The Heist (5 page)

Nick Fox wore a white T-shirt and polyester slacks and sat at a gunmetal gray table. He was in a lopsided chair, his hands cuffed behind his back and the chain around his ankles locked into a steel eyelet on the floor. He faced the mirror that hid the agents watching him in the next room, but of course he knew that they were there. It was like he was starring in a play and the stage lights were so bright in his eyes that he couldn’t see the audience in the darkness.

Kate came in carrying a fat, dog-eared file, her crisp white shirt unbuttoned enough to show cleavage. He knew the show of cleavage wasn’t normal for her, and he appreciated the effort. He would have appreciated it even more if she’d popped a fourth button.

He smiled and Kate was almost blinded by the wattage. How does he do that? she wondered. She should have worn sunglasses, she thought, like those poker players on TV.

She sat down at the table, placed the file in front of her, opened it, and examined one of the pages. “You’re in a lot of trouble,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “I was taken to an ER last night and I don’t have medical insurance. It’s going to cost me a fortune. Those crooks charge fifty dollars for a tongue depressor.”

“Was your tongue depressed?”

“Thankfully, no. It’s very well adjusted.”

“Because it gets a lot of exercise. You’ve got to be a fast talker in your line of work.”

“I’m a professional hand model.”

“You’re a con man and thief, wanted on three continents,” she said. “That’s how I knew you’d be at the Kibbee. It was the first time in decades that anyone knew exactly where to find the Crimson Teardrop and a rare window of opportunity to steal it. You couldn’t resist. I was at the auction house in Santa Barbara, waiting for you to make your move before the diamond sold, but you didn’t show.”

“Sorry to have disappointed you,” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You’re here now, that’s what counts. And unless you can make a deal with me today, you’ll be spending the rest of your life in prison.”

He cocked his head, bewildered. “I don’t see why.”

“Well, for starters, we have you for impersonating a police officer, wiretapping, and possession of stolen property,” she said. “And that’s not even counting the outstanding charges on your last swindle.”

“What swindle?”

“You bilked six men in Las Vegas out of a million dollars each for organ transplants that they didn’t get.”

“Really? There are people who’ve accused me of that?”

She shifted in her seat. She didn’t know whether he’d guessed, or knew for a fact, that not one of the six men had ID’d his photo, or admitted to paying him a dime, or pressed any charges. They didn’t want to confess to trying to buy their way to the top of the organ transplant lists and they didn’t want him caught to contradict their story. So they claimed they’d come for face-lifts and had only seen a nurse. Each man gave a conflicting description of her.

“No,” Kate said.

“Then I’m confused. What swindle are you talking about?”

“You trespassed on private property. You impersonated an engineer.”

“Those are federal offenses?”

“You swindled a hospital for asbestos cleanup that you didn’t do.”

“Did they say they paid me?”

“No,” she said, “but—”

“Is there asbestos in the hospital?”

“No,” she said.

“I rest my case,” he said, and smiled at her. “Can I go now?”

She wanted to hit him with a bus all over again. She was glad her back was to the mirror, to the agents who were watching, so they couldn’t see the flush on her face and her frustration as the interrogation slipped away from her.

Kate leaned forward against the table. “There are dozens of other swindles and heists we haven’t talked about yet. You’ve been doing this for a very a long time, Nick. Scotland Yard, the Sûreté, and the Russian Politsiya all want a piece of you. We’re only just getting started.”

He lifted his eyes to hers. “You must have me mistaken for someone else.”

“Is that the best you can do?”

“You’ve misinterpreted everything that happened last night,” he said. “You’re making a terrible mistake.”

“Then by all means, set me straight,” she said, leaning back again. She needed a moment to regroup anyway, to collect her thoughts and regain control of the situation.

He looked past her, directing his appeal to the audience. “I’m a struggling performance artist. What happened at the Kibbee was a show.”

“Like the Blue Man Group, only in green and with a diamond?” Kate said.

“In a sense, yes. Live theater on the stage of life. A big stunt that we hoped would go viral on YouTube. Obviously, it was a dumb thing to do. I’ll gladly do my thousand hours of community service and pay restitution for the scratch we left in the glass display case.”

“You drove away with a fifteen-million-dollar diamond,” she said.

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “It was a cubic zirconia, a fifteen-dollar bauble just like the one we left behind in its place. So see, it was theater on both sides. No harm done.”

It was another bold guess, but an educated one, Kate thought. She’d switched the real diamond before its arrival at the Kibbee, though only Roland knew that. And as the situation was playing out, her unwillingness to gamble with the real diamond would cost her in the courtroom. He wouldn’t do much prison time for this heist. They’d have to nail him for all the swindles he’d pulled before, assuming they didn’t end up having to stand in line behind
the other countries that wanted to extradite him. Either way, though, he was going down. She had to show him how futile it was to fight the inevitable, that now was the time to make a deal.

“I know all about you, going back to when you were eighteen,” Kate said. “I don’t get it, either. You had such a bright future. You had the smarts to get yourself into Harvard, but you threw it all away by running a massive, multifaceted cheating operation for rich students. Your scams ran the gamut from hiring impostors to take tests to creating entirely fake transcripts that you planted in the registrar’s office. When you were finally caught, you and a dozen students were expelled and seventy-eight of your other victims were quietly forced to repeat entire academic years.”

“They weren’t victims. They came to me to take advantage of the unique services that I offered so they could have more time for their leisurely pursuits,” he said. “Harvard taught me how to be an enterprising entrepreneur in a global marketplace.”

“What you learned was to target the rich and the venal, people who could afford to be swindled and would rarely report the crime or press charges because they wouldn’t want to be seen as fools,” she said. “That’s what’s kept you out of jail. Until now.”

“It’s odd to hear you talking to me about jail,” Nick said.

“I don’t see why,” she said. “I’m an FBI agent and you’re a crook.”

“Your mother died when you were seven. Your father, a career soldier, took you and your younger sister with him from base to base, all over the world, so you lived the same regimented life that he did. Instead of escaping from the military life when you were eighteen, you joined up, becoming a Navy SEAL, until your commanding officer tried to cop a feel.”

“He was a jerk.”

Nick grinned. “You broke the jerk’s nose, and the good ol’ boy
network made you settle for an honorable discharge instead of court-martial. You joined the FBI after that, which is like the army only there’s no uniform and no saluting. You don’t play well with others. You work alone, because you’re too driven and emotionally distant for anyone to last as your partner, and you live alone for the same reason. So you’re in your own kind of prison. Which is really a shame because you’re very pretty, frighteningly competent, and compellingly complex.”

Kate was momentarily speechless. She was shocked that he knew all those things about her. And she was gobstruck that he thought she was pretty.

“I usually look better,” Kate said, “but I threw up.”

“I hope it wasn’t on my account.”

“I’m pretty sure it was the breakfast burrito.”

“You should take better care of yourself and stop eating all that fast food,” he said.

“How do you know these things?”

“Facebook.”

“I’m not on Facebook.”

“But your sister is and so is everybody else in your family. I love the pictures from your thirteenth birthday party. What was with the braces on your teeth? I’ve never seen anything like it, all those wires, rubber bands, and headgear—”

“I had crooked teeth and an overbite, okay?”

“You were cute.”

“I wasn’t cute. I looked like a demented chipmunk.”

Nick smiled wide. “I thought you looked cute.”

Kate narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re playing me.”

“I’m not playing you. I’m serious. I’m attracted to you. You’re sexy and exciting.”

“That’s it.” She slapped the file shut, tucked it under her arm, and got up. “Forget about a deal. Let’s see what your smile is like after ten years in prison.”

Kate stormed out, slamming the door behind her. She squinched her eyes closed and slapped herself in the forehead hard enough to rattle things loose. “Ugh!” she said. “Crap, damn, phooey!” She threw the file against the wall, ran over to it, and kicked it twenty feet down the hall.

The door to the observation room opened, and Carl Jessup stepped out and eyeballed the file scattered over the floor.

“Feel better?” he asked.

“No. I’m sorry, sir. I let him get to me.”

“He’s a con man, it’s what he does. But it doesn’t matter. He’s sitting in there in irons. You got him and he knows it,” Jessup said. “He’ll end up giving us what we want, every dollar that he stole, to avoid extradition and the possibility of ending up in a Russian gulag. So don’t beat yourself up over this.”

“I should have gone with the French braid,” she said. “The ponytail isn’t my power look.”

Kate spent the next couple days back in Los Angeles, gathering all of her notes and files on Nick Fox and handing them over to the federal prosecutor who was leading the trial team. She offered to stick around, to do whatever additional investigation might be necessary, but the prosecutor thought it was best for the case if she stayed out of it until she was called to testify. So she was finally free of the investigation that had occupied most of her time and attention for years.

She enjoyed that freedom in the privacy of her cubicle for five whole minutes before marching into Jessup’s office. It had a commanding view of the Santa Monica Mountains and the hilltop Getty Center museum, which she knew Nick Fox had twice tricked into buying fake paintings, not that she’d been able to prove it.

Jessup looked up from his desk. “Did you give the Justice Department everything?”

“I cleaned out my files,” she said. “I even gave them my paper
clips and the half-eaten turkey sandwich that’s been in my desk drawer since January. What have you got for me?”

He handed her a thin file. “Pirates.”

“You’re sending me to Somalia?”

“There’s a ring in Southern California that’s been duping DVDs of movies and TV shows and posting the digital files on the Internet for people to download for free,” Jessup said.

“We go after that stuff?”

“Haven’t you seen the FBI warning at the beginning of every DVD?”

“Yeah, but I thought it was a joke.”

“It’s not,” Jessup said.

“It is to me,” Kate said. “I brought in Nick Fox. I should be going after the next Nick Fox.”

“This is big-time crime, Kate. The ring has cost the studios millions of dollars,” Jessup said. “One of the movies that they uploaded to a file-sharing site was downloaded twenty-seven thousand times in ninety days. And they’ve uploaded hundreds.”

“I’m not feeling it,” she said.

“The maximum penalty for conspiracy to commit copyright infringement is five years in prison, a two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar fine, and damages, which are computed by taking the sales price of the DVD and multiplying it by the number of times the digital file has been downloaded. On a twenty-five-dollar DVD downloaded twenty-seven thousand times, that’s six hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. Now multiply that by hundreds of movies, and you get the picture. This is a huge case.”

Kate shook her head and put the file down. “I should be going after someone in the same league as Nick Fox. What about Derek Griffin? That big-time investment guy who ran off with five
hundred million dollars that he stole from his clients? I should find him.”

“We’ve already got somebody on it,” Jessup said. “An entire task force, in fact.”

“There must be someone else on the Ten Most Wanted list I can have.”

“They are all taken.”

“All of them?”

“Believe it or not, while you were chasing Nick Fox, the rest of the Bureau was busy, too.”

“Fine. I’ll take number eleven on the list.”

“You’ll take this.” Jessup tapped the file. “Oh, and you’ll be working with an MPAA investigator on this one.”

“MPAA?”

“Motion Picture Association of America,” Jessup said.

“They have cops?”

“Yes,” Jessup said. “They do.”

“You’re telling me to work with a make-believe cop.”