The Job

by Janet Evanovich

  Reyna’s equipment was still spread out on the bed, including the throwaway cellphone that connected her to Nick Hartley. A feeling of dread swept over her when the phone rang. She thought Nick was most likely calling in a ransom demand, and she’d lost her hostage. Not good. She was beginning to wonder if perhaps the smartest thing she could do, for her own survival, was to take whatever cash she could from the house, make a run for it now, and hope that she could hide from Violante, if he lived, or from the Menendez cartel, if he didn’t.

  She took a beat to compose herself and answered the call.

  “We’re going to be returning to port around eight A.M. tomorrow morning,” Hartley said, his tone upbeat and jovial. “I suggest that you and Kate get there early, just so Mr. Violante isn’t kept waiting if we arrive ahead of schedule, but that’s entirely up to you. It’s a suggestion, not a demand.”

  Reyna was confused. Hartley wasn’t asking for ransom, and he didn’t seem to know that his wife had escaped.

  “We’ll be there,” Reyna said.

  “Can I speak to Kate?”

  “I don’t know where she is right now,” Reyna said. “It’s a big property, and she has the run of it.”

  “No problem,” Hartley said. “I’ll see you both tomorrow morning.”

  Reyna disconnected and flipped the phone back onto the bed. When her men finished searching the compound she’d send them to search the brush at the bottom of the gorge. With any luck the Hartley woman was down on the rocks with her head burst open like a water balloon.

  Two black Range Rovers, the Mercedes, and Violante’s security team were already on the dock when the ship arrived. Violante lugged his bucket of gold coins and salt water down the gangway to meet Reyna, who was waiting for them at the bottom.

  Violante could tell right away that something was wrong. Reyna had her AK-47 slung over her shoulder, the guards were tense, and Kate Hartley was nowhere to be seen.

  He could only draw one horrible conclusion. Reyna had ignored his orders and tortured Kate, probably to death.

  Reyna met his icy gaze. “How was your trip?”

  “Excellent,” Violante said. “I saw the wreck and brought back some coins. Nick will be calling us with payment details.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Reyna said. “We’ll do whatever we can to make the transaction as smooth as possible.”

  “Where’s my wife?” Hartley asked.

  “Good question,” Reyna said. “She seems to have vanished.”

  Hartley glanced back at the ship where the captain and three other members of the crew were on deck, shouldering rifles.

  “Vanished?” Nick asked. “Do you want to clarify that?”

  A taxi drove down the wharf and came to a stop behind the Mercedes. Kate got out of the taxi, carrying shopping bags from Escada and Gucci.

  “Reyna told us you vanished,” Nick said to his wife.

  “I did,” Kate said, setting her bags on the pavement. “I vanished after Reyna sneaked into my room with her torture kit. Fortunately, I was in the kitchen and not in bed as she expected.” Kate smiled, obviously pleased with herself. “I hit her with a frying pan!”

  “Good for you,” Nick said, equally pleased. “Now if you could just learn how to cook with one.”

  “I wish you’d get on with it,” Rodney Smoot said into Nick’s earbud. “This rifle’s getting heavy.”

  Nick turned his attention back to Violante.

  “Before you do anything else stupid,” Nick said to Violante, “let me remind you that the shipwreck is rigged with explosives and if anything happens to me or my wife, my crew will destroy the treasure. All the captain has to do is press a button.”

  “Nothing is going to happen,” Violante said. “Everybody stay calm. We can work this out amicably.”

  “She had a filet knife and pliers!” Kate said.

  “Reyna is very loyal to me,” Violante said. “I rescued her from a culture where violence is a way of life. It’s all she knows, and I have been trying to change that. But she was convinced that I was being tricked, that you were kidnapping me, and she expressed her admirable concern for my life. She only wanted to be sure that I was safe.”

  “Twenty-five million,” Kate said. “That’s the new price. I’m going to need therapy after this experience.”

  It was an outrageous demand, but Violante was relieved to hear it. It meant the deal wasn’t dead. And it also meant he’d been right that their greed trumped everything. She wanted his money as much as he wanted their gold.

  “Twenty-five in cash. It’s nonnegotiable,” Kate said. “Take it or leave it.”

  Nick nodded his agreement. “Twenty-five in cash.”

  “Done,” Violante said without hesitation.

  “You have three days to get the cash together,” Nick said. “We’ll be in touch.”

  “You violated my orders and nearly jeopardized everything,” Violante said to Reyna as they sat side by side in the backseat of the car on their way to Marbella. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you.”

  “I’m the one who does your killing.”

  “I can get someone else to kill you. There are lots of people who would love to kill you. I wouldn’t even have to pay them.”

  “The Hartleys aren’t what they seem.”

  “Neither are we. What matters is that they came offering to sell the location of a magnificent treasure. I’ve seen the treasure and I’ve got a bucket of it. So as far as I’m concerned, they are playing straight with me, whoever they are,” Violante said. “The only reason you’re still alive is because we haven’t lost the deal.”

  And because he had no one he trusted to take her place.

  “That was fun, making them sweat,” Kate said to Nick as they reached the ship’s deck.

  “And we got to stick them for a few million dollars more, which is something I always like to do.” He looked at the bags Kate was carrying. “Looks like you’re already spending our money.”

  “I didn’t have any fancy-hotel-worthy clothes,” Kate said. “I left the tags on and kept the receipts so I can return everything when we get to Lisbon.”

  “We’re not going back to Lisbon. We’d be under constant surveillance there by Alves or Violante’s people from the moment we docked. You’re leaving us here and flying to London while the rest of us go to Tangier and split up there.”

  “Makes sense,” Kate said. “What happens to the ship?”

  “Billy Dee will sell it for us in return for a generous commission. The ship will be renamed, reflagged, and back out to sea in a couple weeks.”

  “And what happens to the money you get from selling the boat?”

  “It goes back into our slush fund for illegal derring-do,” Nick said. “Where’s Jake?”

  Kate gestured to the dock. “Dad was covering us from beside one of the warehouses on the waterfront.”

  Nick looked toward the warehouses and saw Jake walking toward the ship, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher slung over his shoulder.

  “When did he pick that up?” Nick asked.

  “Before he came to visit me in Marbella. He knows arms dealers everywhere and doesn’t feel secure without a few explosives handy. If things had gone south here today, he would have blown up the two Range Rovers, and I would have opened up with the Uzi I’m carrying in my Gucci bag.”

  “It’s so important to accessorize correctly,” Nick said.

  Kate called Jessup as soon as she got to London and settled into her small room at the Radisson Sussex.

  “The intel has already started streaming in from Menendez’s computer,” Jessup said. “He’s gathering the cash to pay Nick and, in the process, he’s leading us to all his offshore accounts. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars. But that’s not the best part. We’re getting a real-time overview of his entire global operation and international smuggling routes.”

  “You can’t act on any of that until we have him in custody or you’ll spoo
k him. I’d like you to call Scotland Yard. Tell them I’ve just arrived in heated pursuit of two international fugitives and that the FBI requests their immediate tactical assistance to arrest them and prevent a major crime from occurring in London.”

  “So much for staying below the radar,” Jessup said. “Are you actually arresting any fugitives in London?”

  “We’re going to try. We’re setting up the money drop here.”

  A couple hours after the call, Kate walked a half block to the food court at Selfridges department store. It was her favorite place to eat in London. Kate ordered a chicken and mushroom pie, a steak and cheese pie, and a side of mushy peas, a British dish made of marrowfat and peas soaked in baking soda and simmered in water, sugar, and salt to form a delicious lumpy green glop. She got a Coke to wash it all down and carried her tray to a table in the large communal dining hall.

  She devoured the chicken pie and half of her mushy peas and was about to take on her steak pie when a middle-aged man sat down at her table. He had a cup of tea and three glazed Krispy Kreme donuts stacked like poker chips on a napkin. His disheveled hair was flecked with gray, his eyes were bloodshot, and his ruddy cheeks were covered with stubble. He wore a long, beat-up leather coat with wide sheepskin-lined lapels that were almost as brown as the cracked and faded hide. The coat was open showing a white Oxford shirt and a loosely knotted red-and-yellow-striped polyester tie. He was her kind of cop.

  “Do you live in that coat?” Kate asked.

  “Pretty much,” he replied in an accent that betrayed his Manchester roots. “It goes with everything. If I ever get married, I’ll wear it down the aisle.”

  Kate grinned at the thought and offered her hand. “FBI Special Agent Kate O’Hare.”

  “DCI Dennis Gooley. How did you make me as a copper?”

  She pointed with her fork to the donuts. “Dead giveaway.”

  “And my strong moral posture.”

  “That, too,” she said. “How did you find me?”

  “I run the Flying Squad, that’s our specialist crime and operations section, and this is my patch. You can’t take a leak in the street without me knowing about it.” He took a sip of his tea. “So why do you need our assistance?”

  “Nicolas Fox is meeting Lester Menendez here in forty-eight hours. I want to nail them both.”

  He took another sip of tea. “Maybe after that we can capture the Loch Ness monster and D. B. Cooper, too.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  “You’re telling me that two of the most-wanted fugitives on the planet are going to be together in London?”

  “I am. And in the same room.”

  Gooley shook his head, skeptical. “If you say Fox will be here, I can believe that. But nobody knows who Menendez is now or what he looks like.”

  “He’ll be the guy meeting with Nicolas Fox.”

  Gooley smiled. “Cute.”

  “I come by it naturally.”

  “Tell me how you got onto Menendez. The way I heard it, you were chasing Fox for a string of museum heists. But it wasn’t him, it was his protégé Serena Blake masquerading as Fox to throw the coppers off her scent.”

  “I thought so,” she said. “But I was wrong.”

  “But you caught her in the act.”

  “That’s exactly what it was.” Kate started working on her steak pie while he ate his second donut. “Serena was partnering with Fox all along. That’s why she wouldn’t cut a deal in return for telling us where she’d stashed the stuff that she stole. Because Fox has it all.”

  “I don’t get it. Why would Fox want Serena Blake to go running around the world stealing things and framing him for the heists?”

  “She was a diversion. Fox was using her to drag us around the globe while he was here in London, planning his next big heist and selling the stolen art to finance the job.”

  “What’s he going after?”

  “The crown jewels.”

  Gooley looked at Kate like she’d grown two heads. “That’s insane. The closest anyone has come to stealing the crown jewels was in 1671, and it failed. And back then it was easy. All you had to do was hit a dumb bloke over the head with a mallet. Security is a bit tighter now.”

  “The impossibility of stealing the crown jewels is what makes it irresistible to Fox. He’s been planning the robbery for years, and my intel says he’s ready to do it.”

  “Where does Menendez fit into this?”

  “He doesn’t know it, but he’s helping to finance the robbery,” Kate said. “He’s paying twenty-five million dollars for the stuff that Serena Blake stole.”

  “That’s a hell of a story,” Gooley said, grabbing a paper napkin and wiping the sugar off his fingers. “How did you find out all of that?”

  Kate pushed her plate aside. She was about to tell a lot of lies mixed with just enough half truths to make her story convincing. At least, that was her hope.

  “Are you familiar with Duff MacTaggert?” she asked Gooley.

  “I’ve spent most of my career trying to put him away and never even got close, though we did have fish and chips once,” Gooley said. “Ran into each other at the same greasy takeaway in Soho. It was like that scene between Pacino and De Niro in Heat, except we had nothing to say to each other, so we just stood there talking about football and the weather, and that was that. I hear the bastard has retired to some tropical island in Indonesia where the law can’t touch him.”

  “It’s called Dajmaboutu. I’ve got a source, one of the Torajan natives on MacTaggert’s household staff. She told me that MacTaggert set up a meeting between Fox and Diogo Alves, a black market middleman in Lisbon. I arrived in Portugal too late to catch them together, but I followed Alves to Demetrio Violante, a wealthy and mysterious developer in Marbella. He’s practically a recluse, and nobody knows anything about him. A few months after Menendez vanished, Violante suddenly appeared in Marbella and brutally muscled his way to the top of the construction business.”

  “That doesn’t make him Menendez.”

  “Violante has the same bone structure as Menendez, he’s got no past, and his head of security is Reyna Socorro, an ex–Colombian rebel who joined the Menendez cartel shortly before Menendez disappeared.”

  “It’s still circumstantial.”

  “Don’t you ever have a gut feeling that you can’t ignore?” Kate asked.

  “The way I eat, yeah. Almost every day.”

  “You know what I mean. Do you trust your instincts?”

  “It’s not a question of whether I trust mine,” Gooley said. “It’s whether I can trust yours.”

  “Violante is coming here Thursday with twenty-five million in cash to buy a Matisse, a Vermeer, and a jewel-encrusted sultan’s goblet. Worst-case scenario, Violante is not Menendez, and we arrest Fox on his dozens of international warrants. Plus you get to arrest some guy for buying millions of dollars’ worth of stolen art and antiquities. As an added bonus, we prevent the heist of the crown jewels. Unless, of course, you have something better to do.”

  “Nothing that can’t wait. Do you know where this meeting is going down?”

  “The Excelsior Tower, eighteenth floor.”

  “Perfect. I can put you up in shouting distance, so you can keep it under surveillance. Get your bags, check out of the hotel, and let’s go take a look-see.”

  The Excelsior Tower was twenty stories of pitch-darkness, even darker than the night sky. It was as if a black hole had opened up on the south bank of the Thames, right in the middle of the five-hundred-yard stretch of river that ran between the Albert Bridge to the east and the Battersea Bridge to the west.

  Kate and Gooley leaned against Gooley’s illegally parked Vauxhall Insignia and studied the Excelsior from the Chelsea Embankment. The monolith of glass and marble was curved to embrace a pool, tennis courts, and a private marina where several yachts were docked.

  “Why is the building so dark?” Kate asked. “Is it unoccupied?”

  Gooley lit a cigaret
te. “There are eighty flats in there. The least expensive is twenty million pounds. The penthouses are over a hundred million. Sixty-nine of the flats have been sold. Mostly to dictators, warlords, mobsters, and Russian oligarchs.” Gooley blew a stream of smoke out toward the river. “Lovely blokes who don’t want you to know who they are or how they got their dirty money.”

  “Nicolas Fox’s kind of people,” Kate said. “Who owns the other apartments?”

  “A Ukrainian mining magnate, a Taiwanese drug company giant, a Nigerian telecommunications billionaire, a couple of sheiks, and I don’t know who else. The Malcolms, the British couple that developed the property, are the only ones who actually live in the building. The others visit maybe for a week or two each year.”

  “I imagine security is very tight.”

  “Armed guards, private elevators, retina scanners, fingerprint access pads, the works.”

  “And the perks?”

  “A concierge staff that will do your grocery shopping for you. Also saunas, a movie theater, and a virtual golf course with a full-time flesh-and-blood golf pro.”

  “My building has a coin-operated washer and dryer,” Kate said.

  “Mine doesn’t even have that,” Gooley said.

  “Security, exclusivity, and outrageous luxury,” Kate said. “I can see why Fox picked the Excelsior. He’s going to feel very comfortable there.”

  “We’ll have eyes, including yours, on that building 24/7 within the hour.”

  “He’s got a sixth sense about surveillance,” Kate said. “He won’t be fooled by fake utility workers and female cops pushing baby carriages.”

  “That’s not a problem. The entire city is covered with CCTV cameras. The only place we don’t have them yet is up your bum.” Gooley turned and pointed to a grand old apartment house that faced the Excelsior. “We’ll also set up a dedicated camera and a laser microphone in that building and aim them both at his flat. We’ll see and hear everything.”

  “Unless he closes the blinds,” Kate said. “Then we won’t see a thing.”

  “He won’t close them. You don’t buy a place like that and bring somebody over to see it unless you want to impress them with the view and show them that you’re king of the city.” Gooley tossed his cigarette butt onto the street and stubbed it out under his shoe. “I’m sure you want to plant yourself someplace where you can keep your eye on the building without being seen, so I’ve got a nice surprise for you.”