Uncommon Criminals by Ally Carter Page A

understand her predicament (he couldn’t). And he looked at her as if his smile could take the sting out of her current situation (it didn’t even come close).
    “Then I’m going to assume there’s nothing else I can do for you, Agent Bennett?”
    “No,” Amelia said, gathering the dusty files and clutching them to her black suit. “I have quite everything I need.”
    Despite being a highly trained and deftly skilled observer, there were many things Amelia Bennett did not see on her trip back to the basement archives. After all, it looked like a typical morning with the sleepy-eyed masses swiping cards and coming inside. Workers pushed carts and people scanned papers, and it was a day just like any other, there on the banks of the Rhône.
    Well, at least that was the way it seemed right up until the point when the bouquet of fresh flowers that was meant for the deputy director was carried from the main reception desk to the upper-level offices, setting off a half dozen biohazard detectors along the way.
    A few moments later, on the second floor, a bottle of carpet cleaner began to bubble with seemingly toxic fumes. The head of Interpol’s internal security division was halfway to the mailroom when he heard that a brand-new espresso machine had spontaneously caught on fire. A recently serviced oven in the cafeteria began spewing smoke so thick no one could even see.
    “What’s going on?” one of the guards in the security room wanted to know.
    “All of the toilets in the men’s room on the fourth floor just…blew!” someone else exclaimed.
    All throughout the building, sirens were blaring and sensors were tripping. And when the electronic voice began echoing through the building, saying, “THERE HAS BEEN A BREACH IN SECURITY PROTOCOL. PLEASE PROCEED TO THE NEAREST DOOR,” first in French, then again in Arabic, English, and Spanish, there was only one thing to be done.
    To their credit, every single person at Interpol’s world headquarters reacted in the calm, orderly way that one would have expected. To anyone observing from across the river, it looked like nothing more than a minor inconvenience—a drill. Exploding toilets, after all, did not an international incident make. Many of the Interpol officials said later that if they hadn’t known better, they would have sworn they were witnessing the harmless pranks of kids.
    Well, at least that was the way it seemed until the fire trucks appeared with their swirling lights and screaming sirens. The police, too, were quick to the scene—almost too quick, some might say—to throw up the barricades and block off the traffic.
    But it wasn’t until they saw the big bus from the bomb squad that the people huddled on the sidewalks began to wonder if things might be more severe than some elaborate prank.
    “Step aside!” the tallest of the masked figures in the heavy protective suits yelled. He barked orders at a man with a walkietalkie. “Your people are out of there?”
    “Yes,” the man said. He looked vaguely confused and more than a little annoyed. “But it was just the toilets.…Can’t we go back inside and—”
    “Now, you listen to me,” the masked man yelled. He had a deep voice, and when he spoke, the whole crowd seemed to stop and listen. “This facility has the best biohazard detectors that money can buy, and in the past twenty minutes, nine of them have gone off. We take that sort of thing seriously in my department. What about you?”
    The man with the walkie-talkie stayed quiet, weighing the image of rogue espresso machines and malfunctioning toilets against the words of the masked man. “Do what you have to do,” he said, leaving the four masked figures to walk through Interpol’s gleaming, polished doors.
    Katarina Bishop was not claustrophobic, or so she told herself with every breath she took inside the heavy mask. She’d once flown from Cairo to Istanbul locked inside a solid-gold sarcophagus, after all, so it wasn’t the tiny