Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3)

by Dale M. Nelson

  Which meant Giulia likely knew it as well.

  Jack used her to find out the name Bartolo used to open the safe-deposit box in the Commerce Bank vault, on the pretense that they’d go away together. Jack had no intention of doing that. Giulia served him up to Bartolo to be killed once, and that wasn’t the kind of thing he would just forgive and forget. Spurned and angry, Giulia would have gone to Bartolo for some good old-fashioned get-back. If she knew where Jack lived and the name he lived under…then it was a good bet that Niccoló Bartolo did too.

  “But Nico kind of shot himself in the foot, though, right?” Enzo asked. “With that shit this morning. They had to have lost any chance they had of following Reginald.”

  “If what I said is true, they may not need to. Their backup plan can be to just let us do it, go to my home, and force me to hand them over.”

  Enzo did have a point, though. Nico was incredibly resourceful, but he was also sixteen years out of the game and he’d never played it over here. There were generations of techniques and technologies that were born and died in the time he was away. Fiore and the rest of Cannizzaro’s thugs? They were not detectives. “I agree with you about their following Reginald. But they also wouldn’t have come all this way with no leads. LA is a really big haystack to start looking for needles. I think we need to be on the safe side, and let’s assume that Nico and his crew have some way into this. We need to plan on them making a play. But I think we can also assume that we’re a step ahead.”

  “I agree with that, so what’s our play?” Rusty asked.

  “The trick we tried just now with WorldSecure can work. We find out where Reginald is going to make the sale and then intercept them when they are en route to the destination. We’ve got badges. Let’s pretend we’re cops.”

  “We’ll need to separate Reginald and Vito from the armored car, though,” Rusty said.

  “I’m open to ideas.” Jack’s phone rang. It was Megan. He tapped it and sent it to voicemail. A text appeared immediately asking him to call her. “Guys, I need to take this.” Jack stepped into his bedroom and closed the door. Then he called Megan. “Hey,” he said. When she said, “Hey” back, he could hear the concern in her voice, and he immediately asked what’s wrong.

  “We’ve got several fires in the county now,” she said. “The Big Ridge fire isn’t close enough that I’m losing sleep, but you can see smoke in the hills.” Big Ridge was on the other side of Sonoma from the Alexander Valley, where Kingfisher was located. But what had happened the year before was lightning strikes had started blazes near the city of Healdsburg, and that turned into one of the largest fires the state had ever seen. They’d been able to see flames from the property. One of the biggest dangers with these fires was when individual wildfires combined. “But there’s one in Foothill, and that one does have me worried,” she said. Foothill Regional Park wasn’t far from Kingfisher. “Jack, everyone here is pretty tense. I know you’ve got things that you need to take care of, but we need you here.”

  Jack closed his eyes and felt pressure building behind them. They’d come close to losing the winery the year before. That fire that ravaged the city of Healdsburg was close enough to them that they’d had to shut operations down and evacuate their people. Amazingly, they didn’t lose any of their crop, but looking at the wildfire trend over the last several years, it only seemed like a matter of time.

  He knew that he needed to be there for his people. Jack couldn’t stop the fires, couldn’t prevent them from striking their vineyard if it came to that, but he was the leader and they looked to him in a time of crisis. Jack needed to be there for them. But if he lost the winery, he lost everything.

  “Jack, I know I promised that I wouldn’t ask any questions about…about any of that.” Megan was being cagey because they were talking on an unencrypted line, but he knew what she meant. Jack could also hear not just the worry but the burden of carrying this weight by herself. “But the team is concerned and getting closer to scared. I have to know that what you’re doing, whatever it is, is worth it. You don’t have to tell me what, just tell me that it is.”

  “Reginald LeGrande is out of prison. I’m trying to make sure he can’t ever hurt us again.”

  Megan had learned the full measure of Reginald’s scheming in Paul Sharpe’s embezzlement trial. They only got back a fraction of what he stole. The fact that Reginald set that up just to keep Jack in a position of needing to keep working as a thief…Megan hated Reginald almost as much as Jack did.

  “I understand,” she said. “Please be careful.”

  “I will.”

  “Jack, I love you.”

  “I love you too, Megs.”

  “When will you be home?”

  16

  So, his old protégé was here after all.

  Nico expected to find Jack on this trip; in fact, he was counting on it. He was planning an excursion to this winery that Jack apparently ran where they would finally settle accounts. But he hadn’t expected to find Jack in LeGrande’s apartment this morning. Nor had he expected that idiot Fiore to open fire in the middle of the city. He tried to explain that this was America and not only did the police actually respond to shootings, they tended to do so quickly. You also couldn’t just pay them off and make them disappear. Fiore just shrugged it off. That’s the problem with soldiers, you can’t tell them anything.

  Of course, Jack would know about the LeGrande-Verrazano connection; that’s how Jack came to know Nico, after all. But his knowing where LeGrande lived, that was something that Nico hadn’t counted on. The don’s people hadn’t known either. Nico had to assume that Jack had a plan and that it was well underway. That meant Nico had less time than they’d planned.

  And they were lucky to escape the beach with none of them arrested.

  Though they’d tracked Bachetti to the US and that was how they knew Vito was here, they’d used Reginald LeGrande to find Vito.

  Nico stood in his hotel room at the Westin in downtown Los Angeles, staring out at the city. There was a glassy gray line on the horizon, which he believed was the ocean. Their American “hosts” admonished him to keep the shades drawn in case the police had surveillance up, but Nico didn’t find that likely, and anyway, it was an impressive view. He’d never been to Los Angeles before.

  Nico wasn’t very impressed with the American mafia, but then, the Sicilian mafia never impressed him much and they started the goddamn thing. Still, their American “cousins” had delivered for them, and that was to be commended. They had cars, money, and guns. They also had people who knew the layout of the city, and that was helpful as well. Nico didn’t know what Salvatore told these guys or promised them, but they were strangely cooperative. That alone made Nico cautious.

  Crooks didn’t cooperate for free.

  Nico knew about Vito’s history with the American, Reginald LeGrande. He talked about it enough when they worked together in Turin. Vito was tight-lipped about the jobs he pulled before he joined the School of Turin, which Nico always appreciated. He didn’t trust thieves who ran their mouths. Usually, the bravado wasn’t backed up and they folded under pressure. Vito never cracked. Nico eventually learned about Knightsbridge and admired Vito’s patience, his vision. That spoke well of him. So when Nico learned that the rat stole from him, Nico’s first thought was that he was working with LeGrande. It didn’t take long to figure out that LeGrande had just recently been released from prison and, from there, that he was living at that apartment on the beach. Once they knew where LeGrande lived and what he drove, it was a simple matter of hiding a tracker on his car. Fifty dollars on Amazon got them a GPS tracker with a magnetic case that they clamped to the underside of LeGrande’s Range Rover. They could track him anywhere in the city until he found it.

  They followed LeGrande and Vito to a place called WorldSecure, which a quick Google search showed them was a high-end vault for wealthy customers to stash their valuables. This proved Nico’s theory that Vito and LeGrande were trying to sel
l the diamonds legally in order to realize their full value. That was greedy and stupid. Fifty million each? They couldn’t spend that, not with the years they had left.

  Nico smiled, remembering that he was just a few years younger than Vito. He could spend that kind of money in the years he had left…but it was going to be a big fucking boat.

  Except for the incident this morning, Nico was happy with their progress. They knew where LeGrande was keeping the diamonds, and they knew how and where he moved. The idea for the GPS tracker came from their American counterparts. Apparently, they used that technique to keep an eye on their rivals. A lot had changed in this game. Nico walked over to the ice bucket in his room and drew out the half-consumed bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, then refilled his glass. He’d gotten the bottle along with his room service lunch. Though he was working, Nico saw no reason not to enjoy himself, and his cousin was picking up the tab. Or whoever owned the credit card they’d stolen was. Either way, it wasn’t Nico, and creature comforts weren’t something he’d had much of over the last sixteen years. The Belgian prison system was known to be one of the worst in the modern world.

  Nico was returning to his view and planning out their next move when a sharp knock interrupted his thoughts. Nico set the wineglass down and went to the door, checking the peephole first. Seeing it was Fiore, he opened the door, and the other walked in without being invited.

  Constantino Fiore was relatively new to his cousin’s organization. He was Roman, rather than Sicilian, and while Nico had yet to discover any special qualities about the man, he certainly had Salvatore’s confidences. Fiore was in his early thirties, was well muscled and lean like a predator that relied on speed. Fiore kept his hair short; there was barely enough to part. His eyes, that was the one thing that Nico thought they had in common. Fiore’s eyes were cold and dark. They were the eyes of a man who killed without hesitation. Fiore had changed clothes since their misadventure at LeGrande’s apartment. He was wearing a dark gray suit, a dusty rose shirt that reminded Nico of sandalwood, and black tie that had a sharkskin sheen to it.

  “What,” Nico said and returned to his wine.

  “The don isn’t happy. It’s taking too long.”

  “Well, I hope in your report, you mentioned that you were the one who opened fire.” Nico turned to see if the shot landed and saw a kind of vacancy in those eyes, but as they narrowed slightly, the expression turned to one of seething. “We know where LeGrande is and where he’s going. We know where the diamonds are. We—”

  “But you can’t get them,” Fiore snapped.

  “Not in the vault, no.” Nico had to remind himself that Fiore was a soldier and not a thief. He would have to explain himself as he would to a child. He knew that Fiore’s job had been to be Salvatore’s man inside the Commerce Bank, ostensibly a security guard, a “soft” presence to ensure that the don’s reach was not just understood but felt. Nico also learned that during the attempted robbery, Jack had disarmed Fiore with a bluff.

  “Didn’t you break into the vault in Antwerp? Why don’t you just do that now?”

  Nico restrained a sigh and concealed his expression by taking a drink.

  Fucking amateur.

  The Antwerp Diamond Centre had been a masterclass in thievery. Nico had his sights on that job for years, and that was largely why he’d assembled the School of Turin. It wasn’t just that Jack allowed himself to get turned by that undercover cop, Castro, it was that the arrests that resulted from that broke up the School of Turin and robbed Nico of some of his best pupils. Including Burdette. Nevertheless, Nico proceeded with it. He was forced to push the job back several years, but in 2003, he and his crew executed it flawlessly. They rented space in the diamond center and Nico himself became a frequent face, under the guise of being a diamond merchant, which not only established trust but helped him fade into the background. They secretly installed cameras over the vault door so they could record both the patterns of the security guards and the code to enter it. Once inside the vault, they located the nearly twelve-inch interior vault key. This was supposed to be stored in a secured locker elsewhere, but it was large and heavy and the guards were complacent. After all…who was going to break into an impregnable vault?

  Before the job, Nico convinced the building manager that he was looking to construct his own vault, which would have netted that company millions, and the manager was only too happy to lend his assistance. He gave Nico access to a full-scale mockup of the vault they used for tours with high-profile potential clients. It never occurred to the man that Nico and his crew would use this for practice. So, once they were inside, the crew could work in almost total darkness because they knew the layout. They worked all night, drilling in the darkness, but they netted close to one hundred million dollars’ worth of loose, finished diamonds.

  The job took years of planning, months of execution, and Nico had a crew that he’d worked with and trusted implicitly.

  The fact that this imbecile thought he could just “do” that by walking into a place didn’t just prove his stupidity, it placed an embossed stamp of authenticity on it.

  “No,” Nico said flatly. “That job took years to plan and months to execute. I had a crew, highly specialized, that I’d been training for a long time. We knew the layout of the vault, we knew the security procedures and the technology they used. Besides, that was nearly twenty years ago. The kinds of systems they have on these vaults now would make a job like that impossible.” Nico actually had no idea, though he felt it was a safe assumption. Honestly, he just wanted Fiore to shut up and leave him alone so he could think. However, Fiore was the don’s eyes, ears, and, unfortunately, mouth. Nico had to tread carefully. “Constantino, we are not going to break into that vault. But I did notice a slight flaw in their security.”

  “Oh, and what’s that?” Fiore said, his voice dripping with skepticism.

  “The way we got into the Antwerp Diamond Centre was by analyzing their security practices and finding the flaws that we could exploit. We don’t have the time to figure out what the flaws are inside WorldSecure and, I suspect, LeGrande and Verrazano won’t give us that time either. However, I have noticed one thing that I think we can use.” Nico took a drink of wine and studied the reaction on Fiore’s face. Nico had to hand it to the man, he was very hard to read. “They have three men in the armored car. There’s one driver and two guards. The guards are armed, but they just have pistols and no body armor. That will only deter someone seeing this as a target of opportunity. We have four of us, plus any of the Americans we care to leverage.”

  “To do what?” Fiore asked.

  “Outnumber them, Constantino. Now, what kind of weapons can our friends get for us?”

  Fiore shrugged. “I think they can get whatever we want.”

  “Okay, good. I want pistols, shotguns, and automatics. UZI or MP-5, something like that. Let’s also get body armor if they can do it that quickly. It shouldn’t be too hard in a city this size.”

  “How quickly do you want them?”

  “Right away. I think this is going to happen fast.”

  “I’ll see what they can do.” Fiore walked to the door. He turned and glared back at Nico. “Close your fucking shades. The police here have cameras.” Fiore walked out.

  Nico exhaled and took his wineglass back over to the window. If the police didn’t know they were here, they wouldn’t know to surveil them. If the police did know they were here, they were busted anyway and it wouldn’t matter. Why not enjoy the view?

  You can’t tell soldiers anything.

  17

  Carter LeMothe didn’t have time for fucking Janelle and her fucking conference room.

  He needed to be on the links in two hours, and it was at least an hour to get there this time of day. She didn’t really get this business, didn’t understand that it was entirely relationship driven. No one was going to enter into a multimillion dollar deal with someone they didn’t know, someone they didn’t have a rapport with. Especial
ly now that the markets were turning around so rapidly and people were spending money hand over fist. Carter figured his golf game alone brought them an extra fifteen percent each year.

  Carter straightened his tie and walked into the conference room, which was in between his office and Janelle’s. The interior wall was glass, though it was soundproofed, and the other side faced the street, like Carter’s office did. Janelle was seated at the head, as she always was, wanting to make sure everyone knew she was the COO. Carter wasn’t racist, but he couldn’t help but wonder if that was a Black thing. Or maybe it was because she was a woman, that constant need to assert her authority to the men in the room. Carter LeMothe could read a business card, he knew what her title was.

  Then there was Don Levitt, their chief legal officer. Levitt was a good enough guy and was clearly on his last job before an early enough retirement. He stuck it out an extra few years because he had two kids in expensive colleges; also he and his wife traveled a lot and preferred to go first class. They went “on safari,” apparently, like they were English. Levitt was a scratch golfer and they used to play Fridays, but now that Carter thought about it, it’d been about a year. Not since Janelle showed up.

  God, was this another one of those bullshit sensitivity seminars? If Carter was going to be asked to do another virtual trust fall, he was going to lose his mind. He looked down at his Rolex. He had exactly fifteen minutes to wrap this up or he was going to be late for his tee time.

  There were two other men at the table, one Black and one white, both in suits, though they weren’t very well cut. If these were prospective clients, Carter wasn’t sure they could afford to do business here by the look of them. Levitt was seated next to Janelle, with his back to the door, though he half-turned in his chair when Carter entered. Now he understood. This was some bullshit audit that they, IRS, or Customs, or whoever the fuck made them go through every so often. Well, they’d have to reschedule. Carter had places to be, and those places made him money, and why the hell couldn’t Janelle ever read a calendar. That’s why they had the goddamn things.