house, where she'd left the gear. But she'd give him away. She might not even reach his house
before they caught her. Right, and three hundred yards along the road was Tooting Tube station, and a
world she already knew so well.
She heard the sounds of pursuit —pounding footsteps, people shouting in surprise as they were
shoved roughly aside.
Someone pushed a huge fruit-laden trolley from a shop doorway in front of her. She skipped right,
stepped from the pavement, and ran across the street without looking back.
Decision made for her, she sprinted for the Tube station. The morning sun broke through the light
cloud cover, and the heat on the side of her face seemed like a final good-bye.
Chapter Sixteen
china plates
Jazz descended the stairs that led down into the lair of the United Kingdom as carefully and quietly
as she could. Opening the hatch door at the top of the steps ought to have brought a creak of metal hinges,
but she moved slowly and opened it only wide enough to slip through. It wasn't that she planned to sneak up
on Harry and the others. It was more that, after so many weeks learning to be a thief, stealth came
naturally now. Her mother had raised her to be invisi-ble when she wished —unseen—and unwittingly gave
her daughter the skills and philosophy to become an excellent thief.
As she neared the door at the bottom of the stairs, she. caught the smell of frying sausages, and
her stomach growled. Terence had made her breakfast. He'd been noth-ing but a gentleman to her, and
now he'd be thinking she had lied to him and run off, even though she had left the gear behind. He seemed
so sincere that she had been tempted to trust him, had wanted to take a walk and con-sider how much of
her own life and her own theories she would reveal to him over breakfast. Now the question had become
moot.
Harry liked his sausages burned, the same as Jazz. The aroma made her mouth water. God, she was
ravenous. But she had a feeling Harry wouldn't be in the mood to cook her breakfast.
Not that she cared about Harry's mood.
As she closed her fingers around the door handle, she paused to listen. She heard muffled voices;
Harry wasn't alone. It had taken her nearly an hour to get to the Palace from Terence's, taking the Tube
and then navigating the labyrinth of the Underground on foot. It had to be half past nine at least, which
meant the United Kingdom would be out for their first shift of the day, some of them searching for pockets
to pick, others for goods to nick from shops and street vendors. The rest would be doing errands, including
picking up Harry's newspaper.
Jazz had no difficulty hazarding a guess as to who might have stayed behind.
She turned the handle and pushed open the door, step-ping into the Palace. Harry stood at the stove
with a frying pan. Stevie sat at the table, cutting a sausage on his plate. A strongbox lay open on the table,
stacks of pound notes bound in rubber bands inside. Towers of one- and two-pound coins stood beside the
metal box. Doing their ac-counting over breakfast.
Their conversation halted and they stared at Jazz. For a moment she only stared back, but then she
closed the door behind her, crossed her arms, and raised her chin to fix her gaze on Harry.
"You and I need to talk."
Harry did not smile. His eyes were hard. "I suppose we ! do." He turned his back and stuck a long
toasting fork into each sausage, flipping them over. "Stevie, we'll finish tomor-row. Eat up, then put the box
away. I've been thinking about teaching Hattie to play the guitar. Go and see if you can't manage one,
would you?"
Jazz raised an eyebrow at the incongruity, then glanced at Stevie. He forked another piece of
sausage into his mouth and chewed slowly, staring at her as he might have a strange insect. The frisson of
attraction that had existed between them before had evaporated. Suddenly, they were strangers again.
"I'll see what I can do," Stevie said, standing up from the table.
He scooped the coins into one hand and dumped them into the strongbox, then locked it. Without
glancing at Jazz again, he went through the room to a door at the back and disappeared. She guessed they
had a safe down here some-where. Stevie would lock the money away and, if he fol-lowed Harry's bidding,
go topside in search of a guitar, of all things. Harry, playing father to the kids in his United Kingdom, giving
Hattie guitar lessons. Stevie was the big brother,