“No problem.” Nick glanced from Kat to the dusty file box with the big green stone on its label. “Doing some research?”
“Article for the high school paper. You?”
“Take Your Son to Work Day.” His lie was just as quick and almost as easy as her own.
“Kat!” Hale was screaming in her ear. “Kat, where are you? I’m coming back in to get you.”
“No,” Kat said, and the look in Nick’s eyes told her that he knew exactly what she was thinking.
“Time to go?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Kat said, pushing the box out from underneath the desk and starting to follow. But just then, Nick reached out and held her arm.
“Where are you going?”
“Away,” Kat said, as if the answer should be obvious.
“Don’t use the main stairs,” he warned, then pointed to a dark corner in the distance. “There’s an emergency exit back there. I think someone disabled the sensors and rigged the lock this morning.”
“Oh, someone did?” she asked.
Nick nodded, crawled from under the desk, and turned in the direction his mother was heading.
“Nick?” Kat risked the extra second and the noise. She lifted the box. “What file were you looking for?”
He shrugged. “Yours.”
CHAPTER 17
It was relatively easy to get to the plane. Customs was no problem. What was difficult, Kat realized, was staring through the windows of the New York–bound private jet and seeing for the first time that the world was a totally different place than you had ever thought it to be.
“What about her?” Simon asked. He’d taped a white sheet to the bulkhead at the front of the cabin, and Kat turned back to it, looked at the image on the makeshift screen of a gorgeous woman dressed exactly like the Crown Princess Anastasia. “Of course, this was taken fifty years ago, but—”
“No,” Kat said, and shook her head.
“Her?” Simon asked, and the image changed to a young woman in a sarong, riding an elephant.
Another “No,” this time from Hale.
“What about her?”
“That’s Uncle Felix in drag, Simon,” Kat told him.
“Oh, yeah,” Simon and Hale said, tilting their heads and staring at a surprisingly striking figure in an equally striking hat at the royal wedding of Charles and Diana.
Hale was systematically shifting through the mound of files that Kat had carried from Interpol’s basement. Simon had his computers and wires and screens, and soon data from Interpol began flashing through the cabin at 32,000 feet.
Kat herself was left to stare out the window at the tiny towns and green countryside that eventually gave way to deep blue ocean, thinking that it wasn’t such a small world after all. Sure, it was an odd thing to realize for the first time at the age of fifteen, but the brownstone’s kitchen was no more than a twelve-by-twelve room.…With the exception of three short months the previous fall, Kat had never known a world where everyone didn’t know her father and hadn’t loved her mother, where Eddie wasn’t “Uncle” to every soul she knew.
So Kat stared out at the vastness and whispered, “The world”—she reached to touch the glass—“is big.”
“And cursed,” Gabrielle added, maneuvering her bruised body awkwardly into the plush leather chair across from Kat’s. She plopped her swollen ankle onto her cousin’s lap. “So, Katarina, back at Interpol…you were late.”
Even the best cons eventually meet someone to whom they cannot lie, and like it or not, Kat realized, for her that person was Gabrielle. In the deep silence that passed between them, both cousins seemed to know it.
“Got delayed,” Kat answered.
“I see.”