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

held the gun over the tray of coins. “Copper alloys. Tungsten cores. This baby can detect them all at the atomic level. No fake coin can beat it. True blue. No exceptions.” He pressed the scanner’s trigger. The device hummed and issued a pronounced boop. He showed Talia the readout.

GOLD 97.1%.

Talia scrunched up her nose. “But you said . . .”

Darcy gave her another abracadabra wink. “There are two variables in this equation, yes? The coin and the XRF gun. If you cannot fake the coin . . .”

“Fake the gun.” Talia laughed. “I love it. Okay. We’re meeting Atan in a couple of hours. How do we get the fake gun into his hands?”

Finn cracked his knuckles. “Leave that to me.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-

SIX

ST. VITUS CATHEDRAL

PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

THEKNIGHT’SEYESWEREALLWRONG.

Finn cocked his head, hoping a change of angle might make a difference. It didn’t.

The life-size statue of St. Wenceslas hovered above a tomb in St. Vitus Cathedral, stepping out from a fresco as if stepping out of the past. He wore a knight’s armor and carried a spear and shield, but his eyes did not match such warlike adornments.

A knight, in Finn’s book, ought to be confident and hard. The eyes of this ancient Bohemian king were neither. The artist had given him a soulful look, generous and conciliatory, almost tearful. Those eyes said, What’s mine is yours. By all means, stab me in the heart and pillage my castle at your leisure. According to a pamphlet, the king’s brother had done exactly that.

Finn shook his head and dropped the pamphlet on the stack. A little past the table, however, his eyes fell on something more to his liking—a dark hall guarded by an iron-bar gate with a tempting sign.

THISWAYTOTHEBOHEMIANCROWNJEWELS

An invitation if ever Finn had seen one. Near closing time, few security personnel lingered in the cathedral. Most were out policing the surrounding compound—Prague Castle, among the largest hilltop fortresses in the world. Sure, the gate was locked, and Lexan cases and cameras would protect the jewels. Nothing he couldn’t handle. He clenched and unclenched his fists. “Hmm.”

“Finn.” Tyler came in clear over the SATCOM link. “Your GPS tracker is stationary. What’s the holdup?”

“Just . . . taking in the sights.”

“I see. Since you’ve got time to kill, pick me up a few souvenirs.”

“I was just thinking about that.” Finn took one last look at the Crown Jewel sign and walked off. “But you’d only give ’em away, like that dewy-eyed King Wenceslas.”

“Say again?”

“Nothing.”

A thigh-crippling two hundred eighty-seven steps brought Finn to the top of the cathedral’s southern bell tower, where the giant Zikmund Bell and its lesser cousins looked out over Prague. A young boy pressed himself back against the wall beneath one of the windows as Finn arrived.

Children never shrank away from Finn. But he remembered the business suit he wore—not among his usual fashion choices. To a kid in jeans too short for growing legs and a grease-stained flannel shirt, a guy in an expensive suit must look like a mobster or a stockbroker. In Prague the two were interchangeable.

“Relax, kid. The suit’s just a costume.” He glanced around. “You lose your parents or something?”

The boy gave him a blank stare.

“Where is your papa?” Finn held up a hand, palm down, even with his own head. “You know. Papa?” He moved the hand a little lower. “Mama?”

The kid shook his head.

“Right. You went walkabout on your own. I get that. My mom preferred it when I made myself scarce during the day, too, especially when her boyfriends came around.”

The kid seemed to accept this, or at least the idea that Finn was not some authority figure there to drag him out of the cathedral. He turned to the window, trying—and failing—to pull himself up by the limestone sill.

“You want to see out?”

That question got through loud and clear. The kid nodded and held up his arms. He was light, even for his size. Finn set him on the sill and guarded his waist. “Nice view, huh?”

The kid said nothing, eyes roaming the fortress below and the city of Prague beyond.

“Finn.” It was Tyler again. “The girls are approaching the dock. Time to move.”

“Yeah. I see them.”

The Vltava River split the city. Val and Talia had taken the runabout rather than brave the traffic on the winding, medieval streets. A municipal dock put them within walking distance of Atan’s brokerage, occupying the top floor of a seventeenth-century building at the base of the fortress hill. The building’s red tile roof looked a little close for Finn’s comfort.

“Darcy, are you sure about this jump?”

“Naturellement. The tower is fifty meters above the courtyard—almost two hundred above Atan’s office, yes? That is six times higher than Russell Powell’s jump from the dome of Paul’s.” After a pause, she added, “And Powell was inside the church.”

“But Powell didn’t have to cover a hundred fifty meters of horizontal distance.” Finn lifted the kid down from the sill and pulled a matte gray wingsuit from his backpack. The kid watched him put it on with mild interest. “Darcy, you didn’t answer the question. Am I going to make this?”

“You will accelerate at nine point eight meters per second, reaching a velocity of thirty-one meters per second in the first fifty meters, generating enough lift to glide and enough force to properly open the chute.”

“I give you a yes or no question, and you spout a bunch of maths. Thanks.”

Finn climbed up into the window, which bought him a great deal more interest from the kid than the wingsuit had. He mustered his sternest schoolmarm look. “Don’t try this at home, kid. Don’t try it here, either. Especially here.”

As he began scaling the aged copper roof to the tower’s peak, Darcy interrupted. “You did not lie to me about your weight, did you?”

“Guys don’t lie about bodyweight.”

“Good. Okay. Safe flight.”

Bodyweight. A chill went down his spine. Finn never lied about his weight. Why would he? His abs were like a riverbed. But he did have a habit of removing the contents