Disclaimer: WOEICS is not mine. But I do own more historical monographs on early american history than I know what to do with.

Author's Note: This is a short chapter, lo siento, amigos. But there's just one more! And it's almost done. :)

Night had fallen over the city. Tourists had returned to their hotels and the government workers to their homes in the suburbs. Outside the museum, monuments glowed an eerie white against a midnight blue sky. In the second floor ladies' room of the National Art Gallery, Carmen Sandiego exchanged the shapeless blue gown of a cleaning lady for the close fitting turtleneck and gloves of a cat burglar. Not really sure of what one wore to pull off a robbery, she had finally decided on basic black, cliché though it was.

Her ruse for gaining access to the Gallery had gone even better than expected. Carmen had shown up two or three minutes after the real cleaning crew had already entered the building. After a few obsequious "por favor Señors" with a little "no habla anglais" thrown in for good measure, the guard had let her in without so much as glance at her ID. Which was almost a pity, because she really spent a lot of time forging her badge to get it just right. While Carmen couldn't travel back in time to undo the damage racism had done to her life, she certainly wouldn't hesitate to use it to her favor in the present.

The last of the cleaning ladies had departed over an hour ago. And the fading shuffle of shoe leather on stone told her the guard had just moved on to the third floor. With a click of a button, a remote antenna installed across the street began broadcasting last night's surveillance footage. The second floor was hers for the next thirty minutes.

Carmen glanced in the bathroom mirror before walking out the door. Her reflection looked more mature, her posture taller, than she had ever remembered. Her cheeks were pale, but her blue eyes glittered like two cut gems, diamond-hard. She placed a black gloved hand on the door but hesitated to push it open. Even though she had been hired to do this, it still felt like the testing of uncharted waters, sailing off the edges of the map. And in that moment, she didn't know if she feared success or failure more.

She who hesitates is lost…..

Something compelled her to leave the safety of her hiding place. The same part of her psyche that drove her to circle the globe chasing criminals and to seek out trouble when it didn't come looking for her. She took one cautious step, then another- expecting to hear alarms, bells, sirens, to be tackled to the floor by burly men. But….no. Silent as the proverbial grave.

Carmen glided along the empty hallways and exhibit rooms with a ghostly grace. Her target, a work by modernist Mark Rothko, was not far off, but she wanted to take her time. The irony alone was a dish worth savoring. She who had grown up with nothing now had the treasures of a nation at her fingertips. The National Art Gallery, her own personal jewel house.

All too soon, she was standing in front of the Rothko. It was hardly the Gallery's showpiece or even the artist's most famous painting. But when she saw it on the museum tour, its rectangles of reddish violet and deep crimson had called to her. There was something about it that spoke to her, something hopeful. And she knew she had to have it. One slight clip of wire and the priceless painting was hers. The simple action filled her with an exquisite rush that she was altogether unprepared for.

It was glorious.

It was intoxicating.

And most of all, it was addictive.

Carmen looked at Rothko's red and nearly felt the painting look into her. Abstract expressionism, she knew, was designed to provoke intense emotion in the viewer; some critics said feelings of rebellion and even nihilism. Red…the color of anger, love, power...yet she felt nothing so pedestrian. Holding the stolen painting in her arms, sheltered in its womb-like embrace, Carmen experienced something that could only be described as second birth.

The art of the theft made her soul catch fire. And she fled the museum, not like a thief in the night, but with the miraculous beauty of a phoenix rising from the flames.