The Heist (21 page)

“That’s the idea,” Nick said. “It’s crucial you maintain the illusion while we’re away.”

“How long is that going to be?” Tom asked.

Kate looked at Nick. It was a very good question.

Nick shrugged. “Don’t know.”

Kate left the house and drove the few miles to Indio, where she and Willie had rooms at the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino. Willie
had spent her night at the twenty-four-hour bowling alley and her day lazing around the pool, fending off advances from old men eager to put their Viagra prescriptions to use.

Kate stopped by the pool to check on Willie and to let her know that Burnside had spilled that Griffin was in Indonesia, so they might be heading there soon, but she couldn’t tell her what they’d actually be doing once they arrived.

“Cool,” Willie said with casual acceptance, as if they were talking about nothing more unusual or uncertain than going to a movie.

“Really?” Kate asked.

Willie was sprawled on a chaise, looking to beef up her tan. She opened a single eye and squinted at Kate. “It’s an exotic place on the other side of the world. What’s not to like about it?”

“The possibility that you might not come back.”

“Sweetie, it’s all part of The Big Adventure.”

Kate thought that was a terrific attitude. She just hoped The Big Adventure didn’t include a cell in Sukun Women’s Prison in Malang.

“Okey-dokey,” Kate said. “Stick close to the hotel in case we have to move.”

“I’m in hog heaven here,” Willie said. “There’s lots of cold shrimp, piña coladas, and twenty-four-hour bowling. What more could a girl want?”

Kate headed up to her room, wondering as she rode the elevator to the tenth floor what their next move would be now that they knew where Griffin was hiding. If it was up to her, Kate would drop a strike team of commandos onto the island and remove Griffin by force. She doubted that Bolton would authorize an operation like that, since it would require air and sea support and
could attract the attention of the Indonesian military. To capture an Al Qaeda terrorist the U.S. government might be willing to go along with an armed incursion into a sovereign state and risk the political fallout if it went wrong. She didn’t think they’d do it for some Wall Street embezzler, not even one who’d fled with half a billion dollars. Robert Vesco had proved that back in the 1970s when he ran off to Costa Rica with $200 million he’d plundered from his investment firm. He continued to move between countries without U.S. extradition treaties for decades before finally dying in Cuba, where he’d been imprisoned for drug smuggling.

Kate let herself into her room, called Jessup, and told him everything, including the longitude and latitude of Dajmaboutu, a twelve-acre speck of an island in the middle of Indonesian waters, half a world away.

“Well, it could be worse,” Jessup said. “He could be in North Korea, Iran, or Myanmar. Indonesia is unique, it’s an archipelago of thousands of islands scattered over seven hundred fifty thousand square miles of open sea, where the rule of law is often either nonexistent or impossible to enforce. That’s undoubtedly why Griffin chose to hide there, but it also works in our favor. Plenty of ways in and out without crossing physical borders.”

That was true. And because Griffin was on a tiny remote island, they stood a chance of pulling off whatever they were going to do without attracting the attention of the Indonesian military or the police. But they still had to go into the heart of Southeast Asia and navigate a maze of islands in foreign waters that were notorious for being rampant with vicious, well-armed pirates.

“How are our relations with Indonesia these days?” she asked.

“Rocky enough that if you get caught, there will be a Katrina-size shit storm that could set foreign policy back decades if
anybody can prove you weren’t rogue. I’ll have to run this all past Bolton, but I’m sure he anticipated an endgame like this, and that he is going to tell you to go grab Griffin and haul his ass back here, or at least into international waters. But if anything goes wrong, don’t expect your country to haul your butt out of the fire.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“How are you going to pull it off?”

“It’s only been a couple of hours since we discovered where Griffin is. We might need another twenty minutes or so to come up with a plan.”

“You’ve done great so far. If either Bolton or I knew what you were doing, which we don’t, we’d be impressed.”

“Thanks,” she said. “How much heat have we got on us?”

“The LAPD is investigating Burnside’s disappearance, of course, but they’ve got nothing at all to go on. We haven’t been much help to them, either, the poor souls.”

“What’s the latest on the manhunt for Nick?”

“Ryerson is chasing a lead from Interpol that Fox may have impersonated some Italian count to fly out of Europe and into St. Louis, where the trail goes cold. I told him that was ridiculous. Why would he come back here? And why St. Louis? What’s Fox plotting to do, steal the Arch?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Kate said, and disconnected.

She set the alarm clock on the nightstand to ring in forty-five minutes, pulled the comforter off the bed, slipped her gun under one of the pillows, and went to sleep on top of the blankets. When the alarm woke her after what felt like three seconds, she smashed it with her fist until it was silent and cracked, and she went back to sleep.

The next time Kate came awake it wasn’t because of the alarm.
It was because of an uneasy feeling intruding on her sleep, dragging her into consciousness. She lay perfectly still, eyes closed, all other senses alert. She heard the soft rustle of clothing and knew she wasn’t alone. She stretched and slipped her hand under her pillow, found her Glock, and bolted upright, aiming at a shadow at the foot of the bed.

“How sweet,” Nick said, gesturing to the Glock. “Just like old times.”

He was in a chair facing the bed, eating a Toblerone. A bottle of white wine and two glasses were on the table beside him.

“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you. How did you get in here?”

“To your knowledge, how many times have I visited the Louvre after it was closed?”

“Three,” she said.

“It’s seven, actually.” He unscrewed the top off the bottle of wine and filled two glasses. “With that in mind, do you really think your hotel room door was a challenge for me?”

Smug bastard. She should have shot him. But it was a nonsmoking room, and they charged a $275 cleaning fee for cigarette smoke and ashes, so she figured that their price for scrubbing away blood and brain matter was probably astronomical.

“You could have knocked,” she said.

Nick held a glass of wine out to her. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

She slid down to the end of the bed and took the glass from him. “How did you know I was sleeping?”

“Anyone walking by your room would have known. You were snoring like a hippo giving birth.”

“I don’t snore,” she said, and drank half the glass of wine. “You broke in to raid my minibar, like always, and didn’t expect to find me here.”

“I’ll say that’s what happened if it will make you feel better.”

“If that’s not it, then what
are
you doing here?”

“I thought you’d like to know how we’re getting Derek Griffin.” His gaze dropped to her shirt. “Is that cocktail sauce?”

Kate looked down and sighed. “Willie was at poolside and I snitched a shrimp off her platter.”

Why me? she thought. Why doesn’t
he
ever have food stains on his shirt?

“You’ve figured out the con already?” Kate asked Nick.

“Yep. The honey trap. It works in any situation where a man is vulnerable to the charms of a beautiful woman. And it helps if he has an unfulfilled desire for sex.”

Kate foraged in the minibar, came up with a Snickers, and bit off a chunk. “So basically any man on earth with a heartbeat in any situation at all.”

“Pretty much,” he said. “You’re going to be a rich, bored, man-hungry heiress cruising the Flores Sea in a multimillion-dollar yacht with a two-person crew.”

Kate’s mouth dropped open and some candy fell out. “No! No way. Not gonna happen. I am
not
going to be the honey in the trap.”

Her short hair was a wreck, overgrown for a pixie cut, not long enough for anything else. She had perpetual food stains. She didn’t own an iron and had no interest in buying one. And it didn’t
matter anyway because her clothes were all wash-and-wear and chosen for their ability to hide a gun. There were times when in all honesty she did feel a little man-hungry, but she had no confidence that, even on her best day, could she pull off the honey trap.

“Willie can be the honey trap,” Kate said. “She’s good at it.”

“She’s going to captain the yacht,” Nick said.

“How is she going to do that?”

“She’s had boating experience.”

“Little pleasure craft. This is a freaking expensive boat.”

“The boat is all computerized. She’ll pick it up in no time. We’re talking about a woman who once took a freight train for a joyride. And the real problem with her being the honey is her age. She’s too old. Griffin will be seeing her in daylight. Do you want to hear the rest of the con or not?”

“Not! I’m not doing this.”

“Of course you’ll do it. You’re a team player. We’ll lease a yacht out of Benoa Harbor in Bali. The yacht will run into engine trouble and end up stuck in the waters off Griffin’s island. We’ll hang out on the island while the yacht is being repaired. You’ll entice Griffin to the point of insanity while I nose around and see if I can figure out where the money is.”

“He’s not going to have the half billion dollars in cash in his sock drawer or even in a safe. You won’t find it on the island,” she said. “At most, he might have five hundred million rupiah stashed in a hollow coconut somewhere.”

Nick nodded. “The money is in a bank account. The key is to find out where that bank is, and Griffin’s password so we can access his account and empty it. Once we’ve done that, or at least have a line on the information, you lure him onto the boat, we overpower
him, and we take him on a ride into international waters, where we leave him floating in a dinghy for the U.S. Navy to apprehend.”

“It doesn’t seem very well thought out.”

“Of course it’s not, it’s only the broad strokes. I’ll fill in the blanks as I go along.”

Kate put her glass and the Snickers wrapper on the table. “I have a better idea. We use the yacht and a cruise as our cover. We anchor near Griffin’s island in darkness, then I go ashore, grab him, and bring him back to the boat.”

“He’ll have protection.”

“I’m pretty tough.”

“We’re not.”

“You and Willie will stay on the boat. I don’t need you.”

“You might, and while I can handle myself, I’m much faster with my mouth than with my fists.”

“No one is asking you to kick ass. That’s my department. I’ve done this kind of thing before.”

“If what Bolton wanted was a military strike force, he wouldn’t have put the two of us together and funded this operation. He knows as well as I do that what this situation requires is finesse,” Nick said. “If Griffin comes to the boat willingly, and
then
you put a gun to his head, nobody gets hurt, and no alarms are raised.”

“Okay, fine. Have it your way, but Willie needs to be the honey trap. Some men like mature women. And she’s got bigger boobs than I do.”

“True, but that’s not the way it’s going down.”

She did an eye roll that was so massive it almost gave her a headache. “I was in the U.S. Navy. In case you have forgotten, that’s the branch of our military that operates on the water, so I know a
thing or two about operating boats and navigating the high seas. Besides, you said these yachts practically pilot themselves.”

“They do if you already have a natural affinity for piloting vehicles. That’s not your super power. It’s Willie’s.”

Kate flopped back onto the bed and squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t want to be a honey trap. I hate that stuff.”

“All you have to do is be smart, sexy, and seductive and make Griffin want you enough to get on a boat with you for a little erotic cruise. How hard could that be?”

“I’d rather punch him in his face.”

“And you wonder why you’re single.”

“I don’t wonder,” she said. “It’s a conscious choice. With the job I have, I don’t have time to commit to a steady relationship, but that doesn’t mean I’m a nun.”

“You play around?”

“Define ‘play around.’ ”

Nick grinned at her. “If you have to define it, you don’t do it.”

“I’ve been busy. Besides, what sort of person do you think I am? And if you think I’m going to sleep with Derek Griffin, you’re wrong.”

“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to make Griffin
believe
that you will if he gets on the boat with you.”

“It’s not that easy,” she said.

“Sure it is. Just show some boob and thigh, maintain eye contact too long, lick your lips, invade his personal space, basically do all the things you usually do when you want to distract and manipulate a man.”

“I don’t do those things!”