“You said we need an exit strategy, right?”
“Right,” she told him.
“So we’re gonna go find an exit strategy.” He stopped in the door. “Now you’ve got nine minutes.”
Katarina Bishop was not a girl who liked to gamble. So, walking into the casino that afternoon, Kat didn’t watch the tables. She didn’t turn to the slots. And yet Kat couldn’t shake the feeling that the odds were very long and the stakes were very high and that her luck almost certainly needed to hold.
She stood by the rail, looking out over the room that seemed entirely different in the light of day. Tourists had descended from cruise ships and now crowded around the tables in their flip-flops and floral shirts. Workmen scurried about with ladders and tool belts, setting the stage for the upcoming ball, all of them intent on turning the casino into a fortress.
Well, almost all of them.
“How’s it going, Simon?” Kat asked, looking across the casino floor to the one workman who wore fake glasses and an equally fake beard and seemed to care more about blackjack than the task at hand.
“This guy is splitting tens,” he said, and Kat wondered if he was really speaking to her at all. She doubted it.
“Simon!” Hale snapped, joining Kat at the rail. “I thought you didn’t count cards.”
“Counting isn’t playing,” he corrected, and went on about his business, leaving Kat to turn to the boy beside her.
“Hey,” she told him.
“Hey, yourself,” Hale said, gazing out over the massive room. “So, is the gang all here?”
“Hamish?” Kat spoke through her comms. “Angus? You ready?”
“Just waiting on the green light from Nicky, love,” came Angus’s reply.
“Nick?” Kat asked, but didn’t glance around the room.
“I’m at the hair salon,” Nick said. “Maggie just went in, so you’re clear, Kat. Oh, and Angus, don’t call me love. Or Nicky.”
“Gabrielle?” Kat asked, and turned her gaze across the room. She couldn’t see her cousin, but she heard her “Ready when you are” as clear as day. That left only one question.
“Are you sure we want to do this, Hale?”
He turned toward her slowly and winked. “Just try to stop us.”
“Okay.” Kat took a deep breath and looked out over the railing. The most famous and luxurious casino in the world lay before her, preparing for the party of the century, but all Kat could do was shrug. And laugh. And tell Hamish, “Let ’em fly.”
No one was certain how it happened. Later, people heard the rumor that five hundred white doves had gone missing from a wedding on the beach, but no one ever knew how the birds had made it out of their cages on the rocky shore and into one of the most exclusive casinos in the world.
The first thing anyone noticed was the noise, a rhythmic beating that might have gotten lost beneath the whirling of the roulette wheels and the yells of the tourists had it not grown—louder and louder, closer and closer. And when the first of the birds broke into the casino’s main floor, it was like the rushing of a flood.
There were cries and screams in a dozen languages. Women crawled under blackjack tables. Men lunged to protect their chips. Workmen appeared with brooms and mops as if to shoo the animals toward the doors, but birds—as any thief knows—always prefer to find their own way out.
The doves kept coming, filling the casino, landing among the cards and the chips and—above all—circling through the air, spiraling like smoke looking for the nearest exit.
Exits.
Chaos spread through the crowd, but Kat stood perfectly still, the scene in sharp focus like blueprints in her mind.
She saw the guards and the cameras, the skylights and heating ducts, service entrances and small crevices in the casino’s defenses, almost invisible to the nak*d eye—all while five hundred birds filled the air, looking for a way out, and Kat let them.
“Um…guys…” Nick sounded worried, but Kat wasn’t really in a position to reply.
“We’re kind of busy right now,” Gabrielle told him. At the center of the room, the banner announcing the Antony Ball was being dive-bombed by doves, and dangled, literally, by a thread.
“Well, you’re about to get busier because Maggie’s heading your way,” Nick shouted. “And she’s not alone. Looks like she’s added a new guy to her posse.”