The Heist

by Janet Evanovich

  “No, but Griffin’s laptop is in his library. At least the case is there. And the case is built to survive a nuclear war, so I’m guessing the information we need is in the laptop. How hard could it be to crack?”

  “Impossible without the password that unlocks it. Tell me what you saw, especially anything that seemed meaningful to him.”

  Kate told him about the mountainside burial ground, the water buffalo horn totem, the waterweed carvings, and the inscription above the front door. She also told him about the environmentally controlled library of first editions and Griffin’s ridiculous story about how he developed his interest in old books.

  “Eureka,” Nick said.

  “What eureka? You’ve figured something out?”

  “Something big.” He looked past her to see Griffin standing impatiently on the sand. For a guy who’d stolen half a billon dollars, Griffin turned out to be a very easy mark himself. “What was your excuse for swimming out here?”

  “To let you know you’re welcome to dine with the household staff at six P.M. tonight.”

  “Where will you be eating?”

  “I’ll be having a private dinner with Griffin, and then I’ll spend the night at the main house. You and Willie will spend the night on the boat. It all works to our advantage, because later tonight I’ll slip into his room and suggest we take a skinny dip. That’s when I’ll bring him to the boat, willingly or otherwise, and we’ll make a quiet getaway. Mission accomplished, quick and simple. Now tell me what you know.”

  “What about the laptop?” Nick asked.

  “I’ll go back for it after we have Griffin on board, not that having it will do us much good without the password, which I don’t think he’s going to tell us.”

  “It’s ‘Sikander’ or ‘Sikandergul.’ That’s what I figured out.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” Nick said.

  “No! I want to know now!”

  “You need to go. You’ve talked too long to the help already, and I don’t want Mr. Dravot to get suspicious.” He lifted the towel away from her, nodded stiffly as if accepting an order, and went up to the flybridge.

  “Jerk,” Kate murmured under her breath.

  Nick smiled down at her, and she dove into the water and swam back to shore.

  Kate and Griffin were the only guests at dinner, sitting cross-legged on a bamboo mat on either side of the low table on his torchlit veranda under a crescent moon. They each had a glass of wine, a bowl of white rice, and the requisite dish of sambal in front of them. There were no eating utensils. Kate would be eating with her hands again, Balinese-style. Just fabulous, she thought. Another opportunity for sambal to run down her arm and drip off her elbow into her lap.

  “You mentioned you left Bali because you wanted to experience the real Indonesia,” Griffin said. “So everything we’re eating tonight came from this island, even the salt and seasonings, and I asked Chef to prepare babi guling.”

  Kate took a sip of her wine. “I hope that’s nothing barbaric, like someone’s head.”

  “The Toraja were the headhunters. Our chef is Balinese. Entirely different tribes.”

  “That’s a relief,” she said. “I’ll sleep much better tonight knowing I won’t be served for breakfast.”

  “Not breakfast,” Griffin said. “Possibly dessert, if I’m lucky.”

  Ugh! Arrogant cretin, Kate thought. Slime-coated fungus. Diseased monkey butt.

  “Luck won’t have anything to do with it,” she told him, licking a drop of sambal off her finger. “Tell me about our dinner.”

  “Babi guling is an entire pig, stuffed with spices and herbs, roasted on a spit for six hours, and basted in coconut water to caramelize the skin so it’s deliciously sweet and crispy.”

  “Yummy. And you made this special meal for me?”

  “It’s not often I get such an interesting guest.”

  “You flatter me.”

  “I’m trying,” Griffin said.

  Kate smiled, doing her best to continue to look interesting and maybe even mysterious.

  “I’m fascinated by your property manager,” she said. “He seems so local. What tribe is Dumah from?”

  “He’s one of the Bugis, a seafaring people who terrorized the islands of their enemies, arriving by boat in the darkness. It’s where the fear of the bogeyman comes from, at least around here.”

  “Should I look for him under my bed before I go to sleep?”

  “You don’t have to worry about the bogeyman coming for you tonight.”

  “I hope not. I feel so naked without my grenade launcher.”

  That was the God’s honest truth, Kate thought. She’d barter her appendix for a Glock.

  “I’ll do my best to make you feel secure,” Griffin said.

  They ate the pig and Griffin told stories about Indonesia’s history, the wars fought over control of the spice trade, and the difficulties during the Dutch occupation of the islands. For dessert, the chef served his own homemade recipe for dodol, a candy popular in Indonesia. The pieces of dodol were glutinous globs of rice and cane sugar that looked like saltwater taffy and tasted like a pencil eraser.

  “Yum,” Kate said, choking down a glob of dodol. “Very special.”

  They walked along the beach after dinner, and Kate admired the swaying palm fronds and gently lapping waves, but her focus was on the yacht. Lights were on, and Nick and Willie were at the dinette, obviously having chosen not to eat on the island.

  “It’s a shame about the damage to the yacht. You can kiss your security deposit goodbye,” Griffin said.

  “And let them fix the boat and rent it out again? No way.”

  “What other option is there?”

  “I’ll buy the yacht from them and keep the bullet holes intact as a souvenir of my Indonesian adventure.”

  “It’s not over yet,” he said.

  She held his arm tight against her and looked into his eyes with her best attempt at a mischievous smile. “I think you may be right.”

  A half hour later when they returned to the house, Kate stood in front of her bedroom door and faked a yawn. “I know it’s still early, but I guess the excitement of the day has caught up with me,” she said. “I can barely keep my eyes open.” She pressed her body against his and gave him a soft, lingering kiss. “I’m asleep on my feet.”

  “Would you like me to check under your bed for the bogeyman?”

  “No, but if I wake up scared in the middle of the night, I hope you won’t mind if I come running.”

  “Not at all,” he said.

  She slipped into her room, closed the door behind her, and ran to brush her teeth and gargle with Listerine.

  It wasn’t entirely an act. Kate was tired. Radiating hot sex was almost as exhausting as engaging in it. She had to rest up for a seduction, a kidnapping, and an escape into international waters in a bullet-riddled yacht. So she sprayed herself with DEET, drew the mosquito netting closed around the bed, and slipped under the sheets. Getting infected with malaria or dengue fever from a mosquito bite wasn’t part of her plan.

  According to the old-fashioned wind-up clock on the nightstand, it was 10 P.M. She set her mental alarm for 3 A.M. and stared through the netting at the view out her window. The moonlight made the wide white eyes of the effigies on the mountain seem to glow, and the effect was made even more dreamlike by the blur of the netting.

  Kate awoke at 2:45, alert and ready for action. She lurched out of bed, pulled on bikini bottoms and board shorts, and slipped eyebrow tweezers and a slim metal pick into her pocket. There were sixteen ways she could kill a man with the tweezers and she could use the pick to open all kinds of locks. She was armed and ready. She laced up running shoes and quietly crept out of her room. She intended to go right to Griffin’s room, but she found herself drawn to that one door he’d refused to open during their tour.

  Kate went down the hallway to the door, which was across from the library, and te
sted the doorknob. Locked. She took the pick out of her pocket, worked it into the keyhole, and easily popped the lock. It wasn’t Fort Knox, but she was proud of herself anyway. She eased open the door and peeked inside.

  It was a state-of-the-art surgical suite. She didn’t know the purpose for all the slick electronic equipment, but she recognized the lights, the operating table, the defibrillator, the IV stands, the oxygen tanks, and the shelves of iodine, alcohol, and other medical supplies.

  The strange discovery made her think of all those James Bond movies with megalomaniac villains who had secret and outrageously elaborate island lairs, from Dr. No to The Man with the Golden Gun, and of the opening of Diamonds Are Forever, where 007 finds the leader of SPECTRE undergoing plastic surgery in a high-tech operating room in a cave full of molten mud.

  Those movies, which had seemed so bizarre and over-the-top on screen, didn’t seem so far from reality now. All that was missing were Griffin’s plans for world domination, and a set of steel teeth and a razor-rimmed hat for Dumah, and she might as well be James Bond herself.

  A hand clamped onto her shoulder, and she fought her instinctive reaction to take down whoever was behind her, leaving him with a broken right foot, a crushed larynx, and slivers of his nose driven into the frontal lobe of his brain. Instead, she let out a girlie shriek and whirled around, flailing her arms in a panic, to face Dumah, who stared at her with a face as wooden as the effigies’.

  “What are you doing here?” Dumah demanded.

  Kate looked over Dumah’s shoulder and saw Nick Fox standing in the doorway of the library, grinning at her and holding Griffin’s laptop case. She narrowed her eyes at him for a nano-moment and then she moved on, playing her part.

  “This is so embarrassing,” she said to Dumah. “I was trying to find Daniel’s room.”

  “It’s at the other end of the hall.”

  “My mistake,” she said. “I have no sense of direction. What on earth is this room behind me used for? It looks like some sort of medical room.”

  Dumah looked back at her. “It’s in case anyone gets seriously injured.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “No,” he said.

  Nick slipped out of the library and disappeared down the hall, on his way to whatever window he’d used to sneak into the house. Unless he’d been ballsy enough to just walk in the front door, which, knowing Nick Fox as she did, Kate thought was entirely possible.

  “What good is a hospital room on an island with no doctors?”

  “You ask a lot of questions,” Dumah said.

  Too many, she thought, but she needed to give Nick time to get away.

  “I’m naturally curious,” Kate said. “Did you say Daniel’s room was this way?”

  Griffin stepped into the hall wearing pajama bottoms. “What’s going on?”

  “She was sneaking around,” Dumah said.

  Kate raised her hand. “Guilty as charged. I woke up and went looking for you, and I made a wrong turn.” She leaned in close to Griffin, and whispered, “I’m feeling all hot and sticky. I thought you might like to join me for a skinny dip and dry me off afterward.”

  “Go back to bed,” Griffin said to Dumah. “I can take it from here.”

  Kate and Griffin made their way single-file down the narrow trail of hard-packed sand. The vegetation was thick on either side of the trail, and the darkness was alive with the mating calls of countless insects and reptiles. Kate was on high alert. She doubted Nick had had time to row back to the boat, and she didn’t want to inadvertently stumble onto him or the dinghy. Probably he’d pulled the dinghy into the bushes and was waiting in the shadows for her to show with Griffin.

  Griffin led her off the trail and onto the sandy beach. And without any preliminary warm-up, he dropped his pajama bottoms.

  “Your turn,” he said, standing there naked.

  Good grief, Kate thought. Who does this? Who just ups and drops his pants? The man was totally lacking finesse. And what was she supposed to do now? Was she supposed to look away or was she supposed to stare and compliment him on his woody? Okay, forget the woody. She was at a crossroads. Should she stick to the original plan? Or should she punch Griffin and go looking for Nick and his dinghy? Truth is, she felt odd about smacking Griffin when he was in his present naked, engorged condition. It wasn’t something they’d covered at Quantico.

  “Earth to Eunice,” Griffin said. “Are you going to get naked, or what?”

  Kate was weighing her options and looking at her feet, which she preferred to sizing up Griffin’s Mr. Stiffy. As she saw it, her options weren’t great. She could get naked, or she could sucker punch him. “Oh, hell,” she said, and she smashed her fist into his face.

  Griffin went down to the ground like a sack of sand, there was a flash of light in the trees behind him, and—phoonf!—a rocket shot out of the trees, passing so close to Kate that she could feel the heat on her cheek. It streaked across the water and slammed into the yacht, blowing it to bits in a concussive burst of flames that knocked her off her feet.

  Bits of burning rubble rained down on the water, and Kate stared at the wreckage in openmouthed horror, worried that Willie had been on the boat. No, she told herself. You don’t know that for sure. Don’t even go there. There’s no time for that kind of grieving. Find the guy who shot off the rocket and take him out. And then find Willie.

  Kate got to her feet, with Griffin a beat behind her, looking dazed, his nose dripping blood.

  “Who?” Griffin asked. “What?”

  Five men burst out of the trees, their weapons aimed at Kate and Griffin. One of them had her RPG slung over his shoulder. They were a scruffy-looking group in sandals and mismatched pants and shirts. They had knives in sheaths on their belts, bad haircuts, and leathery skin. The guy with the RPG had elaborate tribal tattoos on his arms and face. His skin was dark but his features were Asian, and a scar slashed the length of one cheek.

  “Now we’re even,” the guy with the scar said.

  Oh, crap, Kate thought. The pirates.

  Griffin clasped his hands over his privates, as if his balls were worth something in the world of pirate plunder. For all Kate cared, the pirates could do whatever they wanted with Griffin’s balls. She was focused on the scarred guy. He was the man who’d blown up the boat. He was the man who might have killed Willie. He was the man she was going to kill at the first opportunity.

  “Did you really think we would just run away?” the pirate asked Kate. “What kind of men would we be?”

  Kate was unarmed except for her eyebrow tweezers, wearing nothing but a bikini and board shorts, up against five men with assault rifles. They wouldn’t be expecting her to strike. So she figured she’d have an advantage … for a few seconds. She ran various scenarios through her mind. She could wait for the pirate to get close, stab her eyebrow tweezers into his carotid artery, then use his body as a shield as she picked off his friends with his gun.

  “Who are you people?” Griffin asked.

  “Wealth management consultants,” the pirate said, dropping the RPG on the sand, rolling his shoulders, working out a kink. “You can call me Bob.”

  Kate almost gave a snort of laughter. Bob? Was he serious? Bob? Really? Okay, so his name was Bob. Fine. She was still going to kill him. She just had to decide on a course of action. She could grab Bob and break his neck with one sharp twist. She could jam her eyebrow tweezers between two particular vertebrae and shut him off like a flashlight. Or she could take his knife from his belt and bury it deep in his gut. Okay, let’s get real, she told herself. That stuff mostly works in the movies, but real life not so much. Maybe her dad could pull it off with tweezers, but she suspected she at least needed a screwdriver.

  Griffin dabbed at his nose, trying to stop the blood flow. “I’m going to bend down and put on my bottoms.”

  “No, you’re not,” Bob said. “You’re going to stand there naked so we can laugh at you.”

  “I’d rather be shot,
” Griffin said. And he bent down and pulled up his pajamas.

  Bob pressed a gun against Griffin’s forehead. “What makes you think I won’t give you what you’ve asked for?”

  “You can’t ransom a corpse.”

  Bob grinned. “I see you understand how my wealth management program works.”

  A sixth pirate dragged Willie out of the woods, shoving her into the clearing. Kate sucked in air, not sure if she was going to burst into tears of relief or coldcock Bob out of pure rage. She pulled herself together and managed to do neither.

  “We found her when we boarded your boat, which by the way was a big disappointment,” Bob said to Kate. “No jewelry. No money. No six-month supply of Cristal champagne and caviar. For a spoiled bitch, you don’t know much.”

  “I know you’re a disgusting pig,” Kate said, back in character. “What about Sam? Wasn’t he on the boat as well? Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a mate who can cook?”

  “You’ve got the pig part right,” Bob said. “But I rarely kill servants. I do, however, occasionally kill their masters. Your man is alive, too. He wasn’t on the boat, but we know he’s somewhere on the island. We won’t hurt him unless he puts up a fight.”

  No problem there, Kate thought. Nick wouldn’t put up a fight. Nick would sweet-talk Bob into giving up the gold fillings in his teeth.

  “I didn’t hear them board,” Willie said to Kate. “I didn’t know they were there until one of them came up behind me and put a knife to my throat.”

  Four more of Bob’s men led Dumah, the chef and his wife, and the bewildered Torajan household staff down to the beach at gunpoint. Bob spoke to them in Indonesian, his inflection more like that of a car salesman making a pitch than a pirate warning his captives. Dumah nodded at Bob, said a few words to the rest of the staff, and they all turned and walked away as if there was nothing interesting left to see.

  “What just happened?” Griffin asked, bewildered. “Where are they going?”

  Bob turned to Griffin. “I told the villagers I had no quarrel with them, they were free to go back to their daily lives, and if they didn’t try to intervene in our wealth management transaction, they wouldn’t even notice that we were here.”