“They came in yesterday when it was clear you were making your move.”
“And who came up with this insane plan?”
“I did,” Nick said. “I thought it was a win-win for everybody.”
“Except for me,” Kate said.
“Especially for you.”
“How do you figure that?” she asked.
“You like chasing after me, traveling all over the place, kicking down doors, jumping out of airplanes, smashing into cars with buses,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of cases that are going to have the same excitement, danger, and fun. Not to mention you’re living in a box and this gives you a chance to get out.”
“I like the box.”
“It’s still a box.”
“And what’s in it for you, Nick, besides staying out of a cell for the time being?”
“Time being?”
She propped herself up on an elbow and looked at him. “You’re a crook. Your fate is inevitable. Even if you honor this deal, which I doubt, in five years you’ll walk away a free man and immediately pull off another big swindle and it will start all over again. I will come after you, and when I catch you there will be no deals. You’ll do hard time.”
“I might emerge from this a changed man. Or you might become an entirely different woman. You might not want to catch me anymore.”
“Yeah, right, that’s all not gonna happen.”
He shrugged. “We’ll see.”
Kate wanted to punch him, wanted to wipe the smug smile off his face. Then she wanted to punch Bolton and Jessup.
“Honestly,” she said, “this just isn’t fair. I’m a team player, but this is too much. This is wrong.”
“It’s the chance of a lifetime,” Nick said.
“For you.”
“Yes, but it comes with a price. I’m going to be stuck with you for five long years. And if you want to know the ugly truth, it’s not my idea of the good life. True, I find you strangely attractive, but that doesn’t mean you’re not a huge pain in the ass.”
Kate perked up at that. She liked the possibility that she could make his life a living hell. And while she was raining on Nick Fox’s parade she might be able to catch some bad guys. Sure there was some risk involved, but risk was always present. Look at Nick Fox: He was driving home from work one day, and he got hit by a bus. Who would have thought?
Nick stayed awake long after Kate fell asleep. There were practical problems he had to face. To mount his cons and heists, he’d need a crew. He rarely used the same crew twice, but he was loyal to everyone who’d been loyal to him. He wouldn’t betray them by involving them in a hustle that he was secretly running for the FBI.
And he didn’t trust the FBI much more than they trusted him. If he introduced the feds to his network of fellow con artists and thieves, he’d be exposing them all to law enforcement scrutiny, revealing not only who they were but their methods of operation. The FBI might turn around one day and use that knowledge to arrest them. Nick couldn’t live with himself if that happened. Not to mention if his clever cohorts discovered he was working with Kate instead of running from her, his cover would be blown and his life would be in jeopardy. Nobody in his field liked a rat, which is what they would naturally assume he was even if he wasn’t. And they would justifiably begin to wonder what he’d divulged about his past scores, and his past colleagues, and if he’d tipped the FBI off to the Crimson Teardrop job, even though he’d arranged with Bolton for the release of his crew on a sketchy legal technicality as a condition of his participation in this operation.
So to mount the cons against the big fish targeted by the FBI he’d have to assemble a crew from scratch, recruiting entirely new people and never letting them know who they were actually working for. He already had some people in mind, since he was always on the lookout for new talent, but he knew that bringing in an entirely inexperienced crew introduced a level of risk and uncertainty that could swiftly derail a con and get everybody killed. And no one was more of a wild card in the deck than Kate O’Hare. She was 5′ 5″ of trouble, and he was going to have a hard time keeping his hands off her, torn as he was between wanting to wring her neck and wanting to sweet-talk her out of her Kevlar vest.
Kate woke up with a stiff back. She stood and stretched and checked to make sure her cuffs and gun were still in her pockets. Nick was at the fireplace, stirring a big pot suspended over the fire.
He glanced at her over his shoulder. “You were expecting me to steal your gun?”
“You’re a thief,” she said. “I expect you to steal everything. What are you making?”
“Hermit’s stew. Basically, a lentil soup. I’ve also got some fresh bread, some salted fish, and red wine, all produced here on Athos.”
“Wine for breakfast?”
“It’s what the monks drink.”
Jessup and Bolton joined them. Bolton looked like he’d spent the last few hours in cryogenic freeze. There wasn’t a wrinkle on his clothes and his hair was perfect. Jessup looked like an unmade bed.
“Have you reached a decision, Agent O’Hare?” Bolton asked.
Kate gave him a single nod. “I’m in. But I want a few things clear from the get-go. I’m in charge of this partnership.”
“You obviously don’t understand the meaning of ‘partnership,’ ” Nick said.
“I’m the cop, you’re the crook,” Kate said to Nick. “If I think something is too risky, or too crooked, or too anything, I can shut it down.” She turned to Bolton. “That goes for you, too, sir. Once we have an assignment, I have the absolute authority to change the play or call the whole thing off.”
“I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that,” Bolton said.
“It’s not your comfort I’m worried about,” she said. “I’m the one who could end up dead or in a prison cell if one of our operations falls apart. This is nonnegotiable.”
Jessup looked at Bolton. “I have to back O’Hare on this. I’ve been undercover. I know what it’s like being out there on your knees in the muck, with your neck on a chopping block over an open latrine while a psycho in overalls stands over you with a roaring chainsaw.”
Bolton mentally chewed on that for a moment. “Very well.”
Nick smiled, poured four glasses of wine, and held his up for a toast. “To our grand adventure.”
“This is not an adventure,” Kate said. “It’s a job. We aren’t doing it for fun or for profit.”
“Speak for yourself,” Nick said.
“I am speaking for both of us,” she said.
Nick glanced at Jessup. “Is she always this irritable in the morning?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Jessup said.
“Okay, let’s try this again,” Nick said, and raised his glass for a new toast. “To a long and fruitful relationship.”
“This isn’t a relationship,” Kate said. “It’s strictly professional. Don’t you forget that for one second.”
Nick sighed and held up his glass again, eyeing her warily as he said, “May misfortune follow us the rest of our lives, but never catch up.”
Before Kate could object, he tapped her glass with his and the other men jumped in to do the same and everyone chugged their wine.
“Now that we’ve settled that,” Bolton said, setting down his glass, “here’s the protocol. Jessup will be your primary. He will release the funds necessary to complete each mission to an off-shore account that we’ve set up in O’Hare’s name.”
“Yadda-yadda-yadda,” Nick said. “Save the bureaucracy for the bureaucrats. Just tell me who we’re going after.”
Bolton smiled. “Derek Griffin.”
Griffin was a high-flying, charming playboy investment banker whose name was mentioned as often in Vanity Fair, for the lavish parties he attended and the charities he supported, as it was in Forbes, for the audacious deals he made and the big money he earned for his elite clients. He got even more headlines when he abruptly disappeared with $500 million of his company’s money
mere hours before he was about to be arrested by the FBI for running a massive pyramid scheme.
Nick whistled. “Not bad. I have to hand it to you, Bolt, you think big.”
“It’s ‘Bolton.’ Or ‘sir.’ ”
“There’s been an FBI task force looking for him for almost a year,” Kate said. “Nick is a con man and a thief, not a fugitive tracker. What can he do for us?”
“There’s one person who knows where Griffin is, and perhaps all of that money, and that’s Neal Burnside, his lawyer,” Bolton said. “He’s protected by attorney-client privilege from being forced to talk.”
“I know about Burnside,” Nick said. “I was tempted to hire him when you arrested me. The guy is brilliant.”
“He’s scum,” Bolton said.
“You didn’t think so when he was a Justice Department prosecutor,” Nick said.
“He uses what he learned about our tactics and our personnel to get scores of high-profile crooks and murderers off the hook and make the FBI look inept in the process,” Bolton said. “There’s a word for men like him.”
“Expensive,” Nick said.
“Traitor,” Bolton said.
“So you want the two of us to use Burnside to find Griffin, bring him to justice, and recover the half a billion that he stole,” Kate said.
“Yes,” Bolton said.
“No problem,” Nick said.
“Huge problem,” Kate said. “How are we going to get Burnside to give up Griffin without resorting to torture?”
“I’ll come up with something,” Nick said.
“And even if Burnside does betray his client,” Kate said, “what makes you think Griffin will tell us where his money is?”
“I’ll figure out a way,” Nick said.
Kate stared at him. “That’s it?”
Nick shrugged. “It’s a start.”
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“Let’s get together four days from now, at four P.M., at the Schokoladen-Café in Berlin,” Nick said. “And I’ll tell you how we’re going to do it.”
“No way. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“So you want us to live together?”
“No, of course not,” she said.
“Then how did you think this was going to work? Did you assume you’d just lock me up in a dungeon somewhere each night?”
“I like the sound of that.” Kate glanced at Bolton and Jessup for backup on this key point, but she could see from the looks on their faces that she wasn’t going to get it. “C’mon, guys, help me out here.”
“He’s a free man,” Jessup said. “With restrictions.”
Nick smiled. “Is speaking in contradictions some secret language they teach you at Quantico? Because you and Bolt are both very good at it.”
“It’s ‘Bolton,’ ” the deputy director said again.
“He could be captured by some other law enforcement agency in the meantime,” Kate said. “And there is nothing to stop him from committing his own scams between assignments.”
“That’s a risk we have to take,” Jessup said.
Kate looked at Bolton, who was obviously in agreement with Jessup. She looked at Nick, who was way too pleased with it all.
“So what am I supposed to do for four days?” Kate asked.
“Enjoy your vacation,” Jessup said.
She had been, right up until the time Bolton and Jessup stepped out from behind that curtain.
It was decided that the four of them would leave Athos separately, to avoid any chance of them all being seen together, and that Kate would go first, since there were others awaiting word from her.
She stepped outside the hut and called her father on the satellite phone. She told him that the mission was a bust, that Nick Fox wasn’t on Athos, and that she’d take the ferry to Ouranoupoli and then the bus back to Thessaloniki, where she would meet him later that day at their hotel.
“You’re lying about Fox,” Jake said. “But I can respect that.”
“You respect lying?”
“Sometimes it’s necessary,” he said. “I only hope that you made the right decision.”
“So do I,” she said.
Nick had to admit there were some undeniable benefits to working for the FBI instead of hiding from them. They made it easier to move around and look legitimate, and even better, he was now operating on someone else’s dime. Bolton had supplied Nick with a new alias, Nicolas Raider. Raider had a U.S. passport, a platinum AmEx card, a bank account, and detailed histories in the IRS, the DMV, Experian, and other major government and private sector databases. The flip side, of course, was that every time Nick used the alias a blip popped up on Bolton’s computer telling him exactly where Nick was located. No problem, Nick thought. I can deal. It’s a new game.
Nick swiped his brand-new credit card through the machine at the airport, flashed his brand-new passport, and flew from Greece to his three-hundred-year-old stone farmhouse in Bois-le-Roi, France. Bois-le-Roi was a small village on the Seine just outside of Fontainebleau. It was one of Nick’s many properties, and it had been chosen primarily for the solitude it offered.
The rambling single-story house, and the two acres it sat on, were surrounded by a stone wall that could be easily scaled but at least shielded the grounds from prying eyes. The former barn housed a beautifully restored red 1966 Jaguar E-type convertible and a three-year-old Mercedes GLK. The house and grounds were tended during his long absences by his neighbor, a gregarious horse trainer by trade who, in his free time, built ships in a bottle and gave them away. There were probably twenty bottled ships around Nick’s house.
Nick arrived in Bois-le-Roi, checked in with his neighbor/groundskeeper, got briefed on all the local gossip he cared nothing about, then stopped by the baker, the butcher, and the grocer. For dinner he made himself a thick steak, fresh vegetables, and a warmed-up baguette, and he washed it down with a bottle of wine from his well-stocked cellar.
While he ate he opened his laptop and did some basic research into Burnside and Griffin. Most of what he read he already knew. Neither man was a shrinking violet, and their private lives were public record. Their professional lives were legend. Nick finished his steak, sipped his wine, and logged in to his encrypted cloud account, where he browsed through the files he’d been compiling of potential new crew members. His late-night diversion was online poker, where he targeted someone calling himself “Le Chiffre,” handily winning $15,000 from him. By the morning of his third day in Bois-le-Rois, Nick had come up with the broad strokes of his plan.
Jake O’Hare knew how to keep a secret, so three days after Kate’s return from Athos, she shared hers with him. She needed someone she could turn to for advice and support as the operation unfolded, someone who didn’t have any hidden agendas. She didn’t trust Nick or her own bosses. They were all looking out for themselves. Her father was the one person she could always depend upon to look out for her.
They were sitting at a café in the airport in Athens, waiting for his flight back to the States and hers to Berlin, when she finally told him about the outrageous scheme Nick had sold to Fletcher Bolton.
“I think it’s brilliant,” Jake said.
“You’re being sarcastic.”
“I’m being straight. For once, your hands won’t be tied by bureaucracy, civil rights, and the law.”
“Oh, those pesky things,” she said.
“You’ll be able to bring down a lot of bad guys who’ve played the system to their advantage.”
“But I’ll be teamed up with a criminal.”
“The pilot who flew you to Athos was a criminal, but you didn’t seem to mind. Sometimes a criminal is exactly who you need to get a job done. But I don’t have to convince you, you’ve already signed on. So what are we really talking about here, Kate?”
“I’m technically in charge, but I know ultimately it’s Nick who’ll be running the cons. I can’t count on him to tell me everything he’s doing and what the danger
s might actually be. I’m going to need a safety net of my own, a plan B he doesn’t need to know about,” Kate said. “I’m hoping it can be you.”
“It’s always been me, didn’t you know that?” Jake said. “That’s what fathers are for.”
“What I am asking could be above and beyond.”
“Hell, Kate, that was my profession for forty years,” he said. “It also happens to be my motto.”
“You have a motto?”
“I do now. It’s ‘Above and Beyond.’ ”
Kate hadn’t ever been to Berlin, nor had she ever had the desire to visit. Her image of the city was shaped by cold war spy movies where everything was in shades of gray, the streets were frosty and bleak, the trees were spindly and bare, and the people were pale, oppressed, and haunted. So she was unprepared for how colorful, vibrant, and energetic Berlin appeared to be as her taxi driver took a long, roundabout, fare-inflating route from the airport to the Hyatt in Potsdamer Platz.
They drove through the lush, sprawling Tiergarten, a forest within the city that made Central Park look like a vacant lot, and cruised by the iconic Brandenburg Gate and a skyline of bold, edgy architecture that embraced the old while also breaking with the past. That architectural philosophy was epitomized by the Reichstag. Built in the late nineteenth century and virtually destroyed in World War II, the Reichstag was restored in the 1990s to its original grandeur as the seat of the German parliament, but its Neo-Baroque dome was replaced with a steel-and-glass version, with a dazzling spiral of 360 mirrors in its center, that looked like it had fallen onto the building from outer space. Kate thought it was a real-life Tomorrowland, without the rides.
She checked in to her room with two hours to kill before her meeting with Nick Fox. So she did the tourist thing, and walked over to Checkpoint Charlie and the replica of the guard shack that once stood on the western side of the Berlin Wall on Friedrichstrasse. Kate was wearing black slacks and a white sweater, but she didn’t have her usual fashion accessories. She’d given her gun and handcuffs to her father to spirit back to the States, using whatever black bag method he’d employed to get them to Greece. She didn’t have Mace, a Taser, or a telescoping baton. This made her purse about fifteen pounds lighter, and she felt like the strap practically floated off her shoulder.