The plan was a house of cards, and they all knew it.
The incident room buzzed with a frenetic, grim energy. Thorne divided his team into two streams: Overt and Shadow.
The Overt team would do exactly what any police force would do upon receiving a credible threat to a priceless artifact. They would swarm the Goldsmiths' Hall. They would upgrade security, install additional cameras, perform overt armed patrols. They would make it look, to anyone watching, like a fortress.
The Shadow team—smaller, smarter, and under Thorne's direct command—would do the opposite. They would create holes. A faulty lock on a service entrance. A blind spot in the camera coverage near the display case for the Aethelred Diadem, just wide enough for a determined thief. They would seed the environment with trackers—not just on the replica diadem that would replace the real one in the display, but in the lining of the case itself, in the floor mats, in the air vents. Chloe was coordinating a spiderweb of digital and physical surveillance, her face lit by the glow of four monitors.
Elara watched, feeling like an interloper. Her role had shifted from consultant to essential bait. Sandys was writing this for her. She was the audience of one he required.
"He'll see through it," she said, not for the first time. She stood before the map of the Goldsmiths' Hall and the Old Bailey, the two formidable buildings facing each other like stone adversaries across the narrow width of Old Bailey street. "He has military-grade reconnaissance training. He'll spot your Shadow team a mile off."
"He's meant to," Thorne said, not looking up from a schematic. He was marking sightlines with a red pen. "We're not hiding them. We're showing him a plausible weakness. A story he'll believe. We're the clumsy police, trying to be clever and failing. He expects that. What he won't expect…" He circled a service tunnel on the map, an old coal delivery route that ran beneath the street, connecting the basements of several buildings. "…is that we know about this. City works closed it in the 1980s. It's not on any public schematic. But it's there. And it comes up into a disused custodial closet in the Goldsmiths' Hall, ten feet from the display room."
Elara's eyes widened. "You're creating a stage for him, but you're building a trapdoor under it."
"He wants to perform at the Old Bailey," Thorne said, finally meeting her gaze. His eyes were hard, focused. "We can't let him get anywhere near it. The second he has the diadem, we take him down in the Hall. No chase. No public spectacle. End of story."
It was clean. It was smart. And it felt, to Elara, like a script Sandys had already read.
Her phone chimed. Another email. Same garbled sender.
The team froze. Chloe gave a quick nod. "It's clean. No malware. Just text."
Thorne leaned over her shoulder as she opened it.
Dr. Vance,
Predictable. The overt show of force is a feint. I count seven new 'security personnel' with poor tailoring and obvious earpieces. The blind spot by the eastern display column is particularly artless. I appreciate the effort, but you must understand: the weakness must be earned, not donated.
The diadem will be taken from the stronghold, not the gift shop. The judgement must be rendered in the seat of judgement. Do not insult the narrative by trying to rewrite the second act.
The thief is already chosen. The peas are in his boots. He just doesn't know it yet.
- L.
A cold dread, deeper than any she'd felt before, seeped into Elara's bones. He wasn't just ahead of them. He was reviewing their performance. And he'd rejected their set design.
"He's not going for the Hall," she whispered. "Or he is, but not in the way we think. 'The thief is already chosen.' He has an accomplice. Or a pawn. Someone inside."
Thorne slammed a fist on the table. "Chloe! I want full backgrounds on every single person inside the Goldsmiths' Hall. Curators, cleaners, caterers for the event, security guards—especially the existing security, not our people. Now!"
The room erupted into a new frenzy. Elara stepped back, the noise fading into a buzz. She read the email again. 'The peas are in his boots.' The chorister was tortured by walking on peas until he fell.
Who was walking in metaphorical pain right now? Someone compelled. Someone under pressure.
Her thoughts flew to Professor Finch, pressured into authenticating the dagger. Sandys didn't just kill; he recruited, he coerced, he created dependencies.
"It's not an employee," she said suddenly. Her voice cut through the chatter. "It's someone with a vice. A debt. Something Sandys can hold over them. Finch had a collector's obsession, a hunger for rare objects. Sandys fed it, then turned it against him. Who connected to the Hall is desperate? Not for money, necessarily. For absolution? For a fix? For protection?"
Thorne's eyes lit with understanding. "Get me the incident reports. Anyone connected to the Hall or the exhibit with a recent arrest, a lawsuit, a scandal. Anyone vulnerable."
The pieces were moving again, but the clock was ticking faster. Sandys had seen their play and called their bluff. Tomorrow at midday, he wasn't just planning a theft. He was planning a full-scale theatrical production, and he'd just informed them they were in the wrong theatre.
They had twelve hours to find a needle in a city of eight million—a needle who didn't yet know he was already threaded.