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

a respiratory mask, poured molten metal into ceramic forms.

Talia poked Tyler’s arm. “Is she transmuting lead into gold?”

“Close enough.” He snapped his fingers, as if the joke had reminded him of some important task, and hurried off.

Everyone moved with a sense of urgency and purpose. Everyone seemed to know what to do. Except Talia.

“Yoo-hoo. Over here.”

Talia heard Val’s call but didn’t see her.

“You look like you could use some direction.” The grifter appeared at the door of a dressing room composed of cubicle panels. The red hair was gone, changed to a light golden brown, nowhere near her natural dark color—or what Talia assumed was her natural color. She wore jeans and a pink quilted biker jacket with leopard-print pumps and a matching belt.

“And you look like you could use some fashion sense.”

“Funny. I’ll admit I felt out of place at your little church. But this is a den of thieves. My domain. Better to save the jokes and put that eidetic mind in learning mode.”

The new hair color and the Jersey Shore look were not the only things Talia found strange about Val’s appearance. Her features had changed. Her eyes looked larger, her nose and chin a little smaller. She opened a makeup case and flipped on a lighted mirror, and without so much as a by-your-leave, sat Talia on a stool and dabbed her cheek with cleansing cream.

Talia caught her wrist. “What are you doing?”

“I thought you wanted in on this job.”

She did. For the little girl and her friends. “Yeah. Okay.” Talia let Val go to work.

In short order, Val had Talia’s scant makeup removed and began applying a fresh coat. “We could be sisters, you and I.”

That was a stretch. “Cousins, maybe. Or better yet, aunt and niece.”

“What did I say about saving the jokes? Seriously, I think we could pull it off. You’re an old soul.” Val dropped a hand to her hip. “And I have a youthful face and figure. We could meet in the middle.”

Talia would have nodded if Val hadn’t caught her chin to run a brush across her cheekbones. After reviewing the exchange in her head, Talia drew back. “Wait. Are you saying I don’t have a youthful face and figure?”

“Not at all, darling.”

The makeup application continued, with pointers along the way. Val showed Talia how to change every feature of her face, even her eyes from almond-shaped to round. Satisfied—eventually—she dragged over a rack of clothes and held dresses up to Talia’s shoulders, settling on a short velvety number. “Try this on.”

“No.”

Val sighed and returned the dress to the rack. “Well, we’re going to have to do something. We can’t stick with”—she gestured up and down at Talia’s jeans and blouse—“practical and rugged.”

“Rugged? Now you’re just being mean. What’s going on?”

“Eddie will explain. How’s your Brooklyn accent?”

“Nonexistent.”

“Then you’d better work on it. And then there’s your hair.” Val dug around in a box and brought out a light brown hair swatch. She held it next to Talia’s head, crinkled her nose, and tossed it back. Her next attempt was a little darker but not much.

“I’ll be wearing a wig?”

Val shook her head, trying a third swatch. “Wigs are a dead giveaway if the wind picks up. Dyes are better.”

Talia had never dyed her hair, never in her whole life. “You’re not changing my hair.”

She’d been successful in staving off the dress, but Val stuck to her guns on the hair. “Open your mind, darling. Get into the spirit of the grift. Besides, if I’m not mistaken, Jordan put a target on your back. When you were Vera Novak, did you change your appearance?”

Talia’s puffed-up stance deflated. “No, I didn’t.”

“Then guess what we have to do now.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-

FIVE

VILLA VÁCLAV

RIVER VLTAVA

PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

THENEWHAIRCOLORWASNICE. Val had done good work. But looking at herself in the standing mirror, Talia found it a level of different for which she was not prepared. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The Farm class on disguises had taken less than an afternoon. No one took it seriously, especially not the instructors. Voice changers and masks were a Hollywood joke, not a real thing. The Agency depended on clothing changes, camera evasion, and fake IDs.

With the addition of a skirt, blouse, and jacket combo Val called academic-chic, Talia didn’t look like the same person. But after two assassination attempts, that was the whole point.

Out in the garage, Talia and Val found Eddie arranging keyboards and monitors atop a stack of cargo crates. He turned to see her coming and snapped the fingers of both hands. “Great. You’re ready. Give me a victory pose.”

“A what?” Talia asked.

“This.” Val locked her fingers in Talia’s and raised their hands together, tilting her hips and smiling at the camera in triumph. “Smile, darling.”

Mac unfurled a green screen behind them, and Eddie snapped a picture with his phone. He checked the screen. “Not the best. But it’ll do.”

An instant later, the photo appeared on the largest of the monitors. Talia and Val stood in their odd pose—Val triumphant, Talia less so—with the Brooklyn Bridge behind them. Once she saw the two of them together, Talia understood Val’s earlier comment.

The grifter gave her a friendly-but-a-little-too-forceful shake of the shoulders. “I told you we could be sisters.”

The photo shrank to become the main image in a webzine article. Eddie added a tilted headline.

LOCALTREASUREHUNTERSFINDPIRATEGOLD

The geek made a Ta-da! gesture. “Meet the Macciano Sisters. Long Island’s treasure-hunting queens. The sisters happen to have a meeting on the books with our first mark this evening.”

Talia squinted at the article, reading the first few lines—something about William Kidd’s lost gold. “Our first mark?”

Eddie tried to answer but sneezed into his hanky instead. He tapped the keyboard with his elbow. Another article appeared beside the first, a legitimate news release touting the rapid rise of an Albanian broker in the Czech Republic’s financial sector. The photo was a power shot of a sharply dressed man in his thirties with green stock tickers flowing behind.

Eddie stuffed