The Heist

  “I did. I couldn’t pack everything I needed into my bag.”

  “Like what?”

  “Handcuffs,” she said.

  “I like it,” Nick said. He gave her a salute, and left.

  Kate changed into her bikini because it seemed like something Goldie would do, and while she was putting on suntan lotion the yacht started with a lurch that nearly knocked her to the floor. Willie getting the feel of the controls, she thought. Kate hoped that Willie was a fast learner. She grabbed a hat and sunglasses and went topside.

  The ride out of the harbor and into the busy Lombok Strait was uneventful. Willie was at the helm on the flybridge, steering the boat through the gauntlet of ferries, tankers, longboats, and pleasure craft. A rusting wreck in the center of the bay bore testament to the dangers of navigating in and out of the harbor.

  They reached open water and Willie rammed the throttle to full speed, anxious to see what the yacht could do. Kate braced herself when the boat lifted and jolted forward. She turned to look at Willie, and Willie gave her two thumbs up. Willie slowed down to cruising speed after a few minutes, and Kate made her way to the stern and climbed the stairs to the flybridge.

  Nick was barbecuing shrimp and chicken on the built-in grill that sat beside a fully stocked minibar and a sink, all within serving reach of the aft dinette area. Willie stood at the starboard-side pilot station, looking ahead to the cluster of islands on the horizon, the wind whipping her hair into a frenzy of overprocessed yellow snarls, her barely contained nipples saluting the bow.

  The communications and radar array were located at the top of the mast, and toward the bottom was an outdoor shower. Kate bypassed the shower and went to Willie.

  “How is it going?” Kate asked.

  “It would be going better if I had a cold beer,” Willie said. “Other than that it’s fantastic.”

  Nick brought Willie a plate of rice, chicken, and shrimp. “I can take the helm if you’d like a break.”

  “No way. I never want a break. I could drive this mother forever. This thing’s better than a Zamboni.”

  “Yeah, and we don’t have to freeze the water,” Nick said, moving Kate away from the pilot station and toward the dinette, where he had their lunch set out.

  “I didn’t know cooking was among your talents,” Kate said, sliding onto the C-shaped settee, spearing a grilled shrimp with her fork.

  “I have a lot of talents you don’t know about.”

  Kate paused with the shrimp halfway to her mouth. “Such as?”

  “I’m a good chess player.”

  No surprise there, she thought. “And?”

  “I can iron a shirt, but I’d rather not. I can play the piano halfway okay. I can touch my nose with my tongue.”

  Kate lost her grip on her fork, and the fork clattered onto her plate.

  Nick smiled. “I knew you’d like that last one.”

  After lunch, Kate went to her stateroom, opened the crate, and sorted through the care package from her dad, amused by his thoughtfulness and impressed by his resources. He’d clearly amassed a huge network of contacts and plenty of favors during his years of covert military service. And it was paying off for her now. She locked a few items in the safe, then slipped her filmy red sarong over her bikini and went abovedeck, where Willie was now piloting the yacht from the helm console in the cabin.

  “What’s our ETA?” Kate asked.

  “At this speed, we should arrive at Dajmaboutu by early morning.”

  Nick was at the table, reviewing the charts. “Or we could anchor off any of a dozen islands along the way for the night, get an early start tomorrow, and show up midafternoon.”

  “We aren’t on vacation,” Kate said. “We have a mission to complete.”

  “Hard to remember the mission with you in that red silk thing,” Nick said.

  Kate flapped her arms. “I don’t have anything else! We only bought mantrap clothes.” She looked down at herself. “Actually it’s really comfy. It lets a lot of air in.”

  “So?” Willie asked. “What’s the plan?”

  “We’re pushing on,” Kate said. “We’ll pilot in shifts. I’ll take the next one.”

  Kate chose to do her time on the flybridge station, where she could feel the night air and see the stars. It was nice to have the GPS, but she felt more secure having the solar system up there as backup and her father’s trusty sextant, which he’d kindly included in his care package. Nick left her alone, only intruding on her solitude to bring her sandwiches and coffee. Shortly after midnight, he tapped her shoulder and told her it was time for her to hand over the helm to him.

  “Do you know how to pilot a yacht?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t, but I thought it would be fun to try it in pitch-darkness in the middle of the Flores Sea,” Nick said, smiling. “They light up the islands, right?”

  “You’re such a smart-ass.”

  “I know, but I’m a charming smart-ass.”

  This was true, Kate thought. He was a charming smart-ass.

  Kate awoke after dawn, jolted out of sleep by a sudden surge in the yacht’s speed. She got out of bed and nearly lost her footing when the yacht banked sharply to one side and then the other. She opened her door and saw Nick coming out of the other stateroom. “What’s going on?” Kate asked.

  “I don’t know,” Nick said. “Willie took over for me an hour ago.”

  They rushed up the stairs to the flybridge, where Willie had the boat at top speed passing what appeared to be a small, uninhabited islet with a jagged shore and a thick forest of trees. Two old, beaten-down speedboats were about fifty yards behind them and closing fast. Kate guessed there were half a dozen men in each boat.

  “They came out of nowhere as I was passing that little island,” Willie said. “I saw guns, and I hit full throttle.”

  “Guns? What kind of guns?”

  “The kind with bullets,” Willie said. “I’ve been swerving side to side to create a bigger wake, but they’re still gaining.”

  Kate grabbed binoculars from a shelf beneath the console and took a closer look. The boats were full of men carrying grappling hooks and automatic weapons. Kate lowered her binoculars as one of the speedboats surged forward and closed in on their starboard side.

  “They’re pirates. We aren’t going to be able to outrun them. They’re twice as fast,” Kate said.

  Willie looked over at her. “Are you suggesting we give up?”

  “No. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

  “No problem,” Willie said. “This is the kind of cruising I’m used to.”

  Kate and Nick ran aft to the stairs and were on their way down when the speedboat opened fire. Kate hit the stern deck hard, taking Nick down with her. Bullets raked the port side, shattering windows and punching holes in the cabin.

  It was a warning, but Willie took it as a challenge. She veered hard toward the pirates, like she was playing bumper boats at the county fair, and they steered away to avoid a collision.

  “She’s good,” Kate said, getting to her feet.

  “Yeah, but it’s pointless,” Nick said. “We’ll have to stop, and when we do, just play the frightened heiress. I’ll do the talking.”

  Willie swerved back around and headed straight at the boat that had been following them. The other pilot easily steered clear, but not before opening a volley of shots at the flybridge as he passed. Everyone hit the deck as bullets tore up the dinette and shattered the minibar, spilling drinks on the floor, a tiny waterfall of alcohol splashing down the stairs to the stern.

  “That was another warning,” Nick said. “The next time they shoot, they could kill one of us.”

  “Good thing we didn’t get a faster boat,” Kate said. “Do what you have to do. I’m screaming in terror and going below.”

  “Make a show of it,” he said.

  Kate screamed, waved her arms in the air for good measure, and ran below.

  Nick yelled to Willie, “Stop the boat!”
>
  “Are you kidding?” Willie yelled back. “They’ll be all over us.”

  “Just do it,” Nick said.

  He took a white towel from a cabinet at the stern and waved it above his head as a flag of surrender. The speedboats were behind them now, almost side by side. One boat hung back while the other one approached. Nick could see two men stepping forward with their grappling hooks to secure the yacht.

  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.’ ”