Page 37 of Fastest Kill

"We should source the catering uniform today," she said, without looking up. "In case we need alterations like an extra pocket."

"I'll ask Tore if he works with someone in Turkey. If not, I know a guy."

"He does, because I've used them before, and they are reliable." She capped her pen. "Two days isn't much preparation time."

"It's enough for pros like us."

She held his eyes for a moment before she nodded once and went back to the guest list.

Dario pretended to be going over the floor plan of the church again. He told himself the new restlessness in his chest was the usual pre-job kind and had nothing to do with the woman across the table. He would get the job done, go back to Italy, and hope that, once he was far enough away from her, he could start believing it.

16

The best thing about a catering uniform was that it made you invisible. Frederica had used the principle before in different variations—maintenance crews, hotel housekeeping, airport ground staff—but for some reason, a jacket and tray were always the most effective.

People at events like this one had paid a great deal of money to be here and were very committed to the idea that the staff existed in a separate layer of reality from their own. You could walk directly past a man's elbow, and he would look straight through you because you weren't a person, you were set dressing. Frederica enjoyed the power of being invisible.

The fundraiser was running the way these things always did. With speeches in the main gallery that had gone eleven minutes over, and a tide of people now released into the room with the focused energy of those who had earned their open bar.

She moved through the periphery of it twice, mapping the guards' patterns against the agreed timing, and both circuits ran clean. Twelve minutes, consistent.

The corridor guard was a young man in a navy blazer who paused at the same point of the service corridor to check his phone every time. She had timed the pause. Twenty-two seconds.

She had everything she needed. What she also had, from her current position near the catering station, was a clear line of sight to Dario.

He was in the middle of the room, in a suit that screamed money. He was talking to a small cluster of guests with ease, acting as if he had nowhere else to be and no interest more pressing than this one. They had all laughed at his jokes. Twice.

One woman wrote something on a napkin and slipped it into his pocket. Frederica's eye twitched, and she looked away before she decided to act on her violent thoughts.

Dario didn't need her watching over him. He was very good at working a room. He wasn't doing it in the showy way she had expected from him. He wasn't performing. He was just present in a way that made the people around him lean in slightly, as though standing close to him was the better option.

She knew that pull. It was like standing next to a sun with its own kind of gravity field that drew you close, just so you could feel the warmth of his attention. It worked on her as easily as the suckers across the room, which was why she had always gone out of her way to piss him off and start fights.

At nine twenty-two, Frederica slipped through the side service door. The corridor was dim and utilitarian after the warm gallery light, with concrete-block walls, overhead fluorescents, and the smell of industrial cleaning products.

She moved fast and quietly along the left-hand wall, counting doors. Restoration office. Storage. The stairwell door that wasn't alarmed. She slipped through it and down.

The basement was cooler. The archive room was third on the right, the lock exactly what Tore had described: a six-pin mechanical with a secondary catch, the kind that had been considered serious security in 1987. She had the picks out before the door was fully closed behind her.

The reliquary was in a climate-controlled cabinet on the second shelf. It was a dark-wood and tarnished-silver case the size of a matchbox, with Byzantine designs on the lid and a glass panel clouded with age.

Inside, just visible, sat a small, sealed vial of crystallized matter that had no business still existing after twelve hundred years, and yet somehow, it did. Whether or not they were really tears wasn't the point. People believed it was, and that belief was enough to make it powerful.

Frederica photographed the case and its position before her mind slipped to the quiet place that it always went when she picked a lock. It was an ability she got from Tore, and her father had made sure she cultivated it.

After a few moments, Frederica felt the lock give and opened the case. She placed the reliquary in a velvet jewelry bag, tucked it into her bra, and put the case exactly as she had found it.

She was two minutes ahead of schedule. She was also, when she came back up the stairwell and checked her watch against the guard's expected position, thirty seconds behind where she needed to be.

No, it wasn't her. The guard's circuit had run short.

Shit. Frederica pressed back into the stairwell doorway and watched through the gap in the door as the navy blazer appeared at the far end of the service corridor, turned, and started walking toward her.

She did the calculation in three heartbeats. He would reach the stairwell in a minute. The corridor door back to the gallery was behind him. The window exit was forward, past him, two doors down, which was not usable.

She tapped the tiny bud in her ear and whispered, "I need more time. Guard is on early rotation, deviated from his routine, and I'm stuck in the stairwell."

"Copy that." Dario's voice was low and completely unbothered. "Give me twenty seconds."