She reached for her bedside table and turned off her alarm. She closed her eyes, hoping the dream wasn’t gone for good. But her room was already bathed in rare rays of British sunlight; her duvet was heavy and warm, tucked around her in the soft bed. Kat thought of the woman in the red coat, and knew why she hadn’t waited.
There are some places daughters aren’t supposed to follow.
So Kat rolled onto her back, stared at the ornate ceiling, then sighed and said, “Phase three.”
When Kat finally made her way downstairs, Marcus was standing at attention beside the open patio doors, a plate of toast in one hand, a walkie-talkie in the other. Simon sat at the center of a long table, surrounded by laptops and wires. But it was Nick who drew Kat’s attention as he sat at the head of the table, flanked on either side by Hale and Gabrielle.
“Don’t ever ask a question when the answer is no,” Hale told him.
“Don’t ever break character—not even for a second,” Gabrielle added.
“You should always be in control of the conversation,” Hale said.
“Your mark should always think he’s in control of the conversation,” Gabrielle said in turn.
Kat knew that speech. Kat had given that speech.
“And never, ever—” Hale started, but Nick had turned toward Kat, smiling.
“Good morning.” He seemed utterly at home, at ease. “Someone got her beauty sleep.”
Gabrielle looked at Kat’s wild hair and wrinkled pajamas. “That’s not exactly beauty.” She smirked at her cousin. “No offense.”
Before Kat could respond, spirals of dark smoke swirled up from behind the long stone fences that crisscrossed through the fields in the distance, and a scratchy voice boomed from Marcus’s hand.
“How was that?” Angus sounded entirely too pleased with himself.
Gabrielle gestured upward with her thumb, so Marcus pressed the talk button on the walkie-talkie and said, “Bigger.”
Nick glanced at Hale. “Don’t you have neighbors?” he asked.
Hale ignored him. Instead, he leaned closer to Kat. “He isn’t ready,” he told her. “I should do this.”
Kat shook her head. “Wainwright knows your voice.”
“I can do the accent.”
Kat smiled. “Like you did the accent in Hong Kong?”
Hale exhaled loudly. “I can do the accent better this time.”
“No.” Kat didn’t feel like arguing.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, love,” Nick said in the perfect accent of the native Londoner that he was.
She saw Hale start to speak, to challenge the new status quo, but then Simon said, “Showtime,” and turned an enormous laptop around for them to see.
Anyone could tell from the image on the screen that Gregory Wainwright was not a morning person.
His tie was entirely too crooked for a man of his station. His suit was rumpled. And as he lumbered toward his desk, he looked a great deal like a man who wanted nothing more than to return to his bed.
Hale looked at Nick. “You sure you’re up for this, newbie?”
“Oh,” Nick said with a laugh, “thanks for the concern, but I think I’ll be okay.”
“Yeah,” Hale scoffed. “Well, okay might be okay working short cons and street stuff, but this is . . .”
The walkie-talkie crackled to life again. “Excuse me, miss,” Marcus said a moment later. “The gentlemen would like to know if”—he cleared his throat—“that boom was as bloody brilliant as they thought it was.”
Kat hadn’t heard anything but the sound of the quiet war that was waging beside her, and so it fell to Gabrielle to lean toward the butler and say, “More smoke. Less boom.”
Marcus dutifully relayed the message.
“Guys,” Simon warned, turning down the sound and pointing to the man on the screen, who was now talking to his assistant. “It’s showtime,” he said again. But neither Nick nor Hale seemed to notice or care as they stared at each other across the table.
In the distance, Angus was chasing Hamish across the dewy grounds toward the rising, spiraling smoke, and Kat found herself whispering, “Two boys running . . .”
Hale looked up. Only he seemed to have heard her, and with that, he slid the phone across the table to Nick. “Make the call.”
They saw Wainwright pick up the phone. They heard Nick say, “Yes, Mr. Wainwright, Edward Wallace from Binder and Sloan here calling to assure you personally that this nasty business with our Windsor Elite furnace model is not as bad as you might have heard. Why, the fire marshal has assured us that—”
On screen, they saw Wainwright speak, but only Nick could hear him.
“Oh dear,” Nick said with a wink in Kat’s direction. “That is disturbing. Well, not to fear, Mr. Wainwright. I’ll tell you what I told Her Majesty’s personal valet this morning: We at Binder and Sloan have been entrusted with the safety and comfort of some of the United Kingdom’s most beloved buildings, and we will not rest until every faulty furnace has been repaired.”
Wainwright stood to examine the small vents in the floor of his office as if he expected flames to come shooting out at any minute.
“Yes, sir,” Nick said. “Now, I see that we can have a team come out to do these repairs two weeks from next Tuesday— Not quick enough? Of course, sir. It is a high priority, yes sir. Of course. Yes. First thing Monday it is.”
Walkie-talkie static filled the air again, and Marcus said, “Excuse me, miss, but the young gentlemen say that you cannot get smoke without the boom, and they would like your advice on how to proceed.”