by Dale Nelson
“What are you doing there, Reginald?” he said as soon as LeGrande answered.
“Well, imagine my embarrassment when I heard this morning that someone ripped off a jewelry exhibition in Cannes and then I find out that you’re in Europe on business.”
“What can I say?” Jack said, his voice flat. “You told me the situation changed. So, I changed it back.”
“You changed it back?” Reginald said. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Jack knew Reginald was never one for word play and had trouble thinking on his feet. If he was stalling for time, Reginald would just repeat your last statement back as a question, pretending he hadn’t heard it. Of course he did. LeGrande didn’t work with jackhammers.
“I asked you to let me back in, and you wouldn’t do it. You didn’t leave me much of a choice.”
“Wow,” he said, “you are one coldblooded son of a bitch, Jack, but I guess you do what you have to do. They’re on you, though, and that wasn’t my fault.”
What the fuck is he talking about?
Reginald continued: “You should’ve taken the fucking job when I offered it to you, and this never would’ve happened.”
“You can obviously see that I’m trying to ease myself into another life. When you first offered me the job, I wasn’t in a position to act on it.”
“So, you’re telling me there’s a right time and wrong time to try and steal eighty-five million dollars?” He let out a short, terse laugh. “Jesus Christ, I want your problems.”
“Why am I talking to you right now, Reginald?”
His old mentor sighed audibly. “I want the eighty-five, Jack, every shiny goddamned penny of it. Or, rather, the thirty-five you’re going to take home from your fence.”
“This is your idea of a joke? I’ve seen your wardrobe, Reginald. I know you have terrible taste, but even you can’t think this is funny. Look, I was planning on giving you your cut anyway to smooth things over, so there’s no need to get touchy.”
“I’m not joking, Jack.” Reginald put a hard emphasis on his name. “You’re going to give me the entire take.”
“You wanted the money, you should’ve let me do the job or hired a better crew.”
“You’re right there,” Reginald said with some finality. There was a tone in Reginald’s voice that he couldn’t quite place. “I honestly didn’t think you had it in you, Jack. But, it is a lot of money, and I’ve never known you to let anything stand in your way. Not even friends.” LeGrande breathed a heavy breath into the phone, and it created a burst of static on the line. “In a way, I guess it makes this easier for me, knowing what you did. I don’t have to feel guilty about what I’m going to do next.”
There was something off in the way Reginald delivered that line, but Jack couldn’t puzzle it out. Instead, he closed his eyes and breathed, forced himself to calm down. “Why are you doing this, Reginald? I took care of you. You’d have been on the street if it wasn’t for me.” There was a bitterness in his own voice that he didn’t intend.
When Reginald spoke again, his cadence was slow and his voice almost sad. “What can I say, Jack? Things change. The world was a different place when I got out.” There was a gravity to those words rather than a simple statement, and something about it pulled Jack toward them, telling him there was so much more than what Reginald actually said. They were both quiet for a few awkward moments, neither of them knowing quite what to say or what to make of the conversation they’d just had. “I didn’t want things to end this way, Jack. I really didn’t. But you forced my hand. There was just too much money to pass up, and I don’t have enough years to nickel and dime it like you do.” Then he said simply, “I’m sorry.” Reginald breathed, and it was a soulless push of air against the phone’s speaker, a ghost. “I’m giving you forty-eight hours before I call the FBI and Interpol. I’ll make it so you can’t stay in Europe and you can’t come back here. I’ll tell them everything. It’s not a big enough world for you to hide in forever.”
“You can’t turn me in without implicating yourself, or did you forget the fact that you’ve set up almost every job I’ve ever done?”
“But not this one,” he said flatly. “And after this, they won’t care about the rest. If I don’t hear from you by this time Tuesday, the feds are going to know everything about you. I’m not sure how much longer you’re going to keep your little operation here going if that happens.”
Jack bit back the words he wanted to spit out, the ones that explained how many people were counting on him, how Reginald had no right to threaten their livelihoods, but Jack knew those would be hollow words that would bounce off unhearing ears.
“I wonder,” Reginald said, “what you’re more afraid of? The police finding out who you really are or that lady friend of yours.”
“She’s not my lady friend.”
“Yes, she is. Everyone knows it but the two of you.”
“You touch her, and I’m coming for you,” Jack said in a flat, cold voice.
“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Reginald responded. “That’s why I’m not giving you the chance. You’re not doing me like you did Enzo, Gaston, and Gabrielle.” Reginald let that hang in the air between continents for a minute. Then he said, “You have two days, Jack.” He hung up.
Twelve
Outside the house, Ozren fidgeted. They’d been sitting in this van for hours just watching for any sign of Burdette. Ozren desperately wanted a smoke, as did his companions, but he’d said that would give them away too quickly. At least once an hour, Milan demanded they just go in and take the jewels, and at least once an hour Ozren told him that was stupid.
Carefully.
Ozren didn’t need the reminder that Milan Radić was a dangerous man. Ozren and Milan’s paths first crossed in 1989 in the Serbian Special Forces. Ozren had just been selected for the elite 63rd Parachute Regiment and Milan was the training sergeant. The 63rd was a Serbian Army unit that traced its lineage back to the Second World War, where it had been dissolved and then reactivated several times, and permanently in 1967 where it was incorporated into the Yugoslav People’s Army and headquartered in Niš. Ozren loved the army—rather, he loved jumping out of airplanes, loved running through the forest and over mountains. He loved the challenge of an operation. It was like solving a complex problem. The army gave him purpose, gave him meaning.
Then the Republic of Yugoslavia crumbled as though it were built out of sand.
Slovenia and Croatia, bristling under the perceived Serbian hegemony forced on them by Slobodan Milošović, took up arms in protest. Ozren never possessed an interest in politics, and he didn’t really know or care how the Yugoslav Wars started. His sergeant told him to fight, so he fought. First the Croats, then Slovenians, then the Bosnians, and then the Macedonians all decided they didn’t like the way things worked, the way things had always worked in that country, and revolted. June of 1991, Ozren’s unit deployed to a peacekeeping operation inside Slovenia. They were riding in helicopters and escorting the First Armored Brigade where they seized the airport at Brnik. It was the most exciting thing Private Stolar had done in his life, but it paled in comparison with what he’d done later in his life.
Sergeant Milan Radić approached him the afternoon of June twenty-seventh. He was collecting the best troops for a special mission and wanted to know if Stolar was interested. Of course he was. Radić gave him a time and place to meet, an out of the way corner of the Brnik Airport well after dark, and he was to tell no one, not even—especially not even—his command chain. It was that secret. When Ozren arrived, there were three others. Radić and two more showed up shortly thereafter. They climbed into a civilian delivery truck and drove into the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, where Radić informed them they were hitting a strategic target. It turned out to be a Slovenian national bank. Getting into the bank was little trouble for six Serbian Special Forces soldiers, and they weren’t especially concerned about raising attention. Radić actually said they wanted t
o be conspicuous. They wanted to remind the Slovenians that Serbia called the shots. What belonged to Slovenia belonged to Serbia by extension. Within fifteen minutes, they had a truck full of dinars and were speeding back toward the airport. Radić gave them a couple thousand each as payment and told them to keep their fucking mouths shut. When one of their secret cabal was “killed by the enemy during maneuvers” two days later, the others guessed what had happened. He ran his mouth. No one else spoke of it, not even to each other.
The situation in Yugoslavia continued to deteriorate throughout the early nineties, and Ozren had little desire to spend the rest of his life fighting what looked to be a war against seemingly everyone, so he processed out in 1993 before he was going to have to make another half-assed attempted at peacekeeping, this time in Bosnia. So, he got out of the army and immediately wished he hadn’t. There were no jobs, and there was barely any food. There was nothing.
The United Nations, led by the Americans, were sanctioning the hell out of Yugoslavia because of the “war crimes” perpetrated by Milošović and his cronies. Of course, the president didn’t feel the bite of the sanctions, only the Yugoslav people did, and the country was already disrupted by the chaos of three years of instability and two of outright warfare. Stolar had no idea this was happening. He’d never cared about politics and had never read a newspaper. He didn’t keep in touch with his family, didn’t really care what was happening to them, so when Ozren left the bubble of isolation that the army formed around him, he found very different world than the one he’d left.
In this new world, it was very hard to put food on the table. At least, if you were trying to do that with honest work, but there was none of that to go around. Ozren had skills, sure. He was an expert marksman, physically fit, a problem solver, all these things the special forces taught him in order to outsmart his opponents. So he put them to work. Ozren became a thief.
At first it was petty crimes, stealing to eat, but once he had his basic survival needs met, Ozren wanted to expand, to improve his life. The first time he’d ever had money, real money, was when Milan Radić recruited him to rip off that bank in Ljubljana. Belgrade was largely untouched by the unrest that was shredding the Yugoslavian State around him, so Ozren relocated there to ply his new trade.
It was there, in 1996, that he once again came into Milan Radić’s orbit.
Radić offered him a job. Said he was recruiting men from the 63rd, men he could trust, men who knew how to use the skills the army taught them. As before, of course, Ozren was in. Radić, in time, went on to explain that he was part of a loose affiliation of professional thieves, most of them Serbs, and many of those ex-Serbian Army with a high concentration of special forces.
The Pink Panthers were more of a series of franchises with no central organization or leadership. Instead, a Panther cell would provide training and resources to someone who showed potential. Then, they would then turn them loose on the world. Radić trained Ozren, and the two worked together frequently throughout the rest of the nineties and early 2000s until the two of them had a falling out over a beautiful Hungarian woman they often used to scout their jobs. Milan Radić was not a man to cross, and Ozren learned that was a mistake he could only make once.
Ozren found himself on the outside of the Panthers. Radić circulated word that he was not to be trusted. Stealing another man’s woman was an unpardonable a sin as it was an ancient one. Eventually Ozren found his way to an American fixer by the name of Reginald LeGrande, who put him on crews with his golden boy, Gentleman Jack. Ozren hated the pretentious ass but had to admit he was a good thief, as good as any of the Panthers and certainly with his own flair for the dramatic. Most importantly, they never got caught.
But it was cold on the outside and working with the Americans was dangerous. They had a different kind of code, and they were only as loyal as the moment.
It wasn’t until Radić got popped in Geneva that Ozren had an opportunity to get back into the fold. He learned through his network that a breakout was being planned. A mutual acquaintance and fellow veteran of the Ljubljana bank job was organizing the effort. Ozren approached him and asked if he could help. The man laughed in his face, so Ozren said, “What if I knew about an eighty-five-million-dollar job? The exact details.” Ozren offered to help spring Radić and then, as a grand act of contrition, would tip him to a major score that would be ripe for the picking. The contact passed it to Radić, who agreed.
The moment that idiot LeGrande recruited him for the Carlton, Ozren began formulating his plan. Once LeGrande told him that it would be Enzo Bachetti and not Jack Burdette leading the crew, he practically came in his pants with excitement. Bachetti and Broussard were both soft. He’d get a better fight out of the woman.
“I’m sick of this shit. Let’s go, Ozren.” Radić put a hand on the door.
Careful, Ozren told himself. “We have to be patient, Milan. Cannes is a city practically without crime and certainly without murder. If we kill Burdette now, and he won’t go quietly, the police will be on top of this place before we’re even out the door.”
“I know how to kill a man with more than just a gun.”
“He doesn’t,” was all Ozren said in return. “The world, literally the entire world, already thinks it was you who pulled the Carlton job. You broke out of prison two days before the theft.
Ozren held a breath, exhaled, and let his words sink in. This was his moment. Radić would either kill him out of blind fury, or the words would drain into that impossibly arrogant, stubborn head of his. Softly, steadily Ozren continued. “Jack has to leave the country. None of the fences he works with are in France. He won’t fly. There’s no way he’s going to take those jewels on a plane and risk them getting discovered by security. His only option is to drive, probably through Italy, east. He normally deals with a Turkish syndicate that he meets with in our backyard.” Ozren held up a steadying hand. “If we can, we’ll take him on the road. If not, we’ll get him—quietly—when he stops. Okay?”
“You’d better fucking be right, Ozren.” Then, Radić added unnecessarily, “Your second chance was getting me in the car.”
Thirteen
Jack left shortly after eight in the morning so that he would hit the border around lunch, in the thick of the noontime traffic. Once Jack got onto the A8, he opened up the GranTurismo and was all but gone. Not that anyone was looking for a legitimate American businessman driving an Italian sports car. He couldn’t put distance between himself and Cannes fast enough. Jack kept his speed around a hundred and ten, a respectable amount for this kind of car. That was miles, mind you. Gentlemen didn’t count in kilometers. Once he crossed into Italy, Jack knew he’d probably draw more attention if he kept the Maserati below the speed limit, so he pushed it up just enough that he wouldn’t piss off any police and force them to pull him over. Speed was a way of life in Italy. Only assholes and foreigners drove slowly on the interstate.
He wiped the villa down as best he could before he left. Jack also took the BMW’s plates and forged registration with him so that he could dispose of them when he had time. Rusty would have a cleaning crew in there to make the place hospital-worthy later that day, but Jack was nothing if not cautious.
The trip was roughly eight hours, and Jack spent much of that listening to BBC Radio to get updates on the Carlton heist. Few, if any, new details emerged during his drive to Rome, but the reporters were already speculating the theft was an inside job. It was just too easy.
The other story they reported was far more troubling.
There was a triple homicide at an apartment on the Avenue Isola Bella in Cannes. The identities had not been released, but they were reported as two men and a woman. Jack already knew their names.
Enzo.
Gaston.
Gabrielle.
They’d been found, murdered by gunshot, Sunday afternoon by another tenant who’d found the apartment door ajar, looked inside, and saw the bodies. Police were saying nothing, but the
reporters were already speculating that three murders the same day as a historic jewelry could not be a coincidence.
During his drive, Jack also replayed his conversation with Reginald, and now everything made sense.
I’ve never known you to let anything stand in your way. Not even friends.
I don’t have to feel guilty about what I’m going to do next.
You’re not doing me like you did Enzo, Gaston, and Gabrielle.
You are one coldblooded son of a bitch, Jack.
Reginald actually thought Jack killed his old crew because they got in his way. Thinking that Jack would stop at nothing, Reginald tried his scorched earth play, threatening to dime Jack to the FBI.
Fucking Ozren. It only could’ve been him.
Jack warned Reginald that the Serb was dangerous.
He’d pieced together Ozren’s plan Friday when he learned of the prison break and spent most of that night wrestling with the decision to call Enzo or not, to tell his friend that the Serb was coming for them. He didn’t. Jack decided that he couldn’t trust Enzo, despite their friendship because Enzo had cast his lot with Reginald when he’d signed on for the Carlton job. Jack didn’t know what lies Reginald told them to explain why Jack wasn’t on the job with them, but whatever it was, it was enough for Enzo not to make a call to corroborate it. Because of that, Jack didn’t believe he could count on those three beyond any doubt, didn’t believe that he could trust them in the way he used to with the depth required for a job like this. You had to be able to anticipate the actions of your crew, and with the uncertainly his reappearance would cause, Jack knew he couldn’t, so he chose to go it alone.
Jack had actually believed that when Ozren found the crew empty-handed, the Serb would just let them go. Maybe that’s just what Jack told himself so he could live with it.
People often waxed about the worth of a life.