End of the Century (34 page)

“I guess we missed the end of the world,” Alice said.

“If you've seen one Apocalypse, love, you've seen them all.”

“Well, anyway,” the escort said, “we were moving all of that gear down
at the end of April, and taking the opportunity to restructure the holdings a bit, when a locked Victorian strongbox was discovered. It didn't appear on any inventory lists or manifests, going back to the museum's founding, so there was nothing for it but to open the thing up and see.”

“And that's when the gem was discovered.”

“Well, it wasn't easy getting the strongbox open, let me tell you. Took the better part of a week. But when we did, yes, there was the gem.” She paused to unlock a door, and then ushered them through. “Funny thing was, though it was velvet lined on the inside, it was obviously designed to hold a much larger object.”

They were descending a flight of stairs now, away from the galleries open to the public on the floors aboveground, into the basements hidden beneath.

“Was that when you first suspected something wasn't right about the gem? That it might be, shall we say, ‘vanishing'?”

The escort nodded. “Maybe. I had an inkling, I suppose. When we couldn't find anything about it in the museum's archives, we sent it to the Department of Conservation and Research for analysis. It was a few weeks later that they reported back that it appeared to be losing mass.”

“Without burning it away in the form of energy, as light or heat or what-have-you?”

The escort nodded again. “That's right. It wasn't giving off anything, on any band of the electromagnetic spectrum, no infrared radiation, no bleed of any kind that the scientists could find, or so they tell us. But it was still getting smaller, all the time.”

“Isn't that impossible?” Alice said. “What about that whole ‘conservation of mass and energy' thing?”

“Well,” Stillman said with a smile, “I've often found that impossible things often aren't, and implausible things never are.”

“So it was kept here, was it?”

Though this room was closed to the public, the gem had been kept in a display case, even more heavily alarmed and fortified than those upstairs. As
the escort explained, things like motion detectors and the like were difficult to implement in high traffic areas, but down in the basements, things were kept strictly under lock and key.

There was a titanium and reinforced leaded glass display case at the center of the room, painted with motion sensitive lasers. Within was a cushion of black velvet. For roughly a week, since it was returned from the reseach department, it had held the Vanishing Gem. Then, for a brief time, it had held a lump of mirrored glass. Now, it was vacant.

There were cameras in three corners of the room and pressure-sensitive plates on the floor. The display case itself was rigged with motion- and pressure-sensitive devices. There was a single door, of reinforced steel, and small air vents high on opposite walls, both of them alarmed.

All Alice knew about security systems, beyond standard car alarms and the like, she'd learned from TV and movies and video games. From where she stood, though, if Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, and Ethan Hunt teamed up—and, of course, really existed—they'd have a hard time breaking in and out of this room.

“And there were no tripped alarms, no broken glass, nothing?” Stillman walked around the room with his hands behind his back.

The escort shook her head. “No, nothing. Just one day the gem was there, the next it was gone.”

Stillman nodded. “All right, then. I'll need access to all of the data. Tapes from the surveillance cameras, security logs, that sort of thing.”

The escort regarded him warily for a moment, then went off to make the arrangements.

“Man,” Alice said, impressed, “when you hypnotize someone, you don't mess around.”

Stillman quirked a grin, but shook his head. “It's nothing so impressive as all that. I can't make someone do something they wouldn't do otherwise, just give them a little push. Like her, most people, they respect authority. They're happy doing what someone tells them, since it means they don't have to decide things for themselves. A little nudge to make them think you're in authority, and after that it's all beer and skittles.”

Alice raised an eyebrow. “So would it work on me?”

Stillman's grin broadened. “I don't know, love. You tell me.”

Then it was back to Stillman's underground home, where he fiddled with decks of VHS and Betamax players, dragging them from the elephant's graveyard of storage in the other tunnel and hooking them up to his ancient color television. Alice took her playing cards out of her backpack and dealt a few hands of solitaire while Stillman spent hours watching the grainy black-and-white video footage or poring over indecipherable security logs, or studying schematics and floorplans.

The playing cards had originally belonged to Naomi Vance, and she'd given them to her granddaughter years before when they wore out. Naomi played bridge, when she still had enough friends alive and still talking to her to do so, and when she ran out of friends just played solitaire. She was serious about her play and retired a deck when it got too worn, when too many cards had bent corners or nicked edges. Alice had come on her about to throw the deck away, only ten years old, and had insisted that it be given to her, instead. Naomi had relented, but only on the condition that she could teach her granddaughter to play.

They'd played together for years. Gin rummy, or two-handed solitaire, or hearts. Even when Alice started hanging out with Nancy and going through her rebellious phase, before it ended badly that last night on the freeway, when Alice wouldn't talk to her mother for days at a time, she and Naomi still played, every week.

Playing now, the careworn cards under her hands, reminded her of those times and helped ease the ache inside, if only a little.

“Hey, Stillman. Since you were practically 007, did that mean you had a license to kill?”

Stillman looked up from the security reports and the handwritten notes he was taking on a yellow legal pad and gave her an odd look.

“I've done the necessary, a time or two.”

“Who were they?” Alice shuffled the deck.

Stillman was quiet for a long moment. “No,” he said at last. “You don't get to ask that. It's not proper. How would you feel, mmm? If I were to say, ‘Hey, Alice, you kill anybody lately?'”

Alice kept her eyes on the cards, feeling the faint breeze of their fluttering on her face as they rippled together.

“I've killed two people,” she said, quietly. “Not on purpose. But I did it. I didn't mean it, but I'm guilty all the same.”

After a long silence, Alice looked up and met Stillman's gaze.

“Well, then,” he said. “I suppose you know what I'm talking about.” Then he picked up the remote and started back up the playback on the VCR.

“You don't often see work like this,” Stillman said, shaking his head in admiration. “Most thieves don't slither past detectors like in the movies. They pay their five quid and walk in with the rest of the punters, and then duck behind the drapes at closing time. They snatch and grab and smash a window to get out. When the guards come running, they think they're looking for someone breaking in, not someone breaking out, and the blagger's on the run before they even know he's gone. But a job like this…”

He gestured to the documents fanned before him like a solitaire spread, and the black-and-white video playback.

“This is the work of a professional. A proper cat burglar.” He mused. “If I didn't know better, I'd say it was the work of Tan Perrin, but that old bastard isn't up and around anymore, so he couldn't have done it.”

“Know a lot of cat burglars, do you?”

“Overlapping skill sets, I suppose you'd say. In my line of work, it paid to know how to get in and out of a place without being caught. Whether you're making off with the crown jewels or sensitive microfiche hardly matters, the idea's the same. It's all tradecraft, in the end.”

“Ha!” Stillman slammed his fist down onto the table, knocking Alice's cards to the floor. “Got her!”

“Got who?” Alice asked, playing fifty-two card pickup.

“Right there!” Stillman pointed to the automated log of one of the air vent alarms. “There's tricks of the trade that everyone knows, and there's others that are as unique as fingerprints. The way that this alarm was bypassed and shunted, it's a technique I first saw years ago. Used by a pair of twins, the Fox sisters.” He smiled and glanced Alice's way. “Not the table-tapping spiritualists of the nineteenth century, of course.”

“Oh, of course.” Like she had any idea what he was talking about.

“Anyway, the Fox sisters died years ago, but not before handing down everything they knew, including this particular shunt.”

“Handing it down to who?”

Stillman picked up the phone—the
corded
phone—and held the heavy Bakelite handset up to his ear. “To whom, love. Not ‘who.'” Then he dialed—with a
dial
—and waited.

Alice sighed. “To
whom
, then?”