The Heist (29 page)

Kate was weighing her options and looking at her feet, which she preferred to sizing up Griffin’s Mr. Stiffy. As she saw it, her options weren’t great. She could get naked, or she could sucker punch him. “Oh, hell,” she said, and she smashed her fist into his face.

Griffin went down to the ground like a sack of sand, there was
a flash of light in the trees behind him, and—
phoonf!
—a rocket shot out of the trees, passing so close to Kate that she could feel the heat on her cheek. It streaked across the water and slammed into the yacht, blowing it to bits in a concussive burst of flames that knocked her off her feet.

Bits of burning rubble rained down on the water, and Kate stared at the wreckage in openmouthed horror, worried that Willie had been on the boat.
No
, she told herself. You don’t know that for sure. Don’t even go there. There’s no time for that kind of grieving. Find the guy who shot off the rocket and take him out. And then find Willie.

Kate got to her feet, with Griffin a beat behind her, looking dazed, his nose dripping blood.

“Who?” Griffin asked. “What?”

Five men burst out of the trees, their weapons aimed at Kate and Griffin. One of them had her RPG slung over his shoulder. They were a scruffy-looking group in sandals and mismatched pants and shirts. They had knives in sheaths on their belts, bad haircuts, and leathery skin. The guy with the RPG had elaborate tribal tattoos on his arms and face. His skin was dark but his features were Asian, and a scar slashed the length of one cheek.

“Now we’re even,” the guy with the scar said.

Oh, crap, Kate thought. The pirates.

Griffin clasped his hands over his privates, as if his balls were worth something in the world of pirate plunder. For all Kate cared, the pirates could do whatever they wanted with Griffin’s balls. She was focused on the scarred guy. He was the man who’d blown up the boat. He was the man who might have killed Willie. He was the man she was going to kill at the first opportunity.

“Did you really think we would just run away?” the pirate asked Kate. “What kind of men would we be?”

Kate was unarmed except for her eyebrow tweezers, wearing nothing but a bikini and board shorts, up against five men with assault rifles. They wouldn’t be expecting her to strike. So she figured she’d have an advantage … for a few seconds. She ran various scenarios through her mind. She could wait for the pirate to get close, stab her eyebrow tweezers into his carotid artery, then use his body as a shield as she picked off his friends with his gun.

“Who are you people?” Griffin asked.

“Wealth management consultants,” the pirate said, dropping the RPG on the sand, rolling his shoulders, working out a kink. “You can call me Bob.”

Kate almost gave a snort of laughter. Bob? Was he serious? Bob? Really? Okay, so his name was Bob. Fine. She was still going to kill him. She just had to decide on a course of action. She could
grab Bob and break his neck with one sharp twist. She could jam her eyebrow tweezers between two particular vertebrae and shut him off like a flashlight. Or she could take his knife from his belt and bury it deep in his gut. Okay, let’s get real, she told herself. That stuff mostly works in the movies, but real life not so much. Maybe her dad could pull it off with tweezers, but she suspected she at least needed a screwdriver.

Griffin dabbed at his nose, trying to stop the blood flow. “I’m going to bend down and put on my bottoms.”

“No, you’re not,” Bob said. “You’re going to stand there naked so we can laugh at you.”

“I’d rather be shot,” Griffin said. And he bent down and pulled up his pajamas.

Bob pressed a gun against Griffin’s forehead. “What makes you think I won’t give you what you’ve asked for?”

“You can’t ransom a corpse.”

Bob grinned. “I see you understand how my wealth management program works.”

A sixth pirate dragged Willie out of the woods, shoving her into the clearing. Kate sucked in air, not sure if she was going to burst into tears of relief or coldcock Bob out of pure rage. She pulled herself together and managed to do neither.

“We found her when we boarded your boat, which by the way was a big disappointment,” Bob said to Kate. “No jewelry. No money. No six-month supply of Cristal champagne and caviar. For a spoiled bitch, you don’t know much.”

“I know you’re a disgusting pig,” Kate said, back in character. “What about Sam? Wasn’t he on the boat as well? Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a mate who can cook?”

“You’ve got the pig part right,” Bob said. “But I rarely kill servants. I do, however, occasionally kill their masters. Your man is alive, too. He wasn’t on the boat, but we know he’s somewhere on the island. We won’t hurt him unless he puts up a fight.”

No problem there, Kate thought. Nick wouldn’t put up a fight. Nick would sweet-talk Bob into giving up the gold fillings in his teeth.

“I didn’t hear them board,” Willie said to Kate. “I didn’t know they were there until one of them came up behind me and put a knife to my throat.”

Four more of Bob’s men led Dumah, the chef and his wife, and the bewildered Torajan household staff down to the beach at gunpoint. Bob spoke to them in Indonesian, his inflection more like that of a car salesman making a pitch than a pirate warning his captives. Dumah nodded at Bob, said a few words to the rest of the staff, and they all turned and walked away as if there was nothing interesting left to see.

“What just happened?” Griffin asked, bewildered. “Where are they going?”

Bob turned to Griffin. “I told the villagers I had no quarrel with them, they were free to go back to their daily lives, and if they didn’t try to intervene in our wealth management transaction, they wouldn’t even notice that we were here.”

It made sense to Kate. Their loyalty was to themselves and the island, not to the rich guy who’d leased their land. It apparently made sense to Griffin as well, who accepted the explanation with a nod.

“What did you say to Dumah?” Griffin asked.

“I asked him how loyal he was to you. He said, not at all. So I
gave him your yacht and wished him a good life. He is a Bugis and a mercenary, like me. He knows not to betray us to the law. We would find him and kill him and every member of his family.”

“But what about betraying me?” Griffin said. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

“No,” Bob said. “Not really.”

“Isn’t he worried about me coming after him for stealing my yacht?”

Bob laughed, said something in Indonesian to the others, and they laughed along with Bob.

“You really know nothing about our people or this country,” Bob said to Griffin. “And you take us for fools. Don’t you think we know you are hiding from someone or something?”

Griffin avoided looking at Kate. “Are we going to stand on the beach all night, Bob, or can we go back to the house and begin the negotiations?”

Bob told two of his men to take Willie to the mountain cave where the Torajan tribe buried, then visited, their dead, and to make sure she didn’t escape. The Torajans went back to their homes to sleep. The Balinese chef and his wife were sent back to their kitchen to begin preparing an early breakfast for Bob and his men, several of whom watched over the couple to make sure nothing bad got slipped into their food. Kate and Griffin were force-marched back to the house.

“Nice place you had here,” Bob said, standing in the foyer, stressing the past tense in the sentence. “Where is your satellite phone?”

Griffin gestured to the doorway. “In the library.”

Bob went in first, followed by Kate and Griffin, and then the
rest of the pirates. Kate was doing mental rehearsals, denying any knowledge of the missing laptop, when she realized the case wasn’t missing. The laptop case was on the table, beside the satellite phone. Nick must have slipped back into the house and returned the laptop … or at least the case.

Bob tossed the satellite phone to Kate. “You have one call, princess. Choose wisely. It should be someone who values your life and is also very rich. Tell whoever it is that I want three million dollars in three days or you die.”

Kate punched in the numbers and got her father’s voicemail. His greeting was simply a confirmation of his phone number. He didn’t give his name.

“Dad, it’s me … Eunice. I’ve been taken hostage by pirates, and it’s not nearly as fun as it sounds. They want money. Three million dollars in three days or they’ll kill me.”

Bob took the phone from her. “You will deliver the ransom in American dollars in a watertight case that floats. You will drop it from an aircraft into the sea at the following coordinates.” Bob rattled off some numbers. “You will see a boat there. If I find any tracking devices in the package, or see any aircraft or boats following us, I will feed your daughter to the sharks.” He disconnected the call. “I hope your father frequently checks his voicemail.”

“That’s not what you should think about,” she said. “Ask yourself what kind of man gives his daughter an RPG and what he would do to anyone who hurts her.”

“I’ll try not to piss my pants,” Bob said, gesturing to two of his men. “Take her to the cave.”

Kate was muscled out of the library at gunpoint, shoved down the hall and out of the house. She was led across the scrub grass, past the huts of the Torajan tribespeople, and then up the winding
path to the narrow cave entrance, where the two armed pirates stood guard. One of the guards pushed Kate into the mouth of the cave and motioned her forward.

“Go,” he said. “You go there.”

Kate picked her way through a rocky, twisting passageway, moving toward a flickering light. She rounded a corner and entered a wide cave, about twenty feet high at its highest point, lit with candles and honeycombed with tombs. The tombs were stuffed with crude, crumbling caskets that were spilling bones onto altars. Offerings of clothes, jewelry, walking sticks, and dishes filled with cash and loose change had been set on the altars. And it was all guarded by wooden effigies of the dead.

When Kate stumbled in, Nick and Willie were sitting on a rock ledge in the dim light, their clothing damp with sweat from the hot, humid air trapped in the cave, eating caviar and crackers from a silver dish on a wooden crate.

Nick smiled when he saw her. “Sit down and have some caviar. I liberated it from the house when I returned the laptop. I also took this to celebrate.” He produced three tin cups and a hand-blown glass bottle filled with amber liquid, which he placed on the crate. “This is Balvenie Fifty, a single malt Scotch whisky that’s been sealed for half a century in an oak sherry hogshead. Only eighty-eight bottles were produced, and they sell for thirty-five thousand dollars each.”

He filled the cups and everyone took one.

“How did you get in here?” Kate asked him.

“Back door. Fairly easy to get in. Impossible to get out without some sort of ladder.”

Kate sat on the rock ledge beside Nick. “What are we celebrating?”

“Our tremendous good luck,” Nick said. “Everything is going our way.”

“Our yacht has been blown up, we don’t have Griffin or his money, and we’re being held captive in a Torajan mausoleum on an island controlled by a dozen armed pirates,” Kate said.

Nick tasted his whisky and nodded approval. “Griffin will beg to leave the island with us when we escape.”

“Good to know you think we’ll escape,” Willie said. “I hadn’t pictured this part of The Big Adventure.” She knocked back her whisky and gasped as it burned down her throat. “Yow!”

Kate took a sip and savored the delicate blend of oak, peat, and honey flavors that had been in a cask since John F. Kennedy was president. It was the best Scotch she’d ever tasted and probably ever would taste. She just hoped it wasn’t the
last
Scotch she ever tasted.

“What happened in Griffin’s house?” Nick asked.

“Bob put a gun to my head and handed me a satellite phone. I called my father and left a three-million-dollar ransom demand on his voicemail. He has three days to drop the money at sea or I’m dead. I’m not sure what happens to you two in that situation, but I’m sure it’s not good.”

“But you really called the international security company you two work for,” Willie said, “and they’re going to send a strike team to rescue us.”

“No,” Kate said. “I called my father.”

“Does he have three million dollars?”

Kate shook her head. “We’re on our own here.”

Willie poured herself another shot of Scotch. “You better know what you’re doing,” she said to Nick, “because I don’t want to meet my maker in these stupid khaki shorts you made me wear.”

“What about Griffin?” Nick asked Kate.

“I assume he’s negotiating his own ransom since he’s got nobody that he can call to pay it,” Kate said.

“That’s perfect for us,” Nick said. “He’ll have to access his account with his laptop to move the money to Bob’s bank, or arrange to have the cash withdrawn and delivered to him, all of which will leave a digital trail on the hard drive that we can follow later.”

“Assuming we can get our hands on his laptop again.”

“We will,” Nick said.

“And that you’re right about his password.”