The Heist (26 page)

They were about ten yards away, coming up the starboard side, when the men suddenly dove off their boat. Nick looked over his shoulder and saw Kate standing behind him with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher resting on her shoulder. It may have been the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.

“Get down,” she said calmly to him, and fired.

The grenade streaked across the water and smacked into the abandoned speedboat, igniting the fuel on board and setting off a massive white-hot blast of flame, smoke, and shards of fiberglass.

Willie didn’t wait to be told to punch it. She used the distraction, and the cloud of smoke, to hit full throttle. Kate stood her ground, staring into the cloud of black smoke as the other speedboat circled back to pick up the men splashing in the water.

Nick got to his feet, grinning. “
That’s
what you had delivered? A rocket-propelled grenade launcher?”

“No girl should ever leave home without one,” Kate said, and tossed it onto the settee as if it was her purse.

The three of them regrouped in the cabin with Willie at the helm, while Kate used a rolled-up navigational chart to wipe glass fragments off the dinette table.

“I want to see how close we are to Griffin’s island,” Kate said, smoothing the chart out in front of her. “We need to get out of the open sea and into a protected cove. Those two speedboats weren’t out here alone. There’s a mother ship out there somewhere.”

“And we can’t call anybody for help,” Willie said. “They shot off the top of our mast, taking out our nav and communications array.”

“We don’t need them,” Nick said. “We’re in terrific shape.”

Kate hated to be the one to ask the question, but she knew someone had to do it. “How do you figure that?” she said.

“Look around,” Nick said, and swept his arm in front of him, gesturing to the shattered windows, the bullet-pocked couches, and the chunks of scorched fiberglass that littered the stern. “The
pirates were a godsend. Now Griffin won’t question why Eunice is seeking shelter on his island. It will be obvious. She’s terrified, in desperate need of comfort and security, after being attacked by a horde of bloodthirsty pirates. If I had their address, I’d send them a fruit basket. They did us a huge favor.”

“It might have turned out differently if I didn’t have that grenade launcher,” Kate said.

“But you did,” Nick said. “Because that is who you are. Sometimes when a plan is right, everything else, all the things you can’t control, falls into place just the way it should. I’ve got a good feeling about this.”

“You’re the only person I know who’d consider nearly being hijacked by pirates as a positive sign,” Kate said, and tapped a location on the map. “We’re only thirty or forty minutes from Griffin’s island. If our luck holds, we can make it there before the mother ship comes looking for us.”

“And if it doesn’t,” Nick said, “what else have you got in that crate?”

“The usual touristy things.”

“Like what?”

“Handcuffs.”

“Kinky,” he said.

“A Glock,” she said.

“Naturally.”

“A garrote.”

“Always handy.”

“Night-vision goggles, a switchblade, a Kevlar vest, plenty of ammo, and a spare rocket-propelled grenade launcher.”

“The bare necessities,” Nick said.

“My God.” Willie looked back at Kate. “What kind of vacations do you take?”

“Ones like this,” Kate said.

A few years ago, Derek Griffin realized that it would soon be impossible to hide the monumental extent of his fraud from his clients or the SEC. So rather than wait to get caught, he began quietly arranging his inevitable flight from justice. With Neal Burnside’s help, Griffin bribed Indonesian government officials to allow him to lease a beautiful tropical island for fifty years from a destitute tribe that had dwindled in number to just a few dozen people. He paid most of the tribe to leave the island in favor of condos in Sulawesi, but he kept a few of them around to take care of him and fulfill his halfhearted promise to maintain their ancient burial grounds.

Under the guise of developing the island as a resort, a requirement of the lease, he’d mowed down most of the tribe’s village and built a luxurious compound that architecturally mimicked the traditional Tongkonan style, which featured sharply curved bamboo roofs that looked like the top of Batman’s head.

Griffin prominently displayed a stack of fifty water buffalo horns, a symbol of wealth and status in the Torajan culture, on the front of his house to let everyone know he was loaded. It was the Torajan equivalent of parking a Ferrari in the driveway. So the horns were a must, as was having a herd of living water buffalo around, just to remind everyone who was boss and inspire the requisite envy. It was like parading around Beverly Hills with a twenty-two-year-old trophy wife, or top model girlfriend, or both.

He’d been well into the process of quietly moving his most
prized possessions from Los Angeles to the island, including his library of first editions and his collection of modern art, when Neal Burnside alerted him that his arrest was imminent. Griffin fled within the hour, and now here he was, halfway around the world, the king of his own tropical island, half a billion dollars tucked away in a secret bank account.

Unfortunately Burnside’s paradise was missing a key ingredient. There were no women on the island, except his chef’s wife and the plain-looking tribeswomen who tended to his home and grounds, and they didn’t count. This sad state of affairs was very much on Griffin’s mind that morning as he sat on his veranda, eating his rice flour pancakes embellished with fruit, brown sugar, and coconut milk. He gazed out at the carved jackwood effigies of the dead that stared wide-eyed at him from their hand-chiseled alcoves in the mountain beside his house, and he felt his manly urges percolating. So much so that even the tribeswomen, who tended his fields in their caftans and straw hats, their lips scarlet with betel nut stain and their faces white with rice powder, were beginning to look desirable to him.

That’s when Dumah, his property manager and head of security, came lumbering out onto the deck. He was a fierce-looking Torajan, part of a tribe that, in the not too distant past, were known as headhunters and slavers.

“There’s a yacht dropping anchor in the cove,” Dumah said, and offered his boss a pair of high-powered binoculars.

Griffin looked out at the cove. The yacht was new and nicely designed, but it had been strafed with bullets and the mast was missing its antennas. Some dumb, rich tourists who’d run into trouble, he thought. He was about to tell Dumah to send them away when he spotted the woman on the flybridge. She had
drastically bleached blond hair pulled up into a frizzed-out ponytail, a set of fun bags that could knock your eye out, and it looked like her ass was okay too. She was sort of wearing a crew uniform. He felt a stirring of desire, but not strong enough to risk letting whoever was on that yacht come onto his island.

Griffin was ready to tell Dumah to give them the heave-ho when Kate walked into his line of vision, and it was like someone had just jolted him with defibrillator paddles. His heart nearly exploded out of his chiseled chest. She was wearing a thin red silk dress that was translucent in the bright sunlight, showing Griffin everything he’d been yearning for and more. And this creature of erotic delight had just been delivered to his door like a Domino’s pizza. He lowered his binoculars, licked the brown sugar from his lips, and thanked God for answering his unspoken prayers.

“These people are in trouble,” Griffin said. “We’re going to help them.”

Nick released the motorized dinghy that was attached to the stern and helped Kate and Willie get on board. Once they were settled, he fired up the outboard and steered them toward the beach. He could see some natives gathering on the white sand in their hand-woven straw hats and bootleg Ralph Lauren shirts. At least he hoped for Ralph’s sake the shirts were bootleg, because the oversize and misproportioned insignia looked like a monkey on a camel.

Kate saw Griffin drive up in a golf cart, and watched him step out from behind the wheel. He was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and white shorts. He was deeply tanned, with a sprinkling of premature gray in his hair, and his body was muscled in the way that men get muscled from working out in a prison yard, lifting
weights and running along the fenced perimeter day after day because it’s all there is to do. Griffin’s prison was his tropical island.

“Go get him, tiger,” Nick said to Kate. “Turn his world upside down.”

“I’m not sure I can do that,” Kate said.

“You did it to me,” Nick said. “And you can do it to him.”

As the boat neared shore, Kate tried out some of Boyd’s Method acting, imagining herself in the afterglow of sex, parts of her still swollen and pulsing, her heart still beating fast, her skin flushed.

“Are you okay?” Nick asked. “You sound like you’re hyperventilating. Do you need a paper bag?”

“I’m fine,” Kate said. “Got a little heartburn from your cooking.”

Okay, she thought, maybe I should dial back on the Method stuff.

Griffin saw the hot bitch in the red dress studying his body, and he saw the smile it brought to her face. Nice, he thought. This was starting out very well and they hadn’t even met yet. He gestured to his men to help bring the dinghy ashore. Three of the tribesmen sloshed out into the water and pulled the boat up onto the beach.

Dumah stepped up beside Griffin. “I don’t like this. We have no idea who they are.”

“She’s a wealthy young woman who decided to take a cruise in pirate-infested waters on an expensive yacht with a flag on the mast that said ‘Come and get it.’ ”

“And yet here they are,” Dumah said. “How did they escape?”

“I’m sure there’s a good explanation,” Griffin said. “You keep an eye on her crew. I’ll watch her.”

Griffin stepped into the warm, shallow water and offered his hand to the woman as she climbed out of the boat.

“Oh, thank God,” she said. “A friendly face. For a minute there, I was afraid we were trading one bad situation for another. What if we’d come ashore on an island occupied by pirates?”

“Fortunately, that’s not the case,” Griffin said, leading her to the beach and leaving her two crew members to fend for themselves. “I’m Daniel Dravot and this is my private island. You’re safe here.”

“That’s a huge relief after what we’ve just been through. I’m Eunice Huffnagle.” She gestured to her two crew members standing a respectful distance away with Dumah and the curious tribespeople. “Willie is my ship’s captain, and Sam is first mate.”

“Eunice Huffnagle,” Griffin said. “What an unusual name.”

“I was named after my great-aunt. She went insane one night and killed her mate.” Kate cut her eyes to Nick.

“Your boat looks like it’s sustained significant damage,” Griffin said. “You don’t have your great-aunt on board, do you?”

“Goodness, no. We were attacked by pirates,” Kate said. “They came out of nowhere on speedboats and just started shooting at us with machine guns. Luckily, no one was hurt. We have to call the coast guard right away.”

“There’s no point. There’s nothing the authorities can do.”

“But those pirates are still out there, waiting to ambush somebody else.”

“It’s a big sea with a thousand islands, all of it infested with pirates. You escaped. Consider yourself very, very lucky.”

“So it’s just open season on the tourists.”

“Only the ones who stray far from civilization and flaunt their wealth and vulnerability.”

He regretted the remark the instant he made it. Insulting a woman was probably not the best strategy for getting her into bed. But, to his relief, she didn’t seem offended. She shrugged his comment off.

“I wanted to get away from it all and experience the true Indonesia, not sit around in one of Daddy’s hotels. So I rented this little boat. What’s the point of having lots of money if you don’t spend it?”

“So true,” Griffin said, trying to sneak a peek down her silky top. “How did you get away from the pirates? Surely you couldn’t have outrun them.”

“Sam blew up their boat with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.”

Eunice said it in a casual, offhand sort of way that made it seem as if she was referring to a common yacht accessory.

“Really?” Griffin looked over her shoulder to Sam, who nodded.

“Her father is very protective,” Sam said. “You should see what she takes with her when she goes camping.”

“I may be rich, showy, and irresponsible,” Eunice said, “but I’m never vulnerable.”

Griffin laughed, truly laughed, for the first time in ages. Eunice was his kind of woman: sexy, smart, and sassy. He hadn’t met anyone like her since he’d fled the United States. And he intended to make the most of the opportunity that had fallen into his lap, right where it belonged.

“You still must be pretty shaken up after such a terrifying experience,” he said to her.

“To be honest, I couldn’t stop shaking until you took my hand to help me out of the boat.”

Holy crap, Griffin thought. It kept getting better and better. He had a sure thing, and she wasn’t even ugly. She was pretty. Okay, so maybe her hair was sort of chopped off, but it was probably hard to get a good cut in Indonesia.