The meeting was at the corner of 23rd and 5th Avenue, at the Flatiron Plaza. Nate gave himself an hour to get there, just in case, but still had a full twenty minutes to kill when he arrived. Hungry, he walked up to Madison Square Eats, got himself a couple of cheese slices, then carried his afternoon breakfast back to the rendezvous, trying to keep his expectations to a minimum. He didn’t know Sully. Just because he’d hung out with Sam, that didn’t automatically make him trustworthy. Nate promised himself that he wouldn’t agree to anything until he’d thought it through.
He has Captain Elcano’s journal, though! The thought made Nate’s heart beat faster. That journal was probably worth a million bucks, and that more than anything had convinced him that Sully thought the treasure was real— the guy could have sold the journal and made bank, but he hadn’t.
Sully was waiting when Nate got back with his pizza, wearing expensive casual. He cocked an eyebrow at Nate’s breakfast, then just tilted his head— this way—and started to walk south.
Nate followed him across 23rd and down 5th , past the Flatiron and then around the corner, heading east on 22nd . Sully hadn’t said a word, yet. He walked like any businessman, head up, steps brisk and efficient.
No small talk. Okay. Nate stacked his pizza and ate, following the older man through the shadows of bank and insurance buildings, apartments and nail salons. Giant wealth management buildings mixed with coffee shops and restaurants, hotels and boutiques and doctors’ offices. Nate focused on his pizza, figuring Sully would get around to saying something eventually. It was his show.
Sully finally slowed down in front of a securities exchange, leaned on a mailbox out front. He pulled a thin, glossy catalogue out of his jacket, opening it to a marked page.
“There’s an auction coming up,” he said, turning to Nate. “Biggest collection of Spanish Renaissance art and artifacts anywhere this century. One of the items is La Cruz de la Hermandad.”
The Cross of the Brothers? Brotherhood? Nate had gotten a C in Spanish.
He handed the auction catalogue to Nate, who wiped his hands on his jeans to take it. The second item on the first page had been circled, a photo of a shining gold Patriarchal cross, the kind with two crossbars, stacked, a shorter bar just over the main one. The endpoints Aared and were tipped with rounded, cut red stones that didn’t look quite like rubies… garnets, maybe. The body and bars of the cross were delicately engraved and dotted with smaller stones, looked like turquoise or spinel, and more garnet. The gold was solid and chunky. Suggested starting bid was $200K.
“Only it’s not a cross, it’s a key,” Sully said. “A key that unlocks the chamber where the Infamous Eighteen hid the gold.”
Nate’s excitement level dive-bombed.
“Yeah, and it’s totally useless to us,” he said, handing the catalogue back to Sully. “The legend says there were two keys. One for the captain, one for the crew, so no one person could take the gold on his own. One key doesn’t do us any good.”
Smirking, Sully shook his head. “Ever get outside when you were a kid?
How do you remember all this shit?”
Nate was about to officially get irritated—yes, he’d got outside, and history wasn’t shit—when Sully breezily added, “I already have the captain’s key.”
Nate’s eyes went wide. “Really? You do?” God, that was huge! Why hadn’t he just said so in the first place? “You could have told me.”
“I’m telling you now,” Sully said. “Second one’s in there. The Augustine.”
He gestured at the impressively modern building ahead on the southwest corner of the intersection, five Aoors of glass and textured stone. Sure enough, Augustine was lettered right by the expensive, shimmering doors. The walls were mostly glass, revealing high ceilings and outrageously expensive décor. A fashionably dressed woman walked through the pristine lobby on stiletto heels, tapping at a tablet.
“I got us on the list,” Sully said. “Very exclusive. All I need you to do is kill the power during the auction. That’ll trigger the main alarm, then I can do my thing.”
That sounded easy enough. “K. How do I kill the power?”
“Well shit, that’s up to you,” Sully said. “I’m not cutting you in for fun.”
“Speaking of which, we haven’t talked about my share,” Nate said. “I assume we’re fifty-fifty.”
Sully’s brow wrinkled like a Shar Pei puppy, eyes narrowing. “On what? The gold? Are you high? This has been years of my life. You get ten percent. And that’s me being generous.”
Off the alleged five billion, that’s… five hundred million.
Nate took a deep breath, let it out. He’d promised himself to think it through. Except… More money than he could ever spend, plus a chance to find a treasure that had been hidden and then lost for four and a half centuries. He could run a wellness check on his brother along the way, make sure Sam was safely off dodging all responsibility, as per the norm.
And I can quit my job. Today. Call Carlos and tell him that I got a better gig, effective immediately, and that his breath mints don’t work.
On the con side… well, it was illegal, and it would suck to get arrested.
Morally, he was okay. The rich mostly had too much stuff, and wealth redistribution was a thing. In this particular case, though, the cross that was coming to the auction house was necessary to the discovery of real, tangible history. It seemed like a moral imperative, almost, if this second key could finally unlock the truth about Magellan’s voyage.
Also: FIVE. HUNDRED. MILLION.
So… just don’t get caught, and you’re all good.
He’d thought it through. When he looked at the Augustine again, the way he saw it had changed. Now he scanned the rooms behind the glass. Noted the security cameras through the lobby, and the single guard at the entrance. There’d be a lot more on duty for an auction.
But how many at the side door, or the fire exit, or a basement window?
And who’s going to guard a maintenance room?
Nate started walking, to see more of the building, ignoring the smug look on Sully’s face.
* * *
The next five days blurred together for Nate, all just one big, sprawling repeat. First, wake up and work out. In addition to his free weights and bench stuff, he’d hung a heavy gym rope from his kitchenette’s ceiling and tackled it at random hours, trying not to have to kick off of the fridge. He didn’t expect to have to do anything strenuous, if all went well… but the risk of some sudden, unexpected physical activity was high, and he didn’t want to underperform in the clinch. He exercised until he was limp and dripping, then hit the shower.
Next, cereal and something caffeinated for breakfast, while he looked up information on his laptop, jotted notes as he tapped his way to relevant data. He studied schematics of electrical grids until his eyes crossed. He’d hung up parts of the Aoor blueprint for the Augustine on his window, printed out across six pieces of paper, the better to visualize. Daily, he added to the decoration— Post-its, pictures that Sully had given him, a detailed diagram of an auxiliary power box. He penciled routes onto the map, erased them. If he got hungry, he ate; antsy, he climbed the rope. When his brain stopped firing clearly, it was off to bed. He’d sack out reading random wikis about Spanish ships or various South Pacific island groups, and dream in the colors of faraway seas.
Next day, same. And the next. He’d taken two field trips to wander innocently past the Augustine in addition to the first walk-by, just to get a feel for its dimensions, discreetly taking photos of the doors he was considering as best exits. The power main was a no-go, it was bundled through the basement wall, but there was a breaker box on the top Aoor, routed into a maintenance station over some of the back offices. He’d told Sully to give him time to work out all the contingencies, and the man mostly left him alone, though he’d sent some helpful photo files of the Augustine… along with a few tantalizing shots of Captain Elcado’s journal.
The day before the auction, Nate woke up and realized he had internalized all the information he had available. He knew where to go, and how to get to it from every angle. He could visualize all the possible routes out of the building and had evaluated each carefully. There were a lot of variables he wouldn’t know until he was dealing with them—guards, staff, random rich people wandering around—but he had backups on backups. There wasn’t anything else for him to learn about the heist through research.
He didn’t head for the weights, instead grabbing a soda and his devices, Aopping on the foldout couch in his little living area and opening his laptop on the coffee table. He looked up Victor Sullivan, filtering down until he found his new partner.
There were a couple of arrest charges from twenty years ago. Smuggling. Not a big shock there, but Sully had still been in his thirties, a decade-plus back. He dug deeper.
His phone dinged a text alert. Speak of the devil. Sully didn’t waste words.
Figure it out?
Nate glanced toward his window, at the printouts and routes drawn in ink.
He sent a thumbs-up, then tapped out a response.
I’ll need a nice suit, handheld sheet metal cutters. He smiled a little, added, And a cat.
For a minute there was nothing, and then the busy-texting ellipsis scrolled out for an impossibly long time. Sully had to be writing a novel.
Finally, just a single letter appeared.
K.
Nate grinned, and set the phone down. Today he would rest, go out for breakfast, spend the afternoon watching a game and practicing his sleight-of- hand. Tomorrow, he and Sully were going to successfully liberate La Cruz de la Hermandad.
* * *
Sully walked in on the kid in his dressing room, trying to knot his tie and checking himself out in the three-way. Nathan Drake cleaned up pretty well; put him in a good black suit, and at a glance you’d think he was born rich. He’d slicked his hair back with some of Sully’s expensive pomade, and he had good posture. But if you looked at him a minute longer, you’d see he clearly wasn’t at home in a suit, craning against the dress shirt’s snug collar and helpless with a tie.
“Alright, we’re almost a go here,” Sully said. “Car’s downstairs.”
Nate pulled his sloppy single knot up and it was short, the tie’s tail extending below the front by a good two inches.
Sully sighed and walked over, unknotting Nate’s crappy attempt. He pulled the ends out, adjusted the distance between them. “I can’t watch you do this again.”
He quickly manipulated the dark silk into a half-Windsor, straightened the knot, and stepped back.
Nate looked down at the tie, then at the mirror. “Wow. How’d you—”
“Dad was a Navy man,” Sully said. “I could do this one-handed with my eyes shut.”
“You served too, didn’t you?” Nate asked, looking at him directly. “Dishonorable discharge.”
“You did some homework,” Sully said, not surprised. The look in the kid’s eyes wasn’t challenging, only curious.
“I Aew helicopters,” he allowed. “I was preserving some artifacts from a museum in Baghdad, but I was over the max load weight. Crashed hard.”
“‘Preserving,’” Nate echoed. “You mean looting.”
Sully shrugged, and shared with the kid a keystone of his own personal philosophy. “If I didn’t take them, someone else would’ve.”
Nate chewed that over. Sully handed him the metal-cutters, a nifty little black gadget about the size of a banana. The mechanics were all in the handle, the top a rectangular casing with a thick blade that dropped down like a fish’s lower jaw. Ate right through sheet metal, sending a curling strip out of the casing’s top. Nate clicked it on and off, satisfied himself that it was charged, and slipped it into his jacket’s inner pocket.
Sully turned and looked at the white longhair cat sitting on his nice couch, watching them lazily from her chocolate-point face, darker at the muzzle and ears. He’d had to buy a litter box and cat food for the thing, just to keep it for a couple of days. Every other time he sat down, she climbed into his lap and purred at him. He figured Nate was thinking of using it as a distraction somehow, but he hadn’t been able to guess the specifics.
“And what’s the plan with the cat?”
Nate was already walking for the door. “Oh, yeah. She’s just for you. Your life here seemed so sad.”
“Are you kidding me? I’m not going to keep—” Nate was out in the hall and headed for the elevator.
Ha-fucking-ha! What the hell am I going to do with a cat?
Sully looked at the nameless cat. She gazed back at him with contented eyes, white Auffy tail twitching.
Sighing deeply, Sully straightened his jacket and stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind him.