“Simon, I want you to stay with the Interpol files. If there’s something in there about Maggie, I want to know what it is. Angus, you and Hamish stay with LaFont. I want to know if he’s in on it or if…”
Kat trailed off, leaving Hale to guess, “If she’s using him like she used us?”
“Yes,” Kat admitted.
“So what about us?” Gabrielle asked from under the brim of her hat.
“It sounds like the Cleopatra is taking over the town, right, Simon?” Kat asked.
“Right,” Simon said.
Kat allowed herself one last look out across the blue water and the distant coast. “Then I think it’s time we see the sights.”
Fortress was a word that, in Katarina Bishop’s opinion, was severely overused and overrated. It does not, for example, adequately describe a jewelry store or most banks. It is a serious misnomer for the vast majority of domestic military bases (with the obvious exception of Fort Knox). Even half of the royal residences in the world would not be best described in such a way. But not, Kat knew, in Monaco.
“You know, Marcus would have driven,” Hale said as the two of them followed Gabrielle up the long winding road that led to the palace walls of the Grimaldi family home.
“Teens today don’t get enough exercise, or haven’t you heard?” Kat said, reaching to pat Hale’s nonexistent gut. What she found were flat, hard abs, and her face blushed a little.
“You know, about a half dozen armies have tried to take this place over the years,” Hale said, huffing slightly as Gabrielle picked up the pace and the cobblestone street grew even steeper.
“Well then, it’s a good thing we aren’t an army, isn’t it?” Gabrielle said.
The wind was clear and almost cool as it blew from the Mediterranean up through the cypress trees that lined the winding road.
“So if the ball is Thursday night, and they’re auctioning it off at the palace on Friday…” Hale started.
Kat pointed to the tall walls in the distance. “Then the Prince’s Palace is our last shot—which is a bad thing. Though it gives us the most prep time. Which is a good thing. But it’s the palace…”
“Which is a bad thing?” Hale guessed, and smiled in her direction. For a split second, Kat almost forgot about the curse and the stone and what she was starting to think of as the most awkward kiss in the history of awkward kisses.
She pulled her camera from her pocket and scanned the bay below with its acres of yachts and motorboats. The palace sat atop a massive plateau that surged out into the water, raised that much closer to heaven by the rocky cliffs.
Gabrielle crossed her arms and stared out at the jagged limestone wall that rose up from the breaking waves. “I could totally scale that.”
“Those cliffs are a hundred and fifty feet tall and eighty degrees steep,” Kat said, with barely a glance in her cousin’s direction.
Gabrielle was insulted and didn’t even bother to hide it. “Oh, and I suppose you think your dad was alone when he free-climbed the Kyoto Banking Tower on a windy day last September.”
“Cliffs mean many, many chances to fall, Gabrielle.”
“So?” Gabrielle countered.
“So catch,” Kat said, tossing a coin underhanded, sending it hurtling through the air in her cousin’s direction. Gabrielle lunged to catch it, but her ankle turned and as she fell, her purse toppled open, sending two wallets, three IDs, two bottles of fingernail polish, and a stun gun skidding across the cobblestones.
“Ow,” Gabrielle said, then looked up at her cousin. “What did you do that for?”
Hale bent down, put a hand under each of Gabrielle’s arms, and pulled her effortlessly to her feet.
“No cliffs,” Kat said a final time.
Gabrielle sighed and admitted, “No cliffs.”
Kat stood with one hand over her eyes blocking out the sun, staring at the stronghold in the distance. “So we can’t go over, and it’s sitting on solid stone, which means we can’t go under. But if we get through”—she eyed the gates—“we’d still have to get to the stone and get it out.…” She turned and looked at them. “We have to get out.”
“Maybe Charlie could make another fake?” Hale suggested, but Kat shook her head.
“No time.”