Skipper winced.
"Marlene, be a doll and get me another drink?"
"Sure, Skipper, tell me when the big strong men have finished crying together." She replied dryly.
"Thanks." Skipper replied as she left. He didn't feel like a debate, "I had to…" He paused, "The thing about chasing Hans was he'd always make you cross boundaries. Sometimes I was amazed by what the team could achieve, other times I was horrified by what we were driven to do. It finally occurred to me after… you know the operation I'm talking about." Kowalski nodded gravely, and Skipper continued, "Hans has to be stopped, somebody was going to have to do it, but I didn't want to see Private have to do what I did or watch Hans do to him anything like what he did to Marlene. Again."
"Skipper, what did we agree in '44 about you trying to do 'selfless and heroic' stuff? We signed up for this too, we…"
"It wasn't for the team." Skipper snapped, "It was for me. Hans knew the one way to get to me was through the team, and I couldn't take it anymore!" For a moment Kowalski simply sat in shocked silence, "That's the only time anyone's going to hear me say that."
"What's so special about Marlene, then?" Kowalski replied, and for a moment there was an almost jealous note in his voice, "I mean, Hans hurt her most of all, or don't you care about her enough?"
"This is what I started to hate about working with you, Kowalski, you turned everyone with the slightest piece of bad luck into, what did Nigel call it, 'an analogy for Doris'?" Kowalski just glared at him, "I didn't have a choice with Marlene, one day she just turned up climbing through my window demanding what I thought I was up to faking my own death. As far as Hans was concerned I'd cut off all connection to all of you and so had generally left you alone, but the moment someone had reported me and Marlene had been seen together, she'd never be safe again. I thought she could handle it, anyway. I'm not so sure anymore, though. I can see all this running eating away at her, even if she won't admit it. That's why I didn't want you brought into this too."
"You clearly haven't talked to someone confidentially in a while." Kowalski commented. Skipper's expression indicated Kowalski was right.
"So, I heard you're trying to avenge Doris." Skipper changed the subject. Dealing with other people's impossible situations was always easier than dealing with his own. At that moment Marlene returned and pulled up a chair.
"Was." Kowalski replied. "I'm being boxed in on all sides and I figure I've got days before someone shuts me down and comes up with an excuse to put me behind bars. Even Rockgut's turning on me, and he knows exactly where I've buried my skeletons – metaphorical skeletons…"
"Easy, Kowalski, I know you're no murderer."
"You oughta tell that to Private some time." Kowalski muttered. Skipper raised an eyebrow, "Inside joke, you might have heard about the McSlade case, there was kind of a misunderstanding about my part in it. I just don't know what to do about Alius, he's been two steps ahead of me this whole time – and that's the last time you'll hear me say that."
"Don't know what to do except drink yourself into a dishonourable discharge." Marlene replied disapprovingly.
"Actually, I was trying to get my nerve up to storm Alius' fortress while I've got something left to storm with." Kowalski countered. "I just don't know… This whole command thing's never sat well with me, I think of options, I don't choose which one we use. I'm out of even options now, though."
"Kowalski," she began, "sometimes there are cases that don't get solved, sometimes never, no matter how hard you..."
"Marlene, what would you be doing now if less than two months ago you got a call from Skipper saying he was going to be in town for a week and wanted to meet you for lunch. However, the next time you saw him he was lying dead on the floor of a warehouse because the guy who was supposed to be looking out for him - I don't know, me - I'd shot him." Skipper looked uncomfortably away from Marlene.
"Then you wouldn't be alive enough to say that to me now." She replied coldly.
"The game doesn't work like that anymore for us unless you want to go down for murder and bring the rest of the team with you." Kowalski countered. Marlene appeared to agree.
"Well, usually I'm the one who suggests full frontal assault, but since you've already put that on the table and I rejected it, I can't do that." Skipper replied thoughtfully, after a moment, "But if you're really that desperate, I can think of one last card we can play…"
Marlene could tell by the dubiously sane grins as they discussed the far from optimum plan that she'd made the right choice. For Kowalski, the need was obvious, but Skipper hadn't been so far from a collision course these past few years either. Anyway, it was clear to anyone except maybe Skipper and Kowalski that the team needed to be a team. Marlene also knew that was about as close to an 'I told you so' she was going to get considering both parties delicate egos.
"'s beautiful up here, ain' it?" Randy commented, staring out at the Manhattan skyline from the roof of the museum, "An' see, that's the Empire State Building, the tall one right there." He smiled at the brunet next to him. "Best date you've ever been on?" Marlene smiled sweetly back.
"Oui."
"See, this is one of the perks of doin' my job, repairin' roofs." He continued, pulling Marlene a little closer, "I hope you're gonna be stayin' here a while, 'cause New York's a real magical place and…" Marlene shivered, and moved to stand up. "Hey, sweetheart, where are you going?"
"My coat." She replied, "I left it at the bottom of the ladder."
"Yeah, don't want the night watchman spotting that." Randy agreed, "Then it wouldn't be just us up here. I'll go down and get it. You stay right here, keep away from the edges." Marlene nodded and sat back down as Randy disappeared down the ladder to the ground.
The moment her way into the museum after hours was gone, Marlene walked up to the edge of the roof, swung one leg over the edge, then the other. Like a cat she dropped from hanging by her hands to the window sill below, landing silently. The lock on the window took her barely a moment to pick and soon enough she was standing on the museum's top floor. She shut the window silently behind her so there was nothing amiss, grabbed a step ladder and a tarp which were being used in the renovations and walked swiftly past a Monet and towards the service stairs she took down to the basement.
She reviewed the list as her feet pattered down the stairs in the dark. She knew where the guards were, she knew the exact size of every step and how many of them there were – she even knew the owner's names and licence plates of every car in the parking lot and how many parking tickets each one had. She didn't really need the flashlight she shone a few steps ahead of her, but was always ready to turn off. With ten steps to go she paused. She already knew that around the next corner there were two guards stood outside the front of the entrance to the museum's storage rooms. None of the eight items, of which she was going to take two, were on display, nor did their owner ever intend them to be.
According to the plans, there was an air vent right above her head. She set up the step ladder on the tarp, balancing it precariously on the stairs. It was points like these where Marlene knew she was making a deal with fate. All it would take is for her to slip, she might break her neck, she might be caught, but she was betting on the opposite. She climbed the ladder, every step the ladder shivered slightly on the tarp. Marlene stood up straight on the second rung from the top, throwing herself into trust before she could have time to think about it. That was the way she'd always done things, ever since the beginning, but that fraction of an urge to stall was still there. She still didn't know how Skipper had seemingly eliminated it entirely.
Marlene glanced over her shoulder one last time at the stairs behind her before taking out her handbag and removing a small pouch containing what looked like a bunch of oversized mildly misshapen marbles and tipping them down the air vent. They bumped and clanged noisily down the air vent as Marlene folded the ladder and tarp in no apparent hurry and set them along the side of the stairs like they'd been left there by one of the workmen. Marlene heard the little pieces of metal continuing down the metal tunnel and into the heavily guarded storage room down the hall. The effect was almost immediate.
"Do you hear someone in the air vent?" Marlene heard one of the guards ask before there was an all-out charge to get into the room. Marlene heard a few shouts followed by a gunshot, but the metal marbles kept going. Marlene walked lightly down the stairs, turned the corner and walked directly past the distracted guards and into the janitor's closet two doors down. She took a length of what looked like thick wire from her bag and pressed it against the wall forming a large rectangle. She took a lighter from her pocket and lit one end of the wire and averted her eyes.
"He's trying to cut through into the room!" one of the guards shouted in the next room. Marlene just smiled and turned back in time to grab the cut away section of wall and quietly move it to the side before it could fall. That kind of noise might alert them to the fact they were gathered in the wrong room. After all, what kind of a master art thief would leave their brand new stronghold alone in favour of a room that many of them suspected hadn't been opened since 1927?
Marlene stepped through the hole in the wall into the room beyond, once again ignored all the presentation easels displaying largely worthless paintings (though gave the recently booby-trapped door on her right a smug glance) and went straight for the safe at the end of the room. It was an ancient model, easily cracked, that was full of brown paper wrapped paintings that looked like they hadn't been touched since they were donated. Marlene took a bottle of a clear liquid from her bag that looked like clear nail polish and painted a long strip across the tops of the exposed parcels. She gave it a few seconds, then smiled as a greyish tint appeared on some of the papers.
"What do ya know, sometimes Kowalski's science projects work." She mused to herself. At least, she hoped what Kowalski had called "high school chemistry" worked, but the count of what the chemical revealed as the newer parcels (though all of them looked as old as the safe) matched the number she was looking for. She grabbed six of the parcels that tested positive and started back towards the hole in the wall then waited.
The phone rang exactly on time. Marlene couldn't hear the other side of the conversation, only the loud responses of the answering guard, but she knew who the caller was and what he was saying.
"Lieutenant Joey Amberley…? Police headquarters… yes, sir…" He stammered. Joey was an old favourite for decoy impersonations; her accomplice loved doing Australian accents. She also enjoyed causing trouble for him. Marlene remembered the gist of the story he was about to be fed: Joey had been driving by when he noticed a suspicious figure climbing out of an upstairs window, likely in the process of escaping. The guard hung up at that point and with the exception of a single sentry there was a general stampede in the direction of the front. After that it was too easy. Marlene disabled the single guard with a smoke bomb and a blow to the head – she'd barely stopped moving. After that it was a simple matter of keeping out of sight on the way to the near empty parking lot, where she located the licence plate she wanted, hotwired the car and drove casually away. She was three blocks away when the first squad car arrived.
Marlene noticed a squad car behind her when she stopped at the light. When the light turned green, she swerved slightly to avoid another car and protested loudly. Half a block later the police car quietly pulled her over.
"Excuse me, ma'am, can you step out of the car?"
She'd been picked up due to the owner of the car having several outstanding parking tickets. Imagine the officers surprise when they realized they'd just caught an international art thief instead. However, the paintings were missing.