“How do you mean?”
“He puts the crown somewhere in the parliament building with a note about how he got in,” she explained. “Make it look like the crown was there the entire time.”
Fuck, she was brilliant.
I grabbed her face and kissed her on the forehead. “God, this is why you’re on my team. Brilliant. I’m going to go call Nadine. If we get this crown tonight, we start planning the return mission. Thank you.”
But when I got Nadine on the phone, everything came to a screeching halt.
“I’m getting pressure to speed up this op,” she explained before I had a chance to tell her Linney’s idea. “Now that we know where the crown is, what’s taking so long to retrieve it?”
Was she kidding? “Nadine, we’ve only been here four days. How long do you think it takes to plan this kind of operation? There are multiple on-site arms guards, a security patrol, and fingerprint scanners. This isn’t a smash and grab in a dark alley.”
“I realize that. I simply need to be kept in the loop. When are you going in? Did you hear back from the target about dinner? Give me something I can give James.”
I hadn’t updated her yet since changing the op target to the yacht, but something in her tone was really bothering me. “We’re going to make an attempt at retrieval tonight. If we succeed, we could be in Budapest as early as tomorrow.”
“The team at Fort Knox with the original crown is waiting for word from us. They can get to Paris in less than twelve hours when we set things in motion. The sooner we can get this situation cleaned up and behind us, the better.”
I closed the door to my bedroom so no one could overhear me question her. “Nadine, what’s the plan to place the original in the Hungarian Parliament Building? You asked me to assess whether or not King can sneak it in. I think he can, especially since they aren’t guarding an empty display case around the clock right now.”
“We will return it, but first we need you to get back here with the stolen forgery. We can’t take the chance of having them both out there in the world at the same time. We’ll make the exchange in the safety of our office and then determine what’s next.”
“Can you send the original straight to Budapest? We can fly there with this forgery and save a little time. The sooner we get this back to the Hungarian people, the better.”
“I don’t feel comfortable having both crowns in Budapest at the same time. We’ll do the exchange at your office in Paris.”
“But—”
“Agent Falcon,” she said, clearly losing her patience. “I understand your desire to close this case as quickly as possible, but I’m not about to take the chance of having two crowns and one of the world’s greatest art thieves in a country where I don’t have any diplomatic control if things go wrong. Do you understand that?”
I didn’t argue with her. “Yes, ma’am. Hopefully we’ll have it home tonight or tomorrow.”
“Good. Oh, and Agent Falcon?” Nadine asked.
“Yes?”
“Bring King Wilde back with you. I like the idea of using him to sneak it back in. Once you have it in your possession, you can start planning the next mission. And if anything goes wrong and the Hungarians discover him there… they’ll assume he was the thief all along. Even if they catch him with the original, they’ll have it back and they’ll have a thief to put away for the crime. Win-win. We get the heat off the US, and your team finally gets to watch Le Chaton go to prison.”
I felt my lips go numb.
“What do you mean?”
“I only mean if something were to go wrong and the Hungarians catch him. Hopefully nothing will happen.”
My chest felt too tight. “No, I mean… he can’t go to prison. He’d be working for the FBI. He has immunity.”
I heard her faint chuckle over the line. “Not from stealing the crown from the Hungarian Parliament Building. That was specifically excluded, remember?”
“But he wouldn’t be stealing it,” I corrected. “He’d be returning it.”
“Agent Falcon, if a notorious art thief with a history of stealing any manner of precious works from around the world is found on possession of a recently stolen antiquity, he’s going to be arrested and thrown in Hungarian prison. And before you continue to argue with me about this, I would throw his own words back at you. According to King Wilde, he’s too good to get caught. So this is all a moot point anyway.”
I opened my mouth to argue some more. We’d made a deal with him. All he had to do was help us get the crown back. Then he owed us nothing. But I couldn’t risk second-guessing my boss again in the same conversation when I could already tell I was on thin ice.