Heist Apprentice: Lily Thorne, #1

By Andrew Duff

All bets on surviving the night are off...

A stolen Picasso. A £20 million ransom. An impossible deadline.

These are the least of Lily Thorne's problems.

Her first proper heist could turn out to be her last. Because she's been lied to. Lives, not money, are at stake. And some very dangerous people are about to get very, very angry…

Heist Apprentice is the explosive prequel to the Lily Thorne series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Duff
• Release date: Feb 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386070757

Book preview

HEIST APPRENTICE

Andrew Duff

Copyright © 2017 Andrew Duff

The right of Andrew Duff to be identified as the author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events and places either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Kit Foster at www.kitfosterdesign.com.

For Marianne

who makes it possible

And for Lily, my daughter

who can never have enough stories

Contents

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

ENJOYED HEIST APPRENTICE?

PART ONE

______________________________

The Job

Chapter 1

______________________________

L

ily Thorne reflected, not for the first time, that there were better ways to spend a Saturday night.

Sensation had long since vacated her extremities. Frostbite, she was sure, threatened her backside. No way of telling whether she was stuck fast to the frozen metal or one twitch away from a five-storey drop. Wardrobe malfunction or certain death.

Mum would pick death every time.

Thought of her mother prompted another glance at her watch. The glowing numerals mocked her. 19:57. Give yourself at least half an hour to get in position, her mother had said. But whatever you do, don’t go before eight o’clock.

Allegedly the security guards would move downstairs then and leave the upper floors clear. Or, just as likely, this was another ruse to toughen her up. Doubtless an extra twenty minutes spent icing her arse would make the girl a woman. Not to mention the added benefit of pissing her off.

Damn you, Mother.

The roof dropped away in front of her, something about its green patina and sparkling layer of frost triggering a childhood memory. A playground slide in winter. Her fingers clamped to the bars, hands pushing against her back, somebody giggling in her ear… Rose-

Another lifetime.

Lily turned her face to the sky. The night was cloudless, the winking red-green-white of descending airliners all around, a few stars showing as orange pinpricks through a haze of light pollution. Off to her right, a towering sixties eyesore dwarfed the surrounding Georgian terraces. She worried about the lit windows on the upper floors, about curious eyes that could pick out her dark shape against the pale green roof. She shut her mind, and her eyes, and listened.

Distant sirens, the whine of jet engines, a chorus of hooting erupting and fading on nearby Piccadilly. Not a sound on Bury Street save for the occasional rumble of a taxi. Too cold for dawdling pedestrians tonight.

Her body clock chimed. Time to go, thank God.

She took a breath, exhaled a cloud of vapour. Flexed her gloved fingers, rotated her wrists, tried to will feeling back into her hands. Her feet had withstood the deep freeze a little better; scrunching her toes inside her climbing shoes, she felt the rubber soles find grip on the patinaed copper.

Pressing her non-slip palms down hard on the slick metal, she unstuck her behind and edged as far forward as she dared. No sound of fabric ripping, no sudden netherward chill. Result.

She peered over the edge. The roof went down another metre or so at a near-vertical angle. Beyond a flimsy-looking metal gutter she could just see the opposite pavement of Bury Street. Deserted, for now.

Dormer windows sprouted from the roof below at even intervals. She checked the straps on her rucksack, slid her feet over the edge. Pictured her mother’s disapproving face.

Darling, how many times have I told you not to perch on rooftops? It’s too easy to lose your balance or be spotted. You should be on your front…

Sod that. What was she supposed to do, dive over the edge? Slide blindly backwards and hope for the best? She needed to see her feet-

Which were slipping.

Black ice on the edge, her shoes suddenly gripless, the weight of her legs pulling her over-

For a petrified half-second she was helpless, hands scrabbling at the roof behind, the street jumping into horrifying high definition below.

She bit off a scream and spun onto her belly, clouting her forehead on the roof, her feet slamming into the gutter…

Which gave a warning groan, but held.

Two long seconds passed. Nothing shifted. She hissed air between her teeth, unslung her rucksack and edged her upper body down the freezing metal until her head drew level with the dormer window to her left. Beyond it, the waist-high railing on the neighbouring roof taunted.

Trying not to look down, she fumbled the rucksack zips, rummaged, and pulled out a spindly aluminium arm with a glass cutter at one end and a sucker pad at the other.

A screwdriver looped off the sucker pad, avoided her grasping hand, bounced off her left foot and went over the edge. She flinched at the distant whang of metal on metal. Held her breath…

From below came the sound of car doors opening.

What the fuck was that…?

Shitshitshit… Lily bullied her frozen fingers into action, taking three attempts to fix the sucker pad onto the nearest window pane. More expletives emanated from the street; presumably the motorist had discovered the havoc wreaked by four ounces of cold steel plunging sixty feet onto his precious bodywork. She’d heard no car pull up, where the hell had he come from-

Hurry up! snapped Mum, in her head. The cutter blade refused to bite into the glass; she breathed, withdrew it, pressed again. Let the blade guide her hand in a perfect ten-inch circle. As it reached its starting point she pushed firmly and had to grab the side of the dormer as the cut glass circle sprang inwards, taking the cutter with it; she dropped it inside.

That hadn’t been the plan, but the plan was rapidly going to hell.

Part of her brain noted that the invective from below had paused; she was already flattening herself below the window as two men appeared on the pavement across the street, peering upwards. She breathed a potpourri of brackish rainwater and bird faeces, prayed that the sepia downwash from the streetlights would hide her prone form from view.

After a muttered conversation and a snarled fuck’s sake, the voices faded. She waited thirty seconds, then risked a peek over the parapet. The pavement opposite was deserted.

Move… she drew her feet beneath her, one behind the other on the narrow gutter, and pushed herself upright. Slinging the rucksack across her chest, she grasped the edge of the dormer for support and pulled out a pair of conjoined magnetic wafers wired to each end of a coiled length of cable. Reaching in through the hole in the window, she felt around the frame until she found a pair of plastic rectangles, side-by-side – one mounted to the wall, the other to the window frame. A magnet and its sensor. If they were parted, the alarm would sound.

Thank God. I’ve got the right kit.

She fed the coiled cable through the hole and found the join between the magnet and sensor; millimetre by millimetre, shoulder muscles complaining, she pushed the twin wafers into the tiny gap.

Mum: Pause. Count to five. If the shit doesn’t hit the fan, continue.

Lily had edited the last bit. Her mother never swore.

The window latch was a simple affair, mounted just above the alarm sensor. She found it, took a deep breath, and opened the window. As the magnet and sensor parted, so did the cable-linked wafers, maintaining the connection and keeping shit from fan. For now.

She slid her rucksack over the sill and lowered it to the floor inside, checking for height. About three feet. Good. No nasty surprises. Taking care not to foul the cable or think about slapstick images of scissoring feet stuck in tiny gaps, she pulled herself through the window.

Her entry would have been balletic if she hadn’t forgotten about the razor-sharp circle of glass on the floor. A last second twist in avoidance sent her shoulder first into a somersault; her heels knocked into something tall which toppled away into the dark-

She rolled onto her feet and flung her arms around what felt like a sculpture wrapped in scarves, staggering forward under its weight but managing not to let it thump to the floor. As her eyes adjusted, she found herself staring into the blank white face of a mannequin. They were frozen in a dancers’ hold, the climax of a ballroom routine. Strictly eat your heart out.

She lifted the mannequin – dressed in something chiffony and impractical – back onto its base, retrieved the glass and cutter, closed the window, and removed the cabled wafers. Aside from the ten-inch hole and the chilly draught, she might never have been here.

Feeling began to return to her extremities and face, bringing with it a band of hurt across her forehead where she’d cracked it on the roof.

She visualised her mother’s told-you-so face. Shut up.

Directly across from the alcove where she stood, a display of wooden jewellery boxes gleamed in the wash of green light from an exit sign beyond. To her right, the room extended for twenty metres or so, heavy wood display tables at even intervals loaded with expensive trinkets for the woman with more money than sense. Above each table hung a glass-cascade chandelier.

Grayson’s. The department store for the cognoscenti. Purveyor of fine goods for the most discerning of customers. Or so it said on the website.

Lily reslung her rucksack and opened her mental map. Top floor. Women’s accessories. She squinted through the gloom and found the security camera, a discreet half-globe high in the far corner. According to her information the system was set to cycle through the exterior and ground floor cameras at night. Only if one of the tea-swilling Rentacops downstairs manually switched to an upstairs camera could she be spotted.

She turned right and padded across the ruby pile carpet towards a pair of oak panelled doors below a second exit sign near the far end of the room. No alarms on internal doors; she hesitated, pushed through into a better lit and equally plush stairwell. Two flights down, she paused at the doors to the fourth floor – men’s clothing and accessories – and listened. Silence.

She pulled the right door open and stepped into a room that was, if anything, yet more opulent than the top floor – gilt edging on the false ceiling, tables groaning under the weight of silver-knobbed shaving brushes and gold plated shoehorns.

Even the air smacked of old money. Leather, polish, obscenely priced toiletries.

Eagle-eyed punters and thieves would notice, however, that this room was a little smaller. To Lily’s left, the wall was four metres closer to the stairwell doors than the corresponding wall upstairs. Midway along it, a rectangle of thin shutlines and the green glow of a keypad betrayed the presence of a door.

She moved across to it, giving a teetering display of men’s fripperies a wide berth. On her recce earlier that day, she’d knocked over this very display while observing the comings and goings through the door. Result: eternal mortification and the purchase of a hideously expensive pair of cufflinks for a fictitious boyfriend named Morten.

Kendall had better be right about this.

Allegedly, the door gave access to Grayson’s private viewing room for items of particular value or rarity. At the moment, it held a copy of Shakespeare’s Third Folio. Current market value: half a million pounds.

Praying that the code hadn’t been changed, she tapped in 2587. After a pregnant half-second, the keypad emitted a muted beep. She pushed the door – there was no handle – which swung ponderously open to reveal… nothing. Pitch darkness. She stepped through the doorway, let the door glide shut behind her. A faint click as it relocked.

Why aren’t the lights on?

The Folio was supposed to be on a lit display at the far end of the narrow room, under the watchful eye of a camera which was monitored – by an external security company. Maybe their information was out of date… they could have gone infra red…

Something’s not right-

She’d felt the air move, was beginning to drop to a crouch as a gloved hand clamped across her mouth and her arms were pinned to her sides. She snarled, jacknifed her legs, her feet connecting with something bony-

Merde… bouge pas! A voice like gravel, at her left ear. The pressure over her mouth released; she felt herself lifted as easily as a doll, thrust into a chair. Abandoning all caution, she kicked and twisted and cursed. But it did no good; somebody with fists like vices and red wine on their breath held her arms down; from her left came the cloth-ripping sound of duct tape unspooling – at least two people – in seconds she was bound to the velour covered arms of the chair.

Her brain felt mired in treacle, struggling to catch up…

French… red wine… hang on-

All the lights blinked on.

SURPRISE!!

Chapter 2

______________________________

Happy birthday, darling, said Helen Thorne.

You’re all bastards, said Lily, for the fourth or fifth time, stuffing a smoked salmon canapé into her mouth and following it with a gulp of champagne. Pascal Toussaint leant against the bar opposite, huge hands cupping a glass of red, his craggy face split in a huge grin.

Pomme, the look on your face… he dabbed his eyes, still bloodshot from tears of mirth.

How’s your shin?

I will have a nice bruise tomorrow.

Remind me to kick you there again. You bloody taped me to a chair.

Only after you threatened to tear off my balls. Anyway, it was Kendall who did that. Pascal pointed to a small, snappily dressed man in his forties who stood a pace or two back.

And as for you… Lily slid off her stool; Kendall backed up a half-step, lips crimped, seesawing between smile and scowl.

In my defence, I was against the whole thing. It’s a huge security risk-

Shut up. You’re the worst of the lot. Pretending to brief me on this bullshit job, making me spend half the day in the bloody men’s department, costing me a fortune… I assume there is no Third Folio to steal?

’Fraid not. Kendall glanced around the empty bar. Love, please keep your voice down. We never know who might be listening-

Sod off. Lily drained her champagne, held her glass out for a refill. Helen drew a bottle from an ice bucket on the bar and obliged. Actually, Lily gulped and choked, pointing at her mother, "you’re the worst. This whole thing has your grubby fingerprints all over it. I can’t believe you let me freeze on that roof… She blinked. God, I’m starting to feel

Reviews for Heist Apprentice

[ebony · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A real page turner, I literally couldn’t put it down. Completely hooked on the series already (I have also read the next one, Heist Incorporated) and I really hope there's more in the future to feed my newly acquired Lily Thorne addiction!

A brilliant read and a total bargain!