He was fresh off his third tour of Afghanistan when she met him at a bar in London. He was to start his service at the Tower of London the following week. He was proud as a peacock, drunk and happy, out for a last fun night with his mates before his new post began.
She’d sashayed by in a black dress cut to her navel and nearly to her waist in the back, and since he wasn’t dead, he’d noticed.
They drank together all night. And the next they’d talked. And the next. After three months of dating, he asked her to move in.
She rarely enjoyed playing the role of honeypot, but this was different. Grant was an intelligent man, a handsome man, a generous lover. He treated her as an equal, not as a plaything. She liked him.
Not loved. That would be too dangerous. But it wasn’t the worst assignment she’d ever had.
Beefeaters lived on-site in the Tower of London, in apartments that dated back to the 1300s. Their families lived with them, wives and children. There was a pub on-site, a doctor, a chaplain, everything the men and their families could possibly need. The women often worked outside the walls, but the men, they had no need to leave.
When Grant proposed, Kitsune accepted both the stunning cushion-cut diamond and the offer to move inside the Tower walls.
Working from the inside out was her favorite way to do business.
She knew there were background checks being done. She had a healthy respect for the British; they took nothing at face value, especially a stranger in their midst. She’d heard only the American FBI was more stringent.
She used an identity as close to her real world as she dared. Julia Hornsby was the expatriated daughter of a Scottish father and a Japanese mother. She’d studied art history at the University of Leeds, hadn’t, however, done anything of note with her degree, and was currently underemployed in a truly disturbing modern art gallery in Notting Hill.
Grant, for all his military expertise, was a trusting soul, but the members of Her Majesty’s government were not. To enhance her cover, Julia quit the Notting Hill dead-end job, rented gallery space near Peckham, filled it with some cheap art she bought at Tesco, and went to work there dutifully each weekday. Her flat nearby was barely furnished but stacked full of large, sweeping Jackson Pollockesque canvasses in various stages of finality. To anyone checking, she was an unsuccessful, undiscovered, not terribly motivated artist, which explained her woeful lack of income, or tax files.
It was thin, but enough. Mulvaney knew his stuff. The background checked out, and she was approved to move into the Tower with Thornton.
Once she was in, her plan was straightforward. The crown jewels were protected by some of the finest security in the world. It ran by computer, with redundancies to make sure if one system failed, another would replace it seamlessly. All she needed to do was hack into the computers, cause a systemic failure, wait for the secondary security to pop online, disable it as well, then use Grant’s physical keys to access the exhibit, and wrench the diamond free of the crown.
Stealing the diamond wasn’t her primary issue—it was difficult but not impossible. Getting out of the Tower with the diamond, now that would take some finesse. They would know something was happening when their security systems went down. She needed a distraction.
The grounds were patrolled constantly. After dark, the stoic beefeaters traded their blue-and-red uniforms and bearskin caps for dark fatigues and automatic weapons. They might as well have been on patrol in Afghanistan.
Being a part of the fabric of life within the Tower was the only chance she had to escape. If she was recognized, knew the daily password to leave the gated walls, she had a chance. She would need to sicken herself, something dreadful that would be beyond the abilities of the Tower’s doctor, something that necessitated a trip to the hospital. Perhaps even make them think she’d been hurt by the thieves in order to make their escape.