CHATEAU TICINO
CAMPIONE D’ITALIA, SWITZERLAND
AFTER THE MEETING in the catacombs, Talia and Tyler found Eddie asleep in Mission Control, facedown on the couch with a list of names and faces on the screen—the job listings he and Talia had been working on earlier.
Tyler woke him with a kick to the cushions. “Hey. Where’s my hacker? I don’t see a hacker here.”
“You’re . . .” Eddie sat up, yawning and stretching. “You’re looking at him.”
“How’s that, exactly?” Talia asked.
The geek rubbed the sleep from his eyes and reseated his glasses. “I’ve been inside Avantec’s server rooms—touched the hardware. I know their infrastructure. I’m your guy.”
“No. You’re not.” Tyler swatted Eddie’s legs out of the way and sat down beside him on the couch. “You have no criminal history. You have no rep. How can I convince our thieves to trust you with their lives when no one’s ever heard of you?”
“Oh, but they have. Look.”
Eddie pulled a keyboard from under a couch pillow and police mug shot—Eddie doing his best smolder—came up on the big screen, followed by rap sheets in four languages and a series of articles covering unsolved cybercrimes. He zoomed in on an alias in the English rap sheet and deepened his voice. “I’m Red Leader.”
Tyler dropped his head into his hands. “And I’m a dead man.”
“I think Eddie’s right.” Talia scanned the articles on the screen. Her instincts had cringed at Eddie’s fake handle, but using him as the hacker would limit the number of real thieves she and Tyler would have to con. “I vote yes. You’re bringing in Valkyrie. I get Eddie.”
Tyler lifted his head from his hands and gave her an incredulous look. “We’re not picking kickball teams on a playground.”
“Take it or leave it.”
He gritted his teeth and growled, “Fine. Eddie, you’re in. Show me the others.”
There were four—two options for the high-flying cat burglar, one demolitions expert, and a Scottish pilot built like a professional wrestler. Tyler thrust his chin at the second face in the cat burglar column. “We’ll go with the Australian, Finn.”
“Ehhhh.” Eddie bobbled his head. “Finn’s okay, but he’s a loner. The other guy, Garrett Mason, works with crews. He’ll be Lukon’s first choice, so he should be ours.”
“Wrong. Lukon and Mason have a history. Put those two in a room together, only one will walk out alive.”
This was news to Talia. “Our file on Lukon doesn’t mention Mason.”
“Then your file is incomplete.” Tyler offered no further explanation. “We grab Finn, leaving the real Lukon no option.” He gave Eddie a commanding nod. “Send Finn a message. Wow him with a dollar figure.”
“I can’t.” Eddie’s cursor jumped to an empty black space beside CONTACT in the information column. “Like I said, Finn only works for himself, so he doesn’t bother hanging out a digital shingle.”
Tyler sat back against the couch cushions, crossing his arms. “What about a location?”
“All I have are rumors.”
“Good enough.”
TALIA AND TYLER flew out early the next morning, leaving Eddie to continue his work in Mission Control. His rumors concerning Finn’s location came with a narrow time window, so Venice would have to wait. “Welcome to St. Moritz,” Tyler said, taxiing the Gulfstream clear of a snow-dusted runway, “the highest commercial airfield in Europe.”
They bought clothing appropriate for the cold at the airport shops and rented a car with studded snow tires. Tyler insisted the vehicle be a BMW, citing no reason for the excess, and paid in cash, promising to send the Agency a bill. Talia answered him with a flat laugh. Brennan would never sign off on the charges.
After a breakfast in a local café, they drove up into a high-mountain valley on the Swiss-Italian border, well above the last of the misty green pines. Tyler parked on a field of white among a hundred Porsches, Jags, and Aston Martins.
Talia pulled herself up from the BMW’s passenger seat and looked around at all the extravagant cars. “This is why you wanted a Beamer.”
“It’s important to blend in, right?”
A pair of thirteen-thousand-foot peaks rose into the deep blue on either side of them, and light aircraft buzzed overhead. A banner stretching across a makeshift exit from the parking area welcomed them to the Bellavista Glacier Airshow.
“And speaking of blending in.” Tyler frowned at the snowsuit Talia had chosen from the airport shops. “Why did you have to pick black?”
“I like black.” Talia let the Beamer’s door fall shut. “And it was cheap.”
Out on the glacier, small packs of wealthy tourists gathered around exotic snow trucks and propeller-driven sleds, and bought hot chocolate from roving vendors. The whole crowd let out a prolonged Oohhh! as Talia and Tyler passed under the welcome banner. She shielded her eyes and looked toward the grandstand to see a pair of biplanes flying low, one inverted above the other, along a runway carved into the top of the glacier. They split up, circled, and touched down, bouncing on oversize tires.
Tyler whooped and applauded with the rest of the crowd. When Talia did not, he nudged her. “Come on. It’s okay to be impressed. And not just with the aerobatics.” He pointed at the taxiing biplanes with his program. “Those aircraft are feats of mechanical brilliance, highly modified to perform in thin air. Did you know most aerobatic shows take place a thousand feet or more below the altitude of the ice you’re standing on?”
“And that’s why we’re here, right?” Talia eyed the expensive toys and experimental planes on display. “High-altitude heists are Finn’s specialty. You and Eddie think he’s planning to swipe some special aircraft?”
“Who said anything about a heist?”
Tyler raised his eyes to the sky, and Talia followed his gaze, slipping on her special sunglasses to fight off the glare. She saw a glint of silver above the western peak. “Is that . . . a weather balloon?”
Metal music drowned out Tyler’s answer, blaring from the loudspeakers bracketing the grandstand. Thumping bass and whining electric guitars joined in crescendo while the announcer shouted an introduction.
“Ladies annnd gentlemen. Like the arctic snow fox, our next guest appears without warning. We hoped he would show, and now he has. I give you . . . Michaellll . . . Fiiiinnnnn!”
The crescendo ended with a thundering downbeat that threatened to knock the snow from the valley walls.
The weather balloon exploded.
Sparks flew from the fireball, and one large piece fell away, trailing red smoke. Fearing it might fall on the spectators, Talia touched her glasses to zoom in. The falling object was no piece of wreckage. It was a man in a silver wingsuit, diving toward the peak. The crowd roared with delight.
“Finn,” she said under her breath.
Tyler slapped the rolled-up program against his leg. “You have to give the kid credit. He knows how to make an entrance.”
The red smoke traced an arc down the snowy face of the mountain. Talia zoomed out again to keep it all in view. “Are you seeing this, Eddie?”
“I am,” he said through her earpiece. “Hold still. I’m taking a screenshot.”
“For reference?”
“No. So I can use it as my wallpaper.”
The red streak drew closer and closer to the glacier, and still Talia saw no parachute. The crowd let out a collective gasp. At the last possible second, the thief flared his body and threw out a drogue. With a swack, a blue parasail snapped open behind him and he flew down the runway, touching down on short skis and skidding to a stop in a shower of glistening white. The crowd went wild.
Talia felt bad for the sad little gyrocopter act that followed, because it seemed as if half the grandstand had emptied to get Finn’s autograph—the female half. Getting close to the rock-star jumper was no easy task. She and Tyler worked their way along the rope line, pushing through a mass of pink-and-white snow-bunny suits.
“Let me do the talking,” Tyler said as they neared the center. “I’m supposed to be Lukon. He has to think I’m in charge.”
Talia frowned up at him. “Right. Whatever.”
Maybe it was Talia’s smaller size—or maybe she had fewer qualms about shoving giggly rich girls out of her way than Tyler—but she reached Finn first. There he was, at the corner of the grandstand, signing some blonde’s arm with a permanent marker. The ski goggles strapped to his forehead sent his bangs off in wild directions, but that did nothing to detract from his good looks. He had them—Talia couldn’t deny it. And from the way he handled that blonde, she half expected him to unzip the wingsuit and step out wearing a full tuxedo. Finn. Michael Finn.
Exhausting.
Talia glanced over her shoulder. Where was Tyler? She wouldn’t wait. Talia put her hands to her mouth and shouted over the giggling and squawking girls. “Hey! Finn!”
The thief took one look at her and bolted.