To Catch a Thief

by Christina Skye

  “A good plan.” The old man studied the haunting face of the woman in the sketch and then nodded. “Your daughter may go. Her use here has ended.”

  “But Father—”

  “Silence.” The order was cold. “She leaves, but the father stays.” He turned to Jordan MacInnes. “I have more work for you. This is agreed?”

  After a long time Nell’s father nodded. “It is agreed.”

  “No. She will talk.” Martim hissed. “We can’t trust an outsider.”

  Luis Gonsalves looked at Nell, and she felt the full force of his cold assessment.

  “Will you speak of this?”

  “No daughter would harm a father,” she answered.

  “Even if she hates the things he has done—and will do again?” the old man asked shrewdly.

  “Even then.”

  “It is finished.” The old man reached into his pocket. “You will be driven to Edinburgh.” He pulled out a piece of paper and scrawled a number in ink. “This paper will take you anywhere in the world without harm. The man who answers that phone will see to it. But it may only be used once. You understand the rest—and that your father’s life will depend on your silence?”

  He’d traded his freedom and future and honor for her, Nell thought. A weight crushed down on her chest. They left him no choice. And now they left her no choice but to turn and walk away.

  “I…understand.”

  Her heart was broken. She would probably never see her father again.

  “Your driver will meet you outside. Go and leave us to our work.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  DAKOTA PULLED himself into the shadows on the wall as a guard walked behind the castle, playing his flashlight back and forth across the grass.

  The walkie-talkie gave another loud burst, and the man stopped. Listening to clipped orders in Portuguese, he glanced out at the sea, then asked a question and waited for an answer.

  High above, Dakota locked his fingers in place and hung motionless, listening to the slap of the waves and the low tread of feet below him. The guard raised night-vision binoculars and scanned the moat. The minutes crawled past. Finally satisfied, the guard walked toward the front of the castle and vanished.

  Dakota found a toehold, dug in hard and returned to climbing.

  Turn. Scan the parapets. Climb the corner.

  Hand over hand, he inched higher, watching for lights or motion sensors. A huge seabird raced past his head and he resisted the urge to duck, pushing hard, fingers burning. Just below the lower parapet he stopped, checking for movement. As the silence held, he wedged a foot, pulled up and swung over. Above him was a straight climb seventy feet to the top of the corner tower. Like a shadow he nudged his feet into the next crack, finding the spot where he would be least visible.

  Four minutes later he reached the top. Hanging motionless, he watched for thermal patterns and movement nearby.

  Thirty seconds.

  Sixty.

  Two minutes.

  Wind gusted in from the sea as he gripped the edge of the high parapet and swung one leg over. Quickly he circled the battlements until he came to a row of windows on the inner wall, facing the center of the castle. The spiral stairs below were boarded up, according to Izzy’s last set of building plans. Dakota quietly scored the glass, popped out a pane and bit back a curse when he slid inside.

  The stairs were completely gone, collapsed in a mound of rubble and mortar that blocked the inner door at ground level. Aware that he had only minutes to reach his target, Dakota secured a rope and worked his way down, dropping onto the debris at the bottom.

  New route.

  He checked his watch: fifteen minutes until the auction was due to start. His target was not what he had told Nell. His real objective was locked in a safe inside Martim Gonsalves’s secure second-floor office, where a laptop held crucial details of contacts and transactions with terrorist organizations throughout Asia and Europe. Dakota’s orders were to copy those files and return the laptop to the safe with no sign of his intrusion.

  He gripped the rope and ascended hand over hand along the wall until he could see through the lowest window. To his left light spilled from a marble patio next to the ballroom.

  A sharp flare of heat nearby caught his attention. Waves of color radiated off the outbuilding he had noted on his way in. The source appeared to be six feet off the ground, near a box with electrical equipment. An auxiliary power generator? High-volume air-conditioning and heating unit?

  The burst of heat troubled him because it was unexpected, and unexpected things had a way of coming back to bite you. But there was no time for him to explore further. His window of time to reach Gonsalves’s office was shrinking fast.

  Twenty feet above, on the opposite wall, a larger window opened onto the back of the inner courtyard, out of view of the ballroom. Dakota crossed to the stone sill.

  Twenty feet of exposed wall between him and the ground.

  Four feet below, he saw a row of rough, jutting stones. This was his way down.

  He wondered briefly where Izzy was at that moment and whether he had managed to track Nell. But he forced the thought away.

  With his eyes on the first toehold, he swung smoothly to the right and toed his way down from hold to hold. Six feet above the ground, he dropped lightly and fell back into the shadows. As he checked his watch, two guards emerged from an underground exterior stairwell, headed right for him.

  NELL DIDN’T MOVE.

  The old man’s promises meant nothing to her. Who was to say this driver of his wouldn’t pull off the road and shoot her as soon as they were out of sight of the castle?

  Nowhere was safe, but staying wasn’t an option either, so Nell decided to take each moment as it came, acting by instinct. Right now her instincts screamed to find the first safe spot and hide.

  The stocky guard was holding a walkie-talkie and waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He gestured for Nell to hurry up, then cursed as he glanced out a window. Whatever he saw made him motion to another guard. The two strode across the front hall and vanished outside. When a uniformed worker appeared from a nearby hallway, pushing a cart with fruit on silver trays, Nell walked calmly past the woman and followed the noise toward the kitchen.

  Inside the kitchen a sweating chef in a white jacket shouted for her to put on her uniform and get busy. Nell grabbed a uniform from the nearest chair and searched for a place to change. Two women appeared from a door to her right, one of them buttoning her black uniform jacket.

  Nell ducked inside.

  AT NINETY-TWO, few things impressed Bujune Okambe. The president of a small, oil-rich country, he was also a most impatient man. The drifting harp music and clink of fine crystal were of no interest to him. His cold expression made it clear that all he wanted was for the business to begin. But the thought of spending thirty-five million U.S. dollars left his throat dry.

  He beckoned to his daughter, who leaned down, then nodded. More than one man watched Marie Okambe move regally through the brightly lit ballroom toward a waiter carrying a tray of champagne. She shook her head, turning back to point to her father, who needed medicine from her bag in the reception room.

  When the waiter motioned for her to follow him, the old man in the wheelchair watched them leave, then cruised impatiently across the room toward Luis Gonsalves and his anxious son.

  DAKOTA TOOK OUT the first guard at the edge of the yew hedge, then swung left, rolling the other guard’s body back, breaking his wrist. His fingers gripped the man’s throat, cutting off his cry of pain before it started. Music drifted from the ballroom as he stowed the bodies out of sight behind the hedge, then followed the tower’s curving wall to the exterior stairwell. Calmly Dakota pulled a strip of plastic from his shoe and feathered the lock.

  As he opened the door, he checked his watch. Two minutes ahead of schedule. Inside he walked quickly past a communications room, then stopped at the small, ornate doors of a vintage elevator.

  Whe
n the doors opened, Dakota covered the security camera with a piece of black cloth and tapped the button for the second floor. The elevator rose slowly and hummed to a halt. Leaving the cloth in place, he headed to the second door on his left, where a new security keypad showed heat patterns from recent contact. Quickly, he read the colors; the hottest key was the one that had been touched most recently. All he had to do was work backward, from warmest to coolest as the order of input. When he punched in the last digit, the heavy metal door slid open with a hiss.

  He glanced at his watch. Right on time.

  The study was pooled in shadow, red velvet curtains cutting off all exterior light. Dakota made his way silently to the desk at the far wall and studied its three locked drawers, assessing which of his tools would open them fastest. He zipped open a pocket on his Neoprene suit, found a narrow sliver of plastic and inserted it carefully.

  A sound near the curtains made him lunge sideways, his knife flashing. The serrated assault blade came to rest on a woman’s throat.

  Meanwhile, her Sig Sauer 9mm was pointed at the center of his forehead. “What took you so long to get here?” the smoky female voice whispered.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  MARIE OKAMBE MOVED with cool grace, keeping Dakota in her sights as she edged around the desk. “Project?”

  “Origami,” Dakota whispered.

  “Code word?”

  “Theodore. Izzy swore it was a private joke.”

  “He’s wrong.” Her hand tightened, and the gun fell. “I haven’t laughed in a very long time, Mr. Smith. Now if you have the hard drive ready for data transfer?”

  Dakota unzipped a waterproof pocket in his suit and connected a USB cable to his portable drive. By the time the connection was made, Marie Okambe had powered up Gonsalves’s private laptop and slipped in an unlabeled CD. The screen flashed for a moment and booted to a command prompt. Neither spoke as Dakota plugged in the cord and waited for the woman to input commands to dump the hard disk to his drive.

  Dakota glanced at the door. “How long?”

  “Less than five minutes, assuming that I—blast.”

  “What?”

  “He’s encrypted one of the partitions. It’s asking for a password.”

  “Do you have one?”

  She stared down at the laptop, the light of her tiny penlight reflected back over the intricate scars on her cheeks. “It’s unexpected,” she muttered, watching lines of text scroll down the screen.

  “Then what are we supposed to—”

  “Silence, please, Mr. Smith. Unexpected is not impossible.” She typed in a string of numbers. “It just takes a little bit longer.”

  Dakota was certain that Izzy had said the same thing in a prior tense situation. Through a crack in the curtains he saw heat flare across the castle’s outer wall, emanating from the same spot as before, and suddenly the walkway lights down in the courtyard exploded.

  Every room went dark. The musicians stopped playing and the air-handling system went quiet. The only sound was the angry questions of the guests in the darkened ballroom below.

  “What just happened?” Marie Okambe’s eyes did not leave the laptop.

  “Electricity failure. I’d say there was some kind of major power surge originating across from us on the south wall.”

  “How would you know the origination point of a power surge?” Marie Okambe’s eyes narrowed. “That is not the sort of thing that one can see, surely.”

  “Just a reasoned deduction. My equipment had already picked up several spikes in that area.”

  She frowned and turned back to the laptop. “The power here is fine. Gonsalves must have an auxiliary generator prepared.”

  “Exactly what I would do, given the valuable data stored in here.” Dakota leaned over her shoulder. “How much longer?”

  “Eighty percent copied.” She opened a small pocket sewn to the inside of her skirt and took out a case with a data chip. Opening the cell phone on the desk, she switched the two chips.

  “Backup monitoring?”

  “Exactly.” She dropped the chip into her pocket and secured it.

  “Have you seen MacInnes?”

  “He was in the display room with the art. He didn’t look good. And his daughter—”

  Dakota felt cold air brush across his neck. “Nell MacInnes is here?”

  “There is no doubt it was his daughter. Gonsalves asked her to comment on the art and she complied, but unwillingly. There were welts on her face, as if someone had recently struck her.”

  Dakota forced down a stab of fury. “Where was she when you last saw her?”

  “With her father. They stayed in the display room with Martim after we left, but I do not know if she is still there.”

  The last time Dakota had spoken to Izzy, Nell’s location appeared to be a plane north of Manchester. Izzy had gotten only a few clear hits from her chip before the signal faded again.

  He checked his watch. The auction should have started by now, but the lower rooms were still dark. Dakota recalled how all the lightbulbs had exploded at once. “Nonnuclear electromagnetic pulse. Gonsalves could have effectively knocked out all communications from cell phones and PDAs in one stroke. We know the man is paranoid.”

  “It would require a great burst of power—exactly what you saw. But why do we still have power in here?”

  “Probably this office is shielded. With such high stakes, he’s taking nothing for granted.”

  The computer beeped twice. Marie Okambe typed in another command and removed the portable drive. “It is done. Now all we have to do is—”

  Footsteps hammered across the floor outside, and an angry voice cut through the silence.

  “Hurry up with those locks. I need this door opened now.”

  BUJUNE OKAMBE’S FINGERS gripped the arm of his wheelchair.

  What was the blasted girl doing? Only moments earlier the lights had exploded all over the room, and now the old man watched impatiently as guards moved to every exit while waiters carried in lit candles. There was no uneasiness among the staff, as if they had expected the power outage. So their host had arranged this. Possibly to control outside communication?

  At the moment he was more concerned about Marie. He didn’t think she’d gotten lost. She had the layout of the castle committed to memory. Something had to be keeping her.

  The old man powered his chair to the doorway only to find his way blocked by Luis Gonsalves. “It would be better for you to remain here until the power is restored, Mr. Okambe. It may be dangerous to move about in the dark.”

  “You think I cannot find my own way, that I am a weak, incompetent fool?” The old man’s voice rose in outrage.

  “Nothing like that, and of course I meant no discourtesy. It was merely a precaution. As soon as my son returns—”

  “Then call him now!” the old man snapped imperiously. “Enough of our time has been wasted in amateur dramatics and lighting displays. We came here to buy, so let the buying begin.”

  Gonsalves motioned to one of the guards positioned near the staircase. “My son has gone to his office,” he said quietly. “Find him and bring him back here immediately. Then locate Mr. Okambe’s daughter for me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  THE DOORKNOB SHOOK. Portuguese curses rained down on the hapless guards outside.

  Dakota shoved his portable drive and cable into a pocket, secured the zipper, straightened the desk and motioned Marie to the window. She hesitated, glancing back at the door, then leaned over the desk, flipping three switches on a sleek security panel. “The alarm at the exterior is disabled.” She watched Dakota pry a screw free from the wooden frame, ease the window open and lean out. Candlelight flickered in the ballroom below, but otherwise every room was dark.

  Overhead the notched outline of the parapets jutted out like an angry mouth. Dakota turned back to Marie and pointed up, pulling out a rope.

  The doorknob shook. Drilling noises echoed out in the corridor. Marie
shook her head, waving him out, her jaw set.

  The doorknob spun free and the drilling became a furious whine. There was no more time to argue. Dakota climbed through the window, cast out his doubled rope and caught the edge of the parapet. Glancing back, he saw Marie ease the window shut behind him and then disappear into the shadows near an ornate Victorian settee.

  As he reached a notch in the high tower, angry voices rumbled in the room he’d just left. Light spilled through the window. Two shadows moved back and forth like restless moths.

  Footsteps crossed the room. Voices rose in muffled argument and then a door slammed. Twenty seconds later the window slowly rose.

  Marie Okambe climbed out, gripped the rope and worked her way silently upward hand over hand, her long silk skirt pulled tight at her knees. By the time Dakota helped her up onto the parapet, applause was ringing from the candlelit ballroom.

  The bidding had begun.

  NELL TOOK a deep breath, listening to staff cross the hall outside the bathroom where she hid.

  The outside door swung shut.

  Nell waited in the last stall, sweat trickling down her neck.

  No shouts. No alarm bells.

  Always a good sign. But why had the electricity failed?

  Carefully she peeked into the darkness, listening to the drip of water from a faucet. When she was certain the room was empty, she straightened her uniform, picked up a garbage can full of used paper towels and carried it outside, looking as if she was in a hurry.

  THE BIDDING WAS FIERCE, but soon the pace slowed in the time lag needed for translation. At twenty million one buyer dropped out. At thirty million two buyers from South America withdrew. Others faded back against the walls of the ballroom as the price kept climbing. Now Okambe was left to bid tensely against a financier representing the head of a South American cartel and a Japanese collector who spoke flawless English.

  Suddenly the bidding jumped to fifty million. Okambe made an angry gesture and his fingers tightened on the wheelchair. When he saw his daughter across the noisy room, he gestured sharply and steered his chair toward the door to the patio. Luis Gonsalves looked back as if noting his departure while the bids kept rising.