Free Heist Society by Ally Carter Page A

night.
    When the tape resumed, Kat leaned close and squinted. “How long until the generators kicked on?”
    “Forty-five seconds,” Gabrielle answered.
    “Not bad,” Hale said.
    “For Taccone’s system or our guy?” Gabrielle asked.
    He shrugged as if to say it was a toss-up.
    “Everything else went black, but this room . . .” Kat pointed to the vaultlike space that filled the screen. “This room must be on a separate feed from the rest of the house. This room kept recording.” Kat glanced from the screen to the blueprints. “Looks like it’s directly under . . .”
    But her voice trailed off as, on screen, water began dripping from the gallery ceiling.
    “The moat,” they all finished in unison.
    “Cool.” Hale’s voice was pure awe. “Benjamin Franklin with a side of Loch Ness Monster.”
    “Eww!” Gabrielle exclaimed. “That moat is disgusting. Seriously. No way would I go near it.”
    “From what I could see, there were at least five Old Masters in that room, Gabs,” Hale said. “You’d go near it.”
    “Maybe,” Gabrielle admitted. “But if he cut a hole in the ceiling of a room under a moat , then why isn’t it flooded?”
    Kat turned away, not needing to see the screen to know what was happening. “He rode a mini-submarine in from the lake and then sealed it to the room’s roof. After that, all he had to do was open the hatch, cut the hole, and . . . A mini submarine, ” Kat said again with a shake of her head, as if trying to cast aside a terrible case of déjà vu.
    Her cousin looked at her. “How do you know?”
    “Because that’s what Dad did.” A silence fell over them as Kat stood and walked to the windows that overlooked the quiet streets. “Two years ago. Venice. It was—”
    “Beautiful,” Hale said, but Kat had another word in mind.
    “Risky.”
    “Well,” Hale said slowly, “at least now we know why your dad is Taccone’s leading suspect.”
    “ Only suspect,” Gabrielle corrected.
    On the screen, a masked man in a plain black wet suit was easing through the fresh hole in the gallery roof, moving with silent purpose. There were no hurried or wasted steps as he neutralized the pressure switches on the individual paintings and removed them from the wall, packed each carefully in a watertight case, and slid them through the hole in the ceiling and into the craft Kat knew was waiting in the moat outside.
    “Taccone said that when the power went out, someone looped the video feed to the guard’s station, so no one saw a thing. What we’re watching is from an off-site backup system that our guy either didn’t know about or missed.” Kat shrugged. “However it happened, no one even knew those paintings were gone until Taccone got home from a business trip.”
    “What kind of business is he in?” Gabrielle asked.
    “The business of being incredibly scary,” Kat answered at the same time Hale simply said, “Evil.”
    The girls looked at him. When he spoke again, his voice was soft. “Arturo Taccone is in the business of evil.”
    Something about the way he turned back to the TV told Kat there was something he wasn’t telling her—information obtained from private investigators or corporate gossips, from Manhattan socialites or high-ranking Italian officials. They were the kinds of stories told in smoke-filled rooms over expensive Cuban cigars.
    But some stories make your hands shake. Sometimes too many details make you fidget in the dark. So Kat didn’t ask Hale to tell the tales. She looked at him, watched him toss the remote on the table and say, “So maybe I’m going to handcuff myself to you the next time you decide to take a stroll.”
    “I was fine,” Kat insisted, desperate for him to understand. “He . . . likes me. I amuse him. He thinks I’m”—Kat hadn’t realized until now—“like him.”
    “You’re not,” Hale blurted. For the first time in hours he looked into her eyes. “You are not like Arturo Taccone.”
    There were times