New York City. Early days.
The suit wasn't bespoke yet. It fit well enough, but it wasn't the kind of perfection he would one day be known for. The smile came easy, though — it always had. Bryce Larkin knew how to disarm people with charm. The trick now was making the world believe the smile belonged to someone else.
Tonight, he wasn't Bryce. He was Neal Caffrey.
The CIA had written the script, but Bryce was the one performing it. Small cons at first — selling forged paintings to collectors who thought they were the hunters, not the prey. Running three-card monte games in Wall Street bars, letting the right people lose just enough money to start whispering his name. Slipping into black-tie galas under aliases that never existed on paper.
Every move was calculated, every job staged. The Agency wanted "Neal Caffrey" to breathe, to exist in the criminal underworld. And so they crafted a trail — FBI case files seeded with doctored evidence, whispered rumors in the right ears, even staged encounters with undercover agents pretending to be victims.
The Bureau thought they were chasing a ghost.
The underworld thought they were watching a legend in the making.
Only the CIA knew the truth.
Bryce played along, rehearsing the role until it felt like a second skin. He forged signatures with a flourish, practiced charming his way past locked doors, learned how to walk into a room and make everyone look his way.
It wasn't about the cons themselves. It was about the story. The building of a myth.
Neal Caffrey: art thief, forger, master of disguise. A name whispered in both admiration and fear. A name that would one day be strong enough to stand on its own, even if Bryce Larkin disappeared completely.
And that was the point.
Bryce knew the day would come when he'd need to vanish again. But when that day arrived, Neal Caffrey would remain — the perfect cover, the perfect mask.
And the game was only just beginning.
The gallery lights dimmed just after midnight, the hum of the security system kicking in as the staff locked up for the night. Behind tinted windows, priceless canvases rested in silence — the kind of treasures collectors whispered about at cocktail parties.
Outside, a lone figure waited in the shadows.
The suit wasn't perfect yet, but the posture was. Straight, confident, as if he already belonged inside. Bryce Larkin drew a slow breath, adjusting the fedora that hid his face from the cameras. Tonight, he wasn't Bryce. He was Neal Caffrey.
His first con.
The CIA had staged everything — the "security guard" on the night shift was an undercover agent, the cameras were rerouted to a safe feed, the gallery owner briefed to play along. But it had to look real. If the underworld was going to believe in Neal Caffrey, the con needed to leave ripples.
Bryce moved with precision, each step practiced. He bypassed the keypad lock with a sleight of hand the Agency had drilled into him for weeks, slid the door open, and stepped inside. The air smelled faintly of varnish and history.
He didn't rush. Neal Caffrey wouldn't rush. He strolled past landscapes, portraits, abstracts — pausing as if he were shopping. And then he stopped in front of the mark: a 19th-century painting of a Paris street scene, worth just enough to make headlines but not enough to trigger Interpol.
With gloved hands, he removed the canvas from its frame, rolling it neatly and slipping it into a tube hidden in his coat.
"Smooth," came a voice in his earpiece. Langston, his CIA handler, watching the feed from a nearby van. "Almost like you've done this before."
"First time for everything," Bryce whispered back, lips barely moving.
He exited the way he'd come, leaving no trace but the empty frame.
By morning, the story was everywhere: Art Thief Strikes Downtown Gallery.
The FBI had a case file open within hours. The underworld whispered about a new player bold enough to walk out of a gallery untouched.
And somewhere in Langley, the CIA smiled. Neal Caffrey was no longer an invention. He was real.