“Let me try the drill again,” Obama said.
“We don’t have time. Now get her!” Reagan shouted loud enough for all the room to hear. And then Bush walked across the ballroom floor and pointed to the little old lady who owned the big yellow diamond.
“Mrs. Calloway,” Bush said. “Come with me.”
“No!” Mrs. Calloway’s son shouted. He jumped to his feet and stood between the white-haired woman and the men. “Where are you taking my mother? You can’t—”
But before he could finish, Reagan struck him across the face with the butt of his weapon. “We’re not taking orders from you,” Reagan snapped, and the son fell silent. No one said a word as the old woman was pulled from the ballroom.
They walked down the hall, Bush dragging the old woman beside him. “Where are you taking me?” Mrs. Calloway demanded. “What do you want?”
“No need to worry, ma’am,” Reagan told her. “We just need to have a little conversation.”
But a conversation about what, no one ever got to ask, because as soon as they turned the corner that led to the Calloway residence, they heard Obama running toward them.
“What is it?” Reagan snapped.
Obama came to a sudden stop and looked between the masked men and the old woman. His voice was soft, almost reverent, when he said, “It’s open.”
“What are you talking about?” Reagan snapped, pushing past Obama and into the Calloway apartment.
The tools were still on the coffee table. The Jaws of Life lay exactly where the men had placed it. Only one thing was different when the men returned to Mrs. Calloway’s formal living room, and for that reason they never had to ask her a single question.
Because the safe on which they had been working for hours now sat with the door propped open, revealing the largest yellow diamond that any of them had ever seen.
In the ballroom, things were changing, though no one really knew what. Or how. But the air was no doubt different when Mrs. Calloway strolled in, unharmed but obviously confused. The men were gathering their bags of loot and moving around the room with renewed purpose, making sure they were leaving nothing important behind, their work finally finished.
“Looks like your girl delivered,” Macey said through the unit in her ear. Across the room, she saw Hale shift toward her.
“She always does,” he said, his mouth invisible behind the Clinton mask he kept pulled down.
But then Obama dropped a bag on the floor and shouted something in a language Hale didn’t understand.
“What did he say?” Hale asked.
“It’s time for Clinton to go check on the elevator,” Macey translated.
Hale smiled. “Glad to.”
But Macey was already slipping out of the ties Hale had never tightened around her wrists. She was already taking off her broken shoe.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Hale asked. He stopped. He looked at her.
And even in the darkness there was a spark in Macey’s eyes when she told him, “To end it.”
The SWAT team was careful in coming up the stairs, slowly clearing corners and making their way in the dark. It was a good thing, it turned out, or else they might have tripped over the man in the Obama mask, who sat handcuffed to the railing of the emergency exit stairs.
When the team reached the Athenia’s industrial-sized kitchen, they found the man who had started his evening in a Clinton mask bound and gagged and lying in a large walk-in refrigerator, right where Macey McHenry had left him.
But it wasn’t until the team finally breached the corridor that ran along the back of the ballroom that they heard banging and found Carter, Bush, and Reagan in a freight elevator that had been (in the SWAT team’s professional opinion) booby-trapped, locking the men inside, a simple note taped to the outer doors, reading “We were not the brains.”
There was a satchel inside, filled with jewels and wallets, watches and the assorted valuables that the finest members of New York society had chosen to bring to the party. Only one thing was missing, it turned out. And that was the big yellow diamond. That, it seemed, was gone for good.
The hostages were interviewed. The room was searched. But despite the best efforts of the NYPD and the FBI, it seemed the Calloway Canary had flown out of the ballroom that night and into the cold winter air, never to be seen again.
The most beautiful ballroom in all of Manhattan was nothing but a maze of overturned chairs and broken dishes, a table full of European antiques and luxurious vacations that didn’t seem quite as important or valuable as before, there at the end of the party.
No, in the end, all that really mattered were the questions.