The Job

by Janet Evanovich

  That was true, but she couldn’t see the reasoning behind any of it. First the fake Nick committed robberies in Nashville and Istanbul that were far less clever than anything the real Nick would do. Now in Cologne, the imposter had robbed Heiko Balz, getting Nick into even more trouble with the mob-connected billionaire. And all three crimes were done in rapid succession, within only a few days of each other. What was the big hurry? Why these three cities? What was the point?

  Kate said goodbye to Atalay and walked down the street to a coffeehouse. I’m missing the obvious, Kate thought. This is a connect-the-dots puzzle. You connect the dots and you get to see the picture. My dilemma is that I don’t have enough dots yet to guess at the picture, so I’m always a step behind the thief. Truth is, I shouldn’t have tried to keep Nick out of this. We probably would have made better progress working together.

  Kate went to the counter, ordered a coffee, and took it outside to a small sidewalk table. She sipped the coffee, took a notepad out of her bag, and listed out the robberies. Big Mike, jeweled goblet, Vermeer. Nothing clicked in her brain. No brilliant flash of insight. She ran through her conversation with Nick at breakfast. The only thing the Big Mike con and the goblet smash-and-grab have in common is me, he’d said. The me was Nick.

  Kate wrote Nick a bunch of times. She drew a heart around the Nicks she’d written. She looked at the heart and was horrified. She scribbled all over the heart until it was unreadable. She wrote Nashville, Istanbul, Cologne. Holy crap. There it was in black and white on the paper. It wasn’t connect the dots. It was Wheel of Fortune. It was fill in the letters and guess the word. And she was pretty sure the word was going to be Nick or maybe Nicolas. The next city would begin with a K or an O.

  She called Nick and was told the number was no longer in service. Great. She was on her own, and she didn’t have much time to make the right educated guess. She searched her memory bank and came up with just one city that fulfilled all the requirements. The French city of Orléans.

  Six months before, an alarm sensor system had gone bad on a ground-floor window on the east-facing Rue Fernand Rabier side of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans, France. The museum immediately ordered replacement parts from the security company in Luxembourg that had originally installed the system. The company didn’t have the parts and ordered them from their supplier in Mumbai. The supplier sent the request to their fabrication facility in Bangalore, which was working at full capacity making a component for Apple’s new iPhone, a job that was far more lucrative than making a run of a tiny obscure part for an outdated window alarm sensor. So the part still had not been made. Exactly eighty-seven people were aware of the gap in the museum’s security. Eighty-eight, if you counted the Nicolas Fox imposter, who had a friend at the security company.

  Twenty-four hours after stealing the Vermeer in Cologne, the imposter arrived in Orléans, toured the museum, and paid very special attention to the window with the broken alarm. Like all of the windows on the ground floor, it had an expanding metal grate on the inside that was secured at night with a simple padlock. There weren’t any elaborate interior security systems, like motion detectors or infrared beams, because the galleries were patrolled by armed guards. But the guards couldn’t be everywhere at once, and the imposter knew their patrol schedule.

  Later that same night, the impersonator took a leisurely stroll in an oversize hoodie down Rue Fernand Rabier, holding what looked like an open can of beer. After pausing in front of the museum’s unsecured window to admire the magnificent Cathédrale Saint-Croix, the imposter poured the paint thinner he’d been carrying in the beer can onto the screws of the vertical metal strip that divided and secured the window’s two panes of glass.

  The imposter returned the following night at 2:00 A.M. He was once again in his hoodie, plus he was wearing rubber gloves and a Nick Fox mask. He carried two cardboard mailing tubes and a shoulder bag containing a battery-operated screwdriver, a box cutter, and a set of lock picks. The paint thinner he’d poured on the mullion the night before had loosened the screws, and he was able to remove them quickly. He detached the mullion and the panes of glass they’d held in place and set them carefully on the street. He picked the padlock, slid open the grate, and slipped inside the museum. The break-in took less than two minutes.

  “Merde alors! Nom d’un chien! You were right,” said Commissaire Killian Bernard of the OCBC, the Office Central de Lutte Contre le Trafic des Biens Culturels, the elite art robbery unit of the French judicial police. He was sitting at a window table beside Kate O’Hare. They were inside the dark Café des Beaux Arts on Rue Dupanloup, across the square from the museum. They both watched the break-in unfold with night-vision binoculars.

  The French detective, a big, wide-bodied man of Scottish and French descent, had been skeptical when Kate showed up in his office in Paris two days earlier and insisted that Nicolas Fox would strike the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans within forty-eight hours. Her explanation had been vague, verging on totally evasive. But given the daring thefts Fox had committed in Europe over the past week, and Kate’s expertise where this thief was concerned, Bernard couldn’t risk ignoring her warning. So he mobilized his team and went to Orléans, a one-hour drive from Paris, and staked out the museum.

  Kate was dizzy with relief when the thief appeared on the scene. She’d been tortured with uncertainty ever since she’d arrived in Orléans. There were tons of cities beginning with the letter O or K. This was the only one she was certain Nick had struck before. He’d broken into this same museum six years ago. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t committed some con or theft in one of the other possible cities, such as Osaka, Oslo, or Oxford. Not to mention Kansas City, Kathmandu, and Kawasaki.

  “How would you like to proceed, Agent O’Hare?” Bernard asked. When he spoke in English, he sounded like Inspector Clouseau trying to imitate Sean Connery. “Shall we move in now, or shall we wait?”

  “Let’s grab him as he’s climbing out the window. It’s when he’ll be the most vulnerable.”

  As if on cue, the thief carefully reached out the window and set the cardboard tubes on the sidewalk. The entire theft, from break-in to escape, had taken less than five minutes.

  Bernard picked up his radio and gave the command to move. “On y va! On y va!”

  The thief swung his legs out the window, but before his feet touched the ground, uniformed police officers swarmed around him.

  Kate and Bernard emerged from the café and walked across the square as the thief was handcuffed and patted down for weapons. He was smaller than Kate had expected, and at close range the mask was obvious and the effect was chilling. An officer pulled back the hood and removed the mask, and everyone gasped. The thief was a woman.

  “Incroyable,” Bernard said.

  The police headquarters, the Hôtel de Police, was a decaying four-story block of concrete that was built quickly and cheaply in the hurried post–World War II reconstruction of Orléans. It had been eroding from neglect ever since.

  The interrogation room was like the hundreds of others Kate had been in, right down to the unevenly balanced chair used to keep the suspect on edge. Kate sat across the table from the thief, whose fingerprints had identified her as Serena Blake. She was in her mid-thirties but could have passed for ten years younger. Her brown hair, colored to match Nick’s, was styled in a pixie cut that brought out the sharp features of her face, her slender nose and prominent cheekbones. She wore a black tank top that hugged her body like a too-tight leotard. She had the strong, slender physique of a gymnast, which made sense, given what Kate now knew about her. Police records showed that Serena Blake was a British citizen who’d spent two years in prison for burglary in her early twenties and, although she hadn’t been arrested since then, was known to be an expert cat burglar. And because Kate had collected extensive information on Nick while she was chasing him, she knew he’d worked with Serena.

  “We caught you red-handed stealing a Modigliani and a Degas from
a museum,” Kate said. “You’ll do ten years for that. And when you get out, the Turkish police will be waiting to lock you up in Diyarbakir Prison for God knows how many years. It’s so hellish there that prisoners have set themselves on fire rather than endure their sentences. After that, assuming you haven’t killed yourself, your time in a Tennessee prison will feel like a vacation.”

  Serena didn’t seem shaken by the grim forecast. She’d probably foreseen that future herself.

  “If you’re so sure that’s it for me, end of story, why are you in here talking?” Serena asked.

  “Because I might be able to shave a few years off your sentence if you cooperate.”

  “The way you tell it, you’ve already got me dead to rights, so what more do you need?”

  “You can tell me where we can find the Matisse, the sultan’s goblet, and the Vermeer.”

  Serena gave a thin smile. “No deal.”

  The artworks were the only leverage Serena had. That she wasn’t willing to use it when it could do her the most good made Kate curious. What was she saving it for? There was something else at play here, and Kate didn’t know what it was. So she decided the best way to reveal what she didn’t know was to use what she did know.

  “Okay, here’s an easier one,” Kate said. “What do you want from Nicolas Fox?”

  “Nothing,” Serena said.

  “It’s obvious that you’re desperate to get his attention. That’s why you were wearing a Nick Fox mask and planting his fingerprints at crime scenes.”

  “If I did that, it was because he’s a famous thief and I wanted you to chase him instead of me.”

  Kate decided to bluff and go with a crazy guess. “I might have believed that,” she said, “if you hadn’t hit Nashville, where you were part of the crew that helped Fox swindle Big Mike Gleaberg, and then Istanbul, where you helped him steal the Topkapi Dagger just to prove that it could be done.”

  Serena blinked hard, clearly startled that Kate knew about their secret crimes. Kate was startled, too, because it meant that maybe Nick actually had stolen the dagger and put it back.

  Kate pushed on. “You also went out of your way to irritate Fox by framing him for crimes that were so simple in concept and execution that they’d tarnish his reputation for ingenious crimes. Or maybe you’re just not smart enough to pull off anything more clever.”

  “I was clever enough to allegedly steal a Matisse, a rare Turkish antiquity, and a Vermeer in three different countries over the course of a little more than a week. How many thieves do you know who could have done that?”

  There was a knock at the door, and Commissaire Bernard stuck his head into the room and gestured for Kate to come out.

  “What is it?” she asked, joining Bernard in the hall.

  “Her lawyer is here.”

  “It’s not even dawn, and she hasn’t made any calls. How did he know that she was here?”

  “She might have had a hidden confédéré on the street who saw us arrest her and alerted her lawyer. But the fact remains, he’s here and we must deal with it. I’ve put him in a conference room.”

  Kate followed Bernard down the hall to the room. “Does he speak English?” Kate asked.

  Bernard reached for the doorknob. “A bit. His name is Jean-Luc Picard.”

  Kate sucked in some air at the name of the captain of the starship Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Stay calm, she told herself. Don’t punch a hole in the wall or have a high blood pressure attack. Just because it’s a name Nick would choose doesn’t mean it’s Nick. Okay, who was she kidding? She knew it was going to be Nick.

  She stepped into the room and stared across the conference table at Nick. He was wearing tortoiseshell glasses balanced on a prosthetic Gérard Depardieu nose that loomed over a thick horseshoe mustache that framed his mouth and went down to his chin. He wore a silk lavaliere scarf tied around his neck, a skinny blue blazer over a zip-up sweater, skinny Japanese denim jeans, and blue suede Derby shoes.

  Before Kate could say a word, Nick spoke in a rapid stream of fluent French, dramatizing his points with elaborate, dramatic gestures. Bernard interrupted him with a short comment in French that was the only phrase in the conversation that Kate understood. “Elle ne parle pas français.”

  “Oh, please forgive me,” Nick said to her. “I assumed you spoke French. I am Jean-Luc Picard, Mademoiselle Blake’s avocat. I must insist on speaking to my client at once.”

  Kate narrowed her eyes at Nick. “Jean-Luc Picard. Why is that name so familiar? Do I know you?”

  “I would remember someone so beautiful,” Nick said. “Even with your hair pulled into that horse’s tail you are a goddess.”

  “Serena Blake hasn’t requested a lawyer,” Bernard said.

  “She has not been given the opportunity yet,” Nick said. “Has she?”

  “It’s a little early for her to be making calls,” Bernard said. “It’s nearly dawn.”

  “I am available to my clients at all hours of the day and night to save them from obscènes abus d’autorité de la police comme ce qui s’est passé ici ce soir,” Nick said, then caught himself, taking a deep, calming breath. “Excusez-moi, I forget myself when I get outraged.”

  “The goddess would like to have a word in private with Monsieur Picard,” Kate said.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Bernard said. “Something might get lost in translation.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Kate said. “I’ll make sure I am understood.”

  Bernard reluctantly stepped out, closing the door behind him.

  “You lied to me,” Kate said to Nick. “You’re a big, fat liar. You told me you didn’t know of any connection other than you. Liar, liar, liar.”

  “I suspected Serena, but it was only a suspicion. I didn’t want to implicate her until I was sure. She was one of four people involved in those jobs. And any one of those four could have told someone else.”

  Okay, so he’d told a fib to protect a colleague. Understandable. Especially since lying was second nature to him. And there was the code of honor about snitching. She got all that. Sort of. But things were supposed to be different now. He was on the good team. Sort of.

  “Where’s the trust?” Kate said. “I thought we’d established trust.”

  “You trust me?”

  “Of course not. You’re a career criminal, a con man, and a cheat,” she said. “But I thought you at least trusted me. I’m dependable, responsible, and I’ve got sterling character. I wouldn’t take advantage of your immunity to arrest someone from your old crew.”

  “Really?”

  “Mostly. I suppose there could be circumstances—”

  “Exactly,” Nick said. “You are so the job.”

  “And you are so irritating.”

  “I love when you get angry,” Nick said. “Your nose gets a cute little wrinkle in it.”

  “Ugh!”

  Kate closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Take a moment, she told herself. Think of something calm. A lake. A kitten sleeping. A puffy cloud drifting overhead. She opened her eyes.

  He was grinning. “Feel better?”

  She felt her nose to see if it was wrinkled. “If you suspected it was Serena, why did I find her first?”

  “You guessed Orléans and I guessed Oxford. I ran into an old friend when I got to Oxford and found out Serena was in Orléans. I was watching a half block away from you when she got arrested.”

  Yes! Kate thought. She’d outsmarted Nick. Woohoo! Yay! She wanted to do her happy dance, but she restrained herself.

  “What job did you do in Oxford?” Kate asked.

  “It’s where I recruited Serena. After I was thrown out of Harvard for cheating, I relocated to England and apprenticed with Duff MacTaggert. Even back then he was a legendary con man. When I left Duff and went out on my own, Serena was one of the first people I recruited. She had gymnastic skills worthy of Cirque du Soleil, and she had natural cunning.”

  Kate
felt some of the air go out of her celebratory balloon. There was a quality to his voice that she didn’t often hear. Hard to put a name to it, but it told her that Serena was more than just a member of Nick’s first crew.

  “She must mean a lot to you if you’re willing to walk into a police station in that outrageous disguise to see her. It’s a miracle you haven’t been recognized.”

  “It’s human nature,” Nick said. “Context is a huge part of how we process information. This is the last place the police expect to see me, so they don’t.”

  Kate thought that was a load of baloney, but she didn’t want her nose to wrinkle so she moved on.

  “Okay, now what?” she asked him.

  “I want to talk to her. You can make it look real by telling Bernard there’s the possibility of a plea bargain.”

  Kate opened the door and gestured for Bernard to come back in. “I told Picard that we’d make a deal, trim some time off Serena’s sentence, if he convinces his client to tell us where she’s stashed everything that she’s stolen. I can talk the U.S. Justice Department into it. Will you back me on that with the French prosecutor?”

  Bernard didn’t look too happy about it, but he nodded anyway. “We have her, and we have our paintings back, that’s what matters to us. So yes, I think I can talk him into it. I can also have a word with my counterpart in Germany, but I doubt Turkish authorities will be so generous.”

  “They will if they want their goblet back in pristine condition,” Nick said.

  “All right, Picard,” Kate said. “Let’s see what you can do for us.”

  Bernard opened the door to the interrogation room. “Your lawyer is here to see you,” he told Serena.

  Nick squeezed past Bernard, whose body filled the doorway, and Serena went wide-eyed with surprise.

  “Yes, it is I, Jean-Luc,” Nick said. “I’m always here for you.”

  He went to her and kissed both of her cheeks. Bernard grabbed Nick’s shoulder and pulled him back with a stern warning. “Gardez vos distances, Picard. You may speak to your client, but you must not touch.”