Three Fates

herself, then flushed when she remembered she was wired. Tia Marsh, she thought incredulously, was wearing a wire. And everything she said, or that was said to her, was being picked up on the equipment in the van that was even now parked in a lot two blocks south of Morningside.
    She resisted clearing her throat. Malachi would hear her and know she was nervous. If he knew, then she’d be more nervous.
    It was like a dream. No, no, it was like sliding into a television show. Her scene was coming up, and for once in her life, she was going to hit her cue and remember her lines.
    “Okay.” She said it quietly and purposefully this time. “Here we go.”
    She opened the door of Morningside’s main showroom and stepped inside.
    It was more formal than Wyley’s, and lacked, if she did say so herself, Wyley’s quiet charm.
    She was aware that security cameras were recording her now. She knew precisely where they were located, since Jack had gone over the diagram with her, again and again.
    She walked over to stare blindly at a display of Minton China until she calmed herself.
    “May I help you, madam?”
    Tia considered it the height of willpower that she didn’t simply leap out of her shoes and cling by her fingernails to the ornately plastered ceiling at the inquiring voice.
    Reminding herself there wasn’t a flashing GUILTY sign on her forehead, she turned to the clerk. “No, thank you. I’d like to look around a bit.”
    “Of course. I’m Janine. Please let me know if you need any help or have any questions.”
    “Thank you.”
    Janine, Tia noted as the clerk slipped discreetly away, was dressed sharply in a black suit that made her look skinny as a snake and nearly as exotic. And quick as that snake, she’d summed up and dismissed Tia as beneath notice.
    It stung a bit, even though Tia reminded herself that was the point. She’d worn a dull brown suit and a cream-colored blouse—both of which she intended to throw out as soon as she got home—because they helped her fade into the woodwork.
    She wandered to a rosewood secretary and saw out of the corner of her eye that the other clerk, male this time, was as disinterested in her as Janine.
    There were other clerks, of course. She had the layout of Morningside flipping through her mind as she wandered. Each showroom on each floor would be manned by at least two eagle-eyed clerks. And each floor would have a security guard.
    They would all be trained, just as they were at Wyley’s, to separate the customers from the browsers, and to recognize the signs of a possible shoplifter.
    She remembered enough of her own training to have geared her wardrobe and her mannerisms for the job at hand.
    The expensive and unflattering suit. The good, practical shoes. The simple brown purse, too small for serious pilfering. They gave her the look of a woman with money but no particular style.
    She didn’t linger long at any display, but moved from spot to spot with the vague and abstracted air of a browser killing time.
    Neither the clerks nor the guards were likely to pay more than minimal attention to her.
    Two women came in—a mother and daughter by the look of them, Tia decided. Janine pounced. Tia gave her points for speed and smoothness, as she’d scooped up the two potentials before the male clerk had gotten off the mark.
    While attention was focused across the room, Tia slipped the first listening device out of her purse and stuck it under the front lip of a secretary.
    She waited for alarms to sound, for men with guns to burst through the door. When the blood stopped pounding in her ears, she heard the women discussing dining room tables with Janine.
    She continued around the room, giving a pate-de-verre paperweight in the shape of a frog a long study. And attaching another bug to the underside of the George III refectory table on which it sat.
    By the time she’d worked the first floor she felt so competent she began to hum. She plugged another bug under the railing as she walked up to the second level. She brought Jack’s diagram back into her mind, located the cameras and did her job.
    Each time a clerk approached, she smiled wispily and declined their help. When she reached the third floor, she saw Janine showing her customers a Duncan Phyfe dining room table, seating for twenty.
    None of them so much as glanced at her.
    She had one bug left, contemplated where it would do the most good. The Louis XIV sideboard, she decided. Angling her body away from