Chapter 18 #3
‘No,’ I said, tears in my eyes and my words muffled by her shoulder.
‘You’ve got this,’ she said.
I channeled all my inner strength as I straightened back up and wiped my eyes. ‘We need to figure out the code.’
‘A number only you will know,’ Alice said. ‘Do you think it’s a birth date or something like that?’
I pressed my hands to my stomach, hoping to keep all my emotions inside.
‘It’s nine digits, though.’ Something tickled at the back of my brain, something that felt relevant but was hovering just out of reach. I shook my head. ‘I need to think about it.’
Alice nodded silently, then from outside the door I heard a soft thump.
She heard it too, her head whipping round to follow the noise.
I was about to call out to her, to tell her to stay back and I’d go investigate, but she was already on the other side of the room and the words were stuck in my throat – caught between the panic that we’d been followed and annoyance at my paranoia.
Alice twisted the door handle and pulled it toward us.
‘Wait –’ I said, but it was too late. Whoever was outside had grabbed Alice’s arm and she let out a tiny shriek before being pulled into the hallway.
I leaped across the room and yanked the door wide open.
Lucas had his strong arm wrapped round Alice’s neck, and her fingernails were digging into his skin, her face turning pink as he slowly choked her. He walked backward until his back was to the wall, giving him even more leverage.
I had the gun out of its holster and pointed at him before I could finish the thought.
‘I can make this easy for you, Kendra,’ he said. ‘Just give me the jewelry and I’ll give you back your girlfriend.’
‘I’ll take both, if it’s all right with you.’
Slowly, I flicked off the safety and steadied my feet, preparing to shoot.
‘That’s not going to work for me.’
Alice was struggling on her tiptoes – Lucas was much taller than her, and he’d yanked her up to make his chokehold easier.
All of the media I’d consumed over the past five years told me the quickest way out of this situation was to shoot the hostage – shooting Alice would mean Lucas would drop her, and then I could either shoot him, or he’d run away.
There was absolutely no scenario in which I was going to shoot Alice.
Lucas was reaching behind him with his left arm, and I knew he was reaching for his own gun. I had to decide what I was going to do – fast.
Then Alice chose for me.
She suddenly stopped struggling and slumped, a dead weight in Lucas’s hold.
He grunted with surprise and hunched over to catch her, and I thought about squeezing the trigger. I almost had a clear shot on him, but they were too tangled together. I couldn’t risk hurting her.
Alice had other ideas. She braced her tiptoes against the floor then slammed all her weight up and back, smashing her head into Lucas’s face. His head snapped back with the impact and hit the brick wall with a sickening crunch. Then he slumped to the floor.
Alice fell to her knees, and I rushed forward to gather her up.
‘Oh my God, Alice! Are you okay?’ I demanded.
‘That really hurt,’ she winced.
‘I know, I’m sorry. We need to get out of here, though.’
I glanced over at Lucas. It looked like he was out cold, though there was no way of knowing how long that would last.
‘Agreed. Get the case and let’s go,’ Alice said.
‘Take this, then,’ I said, handing her the gun before running back into the vault to collect the jewelry.
It only took a second to scoop it off the table and shove the letter into my pocket, then I was back in the hallway watching Alice point the gun at Lucas with a determined look on her face.
‘Don’t shoot him,’ I said quickly. ‘It’ll only make things more complicated.’
‘I wasn’t going to. I was just thinking about it.’
I handed her the case, took back the gun and made it safe, then returned it to the holster.
On the way back to the main floor of the bank, I could hear something, or someone, moving behind us, and I picked up the pace.
The game had changed again. As soon as Lucas regained consciousness, he would call his boss and tell him we had the jewelry. Which meant I needed to get it somewhere safe as soon as possible.
Alice slipped her hand into mine, and I decided to pretend I didn’t notice it was sweaty and shaking – mine probably was too.
We stumbled out into the bright afternoon sunlight, and I was raising my hand to my eyes when I spotted another one of Wilson’s men across the street. Waiting for us.
‘Kendra?’ Alice asked, clearly recognizing him from our night in Tanoshimu.
‘Fucking hell,’ I muttered. ‘Run.’
Not for the first time in the past week, Alice kept pace with me as we sprinted down the street, dodging tourists and investment bankers and underpaid baristas who didn’t deserve the havoc we were raining down on them.
‘Stop them!’ Wilson’s bodyguard yelled. ‘Thieves!’
A man talking rapidly on his phone looked from the bodyguard to us, clearly considering whether to try to grab either me or Alice. I shoved him into a doorway and kept running. I was acting on pure adrenaline now, not thinking rationally, relying on my instincts to get us out of this situation.
As we approached the corner, a yellow cab pulled up and a woman carrying a tiny dog stepped out of it.
‘Go!’ Alice yelled, and I picked up the pace so we could hail the cab before the driver pulled away or someone else got in it.
‘In a rush, sweetheart?’ he asked as I threw myself across the back seat.
A second later, Alice dived in next to me and pulled the door closed behind her.
‘That’s her weird ex-boyfriend,’ I gasped.
The driver leaned out of his window, noticed the man wearing all black running down the street toward us, and pulled away from the curb with a screech of tires.
‘Where you going?’ he asked.
‘Sienna’s apartment?’ Alice asked, and I shook my head.
‘They don’t know that location,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to lead them to you and your family.’
‘Where, then?’
There was one place I knew all of the security systems like the back of my hand. I leaned forward to give the address to the driver.
‘Walker Antiques,’ I said, still feeling breathless. ‘On Eighth Street.’
‘Gotcha,’ he replied.
We rushed up the metal staircase to the apartment, and I couldn’t help but keep checking back over my shoulder, making sure neither Lucas nor his colleague had followed us here.
I pulled out my apartment key from my bag and quickly unlocked the door, ushering Alice inside before I followed her and locked it behind us. Then I swung the metal briefcase onto the kitchen table. Alice stared at it like it was about to bite her hand off.
‘How’s your head?’ I asked, concerned. ‘Do you want to see a doctor?’
She dragged out one of the dining chairs and sat down in it heavily. ‘I’m fine.’
‘I disagree. I think we should take you to the hospital.’
‘Kendra.’ She gave me the stink-eye. ‘If you refused to go to the hospital after getting the shit kicked out of you, then I’m not going now.’
I knew that would come back to bite me in the ass.
‘I’m more interested in getting into the case, anyway,’ she continued. ‘There’s got to be, like, a billion combinations.’
I took another chair and sat down next to her.
The lock was built into the case itself, and I’d seen ones like this before – it was far more secure than a padlock, which could be broken by brute force, or a simple three- or four-digit combination that could, given enough time and patience, be hacked.
The numbers looked like an old-fashioned phone keypad, with the letters ABC underneath number 2, DEF under 3, and so on. Next to the keypad was a small LED light, currently glowing red.
I put my chin in my hand and stared at it, knowing there was an explanation just out of reach.
There had to be. Either my mom had left another clue somewhere with the answer, or I had it already.
All of the clues that had led to this moment followed some kind of logic.
I just had to consider my mom’s thought process and work this out too.
‘Do you have my iPad?’ I asked Alice, and she nodded and got it out of her backpack. I unlocked it and pulled up the digital notepad where I’d been working on all the clues.
‘She said only you would have the answer,’ Alice said softly.
I nodded. ‘We don’t use a nine-digit code for anything else in the business. It doesn’t fit any of our passwords, or the code for the safe or the alarms. It can’t be a birthday, or an important date, because there’s not enough digits in those.’
Alice stared at me. ‘Could it be a word?’ she asked. Then she started counting letters on her fingers. ‘Although it doesn’t fit for Titanic, or De Lacy, or Fabergé, or Insect Brooch …’
I shook my head as it all slotted into place.
‘Oh my God, we’ve got the code,’ I said. ‘We’ve had it for over a week already.’
Her forehead crunched in confusion. ‘What do you mean?’
I started a blank page on my iPad and wrote out the clue we’d found at Grand Central.
K S M
I A O
W S M
Then I translated each letter to the number on the keypad.
5 7 6
4 2 6
9 7 6
‘There,’ I said, turning the iPad to Alice. ‘That’s the code.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘It has to be something I already know – it’s too late in the game to be introducing new elements now.’
‘But what order do we put them in?’ she asked. ‘Five-seven-six or five-four-nine?’
I didn’t let myself think about it in too much detail. ‘The message only makes sense if you read it down, not across,’ I said. ‘It has to be five-four-nine.’
Alice stared at me. ‘Are you going to enter it?’
‘Yes,’ I said, more confidently than I felt inside.
‘What if you’re wrong?’
I gave her a tight smile. ‘Then it was nice knowing you.’
‘Kendra,’ Alice said, burying her face in her hands. ‘You don’t want to take more time to think about this? So you can be absolutely sure?’
‘If I wait any longer, all I’m going to do is talk myself out of it. I know I’m right.’ I turned to face Alice front on. ‘You better … you know. Wait outside.’
‘Jesus Christ.’ I caught her wrist before she stood up, and she leaned over to brush a light kiss on my lips. ‘Don’t blow yourself up, Kendra. I’m so serious.’
‘I won’t,’ I promised.
Alice ducked out of the kitchen, back to the apartment door, where she’d hopefully be safe.
If I hesitated now, I knew I’d lose my nerve, and then I’d spend days or weeks spiraling, second-guessing everything I’d learned so far.
I pulled the metal case over and stared at the keypad.
This was it – a literal life-or-death moment, if the warning my mom had left in her letter was true.
I was either about to find the jewelry that my mom had been killed for protecting, or I was going to die too.
All of a sudden, I was impossibly cold, my skin tingling with fear.
My heart was hammering as I checked and double-checked the numbers, then punched in the code. For a heart-stopping second nothing happened, then a light turned green and the lock clicked open.
‘Oh my God,’ I muttered, putting my face in my hands. The feeling that I was about to throw up hadn’t gone away.
‘Did it work?’ Alice asked as she rushed back over.
‘Yes!’
‘Open it!’
I carefully lifted the lid of the case … and the jewelry was there. All of it laid out carefully in foam casing that had been carefully carved to perfectly support each piece. I counted them quickly, and confirmed that everything from Abigail’s collection was present.
When my mom had packed this briefcase, she’d only known about the importance of the Insect Brooch, yet she’d taken the time to show the same care and attention to the items that it had been kept alongside for the last hundred-plus years.
I wished, desperately, that I could share with her everything that I’d learned about the jewelry and the Titanic, and how really truly valuable the whole case had turned out to be.
Alice lifted up the Insect Brooch, cradling it delicately in her palm, and my blood turned fizzy at the sight of it. This was how it had started – my mom looking into the same black-diamond eyes and wondering what the beautiful little insect had seen.
A pair of diamond drop earrings caught my eye – the pictures from Van der Hausen’s didn’t do them justice. In person they were even more stunning. Then a diamond-and-emerald ring, the gemstones cut in long baguettes and elegantly set in gold.
I grabbed a loupe from the kitchen drawer, wanting to double-check that what we had was the real deal. The last thing I needed was to be fooled by a bunch of fakes because I was too caught up in the emotion of the moment.
‘You know,’ Alice said softly, shifting in her seat to look at me. ‘I didn’t believe I’d ever actually see any of this again. Even this past week, when we’ve been getting closer and closer to it, it felt like a game, like …’
‘Yeah, I get it.’ Carefully setting down a glittering diamond necklace, I faced Alice. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I whispered.
‘You mean about Wilson?’ she said seriously.
I nodded. ‘If I don’t give him the case, then I’m going to have to leave the city. Probably the country. I’m going to be running from him for the rest of my life, and even then I can’t be sure that he wouldn’t go after my family. Or you.’
‘I’m not going to let you do that, Kendra,’ she said softly. ‘I want you to take it to the Maritime Museum.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s yours. It belongs to your family.’
‘It belongs to me,’ Alice corrected. ‘Abigail left it to me. And I want to finish the journey your mom started.’
‘We can do that,’ I said. ‘But I’m not sure it’ll finish anything – at least, not for Wilson. He’ll either kill me for defying him, or he’ll just figure out a way to steal it back from the museum and sell it on the black market.’
‘So we do what you said before,’ Alice insisted. ‘We take down his whole empire. Get justice for your mom. And keep the jewelry safe and somewhere it can be appreciated.’
‘You make it sound easy,’ I said, attempting to suppress a smile.
‘It’s not easy,’ she said. ‘It’s just not impossible, either.’
I took a deep breath, ready to start making decisions on our next steps, when my phone buzzed with a message from an unknown number. I almost ignored it.
Except when I took a second look at my phone screen, my blood turned cold.
‘What?’ Alice said, seeing my face drop. ‘What does it say?’
I turned the phone around so she could read it.
KENDRA. RUN.