They met on the train. He was watching the scenery go rolling by, and she was slamming into the outside of the window, coat and hair streaming in the wind, hat somehow affixed to her head, the cable of a grappling hook in one hand and a black metal bird in the other. She saw him, and her features lit up in surprise and, a heartbeat later, recognition, an expression he hadn't seen in a long time. Then she swung away and vanished, followed by a dark shape.
Perhaps it was that moment of seeing and knowing him, or maybe it had just been too many nights since he had gotten himself into trouble. But when she came sprinting up the aisle of the train car, a burly man in some kind of tactical jumpsuit close on her heels, he stuck out an arm and clotheslined her pursuer.
"Much obliged," she said. "But now we both need an exit strategy."
Thus, as the train clattered over the next bridge, and the ravine opened beneath them:
"I'm not sure this hang glider is built for two," he yelled.
"Me neither." And then they jumped.
"I'm Carmen," she said.
"Neal."
It wasn't until he met Ivy and Zack that he realized how much he had missed that frank enjoyment of the unsophisticated. True, it was root beer they tossed back while watching the game, and Zack preferred to nosh on peanut-butter cups instead of deviled ham during a stakeout, and he couldn't quite believe that Peter had ever been that young. But the urbane, francophonic Neal Caffrey needed that counterbalance to keep himself honest — or, well, to Neal Caffrey levels of honest, anyway.
They kept moving after the train escape until they reached Berlin and stumbled into the rental that Player had booked on Brandenbergische Strasse, whereupon they slept on foam mats for nine hours. Then they went out to retrieve ice cream for breakfast, and returning to the temporary safe house, they got down to the serious business of trading stories. Team Red had passed through Lyon on their way to Poitiers, and in amid all the tourist snaps, Ivy had gotten a great candid photo of Carmen, standing atop the stonework of the Roman amphitheatre, overlooking the city with the breeze swaying her coat just a little to the side. Zack groused good-naturedly about putting up with Carmen spending hours in the multilingual bookstores around the Place Bellecour, looking for a birthday gift for Player. Ivy recounted with rapture her discovery of what the Lyonnais called "un américain," a sandwich made by stuffing fried potatoes and burger meat together in a sub roll, and how good the hot dogs had been — which, being bread and sausage in France, was less surprising in retrospect. Neal told them of the first time he had passed through Lyon, a brisk midwinter day when he had crossed a bridge over the Rhône and heard explosions in the distance, which turned out to be New Year's firecrackers in the Chinatown that he suddenly discovered Lyon possessed. And he told them about passing through again for the Fête des Lumières, when every public square in town seemed to be done up with lights in all the most vibrant colors. And he took special pains to mention the candy store on the Rue Victor Hugo, on the way to the Place Carnot, making Zack pull his own hair in half-serious frustration over missing out on jelly beans. Neal left out that he had been there with Alex, on their way to Copenhagen for the music box. This wasn't the day for memories like that. It was much better to listen to Player on speakerphone, enthusing about how Lyon had been Lugdunum in the days when London was Londinium and Paris was Lutetia Parisiorum, and then having to explain to Carmen, whose upbringing didn't include too many movies, his joke about "What have the Romans ever done for us?!".
Before Lyon, their last stop had been Takayama, in the Gifu prefecture of the big island Honshu. Carmen had brought back a sarubobo doll, a faceless tchotchke of red and black fabric which Ivy insisted was a cat while Zack maintained it must be a monkey.
"So, tell me," Neal said. "How did Zack survive Japan if he can't eat fish?"
Zack tapped his forehead in a clever idea gesture. "Wholesale Pocky," he declared.
They had endless photos of the Ghibli-esque countryside and the historic quarter of Takayama (according to Player, "One of the many places in Japan that calls itself Little Kyoto"). Neal figured that he should warn them about guarding the evidence of where they had been, but that conversation could wait. Higher priority at the moment was hot chocolate at the Café Einstein.
That night, back at their rental flat, Carmen said to Neal, "You seem to be taking the idea of a secret society of thieves on board pretty easily."
"VILE might be the missing puzzle piece of my first long con," he said.
"Vincent Adler?" Carmen asked.
"Who? Oh, Mr. Ponzi!" Zack yelped.
Neal said, his mind flickering over those early memories of New York, "There was a two-year gap in Adler's life story that we never could fill in. Before he went to university, he was totally off the grid. We never learned what he did then, not when we cased him before we tried the job, and not when I worked as his right-hand man. Even the FBI came up with just about nothing. After he died, a few informants gave the feds a couple rumors, but that's it."
Ivy asked, "You think he was training with VILE?"
Carmen observed, "Stealing a whole U-boat filled with priceless art would be about their speed. And we don't have much data on any VILE operatives who graduated that long ago." She paused, thinking back to her own escape from VILE's island lair. "White-collar crime is where the real money is," she said, as though quoting someone.
"I just wish," Player said over the speakerphone, "that we knew why VILE was so interested in replica movie props. First a ZF-1 from The Fifth Element, and now this little bird that dreams are made of. I think the next one is in Northern Europe, but I'm still trying to break the encryption on their work order."
"Never under-estimate the value of a good forgery," Neal said. When the others looked puzzled, he elaborated, "People don't pay for a rock. They pay for a story. Authenticity is one way to tie a story to an object, but it's not the only way. The first time I — allegedly — made off with a small fortune, it was the stamp collection of the real-estate mogul Pierce Inverarity, and his real pride was his book of forgeries." That had been his first big heist with Matt Keller, another chapter of history that he would rather not revisit. Gunfire and forged stamps, the bookends of his life with Keller.
They busied themselves with maps and travel guides and debates about what movie Carmen had to see next, until Player broke in with an "Ah-ha!" that made the phone jump a bit on the table. "It's a replica of John Hammond's walking stick from Jurassic Park, and pack your bags, because it will be in Copenhagen two days from now."
"Amber in Copenhagen," Neal muttered to himself. "It must be fate."
Player sent the details of the replica and its showing at the Danske Filminstitut's museum to Carmen's laptop. Neal watched as her features set in determination, with a dash of wryness in one eyebrow.
There would be another train in the morning, ten hours to Copenhagen via Hamburg. Zack and Ivy had conked out in the other room, Player had actually logged off, and Neal was restless. He tried going over the probable scene of the impending crime, but his focus drifted before he had finished even the publicly-available data. He skimmed the notices of other museums near their destination. The National Gallery had a Haustenberg. For a while, he was lost in recollections of his earliest cases with Peter, back to the days before Adler had returned, when Kate was still alive. He paged through the exhibitions on offer at the film institute, noted a special series on cult classics and, upon seeing the details, felt another wave of nostalgia rush in before the first had faded.
Carmen was up, too, pouring water into an electric kettle in the compact kitchenette. "Herbal tea?"
"Sounds great," Neal said.
Neither of them spoke until the water had boiled. Then, as Neal was fetching a pair of mugs from the cupboard, Carmen said, "I noticed there's a Haustenberg in the National Gallery. Is it one of yours?"
Neal chuckled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Just how much did VILE have on me?"
"Enough in the library for me to write a term paper," Carmen told him. "Shadow-san was even more blank than usual when I read it. I wonder ... what he thought about me picking a thief who switched sides."
"I did what, you say?"
Carmen waggled an index finger. "Now now. Whatever you did for your own ends, you still put men behind bars. VILE doesn't see shades of gray, just that you had a ... an epic bromance with the law."
"Touché," Neal said. He stirred his tea bag with its little string, then glanced up to find Carmen staring out the window. Wistfully. "All right," he said, "who is she?"
Carmen looked back at him with a little well spotted quirk to her lips. Not bothering with a "how did you guess" or anything like that, she spoke the name simply and directly. "Julia."
He though about asking "Interpol?" but then demurred. "Hey, I get it," he said instead. "She understands you. Or you have the sense that she can. That's a rare prize, and it can change everything."
"Not a lot of chance that it would work out."
"Working out isn't what love is famous for," Neal said. "A friend of mine told me that every con gets their heart broken, once. I was too lost in love for any saying about it to have meaning, at the time."
"Were they right?"
"Maybe. I broke my heart twice, but —" He flashed his best grin. "I'm special."
Now it was Carmen's turn to laugh briefly on the surface.
Neal sipped his herbal tea. For something random out of a box, it wasn't half bad. "It doesn't have to end well," he said, "to be worthwhile."
To that, Carmen said nothing.
Neal suggested, "You should buy her flowers."
"What?"
"Come on, red roses from you would be perfect, and you know it."
Her chuckle this time seemed to originate from a place a little deeper than before.
"And," Neal continued, "you should tell her the truth. Give her information about VILE. As much as you can, that doesn't jeopardize your plans for foiling their next jobs by bringing the authorities in underfoot."
"They wouldn't believe me."
They — now it wasn't about Julia, but her partner and her boss. "Probably not," Neal confirmed. "But the day will come when they wished they had, and that's a good card to have in your hand."
Carmen nodded, considering this.
Neal figured he should keep the mood a bit lighter. He tilted his head to indicate the next room. "Do you think you'll be leading them back to Boston any time soon?"
"Oh, if VILE wants to steal the duckling monument. Or if they get too bad a craving for the banh mi of Dorchester. Why? Would you like us to bring a special souvenir for someone?"
"It's not that far from Manhattan. And I couldn't help seeing one of the movies in the cult-classic exhibit and thinking that we might have to exit through the gift shop."
"Duly noted." Carmen looked out the window again. "I guess if we couldn't handle the bittersweet, we should have picked different jobs. But what other job would take people like us?"
"Well, now, that depends on what transferable skills these people like us have," Neal replied, smiling.
Carmen gulped the rest of her tea and clumped the mug firmly down upon the counter. "We are the heroes of the age," she declared. His look must have signaled a do you really mean that, because she went on, "Lawmakers can be bought, but thieves are never content. Barons and bankers inherit their status, while we fight to earn every last florin. We live the dream of a world without borders, where every culture is a treasure. It's in our blood that paint is emotion, the law is unjust and children deserve better."
She stood, leaned toward him and reached out a hand to offer a fist bump. "Wear hats, be gay," she suggested.
Neal shrugged into a lean, made a fist and tapped it against hers. "Do crimes."
* * *
"This is Burke."
"Suit! Priority A-1!"
"Mozzie, this is not a good time."
"Time is relative! And hold on, because life is about to get all ... wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey."
"Honey, what is it?"
"El, I've got Mozzie on the line, and —"
"Two kids just rang the doorbell at my safe house and ran away leaving a doughnut box, and inside was Tiles of Fire IV: The Resurrection Tile!"
"You won't believe this, sir, but Carmen Sandiego is livestreaming a speedrun."
"What?" Chase Devineaux rose in his bed. "I do not understand these words your generation insists on using."
"My apologies, sir." Julia Argent adjusted her glasses, though she did not need to, and consulted her ACME data-pad. "Carmen Sandiego is broadcasting from an unknown location while she plays a video game. People are watching and pledging money for a charity, a trans-friendly youth center in Raleigh, North Carolina."
"Eyungh." He slumped. He and Julia had both come to believe that Carmen was, according to her own principles at least, trying to frustrate the efforts of some other criminal agency. But the Chief was not inclined to find anything moral in the actions of Carmen Sandiego. This made for tense conditions in the office — which, for Chase right now, was a hospital room. The night terrors had ebbed, but his fine motor control was still returning. "What game is she playing?" After he said it, he wanted to kick himself for the inadvertent double meaning.
"MathNet: Global Edition. It is an adventure game intended to teach children mathematics and geography by having them play detectives using math skills to solve mysteries around the world. Judging by its TV Tropes page, it has considerable nostalgia value in a certain age group."
Chase sighed. "Why could it not have been Super Mario?"
"Listen to this, sir!" Julia tapped an icon and turned her data-pad screen to face him.
Carmen Sandiego was speaking from a webcam feed in the upper-right corner of the display.
"Well done, gumshoes! We've just passed 85% of our goal. And while I try to color this map with the four crayons, I'd just like to — oop, another question in the chat. Did I play this as a child? No, I didn't even know about it until a friend started going on about making an emulator just to play it. ... Was my childhood "deprived"? Let's just say I've got my fair share of issues, and I haven't been back to my home town in a long time."
Julia interposed: "She's been playing for over an hour, but we haven't been able to get a lock on her coordinates."
Carmen was speaking again: "I think I see what you mean, though. Nothing's a big mood quite like the edutainment of yesteryear, right? It reminds us of exploring the world as children, when we met its wonders first and hadn't yet learned all the ways people are awful to each other. And so it makes us yearn for a world as safe as the one we believed it to be." Chase watched her eyes dart to the side. Wherever in the world she was, behind shutters or in natural night, she was reading another message from a fan. "'Nostalgia for an informed innocence.' I like that. All right, we've unlocked the next level —"
The scanner crew had cleared the box and given it to her with a report that was both brief and, for all practical purposes, exhaustive. No explosives, no electronics. Origin unknown. Addressee: Agent Julia, ACME.
She brushed aside the straw, which smelled of fields in springtime, and withdrew the bouquet of red roses.
Artificial, of course, read the tag. But this way they'll keep while you're off running around the world.
Julia did not want to think about how long it had been since anyone had made a gesture that ... considerate. So, she allocated herself ten seconds for that, and then resolutely removed the other item from the box.
It was a book. Hardback, a little yellowed. The cover proclaimed it to tell the story of Great Art Crimes of History. A stamp inside the cover indicated that it had been sold from the collection of a small liberal-arts college during a bankruptcy liquidation, brought on thanks to embezzlement by the trustees. Midway into the book was a bookmark, or rather, a postcard — an old one, showing the Louvre before the glass pyramid business — slipped neatly into Chapter 13. On the back of the postcard, in the same handwriting as the bouquet tag: Wish you were here.
Julia studied the two pages that had enclosed the card. They described the triumphant return of a stolen masterpiece, an event Julia knew well, but she had never seen these photographs of the excited crowd. She studied the faces of the spectators.
Impossible.
They would have to test the book. Find other copies. Prove that this image had been doctored, and how.
Wherever in the world she might be, Carmen Sandiego was probably not in Paris — and she certainly hadn't been there in 1914.
* * *
Spring had been delayed, and now summer was on the verge of crowding it out, but in this brief interval, the early afternoon was just about perfect for taking lunch on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History. So, Peter and Mozzie were doing exactly that.
"Sprouts," Peter said, unwrapping his sandwich.
Mozzie was sprinkling sesame seeds over his General Gau's crickets. "What's that, old chap?"
"There are sprouts on my sandwich," Peter said. "And hummus."
"Good for you," Mozzie said, though whether he meant it as encouragement, a statement of nutritional value or both was not quite clear in his tone.
"I just don't understand the world any more. And —" he raised a hand, "— before you lay into me with some 'the wise man knows that he knows nothing' routine, I've been to that coffeehouse before."
"Far be it for me to give my friend advice he could get from a stock-photo sunrise."
"Much appreciated." Peter separated the two halves of his sandwich and took a hefty bite out of one. After chasing it with a gulp of iced tea, he said, "I can't stop feeling like I'm one of the skeletons on display in there."
"You're a specimen of charismatic megafauna that the crowds flock to see, rushing past the humble Pikaia gracilens?"
"Very funny. I just ..." He shook the ice in his tea. "We're raising a kid. In a world that's a lot scarier than I ever really believed it to be. And three or four times a day, I find myself wondering if I even belong at the Bureau any longer, or if I"m just staying because I can't leave it to the wolves."
"You could always join me in the exciting life of managing a driver-owned electric rideshare service and ... et cetera."
"I could, couldn't I?" He looked at Mozzie, just a bit of the old gleam in his eye. "Have you heard of anyone new entering the white-hat hacking scene?"
"I'd say I could neither confirm nor deny, but now I want to know where you're going with this."
"Last week, someone broke into a revenge-porn website and replaced it with an endless loop of Bob Ross videos. Four days ago, I got a call from Mike Shattuck at NYPD, saying they'd been given chat logs for a 'Men's Rights Movement' group that was planning — well, let's just say that whoever handed those logs over might have saved lives."
"And you think someone behind a keyboard is standing up for the innocent?"
"I've been going over a lot of case reports, and my nose is itching. Yeah, somebody wants to do good, and they don't mind showing off when they do it."
"I'll pass that — uh oh, eleven o'clock."
Peter turned and saw the man approaching them. He was older, wearing a light windbreaker over a plaid button-down shirt. Mozzie thought, suddenly, irrationally, that he looked like the grandfather he had always wanted.
"Hi," the man said. "Are either of you the Dentist of Detroit?"
Peter recovered first and responded, in his best Brooks Brothers neutral, "Who wants to know?"
"I guess it's for a consult, you might say," the man told them, handing over the slim leather ID case he carried.
Peter flipped it open. "Graham O'Brien," he read.
"That's me. I have a request for the Dentist, from the Doctor."