His gruff words didn’t fool me. I’d seen the momentary empathy in his stormy eyes. And all I needed was a spark of empathy to manipulate the guy. I was as good as freed already.
And already I’d started thinking ahead, to what came next.
Elek.
Just the thought of the name caused a tide of rage to rise inside me. Elek would rue the day he left me at the mercy of the FBI, Interpol, and the French police. He would regret walking away from me without a care in the fucking world. As if I’d meant nothing to him. As if I was nothing at all.
As soon as Falcon let me go, I was going to teach Elek Kemény a lesson.
By leaving me to be captured, he’d tried to take everything from me. I would return the favor in spades. Except I would find success where he had failed.
He’d underestimated Kingston Wilde. He’d taken advantage of me, used me, and cast me aside.
And he would pay.
1
Falcon - Current Day (Two Years Later)
“Is he… is he fucking kidding? What’s he doing?”
I watched the video again, grumbling under my breath about the audacity of Le Chaton. Sure enough, that was Kingston Wilde walking straight out the front door of Pergamonmuseum in Berlin twelve hours earlier when the Greek coins and ingots had been stolen.
“Your jaw is literally hanging open,” Linney said in her soft Irish lilt. “Why are you so surprised? We knew he was behind it. Who cares?”
“Yes, but… he doesn’t get caught,” I said. “This is… this is ridiculous. He’s just…” I flapped my hand at the monitor. “Ridiculous,” I repeated for lack of a better word.
“Maybe his arrogance will be his downfall one day,” she said, typing something into her laptop. Three empty coffee cups sat stacked around her messy desk, and a ceramic mug of tea steamed closest to her hand. It was after five in the morning and we’d been up dealing with this through the night.
I pressed Pause on the video just at the moment Kingston turned so that his face was fully visible to the camera. It was so brazen, so obvious. Le Chaton was as arrogant as Linney had said, but he wasn’t stupid. “This can’t be right. Have we verified the recording with the techs?” I asked her just as Zivon, our best tech, entered the room rubbing his eyes.
Linney nodded, her blonde hair just as neatly tied back as it had been Sunday afternoon when we’d gotten the call to come in for another case. As soon as we were done interrogating a witness to a forgery—a truly bad one—we’d turned the man over to be booked into custody.
That’s when we’d gotten the news about the Berlin job and the missing Greek coins.
“They say it hasn’t been altered,” Linney said. “Three different cameras got the same man, the same images. It’s him. Berlin agrees. That’s why they called us.”
Why would he have walked right out the front door? Something wasn’t right. Le Chaton didn’t show his face. He wore a mask and gloves. The only reason we knew his real identity was because Ziv had written an algorithm to compare nearby CCTV feeds from all of the art crimes in order to match faces. It had found the same familiar man in nearby areas after three of the thefts the year before. One had been in Barcelona, one in Geneva, and one in Johannesburg. Facial recognition had finally matched with an American passport photo for Kingston Wilde of Hobie, Texas, a man who’d studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris and still lived there.
The moment I’d seen the passport photo, I’d had a shock of recognition. I’d seen him before, but it had taken me a moment to remember from where. It had been the man zip tied to the radiator at the Van Gogh job the year before. The man I’d stupidly let walk away from the scene of the largest art heist in decades.
The mistake that had cost me my promotion to special agent in charge of the Global Crimes Task Force, a fact I was still bitter about and planned to rectify by putting Kingston Wilde behind bars.
Unfortunately, being in the same metro area during three similar art robberies didn’t count as sufficient evidence to do much more than ask him a few questions, and I wasn’t about to approach him again until I had solid evidence to put him away with. I’d tried it a few times before with no success. The man was incredibly talented at talking his way out of things and explaining them away as mere coincidences. I knew this from experience now. For a brilliant strategist, the man played adorkable and bewildered very well. Every time I’d questioned King about his whereabouts, he’d turned into a scared, timid little babbling creature who left me even more confused than before I’d begun.