by Dale Nelson
The next morning, Jack woke early and moved through a yoga routine by the pool while the coffee brewed. It was Thursday, which meant he had three full days to keep tabs on Enzo, Gaston, Gabrielle, and Ozren.
He knew the earliest that Enzo and team could go would be in the overnight hours between Saturday and Sunday because the jewels wouldn’t be delivered until then. Unless, of course, Gabrielle had charmed the location of the vault the jewels were being stored in out of Arshavin, but most likely those weren’t even in country yet. There were simply too many minuscule probability, oddball permutations to think about, and Jack just wasn’t going to waste the time running all those scenarios down. Instead, he’d just watch them.
Jack alternated between watching the safe house and tailing Ozren as the driver practiced various escape avenues from the hotel. The Serb was also checking the roads, making sure that there were no major obstructions like last minute roadwork on their getaway route. Ozren tried several paths but ended up at the D4085 heading north toward the French Alps and, ultimately, to the Swiss border. That would buy them crucial hours as the French authorities coordinated with their Swiss counterparts to pick up the chase. They could well be in Austria by the time the border closed.
On Friday morning, Jack posted in front of the safe house, parking the Maserati on an adjacent block out of sight, but near enough that he could get to it quickly if he needed to. Before coming over, Jack drove to the Carrefour on Rue Meynadier. Carrefour was a kind of French Wal-Mart, though god help the American who drew that particular parallel in mixed company. There, he purchased gardening equipment, a pair of coveralls, a wide-brimmed hat, and sunglasses. Jack changed in the bathroom and, now garbed like a gardener, drove his hundred-thousand-Euro Italian sports car to the safe house. Once there, Jack walked the perimeter once to make sure that there weren’t any legitimate gardeners on the premises and then located the column of apartments he’d seen Gabrielle enter two days prior.
The complex housed what looked to be about twenty units. The apartments were grouped in stacks of four, with each stack having its own dedicated doorway and stairwell. Jack slowly walked past each unit, inspecting the plant life, checking to see what needed to be pruned or trimmed. This also gave him a chance to look in each of the windows in a group of units and see which ones had the shutters open. Jack knew now that he did not need to figure out Enzo’s plan so much he simply needed to know when the group intended to execute it. He drew up several scenarios, using his knowledge of his old friend to red-team Enzo’s operation, but there were still so many variables and so few clues. Jack could not settle on one he was willing to commit to. His best bet was to wait until they were out of the apartment so he could break in—the locks would be laughably easy to pick—and try to learn when they’d go.
Jack was pretending to look at the foliage in an adjacent unit when he spotted Ozren, wearing black jeans and thin gray polo shirt, walking out of the doorway and up the short concrete path to the waist-high metal gate, which he promptly opened and stepped through, barely breaking his stride. The Serb opened his flip phone—he’d never trusted smart phones—and made a call. He checked the street once, again without breaking his stride, stepped off the sidewalk, and made his way quickly to a gray Mercedes Sprinter parked across the street. Stolar got into the van and sped off, never paying the “gardener” a second glance.
Jack had a decision to make. Follow the Serb again and risk him spotting Jack’s car and making the connection of a red GranTurismo two days in a row, or stay here, hoping that the crew had their windows open and Jack could eavesdrop, reasoning that they likely had one car and would stay put with Ozren gone.
He chose Ozren.
Jack left the bucket of gardening tools on the low concrete wall that ringed the front of the building, pushed up against a bush that looked like it needed attention, knowing that anyone walking by would just assume a lazy gardener just abandoned it until he felt like cleaning it up. Judging by the state of the shrubs and hedges out front, this wasn’t a hard sell.
Jack quickly made his way across the street, rounded the corner, and broke into a full run for his car. He spotted the Serb’s van about a half mile west of the safe house. Ozren was sticking to the main roads and obviously wasn’t thinking about a tail. Ozren turned right onto the Boulevard Sadi Carnot, one of Cannes major north-south arteries, and followed that until it merged with D6285, becoming a four-lane divided road heading northwest until it crossed the A8, at which point it became the D6185. Navigating in France had always confounded the hell out of Jack, though he had to admit it was better than Ireland, where road names and designations and even the widths would be dictated entirely by the county they were in with no real semblance of central organization or management.
Ozren stayed on 6285 as it became 6185 and was clearly intent on leaving Cannes.
Whatever the reason, unless he followed Stolar to his destination, Jack could only speculate at the motive, and he was in far too conspicuous of a car to pull that off safely. There were enough high-end sports cars on the streets of Cannes that a Maserati just blended in with the background noise. But once they left town, Ozren would pick him up in a flat second. Jack watched the gray Sprinter grow smaller through his passenger window as he turned onto the A8, accelerating to merge speed, then up to a hundred and twenty for a few miles until the D6007 exit on the western edge of town.
Jack met Rusty at his villa shortly after two to take possession of the motorcycle, a gray and red BMW R 1200 GS. The R 1200 was a sport bike that doubled as a touring cycle. As one of the top-selling bikes in its class and immensely popular throughout Europe, it would not stand out at all. Though the bike was quick and handled well, the real reason they’d chosen it was the detachable briefcase-style side case that would easily hold the take. Rusty told him that the plates were clean but the registration was forged. Whatever Jack was planning with the bike, it’d probably be best to strip the plates and acid bath them when he was done.
The meeting was brief. Rusty wished him luck and said he was heading back to Marseille for another job, reassuring him with a laugh and a smirk that Reginald LeGrande had nothing to do with that one. Jack smiled back. Rusty was the very definition of a rogue—rakish and sly in both style and speech, both his work and his appearance an immaculate simulacrum of the other.
Jack didn’t tell Rusty what he was doing here, but he’d know immediately as soon as the story broke. Jack planned to give the fixer more money as a bonus, and if it were anyone else, he’d be afraid of them thinking that they could come back to the well. Of course, if it had been anyone else, Jack would never have called.
He drove back to the apartment complex on Avenue Isola Bella. He slowed as he rolled up on the building but decided not to stop. The Sprinter was not parked out front, so he drove around the adjoining blocks to make sure it wasn’t on any of the surrounding blocks. Without the van there, he didn’t know if Ozren had come back and gotten the others or if he was still out. So, Jack couldn’t break into the apartment because he had no way of knowing if someone was in there or not.
Deciding there was nothing else he could do, Jack returned to the villa where he spent about thirty minutes swimming laps in the pool and then another thirty doing a yoga routine to burn off some nervous energy. Still in his swim trunks, Jack opened a Sancerre, this would be his last as there was no alcohol consumption the day before a job. As Jack sat in the Mediterranean sun, drinking the ‘07 Domaine Francois Cotat in a villa on the French Rivera, even he had to laugh at the outward hilarity. This was the pregame routine for one of the world’s most notorious thieves.
He called Megan to check in, but it went straight to voicemail. So, he simply reclined and enjoyed his wine, trying to calm the turbulence in his mind.
He really just wanted to hear her voice.
Jack wasn’t exactly sure what their relationship was anymore, or more importantly, what it should be. But he certainly missed her when he was gone. They’d been attrac
ted to each other immediately, and shortly after she’d started working at the winery, they’d gotten drunk and had some inadvisable sex. In the cold light of morning and aided by sobriety, they’d agreed not to do that again for the good of their working relationship. They’d slipped up a few times since, and Jack heard from Corky that most of the full-time staff assumed they were together anyway.
Jack hesitated, not only for the obvious reason that it put a very tangible stamp on the lie that was “Frank Fischer,” but also that he had almost pathological difficulty forming personal attachments. When Jack was young he made a very, very bad mistake, and the only way he saw to answer for it was to disappear. If he stayed, the people he loved would be punished. So, the lesson that Jack learned was never attach himself to something he couldn’t walk away from. Even Kingfisher, he knew, he could drop and run if he had to. But letting himself fall in love with Megan was an entirely different matter. That was not something he could just run away from.
An hour later, Jack walked back into the villa from the patio for a bottle of water. The television droned in the background in the other room when something caught his attention. He kept it turned to CNN International because that was the only station he could understand. Piqued, Jack walked quickly into the living room, dialing up the volume. Frozen in place, Jack watched the silver-haired American broadcaster repeat his breaking news statement with the practiced cadence designed to sound urgent but measured and extemporaneous.
Two inmates escaped Prison de La Croisée in Orbe, Switzerland in a brazen, audacious and well-planned break out the night before. According to the reporter, a car charged the outer gate and then sped up to an inner fence surrounding the prison’s exercise yard. The driver exchanged gunfire with the guards while an accomplice pushed a ladder up and over the fence before opening cover fire himself. The two inmates then used the ladder to scale the fence and jump into the car. The car raced back through the gate and disappeared before the guards or the local police could launch an effective pursuit. Swiss authorities found the car’s charred remains in a town not far from the prison. The reporter said that the French, German, and Italian border crossings were being monitored as well as the airports. There was an inset map at the lower right corner of the TV screen showing Orbe’s location in southwest Switzerland, not far from the French border.
“Shit,” Jack said aloud, softly first, drawing the syllables out long. His second, “Shit,” was much louder and harder. His own escape plan called for him to leave France overland to Italy. If the borders were already being monitored, what did that mean for his plan, especially considering that by the time he arrived at the checkpoint, the news of the Carlton heist would be all over the radio.
Then the reporter said something that made a cold pit form at the bottom of Jack’s stomach. The two escapees were known Serbian criminals and suspected members of The Pink Panthers. The Panthers, a notorious syndicate of international jewel thieves, most of whom came from the miasma of anarchic balkanized chaos that was the former Republic of Yugoslavia. Most of them were suspected to be former soldiers in the Yugoslav Army, particularly their Special Forces, who turned to crime when Yugoslavia broke apart in the 1990s and descended into lawlessness.
The Pink Panthers, in that vein of spite and sarcasm unique to the English, were so named by Scotland Yard in a sardonic homage to the Peter Sellars film after gang members stole a single diamond from a London jeweler valued at half a million pounds. The Metropolitan Police intended the moniker to infuriate and embarrass the thieves, but instead, the gang embraced it, particularly after their successful high-profile jobs made the police look as incompetent as Sellars’s Inspector Clouseau. Soon, they became known for daring jobs reminiscent of Hollywood heist films by employing elaborate costumes, flashy executions, and daring escapes. In a 2009 job on London’s New Bond Street, the thieves made no attempt to hide their identities, which led authorities to speculate they’d used makeup and prosthetic features, speaking of a cold, premeditated calculation and thoughtful planning, whereas before the police ascribed them only thuggish luck.
Ozren volunteered little of substance about his past, and if Reginald had any indication, he certainly never shared it with Jack. But he had long suspected that even if Ozren wasn’t actively affiliated with the Panthers, he had most likely gotten his start in that group. As Jack understood their cellular organizational structure, it was more of a criminal franchise than a syndicate. The group would train prospective members and turn them loose on the world, with cells occasionally providing logistical support or intelligence on juicy scores. There was no notion of a centralized command or hierarchical structures of western organized crime enterprises. This confounded European law enforcement for the better part of a decade. They simply couldn’t reason over a criminal network that looked more like metastasized cancer and less like the mafia. Last fall, Jack and Rusty met up in Sorrento to talk about work, and the ex-G-man gave Jack a master course on the Panthers over a couple buckets of beer.
The pieces began to fit together in Jack’s mind, and he considered the broader implications.
When Jack followed Ozren earlier, on what he assumed was the group’s escape route, Ozren was really heading north on a road that eventually led to the Swiss border.
Jack grabbed his keys and sprinted for the car, not bothering to turn off the television or even lock the villa behind him. Jack made fast time to the apartment complex on Avenue Isola Bella, keeping his eyes peeled only for the gray Mercedes Sprinter. Jack drove around the block and then each of the surrounding blocks for a quarter mile in any direction.
The van was nowhere to be found.
Ozren must have thought that with Jack out of the picture this score would be ripe for the taking. He probably made plans with his former colleagues to go for it themselves. Most likely, they were going to wait until after Enzo and Gaston made their move with the hope they could steal the take from them after rather than make a play themselves.
Jack had to warn them. If that crazy Serb was coming for them, Enzo had to know. He paused. If he told them, Reginald would find out that Jack had taken the job. Jack would certainly have to cut Enzo, Gaston, and Gabrielle in on the score. Reginald would be angry that Jack had taken, but the cut would ultimately be the same. They would just be trading Ozren’s cut for Jack’s. Better to have a cut of something than all of nothing. But Ozren and his fellow Panthers would need to be dealt with, and if the stories were true, they were most likely trained soldiers in addition to being exceptional thieves.
A darker thought entered Jack’s mind as he played through the permutations.
There was a nagging question of exactly where Reginald’s loyalties lay and how many angles he was playing. Pangs of guilt stabbed at Jack as quickly as he thought of it. He wasn’t surprised that Reginald would cut him out of the job considering how Jack spurned him initially and then tried to come in at the last minute. Jack might well have reacted the same way if the situation were reversed. But, he couldn’t banish the knowledge that LeGrande found and recruited Ozren. The Serb was cunning in the way animal predators were, but he was no mastermind. As hard as it was to contemplate, Jack knew he had to allow for the possibility that maybe his old friend was playing both sides.
Reginald had no specific loyalty to Enzo, Gaston, and Gabrielle, and he didn’t know that Jack was here.
Jack didn’t know what Reginald told his team to explain Jack’s absence on the job. It was possible that if Jack approached them, they wouldn’t let him in on it, in which case, he would not only still be going this alone, but everyone would also know he was here. They would undoubtedly move up their timetable.
Still, Enzo was his friend, and Ozren was almost certainly going to double-cross them.
And where are your loyalties, Jack? he asked himself. Is it to a bunch of criminals, or is to Megan, Lincoln, and the rest of your employees who are on the street if you fail?
Jack’s eyes tracked up to the ceiling as his mind sear
ched its hallways for answers.
He coolly reached for his phone. It was time to make a call.
Nine
The Carlton was a huge hotel and occupied nearly an entire city block. Rue Henri Ruhl split the adjacent block, Foncière MCP, from the rear of Hotel 3.14. Jack parked the bike on Ruhl. It was ten to nine on a Sunday morning, and Cannes was far from awake, but Jack made a fast look up Ruhl and François Einsey to make sure. He removed the motorcycle helmet and secured it to the bike, and then he opened the side case and replaced the helmet with a black ball cap and aviators, keeping his head low and aimed at the street. He already wore a large, loose scarf around his neck, styled to look like a regular bandanna that motocross and mountain bike riders wore. Finally, he removed the Beretta from the side case and slid it into the small of his back. Jack detached the side case from the bike and crossed François Einesy to the sidewalk next to the Carlton. It would be warm that day, but it had dawned cool and there was a slight chill coming off the sea, so Jack wouldn’t look too out of place in his long-sleeved white t-shirt and jeans.
Jack briskly walked the two hundred feet or so up to Boulevard de la Croisette, Cannes’ seafront and palm-lined Miracle Mile. Hassar’s propaganda machine was in full effect. Gaudy pink-and-white banners hung at both corners of the salon’s raised exterior patio and from the concrete wall topped by a balustrade that separated it from the street. Further, to fill up the visual space between the street and the salon, they had extended the gold-and-white striped awning to cover the entire patio. More bright pink banners advertising the show, three in total, hung in the space between the awning’s edge and the top of the balustrade. The patio floor was eye level for the average person standing on the street, so someone would have to be standing right there and looking at him to see him enter or exit from the street-side door.