City of the Dead, page 3
“Consider for a moment that maybe some of us didn’t prep for this mission by memorizing the details of every major robbery in history,” Rio said. “What happened in Antwerp?”
“It was the biggest jewel theft of all time,” Kat said. “The bad guys got away with more than one hundred million in gold, silver, and diamonds. But they were caught because of a half-eaten sandwich that one of them left behind.”
Paris laughed. “Then we don’t have to worry.”
“Why’s that?” asked Kat.
“Because Rio’s never left anything half-eaten in his life.”
The others laughed, and Rio put the last bite in his mouth and held up his empty hands. “All clear,” he announced.
Just then, they were startled by a massive whoosh of air and the clatter of a train speeding through an adjacent tunnel. They quickly turned off their flashlights and stood motionless to make sure no one could see them through the windows of the train.
Once it was past, Brooklyn let out a sigh of relief and said, “Just for the record, I’m all good if we stop using creepy tunnels and passageways. I saw enough subway rats in New York to last a lifetime.”
“It’s not just the rats,” joked Sydney. “Don’t forget the smell, which might be best described as… I don’t know…”
“Disgusting?” suggested Paris.
“Revolting?” Brooklyn said.
“Let’s go with disgustingly revolting,” Sydney offered.
“Good call,” Paris said with a chuckle.
“I mean, it’s one thing to deal with all that on a critical mission,” Brooklyn contended. “But this mission doesn’t make sense to me. Why are we even down here?”
“It’s simple,” Kat explained. “It’s the best way to access the museum without alerting the security staff.”
“I don’t mean ‘why’ as in ‘how best to break in,’ ” Brooklyn answered. “I mean ‘why’ as in ‘why do it in the first place.’ I get the Antwerp diamond heist. They were criminals who were motivated by money. But why is the British government stealing two artifacts from a museum owned by the British government? You spent a lot of time planning this. Didn’t you think about that?”
“Not really,” Kat said. “From a planning point of view, the reason doesn’t matter. It’s like an absolute value in an equation. There’s no good or bad, positive or negative. It just is.”
“I’ve thought about it a lot,” Brooklyn said. “I mean, we’re supposed to be the good guys, right? How is this good?”
“I have a theory,” Sydney interjected. “I think it has something to do with the Mukhabarat.”
“Egyptian secret intelligence?” said Paris.
“I didn’t just make up that stuff earlier,” Sydney explained. “The Egyptian government desperately wants the museum to return the artifacts, but the prime minister has refused, claiming that Britain is their rightful owner. My guess is that MI6 needs some help from the Mukhabarat with regard to Middle Eastern intelligence, so they made a deal. We’ll give you back a couple of your priceless treasures, and in return you do us a favor. All hush-hush under the table, of course.”
“That’s not a bad hypothesis,” suggested Kat. “But it may not matter if we don’t reach this station soon.” She checked her watch. “There’s a small window of about twenty minutes during which we know the guards will be elsewhere. That’s the only time it will be safe to enter the basement. That means we need to be in the tunnel and ready to go in less than half an hour.”
“Good news, then,” Paris said, “because I think we’re almost there.” He moved his flashlight beam in a little circle, and a glint of light shimmered ahead of them. “See that reflection? It looks like it’s from an old platform sign.”
“Great. Let’s pick up the pace.” Kat was relieved. They’d already strayed from her plan earlier, and she was determined that they stay on schedule for the break-in.
A few minutes later, they climbed up onto the platform of the abandoned station. Even without the specter of Amun-Ra, the creepy factor was high. There were decades of dirt and grime on the tiled walls, and they could hear little creatures scurrying in the dark.
“Here are some pictures of the platform during World War II,” Kat said, holding up her phone so that she could match the layout of the station with the images.
“You’ve got service down here?” Brooklyn asked. “How? Because I don’t have any bars at all.”
“I assumed there wouldn’t be any,” Kat said. “So I saved all the pictures to my phone while we were aboveground.”
Paris and Sydney shared a look. They were impressed.
“Just for the record,” Paris said, “you’re killing it as the alpha.”
“Definitely,” Sydney said.
“That couldn’t be further from the truth,” Kat said. “We’ve only made it to this point because of your quick thinking at the Rosetta Stone. So far, my plan has failed.”
“Your plan worked perfectly,” Sydney said. “The only problem was that they moved the server. My quick thinking, by the way, was just an example of utilizing chaos theory, which I learned from you.”
“I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” Kat said, “but rather than worry about my feelings, we really need to access the tunnel.” She swiped through a couple images until she reached one of a sculpture being moved into the bomb shelter. It showed the location of the passageway to the museum. “The doorway should be over there,” she added, pointing to the far end of the station.
They found it quickly, but just like the entry to King Tut’s tomb, it had been plastered shut. Although this one didn’t have royal seals with hieroglyphics, just an uneven paint job left by the army.
“It’s hammer time,” Paris said as he unzipped his backpack and pulled out a couple of rock hammers and a chisel. “We’ll start in the middle, where the plaster should be the weakest.”
“Or…,” Sydney said.
“Or what?” asked Paris.
“Well, Kat said we were in a rush,” Sydney replied. “And she also said that I could blow something up.”
“I didn’t specifically mean tonight,” Kat said. “Do you even have any explosives with you?”
“What do you think?” Sydney said with a grin. “I always bring a couple bangers along just in case.” From her backpack she pulled out two small silver cylinders and held them up for the others to see. “These were how I planned on celebrating Bonfire Night.”
Kat did some quick calculations and liked the idea that this would be quicker than hammering. “All right, then,” she said. “Show us what you’ve got.”
“Brilliant,” Sydney replied, excited. “Just move back and get behind something.” She thought for a moment. “Oh, and make sure to cover your ears.”
4. The Break-In
SECURITY OFFICER BARBARA CURTIS was doing her nightly rounds of the museum’s ground floor and had just entered what was known as the lion hunt room when she heard a pair of muffled bangs and a crash coming from one level below.
She paused for a moment to listen for more, then keyed her walkie-talkie and asked, “Did anyone else hear that?”
“Hear what?” came the reply from the night shift supervisor in the command center.
“Two bangs and a crash down in the basement,” Curtis answered.
“I didn’t hear a thing,” replied a guard doing rounds in Medieval Europe.
“Neither did I,” said another in the reading room.
“Well, I didn’t imagine it,” Curtis said.
“There’s nothing on the monitors,” said the supervisor, scanning a wall of video screens in front of him. “It was probably just someone setting off fireworks for Guy Fawkes.”
“Downstairs?” she asked, skeptical.
“Noises have a funny way of bouncing around,” he said. “Maybe it sounded like it was downstairs, but it was probably really out on the street.”
“Maybe,” she replied. “But I’m going to go check it out.”
Curtis had worked the night shift long enough to know that the two-hundred-year-old building had plenty of unexplained creaks and noises, but this felt different. She took the stairs down to the sepulchral basement, a maze of rooms whose name came from a word meaning “related to a tomb or funeral.” Each chamber was filled with an eerie mix of sculpture fragments, stone slabs, friezes, and other items related to burials and the dead.
The central hallway had vaulted ceilings and was lined with archaeological treasures dating back thousands of years. Disembodied statue parts and marble torsos sat next to partial sculptures of animals and mythological creatures. Each was marked with a tag listing a description of the artifact, its time and place of origin, and its museum number, a five- to eight-character alphanumeric code used to identify it in the collection’s database. There were also large wooden crates and various packing materials used to ship objects when they went on loan to other museums around the world.
The guard carefully moved from room to room, looking and listening for anything out of the ordinary. Everything was as it should be until she reached a workshop marked EGYPT AND SUDAN DEPARTMENT—CONSERVATION. This was where scientists and restorers studied and repaired ancient artifacts from along the Nile valley. The work required precision, and the room was always neat and tidy.
Until now.
“What happened here?” Curtis asked herself as she saw that a large wooden shelving unit had toppled over. Luckily, there didn’t seem to be any damage to the artifacts or equipment, but books and papers were scattered everywhere, and there were hand tools and a broken wall clock on the floor.
The scene was baffling, and she wondered if perhaps a small earthquake or tremor had somehow triggered the fall. She didn’t suspect an intruder because this was far from any entry point to the museum. Or at least that’s what she thought.
Unbeknownst to her, and practically anyone else on the staff, the workshop bordered the World War II tunnel that connected to the old Tube station. The shelves and clock had fallen because of reverberations from Sydney’s explosives, which she’d packed with an extra wallop in honor of Bonfire Night.
Once they were in the tunnel, the team entered the room by removing a large ventilation grate in the wall. They’d put that back into place and were trying to stand the shelves upright when Rio heard the guard coming their way. Now, they were trapped and hiding as Curtis came closer to inspect the scene.
Brooklyn was balled up underneath a desk and had a clear view of feet and legs as the guard knelt down to check the base of the unit.
“Why’d you fall over?” Curtis wondered aloud. “Were these books too heavy?”
Eighteen inches away, Brooklyn held her breath and tried to remain perfectly motionless, although she flinched when she heard another voice. This one belonged to the security supervisor, who was speaking over the walkie.
“We have a smoke alarm going off in the southeast corner of the upper floor. Do you copy?”
“Copy that,” one guard replied.
“On my way,” said another.
“What about you, Barb?” asked the supervisor. “What’s your twenty?”
“I’m down in Egyptian conservation, and I think I found the cause of that—” she started to answer, but then he cut her off.
“Okay, now we’ve got an alarm going off on the ground floor too,” he said. “I need you there.”
“Roger that,” Curtis said. “I’m on my way.”
The possibility of a fire was one of the gravest threats to any museum’s collection. One alarm might be a malfunction, but two signaled a potential emergency. Barbara Curtis raced out of the room to help her coworkers locate the cause.
Once she was gone and the door closed behind her, things were quiet for a moment, until Paris sat up from his hiding place inside a marble tomb from the thirteenth century BCE. He’d hidden in there and covered himself with a canvas drop cloth.
“The coast is clear,” he informed the others.
Sydney stepped out of a closet, Brooklyn came from under the desk, and Kat stood up from behind a large wooden shipping crate.
“Well, that was close,” Sydney said sheepishly.
Kat shot her the stink eye and said, “Much too close. I can’t believe how loud that was. How much explosive was in there?”
Sydney shrugged. “It’s hard to say exactly, but the noise wasn’t just because of the explosive. There was a lot of echo in that tunnel.”
“Does anyone else hear a constant buzzing?” Brooklyn asked as she made repeated biting motions, trying to pop her ears. “I keep hearing buzzing.”
“I warned you to cover your ears,” Sydney said in her defense. “Although, I’ll admit those bangers might have been just a bit stronger than we needed for the job.”
“Just a bit?” Kat asked, incredulous.
“But, on the plus side, my smoke bombs seemed to do the trick right on schedule.”
Paris nodded. “You can’t argue with that.”
Sydney had made four smoke bombs that looked like air fresheners. Each had a built-in timer, and the team had hidden them in bathrooms earlier in the day.
“Wait a second,” said Paris. “Where’s Rio?”
“I didn’t see where he hid,” said Sydney.
“Neither did I,” added Kat.
“Rio,” Paris called, “you can come out now.”
“Maybe he can’t hear you,” suggested Brooklyn, who was speaking louder than usual and still wiggling her jaw, trying to clear her ears. “Maybe he can’t hear anything.”
They looked around the room, but there was no sign of him. Then their eyes fell on a wooden sarcophagus.
“You don’t think he…,” Kat said.
They rushed over to it, and Paris lifted the lid to reveal a terrified Rio, who scrambled up and out of it.
“Are you okay?” Brooklyn asked.
“I was holding the top so that it stayed slightly open,” he said, shaking and nearly hyperventilating, “but it got too heavy, and when it shut, I couldn’t budge it. You can’t imagine how dark it is in there.”
Paris looked at the attached label and read it aloud. “ ‘Coffin of Horaawesheb containing the mummy of a female. Thebes. Twenty-second dynasty. Nine hundred BCE.’ ”
“Mummy?” Rio said anxiously. “You’re saying I was in a coffin that’s held a mummy for the last three thousand years?”
“Well, at least she’s not in there now,” Paris said. “She’s probably in some preservation lab or something. But yes. That seems to be the case.”
“And to think, you were worried about the ghost of Amun-Ra,” Sydney joked.
“That’s not funny,” Rio said, trying to brush off any mummy dust. “Not funny at all.”
“Funny or not, we are now on the clock,” Kat said, taking charge. “The smoke alarms will only keep them busy for so long, which means we don’t have much time. You’re up first, Brooklyn.”
“I’m on it,” Brooklyn said as she pulled a laptop out of her backpack and set it up on the desk. She was a virtuoso on a computer keyboard, and she quickly accessed the VPN she’d set up earlier and breached the museum’s security system. “And we’ve got CCTV.”
The others huddled behind her and looked over her shoulder as the camera feed came onto her screen.
“Here’s how this system works,” she said. “The top two monitors are controlled by the operator in command central. At the moment those are locked on the southeast corner, where the smoke alarms went off.”
“You can see the guards right there,” Paris said, pointing at one.
“Meanwhile, the bottom row continually rotates through all the cameras in the museum,” she explained. “But, and here’s the great part, the cameras are ranked by value to make sure they see the most important ones more often. All you have to do is assign a camera a value of zero, and it disappears from the feed.”
She typed a zero under one of the camera feeds, and the image vanished from the screen only to be replaced by video from another.
“Just like I told you, Rio,” Kat said with a grin. “Everything’s math.”
“I’ll get rid of the cameras for your route, and you’ll be invisible,” Brooklyn said.
“That’s great,” Kat said. She turned to the others. “Now get moving.”
“Aye, aye, Alpha,” Paris said with a wink and a smile.
Paris, Sydney, and Rio slipped out into the hallway of the basement, while Kat and Brooklyn set up in the workshop. Kat monitored the CCTV feed to keep an eye on the guards, and Brooklyn used a second laptop to access the VPN so she could take control of the additional security measures. By the time the others reached the stairs, she was ready to go.
“We are at the gate to the Egyptian gallery,” Paris said. “What do we do with the keypad?”
Brooklyn quickly pulled the specs up on her computer and made a few adjustments.
“I just changed the passcode,” she said. “All you’ve got to do is activate it with the badge clone on Rio’s phone, and then enter the numbers one-one-two-zero.”
“You used your birthday as the passcode?” said Paris.
“Thought it might be good to remind you guys,” Brooklyn said. “After all, it’s just a few weeks away.”
Rio held his phone up to the keypad, and when it turned on, he entered the numbers. An interface appeared on the screen with up and down arrows.
“Just lift the gate high enough so that we can slide under,” Sydney said.
“Yes, I know,” Rio replied as he pressed the up arrow. “This is not my first mission.”
The metal gate clattered to life, and the sound of its gears echoed through the cavernous exhibit hall. Sydney and Paris winced, nervously checking to make sure it hadn’t alerted any guards. Once it’d risen about two feet off the ground, Rio stopped it.
“Gate’s open,” Sydney said. “Now you need to take care of the lasers and motion detectors.”
“Already doing that,” Brooklyn replied.
On the screen, she’d opened a diagram of the entire ground floor. There were overlays for the different security measures. First, she turned off all the trip-wire lasers. Next, she deactivated the motion detectors, but as she clicked the last one, the entire screen went blue.
