The Roman Affair: Stories from the Bean There Cafe, #1

Chapter One

Asolid line of police officers dressed in riot gear, carrying shields and batons stood on the pavement between angry protesters and the object of their ire. The Penzick Oil Company's building was a hundred-storey, glass-and-steel edifice that rose to a point towering a thousand feet above the New York City streets. Protesters had been gathered outside the building for a month now. They demanded justice after one of the company's off-shore drilling rigs exploded, filling the Chukcki Sea with five million barrels of crude oil and destroying the ecosystem off the northern coast of Alaska.

A janitor, dressed in a baggy blue jumpsuit with the name Joe embroidered above the left breast started up the steps to the building, tugging a janitor's cart loaded down with mops and brooms, cleaning supplies, and a large rubbish bin. He slipped in between the police and the protesters. The janitor headed into the lobby, a twelve-storey, glass-enclosed atrium with fully-grown trees and lush tropical flowers. Reaching the bank of lifts located at the rear of the soaring space, he called a high-speed car that whisked him up to the seventy-eighth floor in just a matter of seconds.

When he reached the correct floor, he pushed the cart out and glanced both ways down the thickly-carpeted hallway. Once the lift's doors closed, he moved towards a set of mahogany double doors, tugging the cart along behind him. The doors were labelled with an understated brass plaque that read Penzick Oil.

He entered a hushed office and smiled vaguely at the vapid, empty-headed bleach-blonde sitting behind a chest-high curved receptionist's desk. The receptionist looked up at the janitor. She pressed a button beneath the desk and a rumbling buzz and loud click indicated that the door to the right of the desk was now unlocked. The janitor headed through it, letting it fall closed behind him with a soft thud. A solid thunk indicated the lock had re-engaged. He walked down a long corridor that was lined with floor-to-ceiling windows, displaying a breath-taking view of the southern tip of Manhattan Island on his right. A row of wood-and-glass doors were on the left.

He stopped in front of the last door labelled with another brass plaque; this one read Martin Penzick. The janitor glanced down the hallway and pretended to speak to someone just out of sight of the camera on the ceiling. He reached into a pocket of his jumpsuit, palming a small snapgun and torsion wrench before withdrawing a set of keys. He turned to face the door, the keys obvious in his hand, and inserted the wrench into the lock. Before he could use it, however, the door bumped open with a delicate squeak and he smirked. I love this guy, he muttered beneath his breath. Penzick was so arrogant, so trusting of his reputation, that he left his private office unlocked while he was out of the country.

The janitor entered the office, replacing the keys, snapgun, and torsion wrench in his pockets, and pushing the cart before him. He knew from prior entry that there wasn't a camera in the room but wasn't certain if there was a hidden motion detector tucked away somewhere else. He didn't see anything obvious, so he approached the desk, pushing the cart out of the way.

The desk was a huge steel and glass span that sat perpendicular to another wall of windows. These windows had a view of Battery Park and the Hudson River. He used a remote control he found on the desk to lower the blinds over the windows and went to the opposite wall. Running his fingers underneath the bottom-right edge of a large Joan Miró painting, he found a release and pressed it. The painting swung away from the wall, revealing a small safe secured with a biometric scanner. Reaching into a pocket of the jumpsuit, he took out a thin latex glove and slipped it on, taking care not to distort the fingerprints on the tips.

He pressed his hand against the biometric scanner and held his breath. It had been difficult getting Penzick's prints during the three weeks he'd worked as a janitor. Penzick rarely touched anything that he left laying about. Quick action had secured a Coke can with a complete set of prints. The janitor had made ultra-thin copies of the fingerprints with a 3-D printer and pasted them onto the glove, but had never had a chance to test them until now.

The scanner turned a cheerful green colour and he grinned in triumph. The safe's door sprang open, revealing a stack of folders, a thick wad of cash, and a single microchip in a protective plastic sleeve. Ignoring the folders and the cash, he grabbed the chip and secreted it away in the pocket of his jumpsuit, then closed and relocked the safe.

Hold it right there!

The janitor whipped his head around to the side and was confronted with the sight of an armed security guard who was clutching a snub-nosed matte-black revolver. He blinked, his heart racing inside his chest. Apparently there had been an alarm of some sort.

Whoa, he said in a thick New Jersey accent. I ain't doing nothing Mr Penzick didn't ask me to.

Is that so? the guard responded. Back up away from the safe and let's call Mr Penzick.

Okay, okay. Take it easy, Mac. The janitor-turned-thief took a few steps backward, his hands held up at shoulder-height, attention focussed on the gun in the security guard's hands. He soon fetched up against the desk and felt along its edge until he located a letter opener shaped like a miniature sword. Grasping it tightly in one hand, he continued to study the guard.

The guard stepped farther into the office, still holding the gun as he moved toward an occasional table located near the windows. There was a telephone on the table. The guard lowered his eyes, taking his attention off the janitor for a split-second. The janitor attacked.

He threw the letter opener at the guard. The miniature sword wasn't well-balanced, but it flew straight enough. He had put enough force into the throw that its point sank into the guard's biceps an inch or two. The guard screamed in pain and surprise, dropped the gun, and whirled towards the thief, clutching the wound, which was now slowly seeping blood.

The thief smiled contritely and then propelled a roundhouse kick at the guard's head. It connected with bone-cracking force. The guard staggered to one knee, and the thief fled the room, grabbing a small backpack out of the rubbish bin of the cart, and pressing a button to kill the cameras in the hall as he raced out of the office. He ran down the hall and dove through one of the many doors that lined it.

Thankfully, this office was empty. He hid in the kneehole of a solid wood desk and stripped off the janitor's jumpsuit, glasses, and greying wig and moustache. From the backpack, he withdrew a skirt suit, a brunette wig, and four-inch court shoes. The thief, now an attractive woman in her early thirties, had just settled in the executive chair behind the desk when the door flew open.

The guard, still bleeding from the wound in his arm and with a definite purpling of his cheekbone glared at her. Did you see anyone come running down this hallway? he panted. His eyes moved carefully over the room, no doubt looking for places that might be hiding a grey-haired, moustachioed workman from New Jersey. The gun was still clutched in his hand though he was keeping it lowered, pressed tightly against his leg.

The thief forced herself to react like a normal woman would to the sight of a bleeding, bruised man who was holding a gun in his hand. Her eyes sprang wide open and she whipped her head back and forth, her mouth forming a moue of fright. N-n-no, she stuttered, eyes now fixed on the gun.

The guard stared at her for a moment longer and then nodded shallowly. Well, if you see a guy in a workman's uniform, please call building security.

I will. I-is he dangerous?

Yes, ma'am. You should lock this door after I leave. The guard turned and left, closing the door behind him. The thief released a breath and took a moment to stuff the janitor's disguise into the backpack at her feet. Then she withdrew a slim mobile phone from one of the pockets of her suit jacket. She used the mobile to connect to the Internet and then entered the URL of a site dedicated to interior design, supposedly hosted by Columbia University. She slipped the chip she'd stolen from Penzick's safe into a slot on the side of the phone, and used a custom-built programme. It quickly encrypted the information on the chip—bank account numbers, passwords, and other financial information. Once the information was encrypted, she wrote out a message and attached the newly-coded files before posting it to the forum. Her employer, the very man who had organized the protests outside the building, was paying her handsomely to provide him with Martin Penzick's personal and business financial information so another thief—this one with computer skills—could empty the accounts, donating the bulk of the money to wildlife and ecological charities.

No more than three minutes later, the mobile buzzed covertly. She glanced at the screen and grinned at the number of zeroes following the dollar sign displayed there. Then she slipped both the chip and her mobile into her suit, stuffed the backpack containing the janitor's disguise into an empty FedEx box, addressed the box to a letter drop in Rome, and stepped into the corridor. The door to Penzick's office was standing wide open, and she could see a cluster of security guards inside. A few of the other doors lining the hallway were open and the inhabitants of those offices were clustered in the hall, chatting quietly amongst themselves.

The thief turned and went through the secure door that led into the reception area. With a quick smile and a wave to the blonde behind the desk, the thief left Penzick Financial Services and headed back to the lifts.

When she arrived in the atrium, she paused briefly to deposit the FedEx package into the collection box and left the lobby. She descended to street level and shoved her way past the police and protesters, ignoring the venomous shouts hurled at her. She turned right once she passed the building and headed down an alley that ran alongside it.

She surfaced from the opposite end of the alley a few moments later and moved quickly across the street to the subway entrance at Broad and Exchange Place. She hopped aboard the J train headed towards Jamaica, Queens, and then onto a train that took her straight to JFK airport. Three hours later, she was sitting in a first class seat aboard an Air France red-eye flight to Rome's da Vinci airport, sipping champagne, and enjoying a quiet celebratory moment of being fifteen million dollars richer than she had been just hours before.

Chapter Two

The plane landed in Rome nine hours later, and the thief shed her chameleon skin, slipping comfortably back into her real identity, that of Aurelia Elam. Aurelia disembarked, collected her luggage, and hailed a taxi from the queue in front of the terminal. "Piazza di Santa Cecilia, per favore ," she said to the driver and settled back for the fifteen-minute ride to her own neighbourhood, the Trastevere rione .

The rione was located to the south-east of Vatican City, across the Tiber River from most of Rome. It was distinctly working-class and filled with ancient homes and narrow, winding, labyrinthine streets paved with cobblestones. It was a place where tourists didn't often venture and those who did, frequently got lost. Aurelia had called it home for more than twenty years, first as a pre-pubescent pickpocket living in abandoned buildings, then as a thief-in-training while living with her mentor in a house at the foot of the Gianicolo Hill, and now as a thief-for-hire. She owned two entire city blocks across from the Santa Cecilia convent and church, as well as a nightclub and two restaurants in the more tourist-friendly area surrounding the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon.

The building in which Aurelia lived was a nondescript, crumbling, yellow plaster structure in the middle of a group of similar buildings. The ground floor had been given over to a greengrocer, a butcher, and a bakery, and the next four floors were split into sixteen mid-sized apartments. She had the top floor to herself and enjoyed exclusive access to a rooftop garden, planted with fruit trees and a miniature French knot garden that was bordered with clipped boxwood hedges and filled with lavender, culinary herbs, and delicate, shell-pink roses. The flat was her sanctuary, inviolate and secret.

The sun had just peeked over the roof of the convent across from Aurelia's building, flooding its front façade with golden light and stirring the building's other inhabitants. As she climbed to the top floor, Aurelia could hear morning news programs on the residents' televisions as they woke and readied themselves for the day ahead. Most of them would be headed off to work in offices and shops scattered across the city. The smell of frying bread and brewing coffee set Aurelia's stomach rumbling, and she promised herself a trip to her favourite café for her own breakfast. But first, she had to unpack and spend some time with her treasures.

Besides the usual rooms—kitchen, dining, living, bath, and bed—her flat contained a large, windowless room with temperature and moisture controls on a panel next to a thick steel door. Inside the room, in glass display cases, resting on velvet pillows, or hung in UV-proof glass frames, were treasures from all aeons of history. Seashell jewellery over 100,000 years old sat side by side with a leather shoe made for a woman's right foot three thousand years before Christ's birth. On the wall hung paintings by Caravaggio, Monet, Jackson Pollock, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Tiffany objects d'arte, bottles of rare wines, silver and gold reliquaries filled with saints' bones, and chests of Spanish bullion taken from the bottom of the Caribbean Sea covered every horizontal surface and quite a bit of the floor as well.

It was into this room Aurelia went immediately after unpacking her suitcases. A retina scanner and a constantly-shifting numerical code sent directly to her mobile were the only ways to unlock the door to her Dragon's Hoard. A soughing sound accompanied her into the room as the temperature and environmental controls kicked on immediately. She smiled to herself, happy that all was as it should be. She pushed closed the door behind her and locked it securely. She threaded her way carefully through two of the eight missing Fabergé eggs, early copies of handwritten, illuminated Bibles, and an alabaster Lotus Chalice, taken from Tut's tomb by Howard Carter himself. Touching each object, she remembered the thrill of seeing it for the first time, the challenge of planning the theft, and the actual execution of her plans. These memories were more valuable to her than the actual objects.

After spending an hour or so with her treasures, she retreated to her bedroom and laid out clothing for the day, took a shower, got dressed, and left her flat, headed to the Testaccio rione for a cornetto alla mandorla and a cappuccino. She brought with her a tablet loaded with nearly a million dollars worth of the most advanced anti-hacker software available. It was the only computer she owned and it never