The Heist (11 page)

“I am speaking for both of us,” she said.

Nick glanced at Jessup. “Is she always this irritable in the morning?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Jessup said.

“Okay, let’s try this again,” Nick said, and raised his glass for a new toast. “To a long and fruitful relationship.”

“This isn’t a relationship,” Kate said. “It’s strictly professional. Don’t you forget that for one second.”

Nick sighed and held up his glass again, eyeing her warily as he said, “May misfortune follow us the rest of our lives, but never catch up.”

Before Kate could object, he tapped her glass with his and the other men jumped in to do the same and everyone chugged their wine.

“Now that we’ve settled that,” Bolton said, setting down his glass, “here’s the protocol. Jessup will be your primary. He will release the funds necessary to complete each mission to an off-shore account that we’ve set up in O’Hare’s name.”

“Yadda-yadda-yadda,” Nick said. “Save the bureaucracy for the bureaucrats. Just tell me who we’re going after.”

Bolton smiled. “Derek Griffin.”

Griffin was a high-flying, charming playboy investment banker whose name was mentioned as often in
Vanity Fair
, for the lavish parties he attended and the charities he supported, as it was in
Forbes
, for the audacious deals he made and the big money he earned for his elite clients. He got even more headlines when he abruptly disappeared with $500 million of his company’s money mere hours before he was about to be arrested by the FBI for running a massive pyramid scheme.

Nick whistled. “Not bad. I have to hand it to you, Bolt, you think big.”

“It’s ‘Bolton.’ Or ‘sir.’ ”

“There’s been an FBI task force looking for him for almost a
year,” Kate said. “Nick is a con man and a thief, not a fugitive tracker. What can he do for us?”

“There’s one person who knows where Griffin is, and perhaps all of that money, and that’s Neal Burnside, his lawyer,” Bolton said. “He’s protected by attorney-client privilege from being forced to talk.”

“I know about Burnside,” Nick said. “I was tempted to hire him when you arrested me. The guy is brilliant.”

“He’s scum,” Bolton said.

“You didn’t think so when he was a Justice Department prosecutor,” Nick said.

“He uses what he learned about our tactics and our personnel to get scores of high-profile crooks and murderers off the hook and make the FBI look inept in the process,” Bolton said. “There’s a word for men like him.”

“Expensive,” Nick said.

“Traitor,” Bolton said.

“So you want the two of us to use Burnside to find Griffin, bring him to justice, and recover the half a billion that he stole,” Kate said.

“Yes,” Bolton said.

“No problem,” Nick said.

“Huge problem,” Kate said. “How are we going to get Burnside to give up Griffin without resorting to torture?”

“I’ll come up with something,” Nick said.

“And even if Burnside does betray his client,” Kate said, “what makes you think Griffin will tell us where his money is?”

“I’ll figure out a way,” Nick said.

Kate stared at him. “That’s it?”

Nick shrugged. “It’s a start.”

“It’s nothing,” she said.

“Let’s get together four days from now, at four
P.M.
, at the Schokoladen-Café in Berlin,” Nick said. “And I’ll tell you how we’re going to do it.”

“No way. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

“So you want us to live together?”

“No, of course not,” she said.

“Then how did you think this was going to work? Did you assume you’d just lock me up in a dungeon somewhere each night?”

“I like the sound of that.” Kate glanced at Bolton and Jessup for backup on this key point, but she could see from the looks on their faces that she wasn’t going to get it. “C’mon, guys, help me out here.”

“He’s a free man,” Jessup said. “With restrictions.”

Nick smiled. “Is speaking in contradictions some secret language they teach you at Quantico? Because you and Bolt are both very good at it.”

“It’s ‘Bolton,’ ” the deputy director said again.

“He could be captured by some other law enforcement agency in the meantime,” Kate said. “And there is nothing to stop him from committing his own scams between assignments.”

“That’s a risk we have to take,” Jessup said.

Kate looked at Bolton, who was obviously in agreement with Jessup. She looked at Nick, who was way too pleased with it all.

“So what am I supposed to do for four days?” Kate asked.

“Enjoy your vacation,” Jessup said.

She had been, right up until the time Bolton and Jessup stepped out from behind that curtain.

It was decided that the four of them would leave Athos separately, to avoid any chance of them all being seen together, and that Kate would go first, since there were others awaiting word from her.

She stepped outside the hut and called her father on the satellite phone. She told him that the mission was a bust, that Nick Fox wasn’t on Athos, and that she’d take the ferry to Ouranoupoli and then the bus back to Thessaloniki, where she would meet him later that day at their hotel.

“You’re lying about Fox,” Jake said. “But I can respect that.”

“You respect lying?”

“Sometimes it’s necessary,” he said. “I only hope that you made the right decision.”

“So do I,” she said.

Nick had to admit there were some undeniable benefits to working for the FBI instead of hiding from them. They made it easier to move around and look legitimate, and even better, he was now operating on someone else’s dime. Bolton had supplied Nick with a new alias, Nicolas Raider. Raider had a U.S. passport, a platinum AmEx card, a bank account, and detailed histories in the IRS, the DMV, Experian, and other major government and private sector databases. The flip side, of course, was that every time Nick used the alias a blip popped up on Bolton’s computer telling him exactly where Nick was located. No problem, Nick thought. I can deal. It’s a new game.

Nick swiped his brand-new credit card through the machine at the airport, flashed his brand-new passport, and flew from Greece to his three-hundred-year-old stone farmhouse in Bois-le-Roi, France. Bois-le-Roi was a small village on the Seine just outside of Fontainebleau. It was one of Nick’s many properties, and it had been chosen primarily for the solitude it offered.

The rambling single-story house, and the two acres it sat on, were surrounded by a stone wall that could be easily scaled but at least shielded the grounds from prying eyes. The former barn housed a beautifully restored red 1966 Jaguar E-type convertible and a three-year-old Mercedes GLK. The house and grounds were tended during his long absences by his neighbor, a gregarious horse trainer by trade who, in his free time, built ships in a bottle and gave them away. There were probably twenty bottled ships around Nick’s house.

Nick arrived in Bois-le-Roi, checked in with his neighbor/​groundskeeper, got briefed on all the local gossip he cared nothing about, then stopped by the baker, the butcher, and the grocer. For dinner he made himself a thick steak, fresh vegetables, and a warmed-up baguette, and he washed it down with a bottle of wine from his well-stocked cellar.

While he ate he opened his laptop and did some basic research into Burnside and Griffin. Most of what he read he already knew. Neither man was a shrinking violet, and their private lives were public record. Their professional lives were legend. Nick finished his steak, sipped his wine, and logged in to his encrypted cloud account, where he browsed through the files he’d been compiling of potential new crew members. His late-night diversion was online poker, where he targeted someone calling himself “Le Chiffre,” handily winning $15,000 from him. By the morning of his third day in Bois-le-Rois, Nick had come up with the broad strokes of his plan.

Jake O’Hare knew how to keep a secret, so three days after Kate’s return from Athos, she shared hers with him. She needed someone she could turn to for advice and support as the operation
unfolded, someone who didn’t have any hidden agendas. She didn’t trust Nick or her own bosses. They were all looking out for themselves. Her father was the one person she could always depend upon to look out for her.

They were sitting at a café in the airport in Athens, waiting for his flight back to the States and hers to Berlin, when she finally told him about the outrageous scheme Nick had sold to Fletcher Bolton.

“I think it’s brilliant,” Jake said.

“You’re being sarcastic.”

“I’m being straight. For once, your hands won’t be tied by bureaucracy, civil rights, and the law.”

“Oh,
those
pesky things,” she said.

“You’ll be able to bring down a lot of bad guys who’ve played the system to their advantage.”

“But I’ll be teamed up with a criminal.”

“The pilot who flew you to Athos was a criminal, but you didn’t seem to mind. Sometimes a criminal is exactly who you need to get a job done. But I don’t have to convince you, you’ve already signed on. So what are we really talking about here, Kate?”

“I’m technically in charge, but I know ultimately it’s Nick who’ll be running the cons. I can’t count on him to tell me everything he’s doing and what the dangers might actually be. I’m going to need a safety net of my own, a plan B he doesn’t need to know about,” Kate said. “I’m hoping it can be you.”

“It’s always been me, didn’t you know that?” Jake said. “That’s what fathers are for.”

“What I am asking could be above and beyond.”

“Hell, Kate, that was my profession for forty years,” he said. “It also happens to be my motto.”

“You have a motto?”

“I do now. It’s ‘Above and Beyond.’ ”

Kate hadn’t ever been to Berlin, nor had she ever had the desire to visit. Her image of the city was shaped by cold war spy movies where everything was in shades of gray, the streets were frosty and bleak, the trees were spindly and bare, and the people were pale, oppressed, and haunted. So she was unprepared for how colorful, vibrant, and energetic Berlin appeared to be as her taxi driver took a long, roundabout, fare-inflating route from the airport to the Hyatt in Potsdamer Platz.

They drove through the lush, sprawling Tiergarten, a forest within the city that made Central Park look like a vacant lot, and cruised by the iconic Brandenburg Gate and a skyline of bold, edgy architecture that embraced the old while also breaking with the past. That architectural philosophy was epitomized by the Reichstag. Built in the late nineteenth century and virtually destroyed in World War II, the Reichstag was restored in the 1990s to its original grandeur as the seat of the German parliament, but its Neo-Baroque dome was replaced with a steel-and-glass version, with a dazzling spiral of 360 mirrors in its center, that looked like it had fallen onto the building from outer space. Kate thought it was a real-life Tomorrowland, without the rides.

She checked in to her room with two hours to kill before her meeting with Nick Fox. So she did the tourist thing, and walked over to Checkpoint Charlie and the replica of the guard shack that once stood on the western side of the Berlin Wall on Friedrichstrasse. Kate was wearing black slacks and a white sweater, but she didn’t have her usual fashion accessories. She’d given her gun and handcuffs to her father to spirit back to the States, using whatever
black bag method he’d employed to get them to Greece. She didn’t have Mace, a Taser, or a telescoping baton. This made her purse about fifteen pounds lighter, and she felt like the strap practically floated off her shoulder.

There was a double line of cobblestones in the street that marked where the Berlin Wall had once stood. She followed the line, which ran under parked cars and along sidewalks as it meandered over several streets. Nobody but her seemed to notice it. The memorial to a wall that once divided a country, that was the bloody front line of the cold war, got less attention than Jack Webb’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Eventually she found her way to the Fassbender & Rausch Schokoladen-Café at the Gendarmenmarkt, an eighteenth-century market square with ornate cathedrals at either end.

Fassbender & Rausch, Berlin’s oldest and most renowned chocolatier, occupied the first two floors of a corner building that faced the Gendarmenmarkt. There was an enormous chocolate sculpture of the Reichstag in one of the first-floor windows, and beyond it Kate could see a burbling chocolate volcano in the center of a store filled with an astonishing assortment of handmade chocolate delicacies that would have made Willy Wonka mess his pants.

Kate was afraid she’d lose control in the store, racing up and down the aisles, stuffing her mouth with candy. For sure a good time, but not an attractive picture if she ran into Nick Fox. It might be hard to establish authority after he saw her with chocolate dribbling out of her mouth and running down her chin. So she skipped the store entirely and went straight to the elevator, which took her to the second-floor café. She was expecting an ice cream shop like Ghirardelli in San Francisco, but the café at Fassbender & Rausch
was an elegant wood-paneled space that had the feel of a private club.