“See”—she glanced up at him—“I’m trying to build up the miles.”
“Oh, well, when you put it that way…” A split second later, Kat saw her passport appear in Hale’s hands as if by magic. “So, how was Moscow, Ms.…McMurray.” He eyed her. “You don’t look like a Sue.”
“Moscow was cold,” Kat answered.
He flipped the page of the passport and examined the stamps. “And Rio?”
“Hot.”
“And—”
“I thought my dad and Uncle Eddie summoned you to Uruguay?” She stopped suddenly.
“Paraguay,” he corrected. “And it was more invitation than summons. I regretfully declined. Besides, I really wanted to do a Smash and Grab job in a mansion with half the former KGB.” He gave a long sigh. “Too bad I never got that invitation.”
Kat looked at him. “It was more like a Gab and Grab.”
“That’s too bad.” Hale smiled, but Kat felt very little warmth in the gesture. “You know, I’ve been told that I can really wear a tuxedo.”
Kat did know. She’d actually been there when her cousin Gabrielle had told him. But tuxedos, Kat knew, weren’t really the issue.
“It was an easy job, Hale.” Kat remembered the cold wind in her hair as she’d stood in the open window. She thought about the empty nail that had probably gone unnoticed until morning, and she had to laugh. “Totally easy. You would have been bored.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Because easy and boring are two words I frequently associate with the KGB.”
“I was fine, Hale.” She reached for him. “I’m serious. It was a one-person job. If I’d needed help I would have called, but—”
“I guess you just didn’t need the help.”
“The family is in Uruguay.”
“Paraguay,” he corrected.
“The family is in Paraguay,” Kat said louder, but then she felt herself go quiet. “I thought you were with the family.”
He stepped toward her, reached out, and slid the passport into her jacket pocket, just above her heart. “I’d hate to see you lose this.”
When he started outside, Kat watched the big glass doors slide open. She braced herself against the freezing wind, but Hale seemed immune to the cold as he turned and called behind him, “So—a Cézanne, huh?”
She held two fingers inches apart. “Just a little one.…Weatherby?” she guessed, but Hale merely laughed as a long black car pulled to the curb. “Wendell?” Kat guessed again, hurrying to catch up. She slid between the boy and the car, and standing there, with his face inches from hers, the truth about what the W ’s in his name stood for didn’t seem to matter at all. The reasons she’d been working all winter were blowing away with the breeze.
Hale’s here.
But then he inched closer—to her and to a line that couldn’t be uncrossed—and Kat felt her heart change rhythms.
“Excuse me,” a deep voice said. “Miss, excuse me.”
It took a moment for Kat to actually hear the words, to step back far enough to allow the man to reach for the door. He had gray hair, gray eyes, and a gray wool overcoat, and the effect, Kat thought, was that he was part butler, part driver, and part literal man of steel.
“You missed me, didn’t you, Marcus?” she asked as he took her bags and carried them to the open trunk with a graceful ease.
“Indeed,” he said in a thick British accent, the origin of which Kat had long ago stopped trying to pinpoint. Then, with a tip of his hat, he finished, “Welcome home, miss.”
“Yeah, Kat,” Hale said slowly. “Welcome home.”
The car, no doubt, was warm. The roads to Uncle Eddie’s brownstone or Hale’s country house were all free from snow and ice, and the two of them might have been settled someplace dry and safe within the hour.
But Marcus’s hand lingered on the door handle a second too long. Kat’s fifteen years as Uncle Eddie’s great-niece and Bobby Bishop’s daughter had left her senses a bit too sharp. And the wind was blowing in just the right direction, perfectly calibrated to carry the word on the air as a voice screamed, “Katarina!”
In all of Kat’s life, only three people routinely called her by her full first name. One had a voice that was deep and gruff, and he was currently giving orders in Paraguay. Or Uruguay. One had a voice that was soft and kind and he was in Warsaw, examining a long-lost Cézanne, preparing plans to take it home. But it was the last voice that Kat feared as she spun away from the car, because the last voice, let’s face it, belonged to the man who most likely wanted to kill her.
Kat stared down the long line of taxis picking up fares, travelers hugging and saying hello. She waited. She watched. But none of those three people came into view.
“Katarina?”
There was a woman walking toward her. She had white hair and kind eyes and wore a long tweed coat and a hand-knit scarf wrapped around her neck. The young man at her side kept his arm around the woman’s shoulders, and the two of them moved slowly—as if Kat were made out of smoke and she might float away on the breeze.
“Are you the Katarina Bishop?” the woman asked, eyes wide. “Are you the girl who robbed the Henley?”
CHAPTER 3
If a person wanted to be technical about it, Katarina Bishop did not rob the Henley—nor did any member of her crew. She was simply one of a group of teenagers who had walked into the most secure museum in the world a few months before and removed from its walls four paintings that were not the Henley’s property. The paintings appeared on no insurance statements. They were never listed in any catalogs. The Henley had never paid a dime for any of those works, so even as Kat herself carried one (a Rembrandt) out the museum’s doors, she was not breaking a single law. (A technicality verified by Uncle Marco—a member of the family who had once spent eighteen months impersonating a federal judge somewhere in Minnesota.) So it was with absolutely no hesitation that Kat looked at the woman and said, “I’m sorry. You’ve been misinformed.”
“You’re Katarina Bishop?” the woman’s companion asked, and although Kat had never met him before, it was a question and a tone she had heard a lot since last December.
The girl who’d planned the job at the Henley should have been taller, the question seemed to say. She should have been older, wiser, stronger, faster, and just in general more than the short girl who stood before them.