Hit List (5 page)

She caught a split-second blush before Benjamin’s brazen charm returned. “Damn right I am,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

The daylight blinded her after the silent blackness of the tunnel. Ash squeezed her eyes shut as soon as she surfaced. The roaring of the waves was too loud, too close as they
battered the cliffs.

“So who
were
those guys?” Benjamin asked.

Ash’s teeth were chattering. Her fingers and toes were going numb. “There were nine of them,” she said. “At least two males, at least one female. One man was named Harvey
– not sure if that’s his first name or last. They might have been ex-military, judging by their weapons and their skills, but not current, based on the way they talked.”

“Not much to go on.” Benjamin took Ash’s glow stick and tucked it into the belt on his wetsuit. It looked like ordinary plastic in the sunshine.

“Doesn’t matter,” Ash said. “What counts is, they know even less about us.”

“Anyone see you?”

“Harvey did,” Ash admitted. “Heard my voice, too. And one of the others – a guy with no eyebrows. But I was wearing face camo, and they don’t know my name. They
don’t know you or Buckland exist, either. We’re in the clear, as long as we leave quickly.”

Benjamin nodded. “The boat’s that way. What about the miners? Did any of them spot you?”

Only one, Ash thought. Right before she got shot. “No,” she said. An icy wave slapped her in the face, and she spat out some salt water before continuing. “The troops said
something about a ghost.”

Benjamin frowned. “Superstitious robbers?”

“Don’t think so. It sounded like a real person, someone else coming after the prize. And they sounded scared when they talked about it.”

“Just one more reason to hightail it out of here,” Benjamin said, starting to swim towards the boat.

Ash sucked in one more lungful of air and followed him. Maybe Hammond Buckland will know what they were talking about, she thought. I’ll ask him when we give him his cut.

The boat was a fibreglass runabout with an inboard motor. Benjamin had left a rope ladder hanging over the side, and he held it steady while Ash climbed it.

“Did you find the box?” he asked.

“You didn’t notice the unsightly bulge in my clothes?” she replied, clambering into the boat and reaching back down to grab his hand.

“Yeah, but I didn’t want to say anything. Just in case.”

“Just in case I was having a square baby?”

“Or you’d swallowed a Rubik’s cube, yeah.”

“Not today. It’s the box.”

He grinned as she pulled him up. “So we won. I like it when we win.”

“It’s a rare treat, for sure.”

“Unless you count not dying as winning. We’re pretty good at that.”

“So far,” Ash agreed.

“We should celebrate. Perhaps a romantic sunset picnic?”

“Perhaps not.”

She unzipped her camouflage suit, pulled out the box and dumped it on a seat. There was a bag by the stern with some towels and a dry outfit in it – she peeled off her clothes and laid
them out on the deck to dry before pulling out the towels and tossing one to Benjamin. He didn’t catch it – he was staring at the box.

“Go on,” she said, scrubbing her hair dry. “Open it. You know you want to.”

“Is it gross?” he asked.

“Very.”

Benjamin lifted the lid. He stared at the object inside, fascinated, and reached towards it – but pulled away without touching. He closed the box again.

“When you spoke to Harvey,” he asked, “did you shout, ‘This belongs in a museum!’ like Indiana Jones?”

“Nope. Sorry.”

Benjamin sighed. “What a wasted opportunity.”

“There’ll be others. I did shout ‘Geronimo’ at one point.”

“Cool – were you jumping off something?”

“You bet. But I was wearing a safety rope.”

“Still pretty awesome.”

Ash had pulled on her jeans and was reaching for her T-shirt when she spotted something on the horizon. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the light, she could see another boat, floating in the
distance. “Did the soldiers come by boat?”

“No,” Benjamin said. “They were in white sedans.” He followed her gaze. “Uh-oh. Cops?”

“I don’t see any police markings.” Ash lifted up one of the seats, grabbed a pair of binoculars, and held them to her eyes. The boat was slightly larger than theirs, and
appeared to be deserted. “No one on board,” she said.

“Hope they dropped anchor. Otherwise it’ll end up in the Pacific Trash Vortex.” Benjamin had picked up his towel and started drying himself. “Did you know that most of
the rubbish dumped in the sea by the USA and China gets dragged to the same spot by the currents? And so now there’s an island of garbage covering over a million square kilometres?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” Ash said. Other than the mine, she thought, there’s nothing along this coast for twenty kilometres in each direction. The miners arrived by bus.
The soldiers arrived by car. So whose boat is that?

Hurry. The ghost’s coming.

“Start the engine,” she said. “We should go.”

Two hours later Ash was in the Museum of Art History, right where she’d told her father to pick her up. She was standing outside the curator’s office, now
completely dry. While the swim had washed the grime off her, and the sunshine on the boat-ride back had thawed her out, she still felt terrible. Her shoulder was rapidly stiffening up, every muscle
ached in both arms, and there was a ring of bruising around her waist where her belt had taken all her weight.

Benjamin had gone home. She didn’t need his help to deliver the box, and they always made sure clients never saw them both together. They also used fake names, fake phone numbers, fake
email addresses. That way, anyone trying to sell them out to the cops – or to the people they’d stolen from – wouldn’t have enough information to go on.

The curator opened the door. He was a nervous-looking middle-aged man with curly hair and no wedding ring. He looked each way, as if preparing to cross a highway, before addressing Ash.

“Come in,” he said.

Ash followed him into his office. He shut the door, and cleared a space on his desk.

“Is that it?” he asked, nodding to the box.

Ash put it on the desk, and opened the lid. The curator snatched up a pair of magnification goggles and studied the object inside.

Ash didn’t know what he was looking for, exactly. But this artefact was over one hundred and twenty years old, and while it had spent most of that time in a police evidence locker in
Arles, France, she knew it had spent three of the last four decades at this museum. It had been under the curator’s care for most of his career – he’d had plenty of opportunities
to examine it. If it was a forgery, he would know.

“It’s smaller than I expected,” she said, filling the silence.

The curator nodded. “That’s partly its age, partly the way it was cut. And perspective, too – I mean, how often do you see one on its own?” He put down the magnifying
glass. “It’s genuine. Who stole it?”

Ash said, “That information wasn’t part of the deal.”

“Was it hard to recover?”

“You have no idea.”

The curator looked like he had more questions, but was reluctant to ask them. He’s smart, Ash thought. He realizes that the less he knows about what I’ve done, the safer he is.

He unlocked a cupboard, opened it, and took out a brick of cash. “Twenty thousand,” he said, handing it to her.

Not a huge profit for Ash, Benjamin and Buckland. Not after the costs of flying out to the mine, hiring the boat, and purchasing the clothes and scuba gear, as well as the various expenses of
the surveillance they’d been doing over the past few weeks.

But the money isn’t why I’m doing this, Ash reminded herself. Not any more. Right?

She stuffed the cash into her school bag. “Pleasure doing business with you,” she said. “I’ll show myself out.”

She opened the door and left, heading for the front entrance, leaving the curator alone with the mottled remains of Vincent van Gogh’s left ear.

“Hey, Dad,” Ash said, climbing into the car and tightening her seat belt.

Her father flicked the indicator and glanced at the traffic in the rear-view mirror. “Yes?”

“Nothing,” Ash said. “I just said hey. As in, hi.”

“Oh, right. How was the Natural History Museum?”

“Art History, Dad. But yeah, it was intense.”

Ash wasn’t sure if her father had misspoken deliberately to see if she was paying attention, or if he was just preoccupied. Probably the latter – his constant state of distraction
was the reason he hadn’t noticed Ash’s extracurricular activities these past few years.

It was also how Ash’s mother had been able to destroy him so thoroughly and unexpectedly. She left him when Ash was nine, and as a divorce lawyer, she was able to take half his money and
most of his possessions. These days, he seemed to spend most of his time staring out the window at the garden, and though Ash never said so out loud, she suspected he was thinking about his
ex-wife.

“Intense?” he said, finally getting the car moving. “They must’ve really jazzed it up since I was last there.”

“Yeah, they have all kinds of stuff now,” Ash said. “When was that?”

“When was what?”

“When you were last there.” And if you’ve been there before, she thought, why did you think it was the
Natural
History Museum?

Her father squinted. “Not since you were born, probably. So what did you see today?”

“Some van Gogh,” she said, suppressing a grimace. “A few cool things from Leonardo da Vinci’s house in France. And a lot of stuff about cubism and cubists. Picasso,
Braque, those guys.”

If she had really toured the museum, she probably would have said, “Art stuff,” and left it at that. But her father didn’t seem suspicious of the extra information. Ash
suddenly realized she didn’t even feel guilty about lying to him any more – and then that
did
make her feel guilty.

“I got you a present,” she said, as they pulled to a stop at a red light.

“Really?”

Ash passed him a coffee mug she’d bought at the gift shop on her way out. It had
The Scream
by Edvard Munch printed on it, with a subtitle under the howling man’s face:
Two
days without caffeine.

He sighed. “Thanks, sweetie, but you didn’t have to do that. You should be saving your money.”

“It’s a coffee mug, Dad. They’re like, five bucks.” Actually, the mug had cost her fifteen. But she had much more money than her father knew.

The light turned green, and they drove in silence for a while.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“It was okay,” he said. “The clients told us they’d already designed the website they wanted, and then they emailed us something they’d knocked up in PowerPoint and
told us to ‘just write the code behind it’. So someone was going to have to go tell them, delicately, that they were all morons. I thought it was going to be me, but Bridget drew the
short straw.”

Ash tried to picture her father calling a boardroom full of people morons. She couldn’t – he was too polite. “Did you literally draw straws?” she asked.

“No. Random number generator.”

She rolled her eyes. Of course.

Her father glanced at the clock in the dashboard. “Are you going to have time to change?” he asked. “Or should I take you straight there?”

Ash frowned. “Straight where?”

“The dance? At the school?”

Ash groaned. She’d forgotten about the school social. As far as the teachers know, she realized, I’m really sick. It’ll seem very dodgy if I turn up tonight.

“I’m pretty tired,” she said truthfully. “I think I’ll give it a miss.”

“Really?” Her father looked concerned. “But you’ll miss the...dancing.”

Ash shrugged. “We have dance class at school.”

“What about the social-ness? The bonding?”

“I don’t really need it.”

Her father looked sceptical. “Name one friend you have besides Benjamin.”

“Dad!”

“I never see you with anyone else,” he said defensively. “And it’s all very well to have a boyfriend—”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Ash said. “I’ve told you that.”

“—but it’s important to have other friends too,” her father continued. “And avoiding your classmates isn’t going to help you make any.”

“My classmates are boring!” Ash said. “They only care about clothes and bands and politics.”

“Wouldn’t hurt you to take an interest in that,” her father said. “You’ll be old enough to vote before too long.”

“Not
real
politics,” Ash said. “Clique politics. Gossip. Who stole whose best friend, that stuff.”

“And what interests do you have that are so much more important?”

Money. Power. Adventure. “Computers?” she suggested.

Her father laughed. “Nice try.” His voice softened. “All right. If you really don’t want to go, I’ll give the school a ring and tell them you’re sick, or
something.”

“No!” Ash said. She could imagine how that conversation would go:

Hi, this is Ashley Arthur’s father – Ash is feeling a little under the weather, so she’s going to miss the dance tonight.