Disclaimer: If I owned Carmen et al, I could finally buy that Juice Tiger I've always wanted.
Carmen walked to work the next morning, bleary-eyed and dejected. She had not slept well. One panic attack was an isolated incident, troubling but easily dismissed. Two… two and a half if she was honest with herself…was verging on disorder. The irony of it was so sad, it was nearly comical. Carmen Sandiego- star pupil of a Zen master, considered to be the very definition of grace under pressure- unable to control her own nerves.
As she walked through ACME's Art Deco corridors of burnished brass and green marble, Carmen contemplated her options. With each passing day, San Francisco seemed less like her beloved home, and more like a trap to be escaped. She was plagued by a desire to hop the next plane to anywhere so strong it was almost a physical itch. Was it too late to call the Paris office and tell them she'd take the instructor job after all? Or maybe she just needed a vacation. A bit of backpacking in the thin air of Nepal to raise her flagging spirits. Lounging on the beach in Rio and drinking caipirinhas until she forgot her own name was equally tempting...
Or you could just stay right where you are and try to get some help, a small, quiet voice inside her prompted. It was not a voice she listened to often.
One thing was for certain, the search for her parents needed to be put on hold, perhaps indefinitely. Carmen had known the investigation might uncover unpleasant truths, but she had not signed up for whatever the hell this was.
Colleagues gathered around the water cooler waved and called out their good mornings, which she echoed back absently. Ginger-haired Doctor Kaplan was among them; Carmen took care to avoid his gaze. The temptation to finally admit she was not well, had not really ever been well, was too close to the surface. One sympathetic glance and her carefully constructed façade would fold like the house of cards it really was.
Carmen was jolted out of her melancholy reverie by the gruff baritone of the Inspector; "Just the girl I wanted to see this morning. Come on in, got something I think you're gonna like." He clapped her on the back with easy enthusiasm and whisked her through the open door.
Intrigued, Carmen took a seat opposite her boss. "What is it? A new case?"
"Not exactly," he replied, unusually bemused. "Got a call from a Mr. Cornelius Van Vleet- hoity-toity fella, curator of the National Gallery over in DC. Seems they just installed some foolproof multi-million dollar security system there. He's looking for an ex-con to test it out, wants to make sure it was worth all that hard-earned taxpayer money."
Carmen sniffed. In her experience things that claimed to be foolproof usually turned out to be anything but. "Who did you have in mind? I hear Diamond Jane made parole, she's fairly harmless."
"Actually, I recommended you," the older man answered, eyes twinkling.
"Me?" Carmen gasped, incredulous. "But, I'm not a thief, Inspector. I'm a detective."
"And a damn fine one, too," he complimented. "Look, you understand how these crooks think, Carmen. You got a knack for getting inside their heads. You're natural police, you feel it in here," he tapped gently over his heart. "If anyone can find a flaw in this system, it's you."
Carmen let the offer sink in. To be the cause of a crime instead of the solution to one was against everything she had been trained to do as an ACME detective. It made her feel strangely guilty, yet her curiosity was thoroughly, deliciously piqued. "So, Mr. Van Vleet wants to hire me to break into the National Gallery, is that correct?"
"Yup. That's what the man wants. And he's willing to pay handsomely for it, too." He passed her a scrap of yellow legal paper on which was written a tidy sum; nearly half her yearly ACME salary. "And if you do manage to break in, he'll double it."
While the money was certainly nice, Carmen, hard up for a challenge, probably would have done it for free. "This is so unusual," she blushed, feeling a bit embarrassed. "I guess I'm game."
Her boss gave her a hearty grin. " 'Atta girl. Can't have my best detective cooped up here with nothing to do. You got that caged panther look about you lately, makes a man nervous," he confessed.
The Inspector ran through the rest of the logistics, and told her to contact the office in Dupont Circle as soon as she arrived. Seems like Van Vleet wanted her there ASAP. If she moved very quickly, she could just catch the next flight out of SFO. Carmen dashed back to her office and started tossing files, surveillance equipment and security specs into her briefcase. She fetched the battered suitcase she kept packed and ready to go from where it had been languishing in a dusty corner. The young woman caressed the worn leather and murmured sweetly, "It's been too long, far too long." Carmen checked her watch and felt her heart skip a beat with pleasure. She would make the next flight after all.
In the space of fifteen minutes, her world had turned on a dime.
Carmen was nearly out the door when a breathless and exasperated Chief caught up to her. He seemed to be actually sweating motor oil. "Carmen! Wait! I've had a big break on our case!"
"No time, Chief. I'm headed to Washington. We'll talk about it when I get back, ok?"
"But..but," he panted, clunking down the marble steps after her, "I remembered last night that there's also a Harrods in Buenos Aires. And I called them and they…."
Carmen only half-heard him; the majority of her attention was focused on flagging down an approaching taxi. "SFO, please," she instructed the driver. "The case can wait, Chief. But my plane will not."
The Chief, obviously put out, whined, "What can you possibly be up to in DC that is more important than finding your family?"
Carmen turned to him, sapphire eyes alight with mischief. "I'm off to steal a national treasure," she told her friend enigmatically. Pausing only to plant a chaste kiss on his steel cheek, she climbed in the cab and told the driver to step on it.
It was the last time she saw him before it all went pear-shaped.
Carmen sat alone in a nearly empty Chinese restaurant and stared intently out the window, as she had for the last five afternoons. The food was mediocre and the decor hadn't been updated since the Eisenhower administration, but Lucky Kitchen's corner table had a prize view of the staff entrance to the National Art Gallery. Carmen had won the proprietress over with her flawless Cantonese and heavy tips, allowing her to sit undisturbed and well…case the joint…as they say.
Unfortunately, ACME's greatest detective was no closer to figuring out how to pull off this caper than when she took the assignment three weeks ago. To begin with, Washington was a terrible place for a heist; between the Capitol police, the Secret Service, the FBI, the military, ACME and a veritable Whitman's sampler of security and museum guards, there were just too many cops per capita. Carmen supposed it explained why she had only been sent here once before- fraud at the IRS. And that had been an inside job, not a robbery.
So confident was he in his security's infallibility, Van Vleet had offered to give her a personal tour and share the system specs with her when she first arrived. But Carmen politely turned him down; to have the job handicapped for her removed half the fun. So, she took the regular museum tour like everyone else and did what any aspiring thief would do; slipped into Van Vleet's office while he was at lunch and retrieved the plans from his desk drawer herself. She was in and out before his secretary returned from the breakroom. Child's play.
It had taken some time, but she had gathered all the information she needed. Blueprints of the Gallery and the Metro system obtained quite legally from an engaging afternoon at the National Archives. The details of the security system. But what she didn't have was a way into the building.
The genius of the museum's defenses was that all the exterior windows and doors were rigged to set off an alarm if tampered with. Said alarm would bring down the full wrath of the city's overabundance of law enforcement. If that alarm went off when she broke in, it wouldn't leave her enough time to escape. By contrast, the building's internal security was remarkably weak. None of the paintings or interior doors had been alarmed. And Van Vleet had foolishly reduced the number of night guards when the new system was installed.
Security cameras she could easily hack by tapping into the feed. Carmen supposed there was a way to disable the alarm system, but she didn't have the skills. Now she understood why crooks preferred to work in gangs; if she were a real thief instead of just pretending to be one, she'd just hire some brilliant technological genius to do it for her. Unfortunately, collaboration was not on the table for this endeavor.
Despite these myriad obstacles, Carmen was nowhere near ready to admit defeat. Unlike the aborted search for her parents, this did not feel like a fool's errand. There was a way into this museum, she could feel it in her bones. "Natural police," the Inspector had called her. Carmen wondered if the mirror of that statement wasn't also true. What was it Maelstrom had called her? "A thief at heart." Well, maybe she was.
Carmen sighed and picked at her now cold lo mein. If she couldn't cause machine error, she'd have to rely on human error. Every day this week she had watched the museum staff depart for the night through the side entrance. There was only one guard stationed there and it was always the same balding, middle-aged man. Right now he was flirting with a pretty blonde assistant curator on the nation's dime. The cleaning crew arrived precisely at 6:25 p.m., all women, mostly African-American. The guard only gave their badges a cursory examination before waving them through. And then he started chatting up the blonde again, picking right up where he left off. Typical, the would-be thief thought to herself. Reminds me of that pendejo O'Leary…..
Carmen's ruby lips broke into a broad smile and she laughed out loud, the first good laugh she'd had in months. People saw but they did not observe. She knew how she was going to break into the Gallery. And she had just the painting in mind.
Author's Note: "Natural police" is not my phrase, it's an expression used on HBO's The Wire. Which if you haven't seen, go out and watch it now and then write me some WOEICS/Wire crossover fic. Pretty please?