ERICA
Chapter playlist:
The Gala Plan — Daniel Pemberton
Hacking the Met — Daniel Pemberton
“Guard’s doing a loop,” Zoe murmurs in my earpiece. “He’s looked at you twice now.”
I mumble back, trying not to move my mouth. “I’m reading a book on a public bench. This is the least suspicious thing I’ve done all year.”
“You’ve been reading the same paragraph for six minutes, Erica. Turn the page occasionally. Sell it.”
I turn the page. I have no idea what happened on it. Something about mist, and marshlands and possibly a criminal in a cemetery. If I were more gothic, I could lurk in cemeteries instead of a museum on a hot day in July. Anyway…
“Keep your eyes on scan,” I say behind the cover of the open book. “How are we on indoor cameras?”
“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.
Radio silence.
“Rue?”
Still nothing. She’s going to make me use her full name like I’m her mother.
“PRUDENCE ELIZABETH FRASSATI.”
“Yes, yes, I paid for it and everything. Proud of me?”
“Nominally.”
Suri’s voice cuts in, quieter. “Whoever set these sapphires in the eighteen hundreds had better tools than my dentist. Look at this bezel. I want to cry a little.”
“Please don’t cry on the display case.”
“The clarity on this stone.” A pause, wistful. “It’s giving Edwardian dream girl.”
“Zoe, are you getting all of this?” Tanya hisses. “I feel a sneeze coming on.”
“Almost there. I’ve got thirty scans and exactly zero photographs of anyone’s actual face because I am extremely good at my job. Security camera loop’s holding steady too. Anyone reviews today’s footage, they’ll see nothing happening because I am extremely good at my job. You’re welcome.”
“How much longer?”
“Ten more passes. Take two steps to your right but keep your head in the same position.”
“UGH!” Tanya groans.
Suri’s voice cuts back in, low. “Museum staff doing a walkthrough. Going quiet.”
Then silence from all our comms, like we’re all holding our breath. I count in my head. One Mississippi. Ten Mississippi. At thirty, Tanya’s voice, easy and bright.
“Oh, I didn’t know. Sorry. No thank you! Have a nice day.”
A man’s voice, muffled, pleasant. Footsteps.
“He’s gone,” Tanya reports. “There are lines painted on the floor we’re not supposed to cross.”
“Okay we need to wrap this up.” I say. “Zoe, status.”
“Four minutes.”
“Not fast enough.”
“You can’t rush perfection.”
I adjust my spine and keep my eyes on the page, which I am absolutely not reading. We need to get out of here before we’re made.
Zoe starts singing, something she does to help her focus and calm her nerves.
Maybe I should adopt that practice. What song would I sing?
Maybe that 4 Non Blondes song I was joking with Jeremiah about.
Unfortunately, I would turn more than a few heads if I started screaming, “What’s going on? ” at the top of my lungs.
A shadow falls over the paperback.
“Well,” says a voice above me, low and pleased with itself in a way that makes every hair on my arms stand up before I’ve even looked up. “If it isn’t the jailbird’s daughter.”
I don’t look up. I turn the page, deliberately, like I haven’t heard a word, like the single most interesting paragraph in nineteenth-century literature is happening directly in front of me. I even lift the book an inch higher, which, in hindsight, fools exactly nobody.
A hand closes over the top of the book and plucks it clean out of my grip.
“Great Expectations?” He turns it over, reading the cover and lets out a dry huff that’s supposed to pass for a laugh. “Fitting.”
“Do you mind,” I say, finally looking up, aiming for bored instead of murderous. “I was at a good part.”
It’s been six years, and Dennis Hobbs still hasn’t figured out that a comb-over fools exactly nobody.
“Oh were you?” He flips it shut with theatrical flair.
“Hey. You lost my place.” I lunge for it but he just holds it higher out of my reach, like a bully on the playground.
“Hello, America,” he simply says.
“You’re not allowed to call me that,” I say, standing up slow, buying myself a second to think. “Only people I trust get to call me that.”
Like a hockey player I barely know, apparently. One very dashing hockey player who almost kissed me last night.
“You didn’t seem to mind it when you were eighteen,” he says, with a creepy grin sliding along his face. Then tosses my book onto the sidewalk, where it lands spine-up and splayed like roadkill. So Gaston-coded but without the muscles.
There goes my booster. Excellent. Wonderful. Love this for me.
“Erica? Erica, what’s happening?” Zoe’s voice, sharper now, right in my ear. “I’m losing pass twenty. Signal’s weak. What’s going on out there? Who’s that guy?”
I don’t answer her. I can’t, not with Dennis Hobbs standing eight inches away, tracking every twitch on my face like it’s evidence.
“I minded a lot of things when I was eighteen,” I say. “You couldn’t read the room.”
The way I can fake vibrato astounds me. Inside, I’m still that eighteen year old studying for midterms on my bed when a man ten years my senior walked in and shut the door.
“Oh, please.” He steps closer, and I make myself hold my ground instead of backing up, because backing up is what he wants. “All those times you asked me for help with Art History.”
“That was not an invitation. I was a teenager.”
“You were legal.”
“And you were already showing signs of male pattern baldness.” I give his hairline a slow, unbothered once-over. I don’t let the shudder show.
“Your dad ruined it. You know that. And it was all your fault. It didn’t have to be that way.”
Something in my chest goes very still and very cold. “I wasn’t interested when I was eighteen. I’m not interested now.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” His mouth curls. “The only thing I’m interested in is seeing you behind bars.”