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“Exactly that. I’m going to proceed to where I am assuming the safe is, based on what kind of laser and heat fields cover this room. Don’t love that it looks like my Portuguese friend set me up. I’m guessing my time here is limited.”

“Copy, clear to proceed. We’ll have a fat twenty seconds before the notification goes out. Easy. And Lorena is power mad. Don’t take it personally.”

KC walked through the room, holding her breath, mentally counting down the seconds as she strode through the invisible field that was changing the voltage of every sensor and thereby tripping the alarm, even as she couldn’t hear it.

Once she crossed the room, she came to a pony wall that looked strange, given the open plan. “I assume I’m good?”

“So good,” Yardley said. “You get any better, I won’t survive this mission, and I’m safely tucked away in a warm van, not eluding henchmen and lasers.”

KC’s helpless grin in the empty room was the only thing about her reaction to Yardley’s flirting on an open comm channel that she could safely assume belonged to her and her alone.

It felt precisely like one of the dozens of times Yardley had flung a bit of sass her way in the middle of a run, stopping KC dead in her tracks to laugh, or to protest, or to grab her by the waist and kiss her.

It had been a long time.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, running her fingertips along the pony wall and making sure her cameras took in every inch of it, because the agents in the van could pick up more than she would.

“I already like what you’re thinking,” Yardley said. “See if there is a door somewhere to the left of you.”

“Should we all reconsider ‘Tabasco’? Because Tabasco’s from Louisiana, as you pointed out.

” She found the invisible seam and pressed two fingers into it.

She heard a soft pneumatic hiss, and then the hidden door, thick and heavy, came open an inch.

“And it’s kind of insulting? It implies a certain heedlessness normally associated with men who have friends everyone calls ‘Rooster.’ Or ‘Jug Belly.’”

“Absolutely not my associations, but I take your point,” Yardley said. “Unfortunately, you’re stuck with it. You can open that up. We have around seven minutes until the auction begins.”

KC opened the heavy door to a panel with an embedded computer console. Not the safe—another layer of security in front of it. She put her fingers on the keys, waking up the computer into standby mode.

“You need tech?”

“What do you think?” KC ran through a few opening lines of code just to see what she was dealing with, overriding the screen view so she could see the source.

Damn it all to hell.

“I need our asset to join us on the comm link,” she said.

“Negative,” Atlas broke in. “The asset’s authorization is limited to confirming we have the right product.”

“I thought we were authorized to save the world. Look, Mirabel locked this with, for lack of a better term, a riddle he got from the asset. These are kind of her thing. My hope of cracking it and making time are less than zero. I can’t torch my way in.

If I blow it up, we lose what’s inside. So I either get the asset on comm, or I’m going to have to belly crawl out of here and swim home. ”

“I have the asset on comm link,” Yardley said. “Please don’t get in the water. It’s forty-one degrees Fahrenheit, and you’re wearing boots. Bride, you can go ahead.”

“You catch my code name, then?” Kris’s cheerful, extremely loud voice made KC touch her ear as though she could turn down the volume. She could not. “You’re going to want to start with running a regular password request. Doesn’t matter what kind.”

“Are congratulations in order?” KC prompted the system to ask for a password. “Got it.”

“Do you remember the Sphinx Questions code from back in the day? Do that. And, yes, Declan showed up here with three juicy carats, and I said yes!”

“Is a proposal less romantic, do you think, when it happens behind bars?” KC tapped the screen. “All right, I’ve been hit with one of your skeleton key codes, so you’re going to have to give up one of your famous secrets.”

“Does it matter where a girl finds herself when she’s in love?

” Kris’s voice had gone a little dreamy, and KC’s heart softened in response.

“Seems to me the only thing you can choose in this life is love or fear. That’s it, really.

Love or fear. I do hate to give up my secrets, but this one’s old.

It’s just the code to the start screen of the original Mario Kart .

It will autofill if you give it the first line. ”

KC felt her heart twist, just a little, at Kris’s philosophy. Love or fear. Simple.

“I’m in.”

“Ta! There’s someone already holding out her hand for my comm link thing. See you soon, love.”

“Four and a half minutes left. Let me have a look at what we’ve got.” Yardley’s voice had quieted. It made KC wonder if what Kris said about love and fear hit her, too.

KC approached the safe behind the panel that housed the computer.

Its depth accounted for the pony wall. Its face was about twenty-four inches square.

She was surprised to see a dial fit over another dial on its face.

The first was a circle of tiny brass letters, while the bigger dial had numbers, one to ninety-nine.

Her insides went to buzzing, prickling static, and she felt a bead of sweat make its way to the small of her back. She’d been certain she’d be dealing with a digital lock of some kind. So had the team.

She had no hope of cracking a safe like this, absolutely not in a few minutes.

“No worries,” Yardley whispered, just like she did, sleepy and kind, when KC would wake up in the middle of the night from a bad dream.

KC could almost imagine Yardley’s arm coming around her waist, gathering her close to her body.

“I love these little puzzles. No one knows how to crack a good safe anymore. I used to check out the books from the library at Langley and mess around with that stuff they archive in the basement. Did you know safecrackers used to be called ‘yeggmen’?”

KC had not. But she felt a little calmer.

“There’s an international competition,” Yardley said.

“Of the yeggmen. The same sonofabitch wins it every year, pardon my language. I have fantasized about entering. I would, and kick him off his throne, if I didn’t have to keep up my cover.

Okay. This safe is French. Here’s where this is going to get strange. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to put the pad of your index finger on the numbered dial, the larger one. But very, very gently. Just enough to hold it in place. Then, with your other hand, spin the dial with the letters one full revolution, and try to mark the five places you feel something like a ball bearing rolling from one seat to another.”

Yardley’s voice had gentled, pulling in all the familiar vowels and cadence of North Carolina. It steadied KC the same way that her flirting over the comm link did—which Yardley must know, or she wouldn’t be doing it. KC placed her finger and started moving the dial. “Oh. I felt the first one.”

“There you go. What was it?”

“E.”

“That’s it. That’s all you do. Let me know what letters.”

KC moved the dial slowly, time losing meaning. “V. O. N. D. Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Devon. Mercy. Move the dial to each letter in order after you reset it to Z.”

KC did, and then, to her surprise, the lettered dial popped forward.

“So cool,” Yardley said. “Take off that dial. Now’s the hard part. You’re going to have to take out your comm link.”

“What?”

KC heard Atlas and Gramercy say it at the same time she did.

“I need her to stick it on the middle of the dial. It’s the only way I can hear what I need to in order to crack it. Atlas, Gramercy, buy me whatever time you can with tech or with a distraction, but this is it. Our team’s already determined what’s in the safe.”

“They have?” KC’s voice cracked.

“Yeah. I wasn’t supposed to tell you in case it messed up your game, but we’re inches away from, you know, mission complete.

But I’m not even a little worried. It’s you.

You can do anything. So you’ll have to pull out the comm and place it right in the middle of the dial.

I’ll send you over your visual link what numbers to set the dial to. There will be five. Ready?”

KC took a deep breath. “Ready. Audio comm down.” She pulled out the lockpicks again and used the slimmest one to capture the comm, deep in her ear, the size of a screw in a pair of eyeglasses.

The world of sound suddenly pressed in on her—the wind off the water kicking up settling noises from the carriage house, her breath, the creak of her leather boots.

She pushed the comm into a little space in the middle of the dial and started turning it slowly.

The visual from Yardley appeared as a transparent blue box in her mid-vision. She made a full revolution of the dial, holding her breath, before the combination came up.

72, 3, 16, 35, 8. KC entered the numbers in.

She should’ve put the comm back in her ear right away.

She should’ve been watching her back.

Then, maybe, when the safe opened with a silky pop, and she grabbed the tiny, pale green case and prepared to bolt, she wouldn’t have been so surprised to turn around and discover Dr. Brown standing behind her with a disappointed look on his face.