Chasing the White Lion by James Hannibal (best free e book reader .TXT) 📗

into the Jungle network. Stage Two earns us an invitation to Bangkok. And Stage Three—”

“Gets us into a room with the White Lion.” Talia sat back and crossed her arms. “I get it. But if not Bangkok, where are we going right now?”

“Val?” Eddie gave her a Take it away wave.

The grifter rested an elbow on the glossy oak table. “Stage One is the attention getter, elegant enough to raise the right eyebrows but just a taste of things to come.”

“I still say we can do Stage One with a good burglary,” Finn said. “One night. In and out. Leaves us more time for the next two jobs.”

Val rolled her head over like a big sister addressing an annoying little brother. “Did you not hear me say the first job has to be elegant?”

“What I do is elegant.”

“What you do are smash-and-grabs with unnecessarily dangerous showmanship.”

“Hey.” Talia clapped her hands. “Finn, shut up. Val, get back on topic.”

They both quieted down.

Tyler shot her a glance that said Not bad.

After a quick frown, Val tapped the screen’s control tablet. The Stage One balloon in the flowchart expanded and became a picture of silver coins. “This gag is called German Silver.”

“So we’re going to Germany,” Talia said.

“German Silver is not about the location, it’s about the alloy—a cheap alloy used in industrial products.”

Eddie zoomed in on the coins. “Low-level grifters pass these off on auction websites as”—he made air quotes—“100 percent German silver. It’s a play on words. There’s not an ounce of real silver in the coins.”

The whole idea sounded sketchy. Before Talia could protest, Tyler read her mind and waved her off. “We’re not planning to scam people on eBay. I promise.”

Val gave him a thank you nod. “As I said. We have something more elegant in mind—and we’re ramping up the price using gold.” The pile of coins on the screen shrank away, replaced by a painting of an armored Cyrano de Bergerac look-alike, complete with curled mustache. “Meet Maximillian the Great, ruler of Bavaria.”

“A German king,” Talia said. “But we’re not going to Germany.”

Val rolled her eyes. “Would you let that go and listen? Maximillian the Great was a seventeenth-century duke. In the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, he got hitched . . . to Maria, wife number two . . . his niece.” She made a face and shrugged. “It was a different time. To legitimize this union, he had a horde of gold coins minted with her image at a Bohemian mine at the edge of his conquered territory.”

“Let me guess. The coins went missing.”

“Not just missing.” Eddie waved his hanky. “They were wiped off the historical map. A hundred wooden boxes of newly minted coins left the mine in a mule train guarded by twelve hundred Bavarian knights and their soldiers. But this was the Thirty Years’ War. The French and Swedes swept into the valley. Neither the knights nor the gold were ever seen again.”

Lost treasure and lost artifact cons were something of a specialty for Valkyrie, like an old habit. Talia filled in the rest of the blanks. “So we pretend we found these missing gold coins—”

“The Bavarian Thalers,” Eddie said. “The thaler is where the word dollar comes from.”

“Whatever. We pretend we found these thalers, but in an inaccessible location. We throw out a coin or two as proof, and we con our first Jungle mark into helping us dig up the rest.”

Val gave her a condescending smile. “Very good.” She flicked a glittering coin across the table. It had the ring of gold.

Talia caught it and ran a thumb across a crude and unconvincing face imprinted on one side—the Bavarian niece-slash-duchess. “And you expect an experienced criminal to fall for this?” She offered the coin back to Val.

The grifter pushed her hand away. “You go ahead and keep that one.”

Talia did not miss the fact that Val failed to answer her last question. She hadn’t answered the first one, for that matter. “We’re running the German Silver con,” Talia said, pocketing the coin, “using the lost gold of a Bavarian duke. So, if not some town in Germany, where are we going?”

They all answered at once, as if she were a complete and utter noob.

“Prague.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-

FOUR

VILLA VÁCLAV

RIVER VLTAVA

PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

“JUSTONCE”—Talia followed Tyler down a spiral stair that must have dated back to the fourteenth or fifteenth century—“I’d like to see this crew bunk down in a warehouse or a back-alley basement like honest-to-goodness thieves.”

Tyler paused on the bottom step to look up at her, scrunching his forehead. “Why on earth would we do that?” He strolled off into a low passage. “If it helps, we are in a basement.”

“The basement of a castle.”

“The term is baronial hunting lodge.”

“The term is castle.”

The lodge-slash-castle straddled a branch of the River Vltava, which passed through the Czech Republic from north to south. Thus, the passage from the stairs opened into a combination boat dock and garage, entirely covered by the main house. Iron boat gates allowed the river through from both sides.

Looking at the ancient stone dock, Talia imagined Bohemian barons and baronesses arriving under torchlight in unicorn-prowed boats or sneaking away in silent skiffs, depending on the century. But the garage portion had clearly been added in the last decade. The checkered epoxy floor gave it away, as did the halogen lights, electric doors, and aluminum worktables.

She and Tyler crossed an arched bridge, passing over a gray runabout.

Finn met them on the other side. He drew a red LED bulb from the cardboard box in his arms. “Hey, boss, you have any idea how to install these light globes?”

Tyler thrust his chin toward a Mercedes van, rocking on its tires, under the weight of an unseen force. “Ask Mac. Vehicular lighting is his department.”

A hot, acrid scent filled Talia’s nostrils. Near the dock’s wrought-iron gate, Darcy had set up a mad alchemist’s mini-lab. Bags of silver disks and gray powder lay open beside bubbling flasks. The chemist, wearing big orange gloves and