Six Years Later
Willie Pemington was pacing back and forth in front of The British Museum. He grabbed the white handkerchief from his front suit pocket and wiped it across his “balding head” to give the illusion of a nervous curator. Willie wasn’t even his real name, and he wasn’t a balding fifty-something-year-old British guy with a potbelly. His name was Sebastian Dubois.
He was twenty-three years old and from Quebec, Canada. With his unmatched skill in disguise, he earned a reputation as one of the most elusive and talented art thieves in history. Sebastian looked around, and a girl was sitting on the steps, staring at her phone and drinking a milkshake just a few feet away.
Sebastian felt uneasy. Two months ago, he stole an old conquistador map from the Museum of Natural History. A map of the Bermuda Triangle. He remembered how giddy he felt once he filched it. Then, attempts on his life started to happen. While he was on his morning run, a black car almost hit him.
Someone laced his vitamin pills with arsenic a week after that. A couple of days later, he was almost crushed to death while he was running errands in the city by half a crane when it “accidentally” snapped apart.
Sebastian wasn’t born yesterday. He knew someone was trying to kill him. He wasn’t sure why. His disguises were full proof. He was waiting for the armed truck to get to the museum with the goods. This was how his heists worked. He impersonates a curator of the museum he’s about to steal from after he incapacitates the real people, steals the artifacts and artwork being delivered, and swaps them with imitations.
Sebastian’s heart raced as the armed truck drove up the street, the anticipation of another successful heist building within him. As soon as the truck was in front of the steps of the museum, Sebastian Dubois, an infamous art thief, was dead.
White Rabbit
After White Rabbit killed Sebastian Dubois with a poisonous blow dart, she put her straw back into her cup. She timed it perfectly and disabled the security cameras with an electromagnetic signal from her “cellphone.”
She made sure the truck fully blocked the view at the front steps of the museum so she could administer the blow dart. Sebastian “Willie” would appear to have a massive stroke. She researched Willie’s family health history and found that strokes were a very common way for anyone to die in his family. Willie wasn’t a healthy man with his high cholesterol and his chain smoking. No one would suspect a thing.
Underland would take care of the clean-up job; the forensic doctor would write up the papers and send his body to Underland. They can finally find out where he stored the map that could expose Underland’s base of operation.
Sebastian thought he covered his tracks because he believed his disguises would make it impossible to ID him. But Underland’s high-tech cameras scanned Sebastian’s face at several airports in the countries he robbed. It wasn’t hard to track him since he bought a studio apartment in his name where he kept the real Willie Pemington drugged and shackled to a bed. Underland’s number one motto is no loose ends. So, the apartment caught fire, and a body burned beyond recognition, identified as “Sebastian Dubois” by the same Forensic Doctor that would ID “Willie.”
The artifacts he stole he would sell to the highest bidder on the black market. The map that Sebastian stole shows the exact coordinates to Underland. White Rabbit cried as the cop took her statement. She had to throw off suspicion on why she was lingering at the museum steps. A white cloth covered the body, and a crowd gathered around the police tape that surrounded the crime scene.
She recounted dramatically, “The ole’ bastard just keeled ova and bit the dust, yeah!” in a cockney accent that they would underestimate her and write her off as some low IQ teenager.
After Sebastian was taken to the morgue, White Rabbit transformed herself into a tall, gaunt man in an exterminator uniform and called Red Queen, confidently stating, “I have taken care of the little rat problem.”
“Curiouser and Curiouser, how did you find him?”
White Rabbit smirked, “Rats always leave a trail.”