For a moment she felt tempted to stop right where they were and argue this out with him. Common sense reared its head before she could literally jolt to a stop, but her fury was real.

“David, damn it, I’m not going to hang you out to dry, or let you do it to yourself. We’re a team, remember? If you think—”

“Hush, love,” David snapped. “If you raise your voice much more they’ll be able to hear you from inside. We both have a right to be angry, that’s easily explained, but if anyone is going to go down here it’s me. Swear to me you’ll cut me loose if it comes to that.”

“I’ll promise nothing of the sort,” she said, beyond incensed. “I can handle anything these pansies throw at me, but I refuse,
refuse
to sit idly by while they hurt you. Stand or fall, David. We’ll be doing it together.”

David nodded, though his dark eyes flashed with barely suppressed temper. He didn’t appear the least impressed by the ferocity of her response.

“Then I sincerely hope one or the both of us can talk ourselves out of whatever’s going on.”

They walked up to the entrance that had been carved out of the metal roller door. Chelsea dug a hand into her coat pocket and removed a small ring of keys. Selecting the correct one quickly, she inserted it into the lock, and after knocking, opened the door. She went in first, forcing herself to calm down and think positively.

She’d talked herself out of some very tight corners. Words often came easily to her. More than one other agent had been astonished by her flair for discourse. She had a deeply curious brain and held a large range of interests, which kept her ability to adapt to situations keen. Add on her verbose nature and a substantial vocabulary, and some would say she was born for this sort of thing.

Well, being either an agent or a swindler.

Half the time Chelsea wondered if the two weren’t extremely closely linked. The line between each task frequently blurred for her.

Chelsea entered the cavernous room first, though David remained right behind her. She didn’t need to be psychic to know that, should they be attacked outright, he would push her aside and take the brunt of the fire. Keeping her balance on the balls of her feet, she remained sharply aware, ready to dive and cover David’s body with her own should it come to it.

Three men stood in tight formation in the middle of the room, next to the trestle tables they’d set up weeks ago. Just as they’d been when she’d last seen them a few days ago, the tables were covered with blueprints, schematics and hand-copied routes of security rounds, along with dossiers of the guards who were to have been on duty tonight.

The set-up reminded Chelsea of what she imagined a war room would have looked like back in the day. Markers were laid out to indicate motion sensors, cameras and exits where the guards who smoked were known to pause for ten minutes to enjoy a quiet break midway through their rounds.

The fact that the area hadn’t been cleaned up gave her strength. If Phillipe were cutting his losses or disbanding their crew, chances were that all this paraphernalia would be long gone. Things still didn’t look good for her or David, but a flicker of hope caught fire in her chest.

Over six foot, slender and with a head full of black hair, Phillipe looked more like the French aristocrat he pretended to be than the fixer and criminal he was. The leader of the group, he stood in the middle of the three men, his arms crossed over his chest as he waited, clearly impatient. To his left stood a shorter, reed-thin man dressed head to foot in black.

Luke Calloway was a Brit through and through, with a mixed accent that varied depending on his mood and circumstance. Chelsea had decided after a few months that Luke had risen from a poor background. When he became very excited or extremely annoyed, his smooth, Eton-style accent disintegrated into a choppier mesh of lower-class slang. He was the best thief she’d ever encountered. Had he not so clearly lacked empathy and a modicum of common decency she’d have been tempted to try to recruit him for the Agency.

Thaddeus Brown stood on Phillipe’s other side. Taller than Calloway but shorter than Phillipe he looked like an ex-rugby player. Brawny, thick-necked with closely cut, pale blond hair, he was their weapons master and ammunition expert. Anything to do with guns, knives or bullets was his domain. More than once he’d bragged about the time he’d taken a tank for a ’test drive’ five hundred miles out into the country to blow up an ex-girlfriend’s summer house. The first time she’d heard the story Chelsea had laughed, thinking it a wonderful joke. After spending a few months with the man, she no longer considered it funny—or a lie.

It took a while to notice, but there was a craziness in Thaddeus’ eyes. Subtle enough to not recognise at first, third or even tenth glance, it was prominent enough that he couldn’t hide it forever.

Although Thaddeus scared her, being the stubborn, independent woman she was, Chelsea refused to show it or let it affect her in any way. The world was full of craziness. Thaddeus was more volatile and dangerous than many men, but she knew there were worse out there.

That didn’t mean she relaxed her guard around him. Not ever.

Chelsea paused a few feet away from the three men. She tilted her chin and placed her hands on her hips. David stood directly behind her elbow, only a tiny distance behind her, clearly showing she was in charge, but that he supported her fully.

Tension crackled in the air as they silently faced off.

Not wanting to make this a staring contest or a battle of wills for who could remain silent the longest, she shrugged her shoulders and decided to get on with things.

“Well?” she said sharply, her tone cutting through the air like a knife. “What the hell were you thinking? I assume that bloody rocket launcher was courtesy of you, Thaddeus. Do you realise, had you been a minute or two earlier, I’d have still been out front and you could have killed me? How, then, would you have got access internally into the Gallery? Or any new roster changes of the security shifts?”

Thaddeus grinned at her, a mocking, eager look crossing his face. His expression made Chelsea worry.

“I guess that’s all moot now anyway, since every cop in central London is probably crawling over the area. Were you really trying to kill me? Or worse—have me arrested. I’ve only been on loan to the Gallery two months, I haven’t activated any of my deletion or encryption files as yet, nor any of the fail safes I’ll point out I spent months carefully inserting to remove all our tracks. If the police have enough wits they’ll put it together sooner or later and I’ll need to find myself a new identity. That shit costs dearly, you realise that, right?”

Chelsea drew herself taller, straightening her spine proudly and stared at Kent. She gauged that now was the time to remain silent since she’d said her opening piece. Kent’s warm smile unsettled her. Her stomach rolled uneasily though she kept any such fear from her face.

If he’s going to shoot me in the face or the gut now will be the time,
she guessed in a flash of intuition.

Bracing herself, Chelsea held her ground, her chin tilted, her body tensed for the potential impact. Although she was quite worried, she refused to show even a smidgen of fear.

Phillipe burst out laughing.

The tension snapped, dissipated as if it had never been present in the first place. Phillipe clapped his hands together like a chortling goblin, anticipating his next nasty spell.

“Damn but you’re gorgeous when you’re angry. Your eyes snap this blue fire and your face flushes like a woman about to reach climax. It really is a sight to behold.”

Relief had her tone lessening some of its bite, but she didn’t have to pretend to still be seriously annoyed. That emotion was all too real.

“So there’s a reason—other than seeing me mad, I mean—that you blew the hell out of the Gallery almost eight hours earlier than we’d planned?”

“Of course, Chelsea,” Phillipe soothed her. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat and relaxed his posture. “I kept you in the dark because I didn’t know I could trust you.”

Fully expecting far more of an explanation than that cryptic sentence, Chelsea waited. When he said nothing further she waved a hand, gesturing for him to continue.

“That’s it? Sorry I almost killed you, sorry we set every cop in the city racing to you, but it was a test?”

“I’ve worked with Thaddeus here and Luke on a number of other operations. I trust them. I know their strengths, weaknesses, where they can stand firm and what will make them crack. I only have Lawrence’s assurances that you’re reliable and good at what you do. Now, I trust Lawrence, he’s never failed to connect me with the perfect partner for my crews yet, but I wasn’t born yesterday. There’s a certain reticence when such an important job means using someone I’ve never worked with before.”

“That and the fact that you insisted on bringing in silent boy over there,” Thaddeus added thickly, his tone showing disdain for David. “That hasn’t helped any either.”

Chelsea pressed her lips together. They’d had this argument in various forms a few times since they’d joined the crew many months ago.

“We’ve been over this,” she said in a low tone, a warning in her voice. “You didn’t have a security expert. The National Gallery is not some dodgy bank with standard items any fool on his first day can crack. My arse was on the line there. You needed an inside plant and I was your girl. I held up my part of the bargain, but we needed that extra edge and you know it. David is one of the best there is. We’ve covered this ground months ago. And again, it’s all lost now because…because why? You wanted to test me somehow?”

“Oh, more than that, precious,” Kent purred. “And don’t worry, you and your man here passed with flying colours. As a side note, Thaddeus was watching you enter the Gallery. He had explicit instructions to wait until you were a safe distance inside. You were never really in any danger.”

Chelsea merely lifted an eyebrow at this. She didn’t think Phillipe was lying, but in truth it was impossible to tell for certain.

“Okay, so we passed, fantastic. That doesn’t change the fact that the Gallery is now crawling with cops. Likely the Board of Directors will double or triple the number of patrols. Add onto that all the really sensitive and most expensive exhibits will be returned or moved into the vault—which we’ve already agreed is completely impenetrable—and so it doesn’t matter that you’re keeping secrets and we don’t know what the actual target is. There’s no way to get at it now.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” Phillipe intoned. He turned, gesturing that Chelsea and David should follow him. Thaddeus and Luke both moved when Phillipe did, heading for the work area and the five seats spread around the trestle tables.

Chelsea shot a quick glance to David. His features had been set in hard planes while they’d argued. Now the main event seemed over she could see he had relaxed, albeit only a tiny amount. None of the others could possibly have seen the minute tell-tale signs, but she did. She also agreed the imminent danger had passed. They were still on thin ice, but she felt that Phillipe had found whatever he had been searching for between them.