The Heist

  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.”

  “I am,” he said.

  “What makes you so sure it’s ‘Sikander’ or ‘Sikandergul’?”

  “Because Daniel Dravot was a character in Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. And because of the quote from the book that Griffin put above all those water buffalo horns in front of his house.”

  “I didn’t know you were such an avid reader,” Kate said.

  “I haven’t read the book, but I loved the movie,” Nick said
. “Sean Connery and Michael Caine star as two nineteenth-century con men and soldiers of fortune, Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan. They hatch a plot to become kings by teaching modern warfare techniques to one of the uncivilized mountain tribes of Afghanistan. Then the plan is to lead them to victory over their adversaries. Once the tribe is dominant, the two men intend to betray the king, take his throne, and lord over the dynasty they created.”

  “I don’t understand,” Willie said. “What does that have to do with Derek Griffin?”

  “In one of the early battles, Dravot is hit in the chest with an arrow but doesn’t bleed. That’s because he has a bandolier hidden under his shirt that stops the arrow from hitting his flesh. So now the tribe thinks Dravot is a god and they basically make him their king. They give him a collection of gold and jewels that Alexander the Great, who they call Sikander, left with them centuries before in a sacred city they call Sikandergul. The problem is, Dravot begins to believe his own hype. His buddy Peachy wants to sneak out of there right away with the treasure, but Dravot wants to stick around, enjoy being a god for a while, and take one of the chieftain’s beautiful daughters as his lover. But when Dravot goes to bed the girl, she freaks out and bites his lip, drawing blood, revealing to everyone that he’s not a god.”

  “Not god, not devil, but man,” Kate said, repeating the quote inscribed above Griffin’s door.

  “That’s bad news for Dravot,” Nick said. “Everybody in the tribe feels suckered, so they force Dravot out onto the middle of a rope bridge across a deep gorge and then cut it down. Dravot falls to his death and they beat the crap out of Peachy, who crawls back to civilization with Dravot’s decapitated head in a burlap sack.”

  “You could learn a lot from that story,” Kate said.

  “I have,” Nick said. “Griffin’s password.”

  “I’m lost,” Willie said.

  “Griffin thinks his own life is tragically mirroring Dravot’s,” Kate said, “that he’s a king with a vast fortune who is stuck in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of uncivilized natives.”

  “Aha!” Willie said. “And like Dravot, a big part of his undoing is his desire to nail a woman. I almost feel sorry for the guy.”

  “You shouldn’t,” Kate said. “He’s a crook, and he’s sleeping in his own bed while we’re sitting in a cave full of corpses.”

  “A short-term situation,” Nick said. “Twenty-four hours from now, we’ll be on our way to the Indian Ocean in a seaplane with Derek Griffin and his money. We just have to figure out how to escape.”

  Kate thought that should be easy for a man who managed to talk his way out of prison by convincing the deputy director of the FBI not only to let him go but let him continue to commit massive frauds and help him do it. Compared to that, how hard could it be to escape from an island overrun with pirates in the middle of Indonesia?

  “No problemo,” she said. “Pass me the caviar.”

  Part of Kate’s training as a Navy SEAL involved learning to adapt to adversity, to be able to rest and recharge in virtually any environment, no matter how extreme or unpleasant it might be, whether she was on an ice floe or lying on gravel in the open desert. So she figured she could manage to spend the night in a humid cave.

  Willie was on her Really Big Adventure and up for anything. She’d just spent six weeks in jail, so she looked like she was going to be fine. She’d gone on a grave-robbing spree, snatching scraps of material off altars to the dead to make a pillow.

  Kate suspected it would be different for Nick Fox. He appreciated his comfort and rarely settled for anything less than the finest accommodations. To her surprise, Nick stretched out on a slab of rock, put his hands behind his head, and went to sleep. He might as well have been reclining on a chaise in their villa in Bali. Damn, Kate thought, you have to give credit where credit is due. The man can adapt.

  Unlike Willie and Nick, Kate wasn’t ready to go to sleep. She wanted to explore a little and size up the guards at the mouth of the cave. She retraced her steps to the cave opening and looked out. The two Javanese men were standing on the ledge, their guns slung over their shoulders and their backs to the cave opening. They were looking out at the view and smoking kreteks, Indonesian clove cigarettes that made a crackling sound when the guards inhaled.

  “Yoo-hoo,” Kate called. “Can I bum a smoke?”

  The men jerked to attention as if they’d been electrocuted. The guard nearest her swore in Indonesian and shoved her back into the cave, wagging his finger at her.

  “Do not go here,” he said. “This is very bad behavior.”

  Kate smiled to herself. They were lazy and untrained. They thought their guns and knives were all they needed to keep their prisoners in line. This was a good thing for her and unfortunate for them.

  In the morning, Kate and Willie were taken down to the house, where they sat on the scrub grass outside and were served rice pancakes and fruit for breakfast by the exhausted-looking chef and his wife. Bob emerged from the house wearing some of Griffin’s clothes and sporting a panama hat. He was obviously ridiculing Griffin, who sat frowning on the veranda. The pirates gathered around, amused by the caricature, none more so than Bob himself, who couldn’t stop smiling.

  “You’ve got quite a setup here,” Bob said to Griffin. “But there’s one thing missing that would truly make it paradise. You know what that is?”

  “Your absence?” Griffin said.

  “Women! Surely you didn’t come here to build yourself a monastery. Or are you just waiting for the right one to miraculously drift ashore?” He ambled over to Kate. “Is she the one?”

  “Leave her alone,” Griffin said.

  Bob ignored him and grinned at Kate. “What if your father doesn’t come up with your ransom? Would you stay here in paradise if this fool paid for you?” He looked over his shoulder at Griffin. “What do you say? Would you like to buy her from me?”

  “I’m not for sale,” Kate said.

  “Of course you are,” Bob said. “You won’t marry a man unless he’s rich, unless he can give you the things you want, and Daniel here is loaded. Well, not quite as much as he was before I came along.”

  “That’s enough, Bob,” Griffin said.

  Bob glanced at Griffin. “Who are you to tell me what to do?”

  “The man who has the fifty-year lease on this island. I’m not some rich tourist passing through. Her father pays and she’s gone. But after I pay, you’ll still have to deal with me.”

  “Not if I kill you,” Bob said.

  “And risk enraging the Indonesian authorities who’ll be deprived of their generous bribes? And what about them?” Griffin gestured to the Torajan villagers who stood in front of their huts, watching the show unfold. “Their tribe was dying before I came along. Who do you think pays for the condos in Sulawesi where their families live now? If you kill me, they’ve all got to come back here to this rock. They won’t be too happy with you about that.”

  “You think that scares me?”

  “It should,” Griffin said.

  There was a reason Griffin was so successful in his business, Kate thought. He could be tough. And he wasn’t stupid.

  The Torajans mined the salt from the sea, using a system as old as the tribe. The process was simple. Water was lugged from the sea in buckets and poured onto swaths of sand that baked in the sun. Later, the thin layer of dried sand that was saturated with salt was shoveled into baskets. Torajan women carried the baskets on their heads to a bamboo hut, where they were emptied into a crude wooden sieve lined with mesh. Seawater was poured on the sand, dissolving the salt and carrying it out through the mesh into wooden channels leading to outdoor troughs. The water eventually evaporated, and the salt that remained was gathered up with carved coconut shells and put into new baskets.

  The tribe kept a small amount of the salt for their own use but sold the bulk of it to wholesalers. It didn’t bring in much money, but it was reliable income apart from whatever they were paid by Griffin. More
important, it was a tradition and a ritual, one they weren’t willing to give up just to sweep Griffin’s floors.

  “I wouldn’t want you to attempt an escape out of boredom,” Bob said to Griffin, Willie, and Kate, “so I’m going to let you work on the salt flat.”

  For the rest of the day, Griffin lugged seawater to his designated patch of sand, and Kate and Willie scooped up layers of dry, salty sand into baskets, carried the baskets into the hut, and poured the sand into the sieves. Kate played the spoiled heiress, complaining and periodically abandoning her job to stagger off in search of shade. In truth, she was keeping a head count of the pirates, trying to get a sense of how many men were on the island and how well armed they were. Her estimate was about a dozen, not counting how many were on Bob’s mother ship that was anchored on the other side of the island. No way to get a count of them. All of the men had automatic weapons and knives. None of the men looked especially smart.

  Late in the afternoon, Griffin, Willie, and Kate were given a dinner of rice, dried fish, and fruit, which they ate outside in silence. After dinner, Kate and Willie were led back to the cave and Griffin remained at the house.

  Nick was waiting in the large chamber beyond the boulder. He had whisky and fresh fruit set out on a flat rock, lit by candlelight. “Welcome home,” he said.

  Kate poured out a shot of whisky. “The pirates are searching the island for you.”

  “They’re not searching very hard, and I can’t blame them. There are only two ways off the island, either on the boat they are using to go back and forth to their Bugis schooner, or on the seaplane they think none of us knows how to fly. So while you two were relaxing on the beach today, I scouted the island.”

  “How many men are guarding the dock?”

  “None. And I only saw two men out on the schooner. I’ve counted a dozen men on the island.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I have a plan,” Nick said.