Author Games: Caper Crew

The Masterminds

However, none of these people would be anything at all without a Mastermind to bring them all together. The one with the big idea to run the big plan that'll somehow, eventually net us all the big score—for that you'll need the one person who can see the big picture and put all these individual parts together to make a well-oiled machine. At the end of the day, there's only one rule to a con: the mastermind calls the shots.

Or rather, the masterminds. No, not the con: no con's ever got two. At most, there's a mastermind and a right hand. Eyeing this museum are two masterminds: Willow Zheng and Mary Jane Williams have both got their eyes on the same mark, but the thing about marks is that there's only ever one score.

Name: Mary Jane Williams

Age: Not a day over 25 ;)

Gender: Female

Expertise: Mastermind

Mugshot: A white woman who naturally speaks with an Australian accent and can be most easily characterised by a shock of frizzy, blonde hair. Her wardrobe is eclectic and ostentatious, stylish yet ridiculous, worn with the confidence to make it work. She loves playing dress-up for the job; tailored suits, ball-gowns, and sexy black ensembles are all a part of any heist worth it's spit. The second easiest way to identify her is her beaming smile, almost childlike in its glee and complemented perfectly by the wild glint in her eyes. The easiest way to identify her, however, is through her pink and gray galah named Sharkbait, AKA her 'Right Hand'. Sharkbait is a surly yet doted on and spoiled-rotten bird who has an impressive vocabulary of multicultural swear words and is never more than half a mile away from Mary Jane at a given moment.

Criminal Profile: An ascended grifter and pickpocket, Mary Jane is friendly, chatty, 'creative', and impulsive. Her greatest strength lies in spontaneity, in jumping to action just when everything might fall to pieces. Ever confident in her own abilities and luck, she's rarely if ever worried about failure. She considers the planning stage of any heist the 'boring part', so to keep herself amused she spices her plans up with ridiculous turns and diversions that no sane person would ever expect. Her schemes have been labelled as "hare-brained", "going to get us killed", and "just insane enough that it might work". Mary Jane definitely leans more on the 'crazy' side of genius, but damn if she doesn't get results. She doesn't like working on her own–after all, where's the fun in that?–and is typically trusting of her team, even if they don't (or shouldn't) trust her.

Criminal Record: No one knows exactly where Mary Jane came from and what she was doing before. She'll gladly tell anyone that asks, but the answer changes every time. Is she a runaway Swedish princess? An amnesiac whose only clue to her past is the bird on her shoulder? An ex-Olympic rhythmic gymnast hopeful, still bitter about the ankle injury that ended it all? Probably not. Many people know of her first con, though. It wasn't the most interesting mark (the antique Mayflower In A Bottle exhibit was nobody's favourite at the National Gallery of Maritime Art), but what was interesting was which part she stole (the Mayflower exhibit is intact and open to this day, sans the Bottle). Mary Jane is in it for the thrill of the game– the ballsier the job, the better. She loves a good disguise and revels in creating chaos. In her perfect heist, everyone knows she was there but nobody knows how she did it.

Signature: The objects she collects are often peculiarities with a mysterious history, things of legend, curiosities that seem pointless but are fabulously expensive, however she has a penchant for swiping any maps or charts she can get her mitts on.

Name: Willow Zheng

Age: 30

Gender: Female

Expertise: Mastermind

Mugshot: A Chinese-American woman of short stature and average build. Her most notable permanent features are the dark circles she sports under her eyes, followed closely by the barely-concealed look of manic frustration they highlight. When she's not dressing for the con she's dressing down in serviceable, comfortable layers of bland colors with long sleeves that seem tailor-made for blending into a background. Her very actions are efficient: she never deigns to move without a clear purpose and she stays so eerily still otherwise that she's liable to startle people in the room. She's often seen clutching a nondescript thermos like it's her last shred of sanity, in which she only ever carries straight green tea.

Criminal Profile: Known for running meticulously overworked plans with so many layers of contingencies any sane crew would go on strike, in the rare moments she ever attempts to work with anyone but herself. Willow's plans always start with finding a way to make the absolute worst-case scenario work and building upwards from there, Plan Z all the way to Plan A. She thinks along strict analytical and methodically organizational lines, a textbook type-A perfectionist. Although technically capable of improvisation, she becomes unhappy when she hasn't at least considered the possibility of an event, which might explain why she tries to plan so much for every incident that could conceivably occur and then some. High-strung with a short fuse on a cold temper and generally unwilling to hinge success on the ability of others.

Criminal Record: Willow first made her name in China when she used her position as a low-level employee of the American embassy to smuggle a number of high-ranking prisoners in Chinese organized crime out of the country, although ever since she's remained entirely unaffiliated with any organization. Consequently, she's a wanted criminal in both China and America, among other countries. Nowadays she runs cons exclusively in the interest of herself, her happiness, and her personal fortune. She's a fan of stealth and shadows rather than the grift, and her ideal one-man con is one where everything except the lift is done at a distance and she's in and out of location in a minute flat: the less direct contact, the better. Her penchant for staying anonymous makes it difficult to attribute an exact number of crimes to her; estimates vary, but enough have been assumed to make her a known factor for international law enforcement.

Signature: Although her scores tend toward money or items that can easily be liquidated like jewelry and gold, she has a special interest in collecting rare or unique artifacts from China, where she is officially wanted and from which she is officially banned. In particular, she is known for a multiyear-long spree exclusively targeting and retrieving artifacts from the looting of the Yuanmingyuan.