The Conspiracy of Us (The Conspiracy of Us 1)

The guard peered at me dubiously from behind unruly brows that hung down into his eyes. I gave him a condescending smile.

Jack told him in Turkish that I was only in town for the night, and that I was very religious and wanted to see some of the Christian frescoes. “You can let us in, can’t you?” I said, batting my eyelashes until I realized he couldn’t see them behind the sunglasses. I didn’t look enough like her to take them off.

Jack translated, and the guard responded gruffly, scratching his mustache. I held my breath. The guard reached into his pocket.

I grabbed Jack’s arm, ready to run, but he put a steadying hand over mine and nodded to the guard’s hand. A cell phone.

“He wants a picture for his daughter,” Jack said. “And an autograph.”

I let out a breath through my teeth, and smiled nervously for the photo. We’d be long gone by the time his daughter told him I was a fake.

“Let’s go inside,” I said pointedly. Jack spoke to the guard, and he unlocked the doors.

I shivered as we stepped over the threshold. As warm as the night was, the inside of the building was cold in that way stone structures sometimes are, like they don’t want to let warmth in.

The guard followed us. That wasn’t part of the plan.

His excited chatter echoed in the cavernous space, and Jack shrugged hopelessly and translated. When Istanbul was sacked by Sultan Mehmed in the fifteenth century, he was so awestruck by the Hagia Sophia that, rather than destroying it, he converted what had been a church into a mosque. Since it became a museum in the 1930s, restorations had uncovered some of the Christian murals that had been plastered over with Islamic art, so both were represented.

We crossed the threshold into the central room, and my eyes were drawn upward. As huge as the Hagia Sophia looked from the outside, it was nothing compared with the inside. The dome was so high above us, and so wide open, I felt dizzy. The largest cathedral in the world for almost a thousand years, the guard said.

Like the rest of Istanbul, you could tell it was a crossroads. The spears of moonlight through the windows glinted off a mural of Jesus edged in gold leaf, and above it, giant circular medallions adorned with golden Arabic letters looked too new and modern in the ancient building, like someone had Photoshopped them on. I pushed my sunglasses onto the top of my head to get a better look at a second story running along the sides of the main nave, barely visible through high archways.

The guard turned back around and I smiled at him, but he frowned.

My sunglasses. I shoved them back onto my face, but his hand was already moving to his radio. In a blink, Jack had his hand to the guard’s neck. He crumpled to the floor.

“What did you do?” I whispered.

Jack lowered him to the floor. “Nothing permanent. He’ll wake up with a headache in ten minutes. Let’s go.”

Without the guard’s voice, it was eerily quiet, making the empty space seem even more cavernous. I slipped out of my flip-flops and dangled them from my fingers so they wouldn’t clap against the floor and give us away, and we hurried along the dark edge of the museum.

“So what is Fitz’s curated collection?” Even my whisper seemed to echo.

“He must have put together some pieces. Here.” Jack stopped by an information board listing the current exhibitions. “First floor . . . Ming Dynasty Bronzes. Probably not.”

I ran my finger down the board to keep my place in the low light. “Art deco, Japanese calligraphy . . .”

“What about that one?” Jack said over my shoulder, and his breath stirred my hair. My neck tingled, and I ignored it.

“France in the Napoleonic Era? Seems more like we’d be looking for ancient Greek stuff.”

“Look.” Jack reached across me to point at the board, just below where I’d been looking.

“Curated by volunteer docent Emerson Fitzpatrick.” I scanned the rest of the listing. “North gallery.”

CHAPTER 24

We ran by the passed-out guard and up a wide, dark flight of stairs. I stumbled, and Jack grabbed my arm to steady me, and then his hand traveled down to mine and closed around it.

“Would he really have left something important in such a public place?” I whispered. I turned my hand to meet his and our fingers threaded together, a warm spot in the dark. Our footsteps synced as we ran up the steps.

“If it’s something the Circle’s interested in, leaving it in plain sight might be the best way to hide it,” Jack whispered. “They’ve already checked the collections of every known museum in the world. He could have slipped something new in after they checked this one. It’s genius, actually.”

“If we can figure out which thing from the collection he’s talking about.” A faint light shone ahead, and we emerged on the secondstory balcony I’d seen from the ground. I took my hand back, and it felt cold. “They’re looking for other stuff about the mandate, right? Like, other books?”

“Or artwork with a new mandate or something more about this one inscribed on it . . . It could be anything. And for all we know, this is something different from the mandates entirely.”

Jack nodded his head left, and I went right. The only illumination was moonlight streaming in from the windows overhead, so I had to lean close to see what was in the glass case on each pillar and on the matching informative plaque. A porcelain bust, a decorative plate, a necklace.

“Anything?” Jack’s whisper echoed in the quiet.

“No.” After the next few pieces, I let out a frustrated sigh. “How are we supposed to know—” I stopped short.

On the next plaque, in the bottom right corner, was something that hadn’t been on any of the others. “What the . . .”

Jack hurried across the room, his steps hushed.

“What?” he whispered. He leaned close, studying the thick gold band on a pillar under the glass. But it wasn’t the bracelet I was interested in.

“That symbol,” I said.

He squinted at the plaque, and I remembered something. I still had my house keys in my bag, and a tiny key-chain flashlight on them. That would have been useful this whole time.

“What is it?” Jack said again. In response, I plucked my locket from my chest. I shone the light on it, then on the plaque.

There, on the plaque for item J-13, Copper Bracelet, was the symbol from my locket. I’d always thought it looked like a Celtic knot, but I’d never seen this exact one anywhere else—until now.