26
Just Another Job
To Sydney’s relief, the train she took toward the Victoria and Albert Museum was crowded, giving her the chance to disappear into the rush of people. Her head had cleared now, along with her reflexes and her memory. And the way she’d had to send Winter away.
Maybe she had overdone it. She’d been so angry, and she wasn’t even sure who she was angry at. Him, probably. Herself, more likely. Or whoever had tried to kill them. Maybe she was mad at this whole situation, the way everything had gone so horribly wrong, the way she had let herself go off the rails with him. The reality that someone wanted them dead. The realization that their relationship was so clearly a dead end.
The train arrived at South Kensington, and she stepped off with a purposely nonchalant gait, invisible among the flood of tourists and locals, choosing the tunnel toward the museum’s underground entrance instead of the main entrance up on the street. Better to rip the Band-Aid off. She knew the plane that Sauda had sent was probably already at Heathrow, ready and waiting for them. With any luck, Winter would soon be there, too, taking off without her.
With any luck, the way she’d left him would be the last time she ever saw him. And he would be alive because of it.
The pang that shot through her chest was so sharp that she sucked her breath in. His hands cupping her face, pulling her to him. The tearsglistening in his eyes. The warmth of his breath against her neck, his lips on her skin.
She forced her mind to pivot and quickened her steps down the tunnel. The sound of her boots was lost among the echoes of voices around her. As she went, she glanced at her phone and checked on Winter’s location. His tracker was still pinging from the house. Soon it should show him making his way to the airport.
She closed the tracker and kept going. She’d had to part from plenty of fellow operatives in the past without so much as a backward glance.
And this was just another job.
She had memorized the layout of the Victoria and Albert Museum during her train ride. It was a massive, magnificent old building chock-full of security cameras, sensors attached to every door, security tables at the main entrances, and dozens of staff that walked the grounds at all open hours.
The underground entrance, though, was more lax, especially on a weekday before noon. As she approached the nondescript door, the lone guard lounging in a chair beside it cast her a bored glance and just nodded her in. She gave him a sweet smile in return.
The museum hummed with a moderate crowd. Sydney forced herself to take her time, wandering through the sculpture hall and admiring the Rodin collection like a tourist so that security would forget about her and move on to watching others that entered the space. Then she wandered slowly through the fashion exhibit and past the giant Chihuly chandelier hanging in the main rotunda. A throng of schoolchildren wove around her.
Finally, she made her way upstairs, where each floor’s crowd grew progressively sparser, until she was several halls away from Eli Morrison’s newly donated wing, where Connor Doherty’s collection was housed. As she passed the stairs leading up to it, she noted the velvet rope blocking the way.
INSTALLATION INPROGRESS, said the sign. As expected.
She entered a hall with no one in it. There, she stood at a corner beside a glass display of ceramics—and tilted her phone up to the nearest blinking fire alarm.
On her screen appeared a grid showing the thousands of fire alarms in the building. She scrolled past them before picking one located at the opposite end of the museum.
She tapped on it.
An electronic screech shattered the silence, echoing throughout the museum’s marble halls.
Now Sydney had a time limit. Over the ongoing scream of the alarm, an announcement came on over the speakers.
“Guests and staff, please make your way to the nearest exit. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
She smiled slightly. A forced evacuation of all staff.
Sure enough, she saw three security guards make their way down from the roped-off wing holding Connor’s personal collection. Sydney waited until they had disappeared down the stairs. Then she ducked under the velvet rope and sprinted up the steps—before slipping behind one of the pillars at the corridor at the top.
Three of the four guards that had been standing at attention up here were now gone—but a lone guard remained near the doors of the private collection, looking annoyed and a little uncertain about whether or not he was supposed to stay.
Sydney scowled at the sight of him and held up her phone again. Then she tapped her screen and waited until she caught the frequency channel of the man’s radio.
Moments later, she heard it give a telltale crackle. He looked down at it.
You still there?she typed rapidly on her phone.
A voice, deep and male and full of static, came on his radio. “You still there?” it said, speaking Sydney’s typed words.
The man blinked. “Yes?”
“Get your bloody ass down here,” it said as Sydney typed, as if someone in charge downstairs was summoning him.
