Amazing, how easily Curt could dismiss a half a billion dollars in stolen art. But Patricia knew that, in this instance, Curt wasn’t speaking for himself. The two were of a breed. Hired guns. For more than a decade, she had been drawing a paycheck from the Family, and it had all come to a head in the past twelve hours. So many starts and stops over the years, and finally, she had gotten so close.

First, the fence. It wasn’t the first time one of the many sources involved in the business of “moving” contraband art she had been monitoring—via phone taps, email worms, paid informants—had begun making noises about the reward; after all, the Gardner theft was one of the most famous heists in history, and nearly every middleman, pawnshop owner, and low-level art thief in the Northeast had taken a stab at retrieving the missing stash at one time or another—all ending in various degrees of failure. So as usual, she had been skeptical; but a little digging had allowed her to put enough together to excite the Family—after so many years, the object Mr. Arthur so coveted finally, actually, did appear to have been on the verge of surfacing. But in the warehouse, she’d been dismayed when she’d opened those crates. A half billion in paintings, nothing more.

And then, poor Professor Charles. As the Family had instructed, she had been monitoring him for months, along with a handful of his academic colleagues, for any signs that anyone had stumbled into the Family’s business. She had been shocked to see his recent paper posted on the Reddit board he’d created. It had been easy work excising the attachment before any of his colleagues might have seen it, and even easier work gaining access to his home, computer, and bed. If she’d moved any slower, and he’d have published that paper, there was no telling what his discovery might have led to, and how the Family might have reacted. The image he’d uncovered from within John Hancock’s trunk might not have been enough, alone, to inspire the sort of connective thinking that might threaten the Family’s grand plan.

“Maybe so,” she finally responded, now also watching the two swans. “But the paintings and the professor… There are so many threads, but the knot is beginning to unravel. It won’t be long now.”