The Job

  “Oui, bien sûr, je m’en excuse.” Nick apologized to him, took a seat across the table from Serena, and looked soulfully into her eyes. “Tell me, what horrors have you endured?”

  Bernard groaned and closed the door, leaving the lawyer alone to speak with his client.

  “I wouldn’t call pulling off a string of international heists the most ideal way to communicate with someone,” Nick said to Serena.

  “You didn’t give me any choice. You completely disappeared after your escape from the courthouse in Los Angeles.”

  “I’m on the FBI and Interpol’s most wanted lists,” Nick said. “I didn’t think it was a good idea to tweet.”

  “Since I couldn’t find you, I came up with a way to make you find me.”

  He had to admire her for that. At least she’d learned something from him.

  “Here I am,” he said. “What’s so important that you’d risk going to prison in four different countries just to get my attention?”

  “Are you familiar with Lester Menendez?”

  “A really lovely guy,” Nick said. “An international thug who got his start in Colombia, worked his way up in the cocaine and heroin trade by murdering the people he worked for, including his own father and uncles, and taking over their operation. He quickly expanded into the United States and Europe by butchering his competition, literally and with sadistic delight. He got very rich and very fat. He narrowly escaped a raid by the DEA, FBI, and ATF on his New Mexico compound two years ago. Rumor is that he fled to Europe, where he had full-body plastic surgery and killed everybody on the surgical team to protect his new identity.”

  Serena was rigid while Nick was talking. Her lips were pressed tight, her jaw clenched, her eyes steely and unblinking.

  “The rumors are true,” Serena said. “The bodies of the plastic surgeon and his two assistants were found stuffed into an oil drum off a highway in Spain. Their throats were slit so deeply, they were nearly decapitated. But before they were killed, they were tortured, probably to find out if they’d shared details about Menendez’s new identity with anyone else. The plastic surgeon was Sean.”

  Nick took a moment to absorb the shock. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I had no idea.”

  “It wasn’t made public. Sean was quietly buried in the family plot. His obituary said he’d had a short illness.”

  Nick had never met Serena’s older brother, but he knew all about him. Sean was a hardworking, straight-arrow, responsible young man who’d graduated from Oxford University Medical School, married a nice girl, and never had so much as a speeding ticket. Serena, on the other hand, had graduated from Oxford with a bachelor’s degree in fine art and started breaking into estates, galleries, and museums.

  “Why did Sean agree to operate on Menendez?” Nick asked.

  “Sean had big gambling debts. He was about to lose his practice, his wife, his house, everything. He was embarrassed to ask the family for help. The loan sharks put Menendez on to him. I suppose Sean thought the operation would get him out of the hole he’d dug for himself. Instead, he dug himself a grave.” She shook her head. “The two of us had it all. We came from a wealthy Oxford family, we had Oxford University educations, and what happened to us? He became a compulsive gambler who got himself killed, and I became a thief who will probably die in prison.”

  “How can I help?” Nick asked.

  “I want to find Menendez and destroy him, but I don’t have the skills to do it. You do.”

  “I’m not an assassin.”

  “I don’t want you to kill him. I want you to take him down. Gut his empire. Empty his bank accounts. Reduce him to nothing. For Menendez, that would be even worse than death. And I want to help you do it, so you’ll have to break me out of jail, too.”

  “I’ll do what I can to take down Menendez, but I’m temporarily leaving you behind bars. I don’t want to raise any red flags that might spook Menendez.”

  More than that, he couldn’t take a chance on Serena tagging along and discovering he was working for the FBI.

  Kate and Bernard were in the conference room having an early breakfast of French bread and butter and a few slices of aged ham when Nick knocked once on the doorjamb and stepped in.

  “Do we have an agreement?” Kate asked Nick. “Will she tell us where to find the stolen property?”

  “Not until she has written assurance from the United States, German, and Turkish authorities that her sentences will be reduced,” Nick said.

  “That could take weeks,” Bernard said.

  “She’s not going anywhere, no?” Nick said. “We can wait. But the same can’t be said for the things you want. The paintings must be kept in climate-controlled conditions, away from moisture and heat. Who knows if they are?”

  “She does,” Bernard said.

  Nick shrugged. “I’d move quickly if I were you, just to be on the safe side. A bientôt.”

  “Casse-toi,” Bernard muttered when Nick left the room. “Débile.”

  Kate didn’t need to speak French to know a profanity and insult when she heard one.

  “That goes double for me,” she said, earning a smile from Bernard.

  Kate returned to her room at the Ibis Orléans Centre Gare, a modern three-star hotel directly across from the train station with the charm of a budget chain in the States. She’d been looking forward to a moment of calm to reorganize, but she’d walked in to the sound of the shower running and Nick’s fake mustache lying on the bed like a tiny dead hairy animal.

  “Débile!” she yelled in the vicinity of the bathroom.

  There was no answer so she kicked off her shoes, stretched out on the bed, and put the pillow over her face. She heard the water stop running, then sensed she wasn’t alone.

  “You’re going to miss the good stuff with that pillow over your face,” Nick said.

  “What good stuff did you have in mind?” she asked.

  “Me naked.”

  Kate took the pillow off her face and looked at him. He was wearing a towel that hung low on his hips.

  “You’re not naked,” Kate said.

  “I could be.”

  She pulled the pillow back over her face.

  “I get the feeling you’re not happy to see me,” Nick said.

  “Gee, how’d you figure that one out?”

  “I can’t hear you,” Nick said. “You’re talking into the pillow.”

  Kate ripped the pillow off her face and sat up, pop-eyed, arms flailing. “You have to stop breaking into my room! I need privacy sometimes. I need to get away from you. We’re partners, not lovers.”

  “Your loss,” Nick said.

  He dropped his towel and stepped into boxer briefs.

  “Good grief,” Kate said.

  Wow! She thought. The man was freaking perfect.

  “It turns out that Serena’s brother was the plastic surgeon who gave Lester Menendez a new face and a new body,” Nick said. “When the operation was complete, Menendez tortured and killed Serena’s brother.”

  “Oh my gosh, how horrible.”

  “A few years back, a con to trick a Somali warlord out of a piracy ransom went very wrong, and I found myself locked in a tiger cage, facing a sunrise execution. Instead of cutting and running with the rest of my crew, Serena stayed behind, crept into the heavily guarded compound in the middle of the night, and rescued me. We barely made it out of Somalia alive.”

  “So you owe her.”

  “Big-time. Even if I didn’t, I would still help her. She’s a good person, and Menendez is evil.”

  “She wants you to kill him?”

  “No. She wants me to destroy him.”

  “Nice. I like it.”

  “I imagine your boss will also like it,” Nick said.

  “Every law enforcement agency in the world wants Menendez. He still controls a big chunk of the drug trade in North America and Europe. Unfortunately, no one knows what he looks like now or where he is. And even if we did, we don’t have his DNA or an
y fingerprints we can use to identify him. He set fire to his house, so we lost our chance to collect anything we could use to create a DNA profile. And I can guarantee you he also burned off his fingerprints. He could be anybody.”

  “He’s still the same person inside,” Nick said. “He still has the same strengths, weaknesses, longings, and obsessions. Before his radical surgery, Menendez was a fat man who put on the pounds devouring the most expensive and rare chocolates in the world. I can guarantee he still likes them. He’s also been obsessed with finding sunken treasure ever since he was a kid in Colombia and found doubloons that washed ashore from a seventeenth-century shipwreck. Those are the weaknesses we’re going to exploit.”

  “You think you can just wave a Hershey bar and some gold coins under the right nose, and he’ll introduce himself to you?”

  “Pretty much. I came up with something in the shower.”

  The image of Nick naked was burned into Kate’s brain, and she had a vision of what else came up in the shower.

  “We’re going to use Menendez’s lust for rare chocolate to narrow down his new identity,” Nick said. “Once we’ve found him, we’re going to convince him that we’ve discovered the legendary Santa Isabel, a Spanish galleon that sank in a storm in 1502 off the coast of Portugal with over a billion dollars’ worth of treasure on board.”

  “That’s the bait,” she said. “What’s the trap?”

  “I’m still refining some of the details on the trap.”

  “Oh boy,” Kate said. “You don’t know the details.”

  “I know some of them.” He flipped the quilt back and sat on the edge of the bed.

  Kate’s eyes got wide. “What are you doing?”

  “Going to bed. I’ve been up all night.”

  “This is my bed.”

  “It’s our bed.”

  “No, no, no. There’s no our. Get out of my bed,” Kate said.

  “No.”

  “I could shoot you, you know. I’m an FBI agent and you’re a felon.”

  “You don’t have a gun.”

  Damn. He was right. She hated not having a gun. And she missed her FBI windbreaker. This whole out-of-country thing sucked.

  “What about the trap details?” she asked him. “Don’t you want to work out the details?”

  “I know we want to recruit your dad, and probably the crew we’ve used in the past. Tom Underhill, Willie, and Boyd Capwell. I’ll work out the rest of the details while I sleep.” He slipped under the quilt and patted the spot next to him. “Come to bed and leave it all to me. I do some of my best work when I’m in bed.”

  Kate was sure that was true.

  Jake O’Hare approached his Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast like one of the many covert military operations he’d led for Uncle Sam before his retirement. He nibbled at it from various angles, picking away at the egg whites until the yolk was completely exposed, conquering the yolk with some strategic stabs of bacon, then attacking the unprotected mountain of buttermilk pancakes in a full frontal assault that didn’t leave a surviving crumb. When he was done, he carefully mopped everything up with his toast until the plate was clean and there was no evidence he’d ever touched it.

  Kate had just come back to L.A. on a red-eye from Paris, and had cleaned her plate with a lot less cunning than her dad.

  “I love watching you eat, Dad,” Kate said. “You’re so methodical about it.”

  Jake took a sip of his coffee, black with no sugar, and leaned back in the booth, resting a tan, muscled arm on the top of the vinyl seat. He kept his body in lean fighting shape and his gray hair trimmed in a regulation buzz cut, more out of habit than anything else.

  “I’m methodical about everything,” Jake said. “And I’m cute. Yesterday I was in the supermarket and the checkout lady told me I was adorable.”

  “Kittens and baby shoes are adorable,” Kate said. “Do you really want to be lumped together with kittens and baby shoes?”

  “I was in the ten-items-or-less line with twelve items and she didn’t kick me out. Adorable can have its benefits.”

  Kate leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Is your passport current?”

  “I’m sure one of ’em is,” he said. “Who would you like me to kidnap?”

  “Nobody. And you can’t say things like that around me in public. I’m an officer of the law, remember?”

  “Sorry, I should have said ‘apprehend by extraordinary rendition.’ There’s nothing illegal about that. At least that was what I was told by the CIA when I was grabbing suspected terrorists out of their beds in one country and dragging them to a secret prison in another.” He accepted more coffee from the waitress. “Those were good times. How about regime change? Would you like a dictator toppled?”

  “Close. I need to take down the drug lord of a global narcotics empire. It’s a rogue operation. We’ll be on foreign soil without any backup, going up against a sadist and his army of trained killers.”

  “Just another day at the office.”

  And almost a decade ago, that had been a typical day for him. But that was before he collected his military pension and moved in with Kate’s younger sister, Megan, her accountant husband, and their two kids. The home was in Calabasas, California, just a few miles away from the Denny’s where they were eating. Now most of his battles were waged on the golf course, except when Kate occasionally asked for his help. Jake was the only one besides Bolton and Jessup who knew the truth about her and Nick … and the only one she could entirely trust.

  “Does your boss at the FBI know about this?” Jake asked.

  “I called Jessup from the airport and filled him in. He’s completely on board. It was an easy sell. This is exactly the kind of high-profile criminal that Deputy Director Bolton and Jessup broke Nick out of jail to catch. I’m going to stop by the office for a more detailed briefing when I leave here.”

  “I assume you’re going to assemble a team.”

  “We’re going to recruit Tom, Willie, and Boyd,” she said. “You’ve met them on past operations. Nick also has a tech guy in mind. And we’re going to need you and a couple of your buddies with naval experience. Specifically, a chief engineer to handle everything down below and a boatswain to handle everything on deck. We’ll pay top dollar.”

  He shook his head. “You’ll only have to pay their expenses. The guys I have in mind will do the job just for fun.”

  “They could get killed.”

  “That’s the fun part. And it beats the hell out of dying of boredom.”

  She studied her father. “Is that why you’re helping me? Are you that miserable not being in the field anymore?”

  “Of course not. I love living with Megan, Roger, and the grandkids. It’s the family life I never got to have when you and your sister were growing up. And when Megan and Roger aren’t around, I get to teach the kids important life skills.”

  “Like how to make explosives out of household cleaning supplies.”

  “They’re way past that now,” he said.

  “They’re five and seven years old.”

  “They’re fast learners. Now we’re working on how to kill a man with whatever you’ve got handy in your sack lunch. Do you remember when you used to practice that?”

  “Yeah, you taught me how to smother a man with a sandwich baggie, and how to shove a straw up his nose into his brain. Those are treasured memories. I think of you every time I eat a sandwich.”

  “A father can’t ask for more than that.”

  “So if you enjoy retirement so much, why leave Tyler and Sara and go off and risk your life with me?”

  “There are still a few things I can teach you,” he said. “For instance, do you know how to make a field battery?”

  “A what?”

  “A battery made out of potatoes, copper wire, and a few nails.”

  “Nope,” she said, though she couldn’t imagine a situation where she’d need one.

  “There you go,” he said. “Besides, there’s nobody
who is going to watch your back better than me. You know that.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “And that’s why I’m going to be there with you, wherever there is, any time you ask and as long as I’m able,” he said. “It’s what fathers do.”

  “Most fathers don’t show up with hand grenades and bowie knives.”

  “They should be ashamed of themselves,” Jake said.

  The Caterpillar 797F mining dump truck was twenty-four feet tall, forty-nine feet long, thirty-two feet wide, and rolled on six tires that were each thirteen feet high and five feet wide. The sticker price of a 797F, with cup holders, was $5.5 million. It wasn’t a sporty drive. It was like driving a two-story building, as Wilma “Willie” Owens discovered for herself as she tried to steer the massive vehicle through the barren landscape outside the Black Butte open-pit coal mine. Willie had already flattened a mine supervisor’s unoccupied car like a beer can and was heading straight for an office trailer, sending the lone watchman scrambling out the door in terror.

  Willie might have had an easier time controlling the truck if she’d logged the weeks of training in a simulator that a 797F driver is required to do. Instead, she’d put on a pair of skinny jeans, squeezed into a tank top that barely held her double-Ds, and sashayed into the Mint Bar in Sheridan, Wyoming, where the dump truck drivers from the mine hung out. Willie had an insatiable desire and natural ability to drive anything with a motor on land, sea, or air. Problem was, she was entirely self-taught, and almost always unlicensed, which meant there could be a steep, and destructive, learning curve.

  Willie was wandering around her early fifties, but in the dim light of the bar she’d looked twenty years younger, and her bleached blond hair looked pretty darn sexy. The effect was enhanced by the copious amounts of alcohol that was consumed by the bar’s patrons.

  Buck Breznick was a dump truck driver who’d had two pitchers of beer and enough whiskey shots to think it was a good idea to take Willie out to see his massive truck in the middle of the night.

  “Buck, honey,” Willie said, looking up at the 797F, pressing her breast into his arm, “I’d do just about anything to get into the cab of this big boy.”