The Job

by Janet Evanovich

  “Let’s talk to the desk clerk at the Four Seasons,” Kate said. “Have your men drive there and park near the front and rear exits. Tell them to stay out of sight. We don’t want to spook our suspect on the off chance that he’s there. And if he isn’t there we might still learn something helpful.”

  Atalay leaned in the window of the car and gave the driver orders in Turkish. The cars turned around at the end of the street and headed back the way they came. Atalay and Kate began their short walk up the cobblestoned street.

  Despite the yellow paint, red-tile roof, ocher-tinted masonry, and white balustrades along the terraces and walls, the hotel’s origins as a prison were obvious. The building had high walls with tall guard towers at two corners. The entrance was grand but imposing, with bars on the windows. The three flagpoles along the front wall added a touch of governmental authority to the place.

  “There are sixty-five suites,” Atalay said as they neared the front entrance. “The guard towers are occupied by elevators, and the former exercise yard is now a garden with a fancy restaurant. But the fact that it was once a prison works to our benefit if we get lucky and Fox or his imposter is still here. There aren’t a lot of exits. It will be easy for us to lock down.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Kate said, more to caution herself than Atalay. She was on the hunt and she felt a small drip, drip, drip of adrenaline flow into her system. There was a chance that the thief was still in Istanbul. And if he wasn’t still here, the desk clerk might remember him. Plus there were security cameras everywhere. Surely Dale Cooper didn’t always wear his Nick Fox mask.

  They stepped into a marble foyer and walked down a long corridor of high arches. The registration desk was at the end of the passageway. Across from the registration desk was a wall lined with small windows that looked out onto the former prison yard and the opposite wing of the hotel.

  The desk clerk was a young man with posture so rigid and straight he made the marble pillars around him appear crooked. He greeted them in Turkish. Atalay flashed his identification, introduced himself, and then spoke in English for Kate’s sake.

  “We’re looking for a man named Dale Cooper,” Atalay said. “We believe he was registered here.”

  The desk clerk went to his computer. “Dale Cooper reserved a suite yesterday, but checked in just a couple hours ago.”

  That didn’t make sense to Kate. The break-in at the museum was committed two nights ago. Why would the thief check in to the hotel today?

  And then, with an overwhelming sense of dread, the answer hit her at precisely the same moment that Atalay pulled a photo of Nick from his shirt pocket and showed it to the clerk.

  “Is this him?” Atalay asked.

  The clerk gave the picture a quick glance and nodded. “Yes, that’s Mr. Cooper.”

  Of course it was, Kate thought. Because the real Nick Fox had come to Istanbul despite her warnings and got a room exactly where she thought he would. She knew Nick all too well. And now she’d led the Turkish police right to the man she was supposed to protect.

  Atalay took out his cellphone, dialed a number, gave some quick commands in Turkish, and turned to Kate. “I’ve told my men to secure the exits and to call for backup, all in plainclothes. If Fox is in this hotel, he’s not getting out.”

  But if Nick wasn’t in the hotel, Atalay had made a grave mistake. Nick had a sixth sense about law enforcement. He’d easily spot the detectives on the street no matter how they were dressed, and he’d go back the way he came. She hoped that’s what would happen. The alternative was that he was still in the hotel, already a prisoner without knowing it.

  “What room is Cooper in?” Atalay asked the clerk.

  “Room 302, a deluxe suite.”

  The clerk took out a sheet of paper printed with the floor plan of the hotel and circled the room. It was two doors down from the stairs and had windows that looked out over the courtyard and restaurant.

  Atalay and Kate went to the lobby’s courtyard windows and looked up at the third-floor room. The sheers were drawn, but the lights were on.

  The chief inspector stepped back behind the wall for cover and told Kate his plan. Once his men arrived, he’d position detectives at the stairs and elevators on every floor. He and a team of men would go up to the third floor and flank the door to room 302. At that point, Atalay would send a text to his man in the lobby instructing him to have the desk clerk make a courtesy call to Nick’s room.

  “The clerk will say he’s calling Fox to see if there’s anything else the Four Seasons can do to make his stay more enjoyable,” Atalay said. “Not that it matters what he says. I will be close enough to the door to hear the phone ring. The second Fox picks up, we’ll burst in and take him. And if he’s not in the room, then all of us will pull back out of sight and wait for him to show up.”

  “It’s a good plan,” Kate said. In fact, it was probably what she’d do herself in the same situation. The problem was that it could succeed.

  “You need to stay out of sight,” Atalay said to Kate. “If he sees you, we’re finished. You will have to wait here.”

  The translation was that Atalay didn’t want a woman he barely knew along on a mission that might include a firefight, Kate thought. This was fine by her since her primary goal now was to warn Nick, and she needed a private moment to do it.

  Almost immediately, a dozen other plainclothes detectives arrived. Atalay assigned them to areas around the hotel, stationed one at the front desk, and then took the three remaining men with him up to the third floor.

  That left Kate alone in the lobby with two desk clerks and the detective, a man named Giray. He had his phone out and ready, waiting for instructions from Atalay.

  Kate stepped behind a pillar, took out her phone, and sent a one-word text to Nick. RUN.

  Giray’s phone dinged with the arrival of Atalay’s text and he gave the go-ahead nod to the clerk, who picked up the phone and made the call to Nick’s room.

  “Here we go,” Giray said to Kate with a heavy Turkish accent.

  They walked into the courtyard and looked up at Nick’s third-floor room. The window opened, and Nick Fox casually climbed out. Giray cursed and called Atalay.

  Kate was trying to stay calm, but her heart was pounding in her chest. Nick was on a narrow ledge, and he was reaching for a drainpipe. It was an arm’s length away, and it didn’t look all that sturdy. Kate closed her eyes and wished she was Catholic so she could ask God for a favor. She opened her eyes and saw that Nick had made it onto the drainpipe and was shimmying up to the roof.

  Atalay’s head popped out of Nick’s open window. He leaned forward and aimed his gun at Nick. “Halt,” Atalay said.

  Nick looked down at Atalay. “Give me a good reason.”

  “I’ll shoot you if you don’t.”

  “If you shoot me, and I fall to my death, you’ll never find the goblet.”

  Atalay said something in Turkish, and Kate looked to Giray for a translation.

  “Very bad word,” Giray said. “A lady would not like it.”

  Atalay climbed halfway out the window and stopped. He looked at the drainpipe and then at the street. It was a long drop down if he didn’t connect with the pipe. He ducked back into the room, and Kate heard him shout instructions to his men.

  She tipped her head back and watched Nick do a slow run across the rooftop toward the terrace that ran the length of the next wing. It was easy to underestimate him, she thought. He had a hidden athleticism. His body was perfectly hinged together, and he had the muscle tone and coordination of a cat. How he stayed so toned was a mystery since she never saw him work out. She told herself it was wrong, wrong, wrong to look that hot while breaking the law, but that didn’t alter the fact that he was breaking the law, and he was damn sexy up there on the roof, backlit by the twilight sky.

  He slid down the slanted end of the roof, dropped onto a third-floor terrace, and disappeared inside the building. Kate dashed back to the lobby and join
ed a half dozen Turkish cops who were running toward the main entrance. Everyone burst out of the hotel onto the street and gave a collective gasp. Fox was standing on the second floor balustrade. He jumped onto one of the three flagpoles in front of the hotel and, without missing a beat, he flung himself onto the roof of a passing minibus. The minibus sped down the hill into the warren of narrow streets that led to the waterfront.

  Kate thought of the old adage that sometimes it was better to be lucky than to be good. In Nick Fox’s case, he was both.

  Some of the cops scrambled for their cars while others gave chase on foot. Kate was part of the foot chase, sprinting down the narrow street and around a corner. She saw Nick crouch on the roof of the minibus and jump for a balcony on a crumbling old building. He hoisted himself over the railing and disappeared inside.

  The police ran into the building through a shoe store, but Kate remained outside and waited. She heard dogs barking, people yelling, and things crashing. A moment later, Nick appeared on a neighboring rooftop. He was wearing a long coat and a Fedora that he’d pilfered somewhere along the way. He looked like some kind of superhero, his long coat fluttering like a cape. Nick blew Kate a kiss and dashed away again along the rooftops and into the creeping darkness.

  Atalay ran up beside her just as Nick disappeared. “How did he know that we were coming?”

  Kate stared resolutely at the rooftop where Nick had stood. “There were a lot of cops outside the Four Seasons. Someone may have come to meet with Fox, got spooked by what he saw, and warned him. It doesn’t matter how it happened, only that it did. He’s very clever.”

  The manhunt in the Old City continued fruitlessly until Atalay finally called it off at midnight.

  Kate trudged back to her hotel and up to her third-floor room, which was barely large enough to hold the four-poster bed. The pillows on the bed were flat, and there was only a single rough top sheet. As an ex–Navy commando, she’d slept on much worse. She wasn’t sleeping on rocks, and as far as she knew she wasn’t sleeping with scorpions, so it was all good. She was asleep ten seconds after her head hit the pillow.

  She was awakened at 3:30 in the morning by the call to prayer from the mosque, and it took her another hour to fall asleep again, only to be awakened a little over two hours later by the dawn call to prayer.

  She lay in bed for another forty-five minutes, mulling over what investigative steps she could take next to flush out the fake Nick without nailing the real one. No brilliant ideas occurred to her, so she showered, got dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white T-shirt, and went to the rooftop terrace for the hotel’s buffet breakfast.

  There were already two dozen hotel guests scattered among the long communal tables inside the dining room and at the small tables on the patio. They were eating breakfast, reviewing guidebooks, and taking lots of selfies standing with their backs against the rooftop railing, the panoramic view of the Sea of Marmara behind them.

  Kate took a warm plate from the stack at the end of the bar and browsed the offerings on the buffet. She’d tried most of the dishes the previous morning with Atalay. She loaded up on the fried eggs, sausage, fruit, and cheese, picked up a glass of tea, and carried her breakfast to the far end of the table with the worst view and the fewest guests. The last thing she wanted to do was engage in small talk with chatty tourists.

  She was working her way through her eggs when a bearded man in a flannel shirt and faded jeans slid onto the bench across from her. His plate was piled so high with food that an avalanche of olives, cubes of cheese, and a portion of bread pudding toppled onto the table when he sat down.

  “If there’s one thing I love,” he said, “it’s free grub.”

  He spoke with an indecipherable American southern accent, a little bit of the Carolinas mixed with backwater Louisiana. He wore a sweat-stained American flag bandana around his head. His bushy mustache and beard were so thick and mangy, it was like he had a wild animal sitting on his face. The only things she could see clearly behind all of that hair were the tip of his nose and his compelling brown eyes.

  “Aren’t you afraid someone will recognize your nose?” Kate asked him.

  “I’m a risk taker,” he said. “What gave me away? Was it the nose?”

  “It was the desire to punch you in the face.” Kate forked in more eggs and a chunk of sausage. “You lied to me, Nick. You said there wasn’t any connection between the heist at the Gleaberg and the one at the Demirkan.”

  “There isn’t.”

  “But here you are.”

  “Whither thou goest …” he said.

  “That’s touching, but I suspect there’s more.”

  And actually it was touching, Kate thought. Like it or not, even though she wanted to punch him in the face, it was nice to have him across from her at the breakfast table. It was sort of … connubial.

  “There’s curiosity,” Nick said.

  “So besides me, it’s curiosity that got you on a plane?”

  “As far as I can see, the only thing the Gleaberg job has in common with the Demirkan is me. And the thief might have my fingerprints, but he isn’t thinking like me. I wouldn’t come all the way to Istanbul to smash a display case and take a goblet. I’d steal the Topkapi Dagger.”

  “You can’t steal that.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “I’d just be repeating myself.”

  “You never stole the Topkapi Dagger.”

  “Yes, I did,” he said.

  The diamond-encrusted dagger, renowned for the three huge emeralds on the grip, was displayed in the Topkapi Palace treasury, a museum full of the amazing riches the sultans acquired during Turkey’s reign as the greatest power on earth. It was commonly believed that stealing anything from the treasury was impossible.

  “The dagger is one of the world’s most famous and coveted treasures,” Kate said. “If it had been stolen, I would have heard about it. Everybody would have heard about it.”

  “If anybody noticed,” he said. “I swapped the dagger with a fake. Nobody suspected a thing. The next night, I broke into the house of the director general of the Turkish police, and slipped the dagger into his kitchen silverware drawer. He found it when he went to butter his toast for breakfast. Naturally, the police and the palace officials didn’t tell a soul about what happened. It would have been too embarrassing.”

  “Why would you go to the trouble of committing one of the greatest thefts in criminal history only to give back what you stole?”

  “Have you ever seen the 1964 movie Topkapi?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “It’s one of the best heist flicks ever made. I saw it on TV when I was a kid, and it made a big impression on me. This master thief and a team of amateurs steal the dagger and replace it with a fake. It’s the perfect crime, brilliantly conceived and executed, but they’re foiled by a tiny twist of fate. I wanted to see if it was possible, despite all the high-tech security measures available today, to actually pull off the heist. Guess what? It is.”

  “How did you do it?”

  Nick shook his head. “I’ll never tell.”

  “I’m not sure I believe that story. But I do believe you pulled off a job here that isn’t widely known.”

  Nick selected a piece of salted fish and ate it with bread. “Thanks for the warning last night. I was able to escape with my passports and the complimentary bottle of L’Occitane body lotion in the bathroom.” He took the little bottle of L’Occitane out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Kate. “I thought you might like it.”

  “Thank you. I do like it.”

  “So what’s our next move?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a next move. Do you have a next move?”

  “I’m going to continue to chase the imposter. If the pattern continues, there should be another theft soon that will be attributed to me. This person is sending a message and eventually we’ll figure it out.”

  Kate met Atalay in the police station lobby. The modern five-story glass-
cube building might have been impressive had it not been dwarfed by the skyscrapers of Istanbul’s New City. Atalay was pacing when Kate walked in, and it was obvious that he’d spent the night in his office. He was in the same clothes he’d worn the day before, his eyes were bloodshot, and his hair looked like a bird’s nest.

  “I’m guessing you’ve had a rough night,” Kate said. “Has Ceren Demirkan called you yet?”

  “She unleashed her fury on the director general,” he said. “He wants to see me in his office in ten minutes. I don’t think it’s to give me a promotion. Not that it matters, because Fox isn’t my problem anymore. He has not only eluded us, he’s managed to slip out of Istanbul.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He broke into a billionaire shipping mogul’s tenth-floor pied-à-terre in Cologne, Germany, last night and stole a Vermeer out of the man’s bedroom while he was sleeping.”

  “That’s not possible,” she said.

  “A surveillance camera outside a bank across the street got a picture of him leaving the building with the painting tucked under his arm.”

  “But he couldn’t have been there,” she said. “We both know he was right here, in the Old City, at six o’clock last night. We saw him with our own eyes.”

  “If he slipped into a taxi before we were able to seal off the streets, then he could have made it to the airport in time to take a commercial jet to Düsseldorf,” Atalay said. “It’s only about a three-hour flight, and from there it’s only a forty-minute drive to Cologne. Finding Fox is a matter for the Bundeskriminalamt in Germany and Interpol now.”

  “This shipping mogul?” Kate said. “Was his name Heiko Balz, by any chance? From Berlin?”

  “Yes, how did you know?”

  “Four years ago, Fox swindled Balz out of a few million euros by selling him a stolen Vermeer that wasn’t actually a stolen Vermeer. Or even a Vermeer. Ever since then, Balz has been waiting for Fox to step into Germany so he can get his hands on him.”

  “Now Fox has a real Vermeer, taken right from under Balz’s nose,” Atalay said. “Fox has guts, I’ll give him that.”