The Pursuit

by Janet Evanovich

  “I assume that he was double-crossed and left behind,” Kate said. “Maybe we’ll find out, and get a lead on the missing diamonds, when you stop wasting valuable time questioning me and we begin interrogating him.”

  “You aren’t getting near him,” Janssen said. “You’re out of this.”

  “He’s my prisoner.”

  “You have no authority here to arrest anybody. You can stand in line to extradite him with all of the law enforcement agencies in Europe. That is, after he’s released from our prison, in thirty years.”

  There was a knock on the other side of the mirror. Janssen threw a glance at the mirror and saw her own irritated expression reflected back at her.

  “Stay here.” Janssen gathered up her notebook and pen and left the room.

  Kate thought she’d given a good performance. Her story unfolded like a farce but it would be very hard for Janssen to prove it wasn’t the truth. However, it was just the beginning. The U.S. State Department, Justice Department, and the FBI would demand answers too, and probably her badge, if not her head.

  Janssen came back in and held the door open. “You can go, but you can’t leave Antwerp. We’re holding on to your passport and your badge until we decide what to do with you.”

  Kate stood up. “What about Nicolas Fox?”

  “He’s not your problem anymore.”

  —

  Kate stepped out of the monolithic police station into the Saturday morning sun. She walked up the street, past coffeehouses and upscale clothing shops, with no particular destination in mind.

  She was emotionally numb. She’d come to Antwerp to save Nick, and instead she’d put him in prison. There was a time, not so long ago, when she would have celebrated his capture. Instead, she was already thinking about how she was going to manage to get Nick free.

  She caught a glimpse of a familiar figure reflected in a shop window. It was Jake. She didn’t turn to acknowledge him. He’d approach her when he was certain nobody else was on her tail. She wanted to be sure too. So now her wandering had intent.

  She crossed the Groenplaats, a large plaza ringed by cafés and bars, and headed for the Cathedral of Our Lady, a Gothic monument to failed dreams that had taken two hundred years to build and yet was still incomplete. The cathedral was supposed to have had two matching four-hundred-foot towers. But in the 495 years since the church opened its doors, only one tower had been finished, and could be seen all over the city, while the other tower remained uncompleted and half as tall.

  To reach the cathedral’s entrance, Kate had to go down a narrow cobblestone street, a bottleneck of restaurants, coffeehouses, and Leonidas chocolate shops, all crammed tightly together and stuck to the side of the church like barnacles. At the base of the cathedral’s unfinished tower was a sculpture of four stonemasons at work. She stopped to look at the sculpture, not to wonder if it was a critical statement about the glacial pace of construction, but to see if the bottleneck had revealed anyone shadowing her. It hadn’t. Her father walked past her and went inside the church.

  Kate followed him and discovered that the church charged admission. Her father hadn’t lost any of his edge, she thought. Paying for a ticket and going through the turnstile presented an obstacle that would flush out anybody following them. She paid her six euros, walked through the turnstile, and entered the vast nave with its impressive vaulted ceiling.

  At the base of each pillar holding up the church were altars to the various craft and professional guilds that had been leaders of the community in ancient times. The altarpieces were large paintings by Flemish masters. The paintings depicted guild members demonstrating their particular trades.

  She stood in front of the altarpiece for the fencing guild, which had once served as Antwerp’s de facto police force. It was a painting of Saint Michael, the guardian of paradise, and his army of angels battling a seven-headed dragon and a legion of naked man-beasts with what looked like monster masks over their crotches.

  “Those are some nasty codpieces,” Kate said in a voice slightly louder than a whisper.

  Her father pretended to take pictures of the nave with his cellphone. “They sure are. Codpieces are uncomfortable enough to wear without fangs and horns on ’em.”

  “I’m not going to ask how you know that,” she said.

  “What happened in the vault?” Jake asked.

  “I was caught in the act of arresting Nick. I told the police that I’d tracked him here from Hawaii and stumbled into the heist.”

  “I’m glad you were able to smooth-talk your way out of jail. I was already making plans to help you.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “I was going to do what any sensible father would in a situation like this,” Jake said.

  “You started looking for a good criminal lawyer?”

  “I ordered explosives from my buddy in Amsterdam.”

  She looked at him. “That’s what you consider the sensible thing? Blowing a hole in the police station and mounting a jailbreak?”

  “Of course not. That would be insane.”

  “Then what were the explosives for?”

  “I was going to ambush the armored police van carrying you to court on Monday morning and blast open the doors to set you free.”

  “At least that won’t be necessary now.” Kate took a seat in the row of pews behind him and lowered her head.

  “The plan is still on,” Jake said, snapping some more photos. “Now we can use them to bust Nick out. We’ve got forty-eight hours to work on the details and steal the necessary vehicles. A garbage truck and two motorcycles should do it.”

  Good grief, Kate thought. I’m going to steal two motorcycles and a garbage truck! As if she hadn’t already broken enough laws. She pressed her lips together and made the sign of the cross.

  “What are you doing?” Jake asked. “We’re Presbyterian.”

  “The agreement Nick had with the FBI was that if he was ever caught by the police, anywhere in the world, our operation was over and he’d be on his own.”

  “I didn’t agree to that,” Jake said. “Besides, he’s my friend and you love him. That’s more than enough for me.”

  Love him, she thought. Jeez Louise. That’s wrong on so many levels.

  “I don’t…you know,” she said to her dad.

  “What?”

  “The L word.”

  “Love?”

  “Yes. The L word and Nicolas Fox shouldn’t be said in the same sentence. Especially not out loud.”

  Jake gave his head a small shake. “How would you describe your relationship with him?”

  “Reluctant partners,” Kate said.

  “Okay, I’ll buy that. What else?”

  “I guess I think he’s hot.”

  “Too much information,” Jake said. He got up with his back to her, and left a disposable phone behind on the pew. “Get some rest. Call me when you’re ready.”

  Kate walked back to her hotel. She needed some sleep to clear her head. She needed to make sure that whatever the plan, her dad wouldn’t end up in a Belgian jail too.

  She went to her room, found her iPhone, and left her boss, Carl Jessup, a voicemail that said only “What was in the vault?”

  Kate flopped facedown on the bed fully clothed and fell asleep almost instantly. It felt like she’d closed her eyes for only a second when she was awakened by the electronic trill of her iPhone. The time on the clock radio, next to her phone, was 3 P.M., and the caller ID on her phone read “Jessup.”

  Kate grabbed the phone. “O’Hare,” she said.

  “How much of the story that you told the Belgian police is true?” her boss asked. His Kentucky drawl was disarmingly low-key. It was as if he was casually asking about the weather, or the price of turnips, and not about an international incident that was likely to end Kate’s career with the FBI.

  “Ninety percent,” she said. “What I left out was that Nick was kidnapped by the Road Runners to pull off the heist and that I
came here to rescue him.”

  “Then you did the right thing going to Antwerp without telling me,” Jessup said. “You gave us plausible deniability.”

  “That was the idea.”

  “I sincerely doubt that.”

  “How much trouble am I in?” she asked.

  “That depends on if you get caught,” Jessup said.

  “I think they bought my story.”

  “I’m not talking about that,” Jessup said. “I’m talking about you breaking Nicolas Fox out of jail.”

  “Excuse me?” Kate could feel beads of panicked sweat appearing on her upper lip. How did Jessup know she was planning a jailbreak?

  “I’m expecting the Belgians to throw you out of the country within forty-eight hours, so you don’t have much time to free Nick, and you need to do it without hurting anyone. If you get caught, we’ll say it was a desperate act by a crazy FBI agent who fell in love with the man she was chasing.”

  It wasn’t that far from the truth, but even if Jessup knew it he wouldn’t sanction a jailbreak for it. There had to be another reason.

  “I can’t believe you’re asking me to do this, sir. I expected you to tear my head off and order me to forget about Nick.”

  “I would have, and I’d still like to, but we believe one of the safe-deposit boxes in that vault contained a vial of smallpox,” Jessup said. “Now the Road Runners have it. The smallpox was probably their target all along.”

  “How is that possible? Smallpox was eradicated decades ago, and the only samples that exist are at the CDC in Atlanta and a lab in Russia.”

  “Yes, that’s been the general assumption.”

  “ ‘Assumption’?”

  “Well, it’s not like somebody went around to every lab in the world and verified that each smallpox sample ever collected was destroyed. However, since nobody has been infected in forty years, the accepted belief is that the virus was wiped out and the only samples of the virus are secured.”

  “You’re telling me that isn’t true.”

  “In the early 1990s, a Soviet defector revealed to MI5 that the Russians were secretly developing a super-virulent strain of smallpox, in blatant violation of international agreements, through a civilian drug company called Biopreparat. After that came out, the U.S. and NATO threatened an all-out bioweapons arms race, so the Soviets caved, ended the program, and destroyed the smallpox.”

  “But not all of it,” Kate said.

  “They were in the midst of complying with international demands when the Soviet Union collapsed and descended into chaos. One of the bioweapons scientists, Sergei Andropov, fled Moscow with a vial of smallpox in his pocket to sell to the highest bidder. Sergei settled in Antwerp, where his cousin Yuri Baskin was a diamond merchant. But before Sergei could make a deal with anyone, he was killed in a car accident. The vial was never found.”

  “But you think Sergei gave it to Yuri,” Kate said, “who stashed it in his safe-deposit box in the Executive Merchants Building vault and was afraid to touch it after his cousin’s suspicious death.”

  “It was only a theory before, but now we’re certain that’s what happened,” Jessup said. “The Belgian police found some of Sergei’s research notes from Biopreparat on the floor of the vault along with a cigar-sized metal container that could be used to store a vial.”

  “How could the smallpox virus still be alive after all these years?” Kate asked, though she wasn’t sure alive was the right word.

  “The temperature in the vault was kept at a constant sixty degrees,” Jessup said. “Even if the temperature wasn’t controlled, we know the virus could still survive. A forty-five-year-old vial of smallpox was found two years ago in Washington, D.C., by a custodian. It was in a cardboard box in an unlocked closet at the National Institutes of Health. Testing of the sample at the CDC revealed it was still viable.”

  Kate was wide awake now. “That’s frightening.”

  “Not as much as Dragan Kovic selling smallpox to ISIS or some rogue nation and what they might do with it. Smallpox is the deadliest virus humanity has ever known. It killed three hundred million people in the twentieth century alone. All you have to do is inhale one microscopic particle and you’re infected. You become a walking chemical weapon that infects everyone within a ten-foot radius.”

  “Nobody is vaccinated for smallpox anymore,” Kate said. “Most of the population has no immunity. The virus could spread at light-speed through a major city.”

  “That’s the nightmare scenario,” Jessup said. “You need to break Nick out of custody. Then the two of you have to retrieve that vial, find out what it was going to be used for, and stop the plot, whatever the hell it is.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And stop threatening to kill Cosmo.”

  Kate disconnected and set her iPhone on the bedside table. She reached down to her purse on the floor, dug around for the new disposable phone that her father had given her in the church, and hit the preprogrammed key that dialed his cell. He answered on the first ring.

  “Jake O’Hare, Man of Action.”

  “I’m ready,” Kate said.

  —

  Early Sunday morning, Kate put on her sweats and jogged into Stadspark, which had once been the site of a Spanish fort. She dashed across the footbridge, over a duck pond that had been part of the fort’s moat, and then followed a paved trail as it snaked into a canopy of trees and bushes. She stopped at a stack of stones that appeared to have once been a man-made waterfall but that was dry and weedy now.

  She made sure she was alone before retrieving blasting caps and a small brick of C4 plastic explosive that had been hidden there the night before by her father’s buddy the arms dealer. She stuffed the goodies into her hidden running belt, jogged out of the park, and went shopping for duct tape, a razor blade, paper clips, and another disposable phone. The Meir, Antwerp’s main shopping street, was lined with renovated medieval buildings shoulder to shoulder with modern re-creations. Every two feet there seemed be another Leonidas chocolate café, the Starbucks of Belgium. The Leonidas cafés were inescapable, so she surrendered and got herself a hot chocolate.

  —

  Kate was halfway across her hotel lobby when she was stopped by a paunchy forty-something man in a rumpled business suit. He had the bloated belly and pained expression of a man who’d been constipated for days, perhaps even months.

  “Miss O’Hare?” the man asked, sizing Kate up from a computer-generated picture of her that he held in his hand.

  Career bureaucrat, Kate thought, smiling politely. American. No doubt clogged up with schnitzel.

  “Conrad Plitt,” he said. “I’m attached to the U.S. embassy in Brussels.”

  “I was expecting to see an FBI legat,” Kate said, referring to the FBI legal attachés at U.S. embassies who worked with local law enforcement agencies on cases involving American interests.

  “Sorry to dash your hopes, but sending an FBI agent here to deal with this muck-up would only worsen an already terrible situation,” Plitt said. “It would imply to the Belgians that the FBI had prior knowledge of your actions or that they tacitly approve of your conduct. We can’t have that. Besides, the FBI has notoriously poor diplomatic skills, which you’ve profoundly demonstrated already.”

  She might have been offended by his comment if it hadn’t been totally true. Not to mention she was standing there holding the makings of a bomb in a grocery bag.

  “What happens now?” she asked.

  “My job is to convince the Belgians that despite your unorthodox and inappropriate conduct you’re a hero and that the apprehension of Nicolas Fox is a win for everybody. If I can do that, I deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. The first step is for you to offer the Belgian authorities your total and unconditional cooperation with their investigation.”

  “I’d be glad to do that, but they’ve made it clear they don’t want me involved.”

  “They still don’t,” Plitt said. “But Nicolas Fox does. He refuses to talk t
o anybody but you.”

  —

  “He’s playing with us,” Chief Inspector Amelie Janssen said, clearly not pleased with the way things were proceeding.

  “Of course he is,” Kate said. “What did you expect?”

  Kate was standing in an observation room, looking out at Nicolas Fox. He was sitting at an interrogation table, and he was wearing an orange jumpsuit, his wrists in handcuffs and his ankles in chains. And yet, he not only appeared relaxed and content, but somehow managed with his posture to make the hard, stiff chair seem incredibly comfortable. There was a time when his cool attitude would have irritated Kate as much as it obviously irked Janssen. Now Kate found it reassuring to see him in control of himself and his environment.

  She hoped she appeared equally in control. If she did appear equally in control she thought it would be an acting miracle because she didn’t feel in control. What she felt was sick. Not exactly on the verge of throwing up but moving in that direction. She was making a maximum effort to put up a hard-ass front. She’d decided on a role. She’d rehearsed her lines. She’d put some Imodium in her purse just in case.

  Jeez Louise, she thought. This isn’t my thing. I’m good at enforcing the law, not breaking the law. How did I get into this mess? She narrowed her eyes at Fox. It’s him, she thought. It’s my stupid obsession with Nicolas Fox.

  “Are you okay?” Janssen asked Kate. “Your face is flushed.”

  “I’m fine,” Kate said. “I’m just angry. I hate this guy.”

  Not far from the truth. She hated him. She liked him. She hated him. She liked him. And she especially hated him because he looked so damn good in his jumpsuit. It was just wrong, wrong, wrong.

  Kate flipped through several pages of inventory itemizing everything that was stolen from the vault, with the notable exception of the vial of smallpox.

  “He’s a con man,” Kate said. “Manipulating people is what he does for fun and profit.”

  “That’s why it was a huge mistake for my bosses to give in to his demand that we bring you in. I warned them not to do it, but although they have badges, they are politicians, not police.”