The Eighth Guardian

CHAPTER 12

Alpha doesn’t mention my jaunt through the Common the next day at breakfast. He just hands out assignments as if nothing’s wrong.

“Orange, solo mission that we have previously discussed,” he says.

Orange nods his head, and his mop of orange hair falls in his face.

Alpha looks back down at his notepad. “Green and Blue, historical prep today.”

Green nods his head, but Blue doesn’t. Instead he stares at me from across the table. He’s been doing that since I sat down this morning. Staring. It’s kind of creepy.

“Indigo—where’s Indigo?” Alpha asks. It’s like he’s just noticed that there’s an empty chair beside me. Funny. It’s the first thing I noticed this morning.

“I’m not sure, sir,” Red says. “He didn’t tell me he’d be absent this morning.”

“He’s not feeling well today,” Zeta says as he clears his throat.

“Nepotism at its finest,” Blue mumbles under his breath. Most people in the room gasp and turn to look at me. Only Alpha, Zeta, and Violet don’t flinch. But that’s because they already know that I know the truth.

“Oh, shut up, all of you,” Blue says. “She knows.”

Alpha folds his napkin and sets it down on the table. Then he straightens his tie and stands. “Blue, a word.” He jerks his head toward the door. “The rest of you have your assignments.”

I guess breakfast is now over, even though I have no idea what my assignment is. No one’s assigned me anything in days, except “study the early-twentieth century.” I guess I’ll do more of that today. I scoot my chair back and stand along with everyone else. But Green backs away from me, as if I’m a lion in a cage and everyone just figured out the door is open. Orange makes eye contact and quickly looks away.

Okay, guys, I get it. I’m an outsider here. I’m not one of you because none of your time-traveling mothers expelled me out of her uterus.

I turn to head toward the library.

“Iris,” Zeta says. “Where are you going?”

“Library,” I mutter, not bothering to turn around.

Zeta sidesteps in front of me. “Uh-uh. It’s mission day. Your first real one.”

I whip around. Real one? As in nontraining? “No one told me about this.”

“I know,” Zeta says. “Alpha only decided you were ready last night.”

Weird. Did he make that decision before or after gave me that good verbal spanking?

Zeta whips his head over to the door. “Yellow and Violet, you’re going, too.”

Yellow clucks her tongue in disgust while Violet gives me an icy stare. I stare right back. If she thinks I’m going to blink first, she’s got another thing coming.

“Come with me.” Zeta walks toward the back staircase that leads to the basement. Yellow turns on her heel and prances toward the staircase, while Violet stomps behind her. Stomps. Like a toddler.

“I hate fire missions,” Violet mutters to Yellow on the stairs, and I have no idea what she’s talking about.

Zeta holds the door open for us and gestures to the classroom on the right. We all file in. There’s a projector and a screen set up in the front of the room. I slide into one of the dozen or so desks, each of which has a yellow legal pad and a sharpened number 2 pencil set atop it. Violet leaves a desk between us, and Yellow sits on the other side of her, away from me.

“Ladies,” Zeta greets us, then he looks right at me. “Iris. I believe in trial by fire. You’re not going to learn until you’re thrown into the flames and made to find your own water. All first missions are designed to be high pressure, high stakes, high risk. The chance of failure is great, the chance of violence even greater. It’s, quite literally, do or die. You ready?”

My heart is thumping against my chest. This is what I’ve been trained for. It’s what Peel excels at: training its students for missions such as this. I’ve been on dozens of high-stress simulations but never anything real. Ever. I always got the jitters before, but I’m shaking now. I feel weightless.

“I’m ready,” I say.

But inside I’m crumbling. Because this is just great. I’m about to go on a high-pressure mission with an excellent chance of violence, and my team members don’t even want to sit next to me.

Zeta flicks the light switch and snaps on the projector. The screen becomes awash in a glow of white light before there’s a click and an image pops up. It’s a painting. There’s a woman sitting at a piano and another woman standing behind it, her arm raised slightly and her mouth open as if she’s singing. A man sits with his back turned. It’s pretty. So pretty. I squint my eyes and examine the detail on the singer’s dress.

“The Concert,” Zeta says. “Painted by Johannes Vermeer around 1660, stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on March 18, 1990, along with twelve other pieces of art. The Concert alone is valued at two hundred million dollars.” My mouth drops open. “The total value of all art stolen that night is about five hundred million. None of the stolen works has been recovered.

“And, ladies, tonight the president himself has authorized us to prevent that burglary from ever happening in the first place.”

I sit up straight in my chair and lean my elbows on the desk. I glance over and see that Yellow and Violet have done the same. My heart is beating faster, but now there’s excitement mixed with nerves. This is what I’m talking about. Forget causing someone to miss a cab. This is what I want to be doing.

Zeta clicks the remote again, and a cross-section of the museum pops up on-screen. He grabs a pointer and aims it at a corner of the first floor.

“At precisely 1:24 a.m. on the morning of March 18, 1990, two thieves disguised as uniformed police officers knocked on the museum’s service entrance door. They told the guard—a young, poorly trained college student—that they had been alerted to a disturbance at the museum related to the St. Patrick’s Day revelry that was still taking place on the streets of Boston. The guard buzzed them through the door.

“The two thieves then told the guard that he looked familiar and that they both had seen a warrant issued for his arrest. The guard stepped out from behind the desk, leaving the only panic button that would have alerted the real police force. The thieves then forced the guard to summon the other guard, and when he arrived, both were handcuffed and led to the basement. The thieves then wrapped the guards’ hands, feet, and heads in duct tape, and secured them to posts forty yards apart.”

Yellow and Violet are just sitting there listening, but I’m scribbling notes like crazy.

Zeta continues. “At approximately 1:48 a.m., the two thieves made their way up the main staircase into the Dutch Room on the second floor.” Zeta moves the pointer to the top right corner of the second floor. “For the next forty minutes the thieves tripped alarms as they traveled between the rooms on this floor. From the Dutch Room, they stole three Rembrandts, a Flinck, The Concert, and a nearly three-thousand-year-old Chinese bronze beaker. Across the floor in the Short Gallery”—the pointer whisks to a room on the left—“they stole five Degas drawings and a bronze finial that sat atop a pole holding a Napoleonic flag. At some point, a Manet was stolen from the Blue Room on the first floor as well”—the pointer falls on a room on the first floor that looks to be almost directly below the Short Gallery—“but investigators have not been able to determine the precise time it was stolen.

“The thieves exited the museum at 2:45 a.m., making off with half a billion dollars’ worth of art that has not been recovered. And after too many decades of false leads and no breakthroughs, the FBI director has decided that the loss to the art world is too great and the windfall to the thieves is too high. So he went to the president, and here we are.”

Zeta sets down the pointer and clasps his hands together in front of his body. I remember to take a breath.

“You get one shot to stop this thing. The thieves are very likely armed, and there is a chance that they’ll try to use their weapons. Iris—”

Zeta turns directly to me, and Yellow and Violet do the same.

“This mission is designed to play to your strengths,” Zeta says. “You’re the leader of this one. I want the three of you to spend the day at the museum. Get to know its ins and outs. Prepare yourself. Meet back here at five p.m. to get changed and ready.”

We catch the Green Line at Park Street and take the E to the MFA stop. Neither Violet nor Yellow say a word to me the entire train ride, and I don’t know if it’s the fact that they really don’t like me or if it’s bitterness that Zeta named me the leader. I snort. Leader. Right. A woman can’t lead without people willing to follow her.

“All right,” I say as the three of us stand in front of the museum, gazing up at its boxy brick exterior. The outside of the building is completely underwhelming. It could be a condo complex or even an old factory. “I think we should split up and—”

“Yeah, I got this,” Yellow says. “This is my fourth fire mission. I’ll wander around and make notes of the scene, and then I’ll devise a plan of action from there.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Maybe you didn’t hear Zeta, but I’m the leader of this mission.”

Yellow raises a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “He can name you whatever he wants, but I’m going to lead this mission.”

“Says who?” I ask.

“Violet?” Yellow turns to face her. “Who are you going to follow on this mission?”

“Duh,” she says. “Let’s go inside.”

Yellow gives me a smug look and brushes the hair off her shoulder. Then she and Violet walk toward the main entrance. I let them go. Idiots. They’re not even going to check out the service entrance? As soon as they’re inside, I make a left onto Palace Road. About half a block down, there it is. The service entrance. It’s a green door sticking out of what looks like a concrete addition. A guy and girl only a few years older than me stroll by, deep in a conversation about some party last weekend, and I bet they have no idea that half a billion dollars walked through this door years ago.

But we’re going to change all that tonight.

I double back to the front door and pay my admission fee. I have no idea where Yellow and Violet scampered off to, nor do I care. Screw them. I can do this myself.

I’ve never been to the Gardner before, and the courtyard takes my breath away. Sunlight beams down on grasses and plants, and it’s so pretty. Like being in a tropical garden. But I’m not here to gawk. I’m here to prevent a burglary.

I go up the main staircase. I’m standing in a long hallway with high arched windows overlooking the courtyard. I check the map they gave me downstairs again. This floor is laid out in a big rectangle with the courtyard in the middle. To my left is the Early Italian Room, which sits in a corner. If you round it, you hit the Raphael Room and the Short Gallery. That’s where all of the Degas drawings were taken from. To my right is the Dutch Room. That’s the money room. Three Rembrandts, a Flinck, the Chinese beaker, and the Vermeer. I start in there.

I imagine I’m one of the thieves. No doubt they’d visited the museum numerous times before the heist. The museum still has empty frames hanging where some of the pictures once were—a reminder of what was stolen. I walk past each of them and try to think like a criminal. Hands down, I would go for the Vermeer first. Get the most valuable one in case you have to abandon the rest and bolt. I walk the entire room, noting the empty frames, then double back past the hallway and through the Early Italian and Raphael Rooms into the Short Gallery.

This is a no-brainer. You have one person steal the pictures from the Dutch Room while the other is taking down all the Degases in the Short Gallery. Then you grab the Manet on the first floor on the way out.

So how do we prevent this? The easiest thing to do would be to stop the guards from even opening the door in the first place. We take down the fake cops on the street and then we don’t have to go into the museum at all.

But a little voice nags me that this plan won’t work in the long run. The thieves will just come back another night. No, the only way to truly end this thing is to end it in the museum. To stop the burglary while it’s in process. I’m suddenly conscious of my heart beating away inside my chest, and I don’t know if it’s nerves or excitement. Probably both.

I find Yellow and Violet downstairs in the courtyard.

“There you are,” Violet snaps. “We’ve been ready to go for like twenty minutes.”

I check my watch. It’s eleven thirty. “We have until five to get back.”

The two of them stare at me, blank faced.

I shake my head. “I thought it would be best if we made a plan of attack. I figure we put one person in the Dutch Room and one by the Short Gallery upstairs, then we have one of us act as backup down in the Blue Room where the Manet is. That way if—”

Yellow holds up a hand, cutting me off. “Why are you talking? We’ve already got it figured out. We’re going to wait outside and call the police to report two suspicious individuals loitering around. That way they never have to enter the museum. We save the art and spare the guards the trauma of thinking they’re going to be dragged to the basement and shot in the head. Win-win.”

“Yeah, and what happens when they come back the next night?” I ask. “You’re going to leave that to chance? Uh-uh. We need to find a way inside the museum so that we can be there when the break-in happens. Then we apprehend the perps, tie them up, and bolt back to the present before we’re seen by the cops. We’ll be nameless, faceless heroes.”

“No,” Yellow says. “This mission is to prevent the burglary from happening. We’re going to do it the quick, easy way.”

“That’s not going to work!”

“Violet, are you ready?” Yellow asks. Violet nods, and the two of them turn and head toward the front door.

“Listen to me!” I shout after them, but they’re already gone.

I ball up my hands into fists. I want to punch something. Or someone. I’m not going to let her blow the entire mission. I’ll do this myself. I head back up the stairs. I’m about to learn every square inch of this museum. And I’m going to be here on March 18, 1990, at 1:24 a.m.