The Final Cut (A Brit in the FBI 1)

“I sure hope you know what you’re doing. Give me the Maglite, you need both hands for this.”

“If I screw up, we’ll find out soon enough. Aim the light here. Good.”

He heard Tommy Magallan, the head of London’s bomb disposal unit, saying over and over, his voice soft and firm, No hesitation; hesitation means you die.

He worked with his mobile for a moment, activated the jamming signal, waited ten seconds for it to take effect, and pried off the faceplate with the screwdriver on his Swiss Army knife.

He set the faceplate aside, looked closely at the guts of the detonator. It was attached to a seven-by-twelve-inch gray paper-wrapped brick, most likely C-4, a couple of pounds of it, enough to take down a large section of the museum, not to mention destroy the priceless crown jewels.

He counted three, two, one, and snipped the small piece of wire running to the ringer. He used the flat of the blade to edge the battery away from the phone, and time started again.

Safe.

The ticking continued, unnerving and insistent. But that was all right. He knew it wasn’t coming from the bomb.

He and Mike pushed out from under the vitrine case and stood. He saw her face was pale, but she hadn’t panicked. He righted the queen mother’s crown, lifted it to see a small metronome in the shape of a skeleton.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

He used his finger to stop its motion.

Silence.

Where had he seen this skeleton before? He’d had very little sleep for more than a day, his adrenaline was still doing the rumba, and he wasn’t firing on all cylinders. But what? Then it came to him.

He said in the silent room, “The Fox.”

She was staring at the skeleton. “What fox?”

He handed her the small plastic skeleton.

“What is this?”

“A metronome—a toy, really—meant to scare the crap out of us. It worked, too. When I saw the detonator was a cell-phone trigger, well, fact is, they don’t tick. I knew there was something else in the room making that noise. She’s a devious bitch. She set it up right under the crown.”

He shook his head and laughed. “Oh, you clever, clever girl.”

Mike said, “Who set it up? I’m clever? All I did was hold the Maglite.”

“An excellent job you did, too. Do you remember seeing Dr. Browning when you came upstairs?”

Her brain clicked into place. She said slowly, “No, I didn’t see her.”

Nicholas said, “Because she wasn’t in the comm center. Our curator stole the real Koh-i-Noor diamond ten minutes ago, right out from under our noses.”

“Browning? But that doesn’t make sense, I mean—what’s the fox?”

“It’s not a what, it’s a who. I had no idea the Fox was a woman.”

“Nicholas, has the gas gotten to you? You’re not making sense.”

He said, “The Fox is one of the most notorious jewel thieves in the world. Remember I told you I put together a short list of thieves who had the skill to pull off a job this big, and we wanted to see if they had any ties to the Anatoly crime family? Only a handful of thieves operate at this level, and the Fox is one of them. No one has any idea who he—excuse me, she—is. But now we know.”

“You’re saying the Fox is Victoria Browning? I’ve got to alert everyone, she might still be in the museum, we have to catch her.” She got Zachery on her comms unit, could practically see his brain compute what had happened, then heard him go into action. She switched off. “She can’t be far. It’s only been ten minutes.”

Nicholas said, “She’s long gone, and you know it. I’ll wager the video will show Paulie or Louisa freeing the diamond to fingerprint it, she whacked them on the head, rolled the canisters of gas into the comm center, and waltzed right out the Met’s front door, everything timed to the second.”

Mike said, “Maybe the gas is getting to me, because if I hear you right, you’re saying the real Koh-i-Noor was in the crown, snug in its case, this whole time? It hadn’t been replaced with one of the replicas?”