The Family had been correct to task him with overseeing her mission; and in a way, Hailey, Nick, and Lindwell had done him a favor by taking her out of the picture, saving him the effort of having to do the job himself. The Family didn’t respond well to disappointment. No doubt, Patricia would have been a worthy adversary, and part of him regretted that he’d never have the opportunity to test his training against hers. He knew, from Patricia’s dossier, that she’d been through hell as a child in Russia; but if skill was the end result of torment, he had no doubt that his own scars would put hers to shame. The tangled, knotted web of suffering that had honed him was not the sort of thing that could be encapsulated in a dossier.

Curt turned back toward the staging area, listening as Lindwell began to describe what the girl—Hailey—had found. It was clear the FBI agent was still far away from understanding what he was investigating; to him, this was still about the Gardner Museum, and he had no way of processing the new information.

But Curt was beginning to understand what Patricia had missed. Nick had set things in motion, trying to fence the eagle that had gone missing for so long; but now things had moved beyond that narrative. It appeared as though their “loose ends” were putting pieces together in ways that Patricia—and the family—had not foreseen.

Hailey seemed to be a step ahead of all of them, which made Curt’s job even easier. She wasn’t going to go to ground; if anything, she was going to take more risks now that she was so close to solving the puzzle.

Hailey had a head start; but Curt had threads to follow. If the Coast Guard found the eagle, Curt would be able to retrieve it from them with minimal effort. If they didn’t, the Family would dredge the harbor themselves. But in the meantime, Curt had a more immediate path: earlier that evening, the Family’s contacts at the BPD had intercepted a 911 call from a cell phone pinged to the Tea Party Museum that would provide direction.

Hailey was smart, and obviously determined. If Curt could mimic her and likewise figure out where the pieces fit—he could turn Patricia’s failure into the Family’s success.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Four

The sky above Beacon Street had gone from pitch black to gunmetal gray by the time Hailey found the professor where he’d told them he’d be waiting, when she and Nick had first left his office twenty minutes earlier: poised in moderately drunken repose, an overcoat now slung over his skintight, near-neon cycling outfit, his back against the wrought-iron fence that ran the length of the Boston Common behind him, just a few feet from his shiny, professional-grade bicycle, which was chained to a parking meter by the curb.