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

“Your sister,” he said when Val allowed him to get a word in, “does not say much.”

“Nat’s the introspective one. Know what I mean?” Val gave her an accusing look. “Ditched me after high school and ran off to a fancy Ivy League school in DC. Got so edumacated she don’t even talk right anymore.” The anymore sounded like any-mo-ah. “But Nat’s my research queen. She traced Kidd’s treasure to that cemetery in Flatbush. And she’s the one who traced the Bavarian Thalers to the Czech Republic.” Val slapped Talia’s arm again. “Nat. Say somethin’. Don’t be rude.”

Talia swallowed. “I—”

“See. Introspective. That’s my little Nattie-pie.”

A second mention of the Bavarian Thalers shifted Atan’s focus. “So, you think you have found Maximillian’s gold.”

“We don’t think. We know.” Val nudged Talia. “Show him, Nat.”

The nickname didn’t bother Talia all that much. She had been ribbing Val, but all this nudging and slapping scraped at her patience, character or not. She tried not to growl. “Show him what, Valerie?”

Val lowered her chin. “The coin, Sis. You know, the one I gave you for safekeeping?”

Maybe Val’s mind worked on a different level. Or maybe she’d purposely failed to tell Talia the coin she’d flipped across the table on the jet would play a principal role in the con.

Talia dug the coin out of her purse, grateful she still carried it. The fake gold made a lovely tink as she set it on the copper table.

Atan’s nostrils flared. “The Duchess Maria?” However ugly and malformed the engraving of the Bohemian duke’s niece-wife looked to Talia, Atan treated it like the image of a beauty queen. He drew a monocle from his breast pocket and held the coin to his eye. “It cannot be.”

“Oh, it is, sweetums,” Val said. “It most certainly is.”

He let the monocle fall. “And there are more?”

“Thousands, Mr. Atan.” Talia kept her diction slow and precise to cover the Ivy League New Yorker backstory Val had given her. “Perhaps tens of thousands, depending on how many coins history and the elements have stripped away. My research confirms Maximillian the Great had at least forty thousand minted.”

A notion—perhaps a suspicion—seemed to strike the Albanian. He placed the coin on the table. “If you have the location, why do you need my help?”

“We don’t,” Val said.

“But . . . you need me to move them, correct?”

“Ver-ry good. This guy don’t miss a trick, right, Nat.”

Talia conjured up a smile. “No, he doesn’t.”

“But, ladies, you could simply report this find—enlist the help of the Czech authorities.”

Val laughed, ending it with a snort. “Okay, maybe he’s not such a smart cookie after all. Treasure hunters and governments don’t get along, Mr. Atan. Everyone knows this. Take the South African kayaker who found the Boer Krugerrands, for instance. This law-abiding zero finds billions in gold and dutifully reports every penny to the authorities.” She smacked Talia’s arm again. “Nat, tell the man how much the kayaker paddled away with.”

Talia had never heard of the Boer Krugerrands, but Val had given her a clue—the same way a fortune-teller’s shill passed information. Law-abiding zero. “Nothing,” she said with absolute confidence.

Atan nodded. “Yes, I followed this affair. A shame.”

“Same thing happened to us,” Val said. “The press got wind of it, and once the cat was out the bag, the government pounced. State, local, federal. Taxes, fees, tariffs. The Historic Preservation Act. We barely got outta there with our Louis Vuittons.”

Talia glanced at her, beginning to find the rhythm of her academic-sister-to-the-flamboyant-Brooklyn-girl character. “I don’t wear Louis Vuitton.”

“Ain’t that the truth.” Val touched Atan’s hand. “The Boer Krugerrands, the Odyssey Pieces of Eight, Kidd’s Gold—when governments get involved, treasure hunters lose. We’re looking to move these coins quietly on multiple continents. You’re our guy for Eastern Europe and Asia.”

Atan scratched his chin, eyes on the coin.

Val tapped his hand twice with her finger before drawing back. “You’ll be paid, of course.”

The hard set of Atan’s jaw worried Talia. Val liked to flirt with the edge of believability to throw off a mark. She might have flirted too much.

“I keep my collection here in the office,” Atan said, “along with a few tools for authentication. May I take a closer look at your sample?”

Talia pushed back from the table. “By all means.” Finn had told them he needed less than three minutes to breach the keypad lock on the coin room door. She and Val had given him five. She threw Finn a hint over the comms. “Your coin collection is one of the reasons we came to you. We’d love to see it.”

Before she finished the statement, her earpiece buzzed with a desperate whisper from the thief. “Negative. Negative. Stall him. I haven’t made the switch.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-

NINE

ATAN INVESTMENTS

PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC

TO FINN’SKNOWLEDGE, no real thief had ever used a Hollywood hacker box—the kind with analog numbers rolling through pass codes at a thousand numbers a second to defeat keypad locks. Sure, a few YouTubers had built working replicas, but such boxes were overkill.

The keypad lock was the biggest con in the security industry, including its prettier cousin—the biometric lock. Experts called them security theater. Thieves adored them. High-end tumbler and bolt locks were bump key–proof and unpickable. Defeating mechanical cipher locks required a cutting torch. But keypad locks were electric, and therefore vulnerable. To defeat them, a pro need only carry a multi-tool and a stun gun.

Or so Finn had thought. Atan’s lock shattered this illusion.

The keypad lock on the coin room door looked like a medium-range model—decent internal shielding but nothing more than a sixty-second job. The hardest part should have been popping off the cover and removing the shielding to get a better hit with the stun gun.

All keypads appeared inaccessible from the outside. But Finn knew where to look for the hidden screws. He found them behind a piece of aluminum trim, easily pried loose with his flathead. Thirty seconds later, the cover was off and the guts exposed. He checked the