Molly and the Phantom

Lynn Michaels

Chapter 1

She was born a princess but you’d never know it to look at her. Any more than you’d know just by looking at Chase Sanquist that he ranked third on Interpol’s most-wanted list. He no more looked a thief than Her Serene Highness Marie-Marguerite Christiana Alistrina Helene Savard looked born to rule the tiny principality of St. Cristobel.

In a Chicago Bears baseball cap, jeans and a red sweat­shirt over a white turtleneck, she looked born to marry an accountant and attend PTA meetings. Her knee-high jodhpur boots gave her outfit just a dash of Continental chic, enough to make the Princess Molly look—so called because Her Highness refused to answer to anything but the nickname given her by her American mother—all the rage in Europe.

Trailing a discreet half block or so behind the princess along Parabello Street, the Rodeo Drive of San Blanco, the capital of St. Cristobel, Chase looked a typical wealthy tourist in Gucci loafers and gray pleated trousers. The sleeves of his striped silk-blend shirt were rolled to the el­bows, a Ralph Lauren sweater knotted around his shoul­ders.

When the princess slid her dark glasses down her up­turned nose to take a closer look at something in a shop window, Chase swung away from her, lifted the Nikon looped around his neck and squinted into the lens. The viewfinder showed him a panoramic sweep of Alpine peaks ringing the far borders of St. Cristobel in a majestic, blue-gray haze.

The light meter he raised showed him a tiny red blip on a grid less than half the size of the screen on a pocket video game. Chase smiled. The bug he’d dropped into the suit coat pocket of the princess’ bodyguard four blocks ago was working perfectly.

Her Highness shrugged and moved on. Chase went with her, the bodyguard following a few yards behind. Planting the bug had been child’s play, the first of many skills Chase had learned from his uncle Cosmo.

“Once you’ve mastered the art of putting things into pockets,” he’d told his orphaned twelve-year-old Ameri­can nephew some twenty years earlier, “we’ll move on to taking things out.”

Which nimble-fingered Chase had done within six months. By his thirteenth birthday he’d lifted enough to enable Cosmo to move them west from London’s dreary East End into a charming flat much closer to the hotels and tourist haunts that were their stock-in-trade.

“You’re a natural, my boy,” his uncle had told him proudly. “A throwback to Chastain Sanquist himself.”

Chase had been in St. Cristobel for a week, for the last three days following the princess on her afternoon shopping forays. By the number of packages she carried, embla­zoned with names like Gucci, Dior and Chanel, you’d never guess St. Cristobel was in the throes of its worst economic depression since the end of World War II.

If you lived in a palace filled with more treasures than the Louvre, money was obviously not a problem. But if your birthright was a five-hundred-year-old castle in Scotland, a towering pile of rock with more drafts than a last-place team in the National Football League, you could never earn—or steal—enough to support it.

Filthy rich as the princess was, losing the Phantom would hardly dent her personal fortune. Chase was always care­ful never to steal more than a mark could afford to lose. Unlike some people’s ancestors, who had blithely ripped his off and cast them into ruin.

The two plainclothes guards who had followed the princess from the palace were still trailing her on the other side of the street. Chase hadn’t bothered to bug them. There was no need; wherever the princess and her bodyguard went, so did they. And so would Chase, until the opportunity to make her acquaintance presented itself.

From there, he planned to charm his way into her bedroom in the south wing of the palace. The Phantom spent its nights there in a room-size safe behind a shimmering high-tech security grid similar to the one that protected it from nine to four-thirty Monday through Friday while it sat on display with the rest of the St. Cristobel Crown jewels. The treasury made a pile off the tourists who plunked down five francs to tour the palace and behold the fabled Phan­tom, surrounded by lesser diamonds, rubies, emeralds and a king’s ransom worth of gold and platinum in the royal scepter.

Disabling or fooling the grid wouldn’t be difficult, but it would take time. More than Chase wanted to spend dodg­ing palace guards and playing password with the computer-controlled security system. He’d decided on the plane from Edinburgh that it would be a hell of a lot easier if the princess simply invited him to see her etchings.

He had absolutely no doubt that she would. He might never make the “sexiest man alive” cover of People maga­zine, but he’d wooed his way into more than one boudoir. Her figure was a bit too willowy for his taste, her features too elfin, but at least she wasn’t plug-ugly like most of the Savard women. Which was, Chase was sure, the reason no Sanquist male had ever even remotely considered matri­mony as a means of recovering the Phantom.

On the corner of Parabello and rue de Savard, the princess stopped and waited for the gendarme directing traffic on the center island to halt the cars zipping through the in­tersection at Formula One speeds. Chase stopped behind her, close enough to note the gold highlights in the thick brown ponytail stuck through the back of her cap. It was time, he decided, to pick up the pace. Her twenty-fifth birthday ball, the perfect setting for dancing her upstairs into bed, was tomorrow night.

He lifted the Nikon and looked into the lens. In the tiny mirror beside it, he saw the bodyguard, a dark-haired behemoth with a handlebar mustache, come to a halt in the crowd of pedestrians behind him. Next to him stood a woman in a beige mink jacket, a vivid pink tunic and leg­gings tucked into suede ankle boots. Her blond hair was swept under an electric-pink ball cap with silver stars studded on the brim. Her arms were draped with shopping bags, her features obscured by a huge pair of dark glasses.

She’d do nicely, Chase decided, watching the princess adjust her shoulder bag as he wound the film advance on the Nikon and wondered how she’d react if she knew they were distant cousins. Would she whip out his photo during an interview with a Paris Match reporter as she had the dog­-eared tintype of her great-grandfather on her mother’s side, hung as a horse thief in Arizona in 1876?

Clever piece of work, that. Her then beau, son of a Ger­man industrialist with semi-royal connections, hand-picked for her by her uncle Karroll, Grand Duke and Regent, had whisked himself off the ski slopes of St. Cristobel quicker than you can say giant slalom.

With baton held high in one white-gloved hand the gendarme stopped traffic. With the other he signaled the pedestrians. The princess stepped off the curb. Chase followed, brushing close enough to the woman in mink to get a noseful of Joy and hook a finger through the nylon cord handles of the shopping bags looped over her arm.

They spilled at her feet as he moved past her, tumbling smaller bags and boxes into the street and the gutter. She tripped over a couple with a cry of dismay and bent to pick them up. The bodyguard stopped to help her, just like Chase figured he would. Glancing over his shoulder, Chase kept walking. So did the princess.

The bodyguard snatched up the last package and pulled the woman back on the curb. A second before the baton fell, a heartbeat before Chase quickened his pace and made the crossing—just barely—with a red Fiat convertible nearly nipping his heels.

The driver gave him a sharp, angry toot of his horn, the gendarme a shrill blast of his whistle. Chase spun around with a sheepish who-me lift of his shoulders. The gen­darme stood pointing at him, the bodyguard glaring. Chase raised the Nikon, took a quick snap of the two of them, then ducked after the princess.

His blood was singing, his pulse thudding. Nothing like a close brush to get the old adrenaline pumping. He’d been playing chicken with cars at crosswalks since he was four­teen, and had yet to lose. It was the one thing, the only thing he did that had ever come close to giving Cosmo heart fail­ure. Until the day Chase announced he was going after the Phantom.

The princess was about ten yards ahead of him now and nearing her destination, an open-air cafe near the end of Parabello Street where it tumbled down a long, cobbled hill to the sea and the wharfs and marinas built around the mouth of the bay. Invariably she stopped here to drink cappuccino and bask in the early spring sunshine. Her bodyguard usually gave her about half an hour before summoning the Rolls limo that would chauffeur her to the palace.

Chase quickened his steps as she veered off the sidewalk toward the entrance, fumbling for something in her shoul­der bag as she pushed through the swinging, waist-high iron gate. One of the packages tucked inside, a gold foil sack, snagged on a black filigree and fell onto the sidewalk. Chase picked it up and checked his light meter one last time. Her bodyguard was a good twenty yards behind.

Smiling, he followed the princess into the cafe.