Wanted at Headquarters

A luminous spiderweb of deception glimmers inside George Flanbaugh’s gilded boardroom: Kate Westhanger, velvet-gloved puppeteer of a clandestine syndicate, slips between ledgers like a poet inserting clandestine metaphors into a hymnal, harvesting itineraries of bullion while her smile stays chastely pinned. Her crew—shadows stitched from dockyard fog—believe the heist will birth their retirement; Kate, meanwhile, savors the artistry of the con itself. Enter Michael Pretherson, quixactic criminologist with ink-stained cuffs and a gaze that files every flutter of an eyelash into evidence. Their pas de deux is half courtship, half duel: she taunts, he misreads; she filches, he footnotes. When a midnight train groans beneath its auric cargo, Kate choreographs larceny on a Wagnerian scale—only to discover her acolytes would rather butcher the orchestra than play the encore. Betrayal ricochets; bullets write cursive across warehouse walls; love, that most unreliable of narrators, flips the final page. Gold restored, guns cooled, Kate steps from the rubble absolved, marriage license in hand, the ink still wet as fresh blood.