The Heist

  Kate sipped the whisky. “Mine’s better.”

  “You haven’t heard mine yet.”

  “I don’t have to. You are a con man. I’m a trained soldier. The escape is a military op, that’s my bailiwick. We should make our move at two A.M. by overpowering the two guards. Willie will head for the seaplane and get it ready for flight while I get Griffin and you steal the laptop. Unless it’s too risky to get the laptop. The laptop is a bonus, not a necessity. We’ll have Griffin and his passwords, and if we can’t figure out which bank he’s stashed the money in, then Diego de Boriga can squeeze the name out of Burnside. All we have to do is get Griffin to the seaplane.” Kate turned to Willie. “Can you fly it?”

  “Sure,” Willie said. “A plane is a plane.”

  “This one takes off and lands on water.”

  Willie shrugged. “I’ll pretend it’s a runway.”

  “That doesn’t fill me with confidence,” Kate said.

  They all knocked back another whisky.

  “Okay,” Kate said. “I’m feeling more confident now.”

  “Your plan is actually the same plan as mine, with one key difference,” Nick said. “I’ll get Griffin while you make the run for the laptop. The con isn’t over. You have to look at the long game. If we want Griffin to come with us willingly, we need to stay true to the characters we’re playing. Eunice Huffnagle wouldn’t be leading an escape, but the guy her father hired to protect her might.”

  “Good point,” Kate said. “Okay, we’ll switch jobs.”

  “We’re also going to need a distraction to keep the pirates occupied while we make our escape.”

  “I’ve got that covered,” she said.

  Nick smiled. “Then we’re good to go.”

  The first thing Nick and Willie saw when Kate nudged them awake at 2 A.M. were two unconscious pirates stripped to their underwear and lying side by side on the ground, bound and gagged with garments pilfered from the dead. Kate stood over the men, one AK-47 slung over her shoulder, the other one propped up beside her.

  “You took them both out on your own?” Willie asked Kate.

  “I didn’t want to wake you.” Kate held out the second AK-47 to Willie. “You might need this.”

  Willie looked the gun over. “I’m more a buckshot kind of girl. You want to walk me through this?”

  “It’s easy. Here’s the safety catch and the selector for semiautomatic or fully automatic fire. As you can see, it’s got a pistol grip. All you have to do is point and shoot. You’ve got thirty rounds.”

  “Ignore what she just told you,” Nick said. “You don’t need to know any of that.”

  “She does if she’s carrying a weapon,” Kate said.

  “Carry it, but don’t use it,” Nick said. “If you shoot at people, they usually shoot back.”

  “What if the pirates start shooting at me?” Willie asked him.

  “Duck and run,” Nick said.

  “And if I’m cornered?”

  “Surrender,” he said. “Having a gun is a good way to get shot, which is why I don’t ordinarily carry them.”

  He reached for Kate’s AK-47, but she swatted his hand away.

  “Eunice Huffnagle wouldn’t carry an assault rifle,” Nick said.

  “Fine. Great. Wonderful,” Kate said, rolling her eyes. “Take the gun. I don’t need it anyway.”

  They picked their way around the boulders and followed the winding route to the mouth of the cave, where Nick grinned at the two wooden effigies dressed in the pirates’ clothes and standing on the ledge. From a distance, and in the darkness, they would easily pass as the guards.

  “Nice,” Nick said to Kate. “I assume this is your work?”

  “I tried to make one of them smoke a cigarette but it wouldn’t stay lit.”

  Kate looked at the compound below. She could see two armed pirates patrolling the main house, but otherwise there didn’t seem to be anyone around.

  “Everybody’s asleep and nobody’s expecting any real trouble,” Kate said to Willie. “You should be able to make it to the plane without a problem. Be careful.”

  Willie disappeared into the shadows, and Nick and Kate crept down to the house. Not a lot of action going on. The two guards were patrolling the outbuildings at the back of the property, talking and laughing. Nick pointed to a guest room veranda, and they silently scuttled across the lawn and climbed up onto it. Kate eased a window open, and they slipped inside the empty room. Nick closed the window, and they crossed the room and moved into the hallway.

  “Okay,” Kate whispered. “You get Griffin, and I’ll get the laptop.”

  She watched Nick until he disappeared around a corner, and then she headed down the hall to the library. The door was open and she could see the laptop on the table. Unfortunately, Bob was sleeping in an armchair beside it, and he wasn’t alone. Three other pirates were asleep in the room, two on chairs, one on the floor. They were all snoring.

  Not gonna happen, she thought, and she scratched “Take the laptop” from her to-do list. She moved across the hall to the operating room, eased open the door, and stepped inside. When she closed the door behind her, the windowless room became pitch-black. She’d thought ahead and taken matches and a candle from the cave. She lit the candle and set it on the operating table, and in the dim, wavering light she disconnected the oxygen tank from the anesthesia machine. She carried the tank to the far wall, bunched some towels around it, and soaked the towels with iodine and alcohol. She opened the tank valve just a bit, allowing it to leak oxygen, and left a trail of spilled iodine and alcohol from the tank to the operating table. She was about to ignite her makeshift firebomb when she heard a commotion in the hallway.

  She recognized Bob’s voice, and it wasn’t hard to tell he was furious. There were more voices, more feet running, more yelling in Indonesian. She blew her candle out and listened at the door. People were being hustled her way, and she heard Nick’s voice in the mix.

  “How was I supposed to know you wanted to stay?” Nick asked.

  “Because I live here, you idiot,” Griffin said. “I’ve already paid my ransom. I’m just waiting around for you to go.”

  “We’d be on our way if you hadn’t raised the alarm,” Nick said. “It was Eunice who insisted I come for you.”

  “My new best friend is playing it smart,” Bob said. “His ransom was a retainer for my ongoing protection from people like me.”

  “Your escape could have jeopardized that arrangement,” Griffin said.

  Kate gave her head a shake. If she didn’t have bad luck, she wouldn’t have any luck at all. She’d underestimated the possiblity that Griffin would turn, that he’d work out a deal of his own that would make it more attractive for him to stay than to escape with them.

  Bob gave an order in Indonesian to his men, and she heard everyone moving outside. Probably this wasn’t a good sign. Like when they shot Nick they didn’t want to get blood splatters on the wallpaper. Time for the big diversion, she told herself. Time to blow the operating room to smithereens.

  She broke the candle in half, so what remained was about an inch tall. She lit the candle, and set it on the floor at the end of her liquid fuse. She figured she had maybe five minutes to make her play, whatever it was going to be, before the explosion.

  Willie reached the point on the path where the forest met the beach. Still hidden in the brush, she paused to see if there was anybody on the sand, or on the dock, or visible on the schooner anchored in the cove. The seaplane and a speedboat rocked gently on the swells and bumped against the dock, making the wood slats creak. She took a deep breath, hung tight to her AK-47, and dashed across the sand and onto the dock. She jumped into the speedboat, set her rifle on the floor, and yanked a bunch of wires out from under the cockpit dashboard. Good luck chasing us now, she thought. She turned and choked down a scream. A man dressed in black stood in the stern of the boat. The black paint on his craggy face made his eyes huge, horrifying, and unnaturally white. And
he was pointing the AK-47 at her chest.

  Kate made as much noise as she could climbing out of the guest bedroom. First she threw her suitcase out, then she jumped down after it. She fussed around for a couple beats, thinking the pirates were the most inept band of kidnappers to ever have walked the earth. When they finally rushed out of the darkness at her with guns drawn, she had her suitcase in hand. She made a quick show of being startled, and then wasted no time getting herded to the front of the house, worried she wouldn’t be in place when the OR blew.

  Nick was standing in the grassy area where they’d had breakfast, his back to the sea. Bob was next to him, casually holding his gun at his side. The pirates and tribe members stood to one side, as if watching a performance in a park. The Torajans seemed intrigued, but distant from it all. They knew that none of this involved them, that they were mere observers, like the effigies of their ancestors looking down from the mountain. They were here before this little drama unfolded and they’d still be here long afterward.

  Nick shook his head in disbelief at Kate. “You went back for your bag?”

  “It’s Louis Vuitton. Besides, you didn’t expect me to wear this for the next three days, did you?”

  Griffin didn’t expect her to wear anything at all. Griffin wanted her dead. If Eunice’s father paid her ransom and she was set free, her father and the United States government would undoubtedly exert enormous pressure on the Indonesian authorities for an investigation into the kidnapping. And the Indonesians would comply because a story like this would be very, very bad for tourism. The wealthy would take their vacation dollars, and their resort investments, to some other tropical locale. And that meant things could get very bad for Griffin. The U.S. didn’t have an extradition treaty with Indonesia, but the local authorities could arrest him, put him through a show trial, and lock him away in one of their hellhole prisons, even though he had nothing to do with the crime. He’d be sacrificed to the Gods of Tourism.

  There was only one way out of this. He’d fork over the ransom money himself and get Bob to kill Eunice and her crew. Bob would be very rich. And Griffin could keep his island and get some long-term protection out of the deal, too.

  “We need to talk,” Griffin said to Bob.

  “We can talk after I kill this guy,” Bob said to Griffin, pointing his rifle at Nick.

  “It’s rude to point a gun at someone,” Nick said, grabbing the AK-47 by the barrel, pivoting, and yanking it across his midsection. The move jerked Bob along with the gun, Nick elbowed Bob in the throat, took the gun from him, and whacked him in the gut with the stock. Bob went down to the ground, and Nick held the gun on him. The whole series of maneuvers took maybe three seconds.

  No one was more surprised by the disarming than Kate. She thought she knew everything there was to know about Nick Fox, but she had no idea where he’d learned to do that.

  The two guards behind her pressed their guns to her head and all the other pirates were taking aim at either her or Nick.

  “That was a big mistake,” Bob said, doubled over in pain and trying to catch his breath. “You have five seconds to drop the gun or the girl dies.”

  “If she dies, so do you.”

  Bob tipped his head toward his men. “Do you think they care? The ransom is what matters to them. You can save her, but no matter what happens, you are a dead man.”

  That’s when the house blew up. It was like dynamite had gone off in a box made of Popsicle sticks. Flaming debris rained down, there was pandemonium among Tarajans and pirates, and in the middle of the confusion Kate took out the two pirates holding her at gunpoint. She snatched one of their rifles and pointed it at Griffin. “Grab my suitcase and run for your seaplane.”

  “We’ll never make it,” Griffin said.

  “You can die right here, or you can run. Your decision. You have one second.”

  “He has less than that,” Nick said, grabbing Kate’s suitcase, ramming Bob’s gun into Griffin’s back. “Run!”

  They all ran hell-bent for the cove, with the pirates shooting blindly into the darkness in their direction, bullets shredding the brush and pocking the ground around Kate and Nick and Griffin. Griffin stumbled and Nick scooped him up under the arm and kept him moving.

  “We need to find cover,” Nick said.

  “We’ll get pinned down,” Kate said. “You run ahead with Griffin and hope Willie has the plane ready to go. I’ll stay behind and hold them back for you as long as I can.”

  Nick looked at Kate. “Is the laptop in the suitcase?”

  “Yes. Go!”

  He shoved the suitcase at her. “You go.”

  “No way.”

  “You’re both nuts,” Griffin said. “Give me the suitcase and I’ll go and you can both stay here.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Kate said, handing over the suitcase. “Keep running until you get to the plane and don’t look back,” she said to Griffin.

  Griffin took off, and Nick grabbed Kate and kissed her with a lot of tongue and his hand on her ass.

  “Just in case we get overpowered I didn’t want to die without doing that,” Nick said, breaking from the kiss. “And in the interest of world peace, if we don’t die I suggest we forget the whole kiss and ass grab ever happened.”

  Kate didn’t think she was likely to forget it. It had been, hands down, a fabulous kiss. And after the dust settled, Kate was going to give the kiss some thought, because Kate was feeling emotions she wasn’t supposed to feel … at least not with Nick.

  She moved to take her position on the opposite side of the trail so she and Nick could take the pirates down in a cross fire, when Griffin suddenly reappeared, running toward Kate in a blind panic.

  “Help!” Griffin said.

  “Fire in the hole,” someone yelled from behind Griffin, and a grenade sailed over Griffin’s head.

  Nick, Kate, and Griffin hit the ground, and an instant later there was an explosion that brought an end to the gunfire from the pirates. Nick looked up to see a man in black limping toward them from the trail leading to the seaplane. The man in black had a rifle slung over his shoulder and was holding another grenade. Behind the man, and on either side of him, a dozen other dark figures fanned out in the trees toward Griffin’s blazing compound.

  “I see you started the party without me,” the man said.

  He pulled the pin on the grenade and lobbed it in the same direction as the previous one.

  “Daddy!” Kate said, scrambling to her feet, running to Jake. “I knew you would come for me,” she said, hugging him. “You are definitely getting my vote for Dad of the Year.”

  “I have a lot of years to make up for,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I just wasn’t sure if you’d be able to make it in time.”

  “I have lots of friends in the neighborhood.” He waved his arm toward the men on either side of him, who now surged ahead, opening fire on the retreating pirates. “And they were glad to help, especially if it gave ’em a chance to shoot at pirates.”

  Kate gestured to Griffin. “Can you take him and the suitcase back to Mexico?”

  “Mexico?” Griffin stood. “What the hell is really going on here?”

  “Diego de Boriga sends his regards,” Jake said. And he punched Griffin in the face, sending him back down to the ground.

  “This face punching thing must run in your family,” Nick said to Kate.

  “About Mexico?” Kate asked her dad.

  “It’ll be no problem, honey,” Jake said. “I was doing extraordinary renditions back when they were still called foreign abductions. You’re not coming with us?”

  “It’ll be less risky if it’s just the two of you,” she said. “We’ll make our own way back.”

  “Willie has the plane fired up and ready to go,” Jake said, looking at Nick. “You surprised me, Fox. Instead of saving yourself, you stayed to fight beside my daughter. For that, you will always have my respect.”

  “I never abandon my cr
ew,” Nick said.

  “Then we’ve got something in common.” Jake studied his daughter. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Never better,” she said. “That was fun.”

  She kissed her dad on the cheek and headed down the trail with Nick.

  Jake watched her go and smiled to himself. “That’s my girl.”

  Thirty-six hours later, Derek Griffin woke up on the floor of a cinder-block prison cell and squinted into the harsh blast of sunlight that blazed through the barred window. The air was hot as a pizza oven and smelled like rotting carcasses. He sat up, slid over to the wall beside the stainless steel sink, and leaned against it to get out of the light and assess his situation.

  The last thing he remembered was being on the floor of a boat, looking briefly into the black-painted face of the man who’d hit him on the island, and then getting jabbed in the neck with a syringe that knocked him out again.

  He had a skull-splitting headache that made it hard to focus his eyes. His throat was raw, his lips were chapped, and his body felt as if it had been run over by a truck, twice. His clothes, the same ones he’d been wearing on the island, were drenched with sweat. He rubbed his face and felt two days’ growth of beard.

  His first thought was that he was in an Indonesian prison, but the air was too dry, the texture of the light was wrong, and the stainless steel toilet was Western-style. Then he remembered what Eunice, or whoever that bitch really was, had said to the man in black face paint.

  Can you take him and the suitcase back to Mexico …

  Griffin grabbed hold of the sink, pulled himself to his feet, and almost collapsed again from light-headedness. He turned on the faucet, held his face under the lukewarm water for a long moment, then drank from the stream, his head crooked at an angle that nearly got him stuck in the sink. It wasn’t until after he’d maneuvered his head out from under the faucet that he saw the tin cup on the rim of the sink.

  Across from him was a cinder-block shelf with a thin mattress on top that served as a bed. He went over to the bed and sat down on it.

  “Hey, Derek, are you awake over there?”