The Heist (28 page)

“Derek Griffin is in a league of his own.”

Which reminded Nick of the meeting on the beach. There was something about the fake name that Griffin chose for himself that was nagging at him. Where had he heard of “Daniel Dravot” before?

Nick grabbed the binoculars and scanned the island. Kate was
in a bikini on the beach, lying facedown on a towel and letting Griffin untie her top and smooth suntan lotion on her shoulders, back, and sides.

“She’s really working it,” Willie said. “You don’t need binoculars to see what’s going down.”

“She’s just doing her job.”

“Yeah, but looks to me like she’s enjoying it. You aren’t gonna fly off in a jealous rage, are you?”

“Not in the immediate future.”

“You should have let me be the honey trap. Being that you already rejected me, the least you could do is give me a shot at the bad guy.”

“Kate has more experience with criminals.”

“Yeah, but I
am
one. And I have experience with men. Her, I’m not so sure about.”

Nick swung his attention back to the island. Kate had retied her bikini top and was wading waist deep in water with Griffin watching from the beach. She turned and waved at Griffin, dove in, and headed for the boat, slicing through the water using a killer freestyle stroke.

“I have to give it to her,” Willie said. “She sure can swim.”

Nick stepped down from the flybridge, got a towel ready like the dutiful manservant he was supposed to be, and was standing on the swim deck to meet Kate when she emerged from the water.

“How’s it going?” he asked, draping the towel across her shoulders.

“Seducing him is going to be easy,” Kate said.

“So I’ve noticed.”

“His only security is that guy Dumah, and I don’t see him as much of a threat.”

“Did you happen to see half a billion dollars lying around?”

“No, but Griffin’s laptop is in his library. At least the case is there. And the case is built to survive a nuclear war, so I’m guessing the information we need is in the laptop. How hard could it be to crack?”

“Impossible without the password that unlocks it. Tell me what you saw, especially anything that seemed meaningful to him.”

Kate told him about the mountainside burial ground, the water buffalo horn totem, the waterweed carvings, and the inscription above the front door. She also told him about the environmentally controlled library of first editions and Griffin’s ridiculous story about how he developed his interest in old books.

“Eureka,” Nick said.

“What eureka? You’ve figured something out?”

“Something big.” He looked past her to see Griffin standing impatiently on the sand. For a guy who’d stolen half a billon dollars, Griffin turned out to be a very easy mark himself. “What was your excuse for swimming out here?”

“To let you know you’re welcome to dine with the household staff at six
P.M.
tonight.”

“Where will you be eating?”

“I’ll be having a private dinner with Griffin, and then I’ll spend the night at the main house. You and Willie will spend the night on the boat. It all works to our advantage, because later tonight I’ll slip into his room and suggest we take a skinny dip. That’s when I’ll bring him to the boat, willingly or otherwise, and we’ll make a quiet getaway. Mission accomplished, quick and simple. Now tell me what you know.”

“What about the laptop?” Nick asked.

“I’ll go back for it after we have Griffin on board, not that
having it will do us much good without the password, which I don’t think he’s going to tell us.”

“It’s ‘Sikander’ or ‘Sikandergul.’ That’s what I figured out.”

“How do you know that?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Nick said.

“No! I want to know now!”

“You need to go. You’ve talked too long to the help already, and I don’t want Mr. Dravot to get suspicious.” He lifted the towel away from her, nodded stiffly as if accepting an order, and went up to the flybridge.

“Jerk,”
Kate murmured under her breath.

Nick smiled down at her, and she dove into the water and swam back to shore.

Kate and Griffin were the only guests at dinner, sitting cross-legged on a bamboo mat on either side of the low table on his torchlit veranda under a crescent moon. They each had a glass of wine, a bowl of white rice, and the requisite dish of sambal in front of them. There were no eating utensils. Kate would be eating with her hands again, Balinese-style. Just fabulous, she thought. Another opportunity for sambal to run down her arm and drip off her elbow into her lap.

“You mentioned you left Bali because you wanted to experience the real Indonesia,” Griffin said. “So everything we’re eating tonight came from this island, even the salt and seasonings, and I asked Chef to prepare babi guling.”

Kate took a sip of her wine. “I hope that’s nothing barbaric, like someone’s head.”

“The Toraja were the headhunters. Our chef is Balinese. Entirely different tribes.”

“That’s a relief,” she said. “I’ll sleep much better tonight knowing I won’t be served for breakfast.”

“Not breakfast,” Griffin said. “Possibly dessert, if I’m lucky.”

Ugh! Arrogant cretin, Kate thought. Slime-coated fungus. Diseased monkey butt.

“Luck won’t have anything to do with it,” she told him, licking a drop of sambal off her finger. “Tell me about our dinner.”

“Babi guling is an entire pig, stuffed with spices and herbs, roasted on a spit for six hours, and basted in coconut water to caramelize the skin so it’s deliciously sweet and crispy.”

“Yummy. And you made this special meal for me?”

“It’s not often I get such an interesting guest.”

“You flatter me.”

“I’m trying,” Griffin said.

Kate smiled, doing her best to continue to look interesting and maybe even mysterious.

“I’m fascinated by your property manager,” she said. “He seems so local. What tribe is Dumah from?”

“He’s one of the Bugis, a seafaring people who terrorized the islands of their enemies, arriving by boat in the darkness. It’s where the fear of the bogeyman comes from, at least around here.”

“Should I look for him under my bed before I go to sleep?”

“You don’t have to worry about the bogeyman coming for you tonight.”

“I hope not. I feel so naked without my grenade launcher.”

That was the God’s honest truth, Kate thought. She’d barter her appendix for a Glock.

“I’ll do my best to make you feel secure,” Griffin said.

They ate the pig and Griffin told stories about Indonesia’s history, the wars fought over control of the spice trade, and the
difficulties during the Dutch occupation of the islands. For dessert, the chef served his own homemade recipe for dodol, a candy popular in Indonesia. The pieces of dodol were glutinous globs of rice and cane sugar that looked like saltwater taffy and tasted like a pencil eraser.

“Yum,” Kate said, choking down a glob of dodol. “Very special.”

They walked along the beach after dinner, and Kate admired the swaying palm fronds and gently lapping waves, but her focus was on the yacht. Lights were on, and Nick and Willie were at the dinette, obviously having chosen not to eat on the island.

“It’s a shame about the damage to the yacht. You can kiss your security deposit goodbye,” Griffin said.

“And let them fix the boat and rent it out again? No way.”

“What other option is there?”

“I’ll buy the yacht from them and keep the bullet holes intact as a souvenir of my Indonesian adventure.”

“It’s not over yet,” he said.

She held his arm tight against her and looked into his eyes with her best attempt at a mischievous smile. “I think you may be right.”

A half hour later when they returned to the house, Kate stood in front of her bedroom door and faked a yawn. “I know it’s still early, but I guess the excitement of the day has caught up with me,” she said. “I can barely keep my eyes open.” She pressed her body against his and gave him a soft, lingering kiss. “I’m asleep on my feet.”

“Would you like me to check under your bed for the bogeyman?”

“No, but if I wake up scared in the middle of the night, I hope you won’t mind if I come running.”

“Not at all,” he said.

She slipped into her room, closed the door behind her, and ran to brush her teeth and gargle with Listerine.

It wasn’t entirely an act. Kate
was
tired. Radiating hot sex was almost as exhausting as engaging in it. She had to rest up for a seduction, a kidnapping, and an escape into international waters in a bullet-riddled yacht. So she sprayed herself with DEET, drew the mosquito netting closed around the bed, and slipped under the sheets. Getting infected with malaria or dengue fever from a mosquito bite wasn’t part of her plan.

According to the old-fashioned wind-up clock on the nightstand, it was 10
P.M
. She set her mental alarm for 3
A.M.
and stared through the netting at the view out her window. The moonlight made the wide white eyes of the effigies on the mountain seem to glow, and the effect was made even more dreamlike by the blur of the netting.

Kate awoke at 2:45, alert and ready for action. She lurched out of bed, pulled on bikini bottoms and board shorts, and slipped eyebrow tweezers and a slim metal pick into her pocket. There were sixteen ways she could kill a man with the tweezers and she could use the pick to open all kinds of locks. She was armed and ready. She laced up running shoes and quietly crept out of her room. She intended to go right to Griffin’s room, but she found herself drawn to that one door he’d refused to open during their tour.

Kate went down the hallway to the door, which was across from the library, and tested the doorknob. Locked. She took the pick out of her pocket, worked it into the keyhole, and easily popped the lock. It wasn’t Fort Knox, but she was proud of herself anyway. She eased open the door and peeked inside.

It was a state-of-the-art surgical suite. She didn’t know the purpose for all the slick electronic equipment, but she recognized the lights, the operating table, the defibrillator, the IV stands, the oxygen tanks, and the shelves of iodine, alcohol, and other medical supplies.

The strange discovery made her think of all those James Bond movies with megalomaniac villains who had secret and outrageously elaborate island lairs, from
Dr. No
to
The Man with the Golden Gun
, and of the opening of
Diamonds Are Forever
, where 007 finds the leader of SPECTRE undergoing plastic surgery in a high-tech operating room in a cave full of molten mud.

Those movies, which had seemed so bizarre and over-the-top on screen, didn’t seem so far from reality now. All that was missing were Griffin’s plans for world domination, and a set of steel teeth and a razor-rimmed hat for Dumah, and she might as well be James Bond herself.

A hand clamped onto her shoulder, and she fought her instinctive reaction to take down whoever was behind her, leaving him with a broken right foot, a crushed larynx, and slivers of his nose driven into the frontal lobe of his brain. Instead, she let out a girlie shriek and whirled around, flailing her arms in a panic, to face Dumah, who stared at her with a face as wooden as the effigies’.

“What are you doing here?” Dumah demanded.

Kate looked over Dumah’s shoulder and saw Nick Fox standing in the doorway of the library, grinning at her and holding Griffin’s laptop case. She narrowed her eyes at him for a nano-moment and then she moved on, playing her part.

“This is so embarrassing,” she said to Dumah. “I was trying to find Daniel’s room.”

“It’s at the other end of the hall.”

“My mistake,” she said. “I have no sense of direction. What on earth is this room behind me used for? It looks like some sort of medical room.”

Dumah looked back at her. “It’s in case anyone gets seriously injured.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“No,” he said.

Nick slipped out of the library and disappeared down the hall, on his way to whatever window he’d used to sneak into the house. Unless he’d been ballsy enough to just walk in the front door, which, knowing Nick Fox as she did, Kate thought was entirely possible.

“What good is a hospital room on an island with no doctors?”

“You ask a lot of questions,” Dumah said.

Too many, she thought, but she needed to give Nick time to get away.

“I’m naturally curious,” Kate said. “Did you say Daniel’s room was this way?”

Griffin stepped into the hall wearing pajama bottoms. “What’s going on?”

“She was sneaking around,” Dumah said.

Kate raised her hand. “Guilty as charged. I woke up and went looking for you, and I made a wrong turn.” She leaned in close to Griffin, and whispered, “I’m feeling all hot and sticky. I thought you might like to join me for a skinny dip and dry me off afterward.”

“Go back to bed,” Griffin said to Dumah. “I can take it from here.”

Kate and Griffin made their way single-file down the narrow trail of hard-packed sand. The vegetation was thick on either side of the trail, and the darkness was alive with the mating calls of countless insects and reptiles. Kate was on high alert. She doubted Nick had had time to row back to the boat, and she didn’t want to inadvertently stumble onto him or the dinghy. Probably he’d pulled the dinghy into the bushes and was waiting in the shadows for her to show with Griffin.

Griffin led her off the trail and onto the sandy beach. And without any preliminary warm-up, he dropped his pajama bottoms.

“Your turn,” he said, standing there naked.

Good grief, Kate thought. Who does this? Who just ups and drops his pants? The man was totally lacking finesse. And what was she supposed to do now? Was she supposed to look away or was she supposed to stare and compliment him on his woody? Okay, forget the woody. She was at a crossroads. Should she stick to the original plan? Or should she punch Griffin and go looking for Nick and his dinghy? Truth is, she felt odd about smacking Griffin when he was in his present naked, engorged condition. It wasn’t something they’d covered at Quantico.

“Earth to Eunice,” Griffin said. “Are you going to get naked, or what?”