The Heist (9 page)

“You mean kidnapping,” she said.

He ignored the comment. “You’ll parachute in on a moonlit night, and if you succeed in capturing Fox, instead of calling Interpol or taking the ferry, you’ll call me and make your way to a prearranged extraction point on Athos, where I will pick you up by chopper. We’ll go back to Thessaloniki, where we will stash Fox someplace remote and abandoned. That’s when you will call Interpol with an anonymous tip that will lead them to Fox, who will be gift-wrapped for them.”

“But I won’t get any credit for the arrest that way.”

“Oh, forgive me. I was working under the assumption that you wanted to keep your job and stay out of prison yourself.”

He had a good point. Her bosses at the FBI were unlikely to be pleased that she’d captured Nick Fox after she’d been thrown off the case, or that she’d engaged in an unsanctioned apprehension on foreign soil where she had absolutely no jurisdiction, or that she’d failed to notify the FBI or local law enforcement of her
intentions. And there was the little matter of kidnapping Nick, which was technically a criminal offense in Greece, whether he was a fugitive or not.

Kate sighed with resignation. “Okay, fine, I guess I’ll just have to be satisfied knowing that I was the one that got him.”

“Welcome to my life. Most of my career was made up of missions like that. To this day, very few people know what I’ve done.”

She opened a beer and took a sip. “You’d really go all the way to Greece, and run a covert operation again, just so I can have the satisfaction of capturing Nick Fox?”

“Sure,” he said. “We don’t get nearly enough quality father-daughter time.”

The Greek smuggler’s 1978 Cessna 182 Skylane had three seats salvaged from an old Volvo, an instrument panel held together with duct tape, and a single propeller on its rusty nose. The smuggler’s name was Spiro. No last name given. He was a crusty old man in a moth-eaten sweater, a worn-out leather bomber jacket, and stained cargo shorts. Jake and Kate kept him company at dinner, during which time Spiro had barely touched the platter of salted fish, olives, hard-boiled eggs, feta cheese, and pita that he’d laid out in his drafty hangar. The hangar doubled as Spiro’s home and barn and was located on a private airfield outside of Thessaloniki. Jake had enlisted Spiro to fly them to Mount Athos, and in preparation for the hundred-mile flight, Spiro had chosen to forsake the food and instead guzzle an entire bottle of ouzo.

“We have to scrub the mission,” Kate said to her father when Spiro stepped out to relieve himself on the side of the hangar. “Spiro’s too drunk to fly.”

“He’s a better pilot drunk than most pilots are sober.”

That didn’t give Kate much comfort, but it wasn’t like she had any choice. It had to be tonight. She had to jump during a full moon so she could see where she was landing. And there weren’t many pilots who were willing to drop her over Athos, and probably none who’d do it for nothing. But Spiro was grudgingly repaying a debt to her father, and neither one of them would tell her what it was. All she needed to know, her father insisted, was that Spiro had a plane and two choppers and could fly them, even if he couldn’t pass a field sobriety test.

Spiro returned to the table, drained the last drop from the ouzo bottle, and chased a flock of roosting hens out of his plane. He said something in Greek and made some hand motions that Kate interpreted as
Let’s get this stupid mission over and done so I can crack open another bottle of ouzo
.

So here she was, flying twelve thousand feet above the Halkidiki peninsula at midnight, a mere two weeks after laying out her plan to her father. Her hair was cut pixie-style under her helmet, and her breasts were minimalized by a compression sports bra. She had her Glock and a pair of handcuffs in special pockets on the thighs of her jumpsuit, an altimeter strapped to her left wrist, gloves on her hands, and the tracking device for Nick’s satellite phone in a pack on her stomach.

Judging from the smile on her father’s face, Kate was guessing this was definitely more fun than another round of golf at the Calabasas Country Club.

Kate gave her father a kiss on the cheek, and he put his arm around her.

“You’re going to be fine,” he said.

“I know that,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re here.”

“So am I,” he said. “We should do this more often.”

Spiro peed into the coffee can at his feet, and Kate couldn’t help seeing it as an expression of his feelings about their conversation.

Jake checked his handheld GPS. “We’re at the drop point,” he said, turning to Kate. “Are you ready?”

“I can’t wait.”

Kate stood up, adjusted her goggles, and opened the door. A blast of air roared through the plane, making it shake and rattle.

“Good luck,” Jake yelled, and Kate jumped into the darkness.

She stretched out into the box position, belly to the earth, her arms out at her sides, her legs bent. Although she was dropping at 120 miles per hour, she didn’t feel like she was falling. She felt like she was flying. Kate moved through the air as if she’d been born with wings. It had been two years since her last skydive, and she’d forgotten how exhilarating and liberating it could be.

She flew over fortresslike monasteries rising dramatically out of the sea mist, and over honeycombs of earthen hermitages clinging like mud dauber nests to the jagged faces of gorges and cliffs, and over the stone huts that blended into the meadows and forests. It was like no landscape she’d ever seen before. She felt as if she’d traveled into the past, not as it ever existed but as imagined by the Brothers Grimm.

At three thousand feet she reached down with her right hand and yanked the small leather strap behind her, releasing her canopy. The chute caught the air and yanked her up, feet to the earth, so she was now dropping in a standing position.

Kate headed into the wind to slow her descent and steered toward a clearing that was a safe distance from the monasteries and far from the dangers posed by the cliffs and dense chestnut
forests. She’d been trained to land within a ten-foot square on a drop zone, so she knew she could be precise.

The drop was smooth, fast, and silent. She landed on her feet, quickly gathered up her chute, and dragged it into an olive grove that bordered the clearing. Kate stood for a moment to get her bearings. It was so quiet that the silence was unsettling, as if the volume of the entire world had been shut off. She saw lights coming from within the fortified walls of an imposing monastery on the nearest peak, but she wasn’t concerned about that. The monks were already deep into hours of prayer. She wasn’t likely to run into any of them as she made her trek, unless Nick was hiding in the monastery, but she doubted that.

She took the tracking device out of her pocket, hoping she’d made a good choice in landing on the western side of the peninsula. If Nick was on the eastern edge she’d face an arduous journey on foot, over a mountain pass. The tracker looked like a standard handheld GPS, but was designed to pick up a signal from a satellite phone. If it turned out Nick didn’t have a satellite phone or didn’t have it powered up, she was screwed. She turned the tracker on and nearly collapsed with relief when, almost immediately, a red dot began pulsating on the map of Athos. There was a satellite phone emitting a signal a few miles north of her present position. The good news was that there was a satellite phone nearby. The bad news was that its location appeared to be on the edge of a cliff, and she hadn’t brought any rappelling gear.

She headed north and had only walked a short distance when she came upon a collection of primitive huts arranged around a lopsided church no bigger than a double-wide mobile home. In the front yard of one of the huts was a small vegetable garden, a pile of cut wood, and a clothesline strung between two crooked
chestnut trees from which several pairs of pants and shirts had been hung to dry. The clothes looked as if they’d been sewn together from gunny cloth and old potato sacks.

Kate snatched a shirt and a pair of pants that seemed to be about her size and slipped them on over her jumpsuit. She crept out of the village, following the course set by her tracking device. She hiked along a narrow footpath through the dense woods, across a crystal-clear creek, and then up a steep, rocky hillside that had a rope strung through bolts hammered into the stone to use as a handrail.

After about an hour of climbing she came to a centuries-old stone and earthen hut built out from the mouth of a cave. A curl of smoke rose from its chimney. A stream originating from the wooded peak high above spilled down from a wide crevice beside the hut and turned a paddle wheel. She assumed that the paddle wheel powered the steady light that glowed warmly behind the single small window. The setting had such a storybook quality to it that she half expected the Seven Dwarfs to pop out, singing as they headed off to work.

Kate doubled-checked the tracker. The satellite phone was inside the hut, and it was on. Her gut told her she’d found Nick Fox’s hideaway, and judging by the light and the smoke, he was awake. She put the tracker back into the stomach pocket of her jumpsuit and removed the Glock from the pocket on her thigh. She tiptoed slowly up to the large wooden door and pressed her ear to it. She could hear the crackle of the fire, the burbling of the stream, and the churn of the paddle wheel.

Pressing her left side against the door, she carefully tested the latch and decided it wasn’t locked. She took a deep breath, threw her entire weight against the door, and burst into the room.

Nick Fox smiled at her from across a small table. He was wearing an aloha shirt, board shorts, and flip-flops. And he was eating a sandwich and drinking tsipouro, a clear liquor made on Athos from the residue of the wine presses. He didn’t seem especially surprised to see her or alarmed that she had a gun pointed at him.

“You’re under arrest,” she said.

“Is that how you greet everyone?”

“Only international fugitives.”

She kicked the door closed and looked around the tiny room. It was a bleak hermit’s cell, built for quiet spiritual contemplation and little else. A small fire burned in the stone hearth behind Nick, and a ragged curtain was drawn across an archway leading back to the cave.

“You really ought to try ‘Hello, Nick, it’s nice to see you’ as a greeting one of these days.”

“I’ll try it the first time I visit you in prison.”

Nick’s eyebrows raised a fraction of an inch. “You’d visit me in prison?”

“No,” she said. “I lied.”

Nick smiled, and Kate sank her teeth into her bottom lip to keep from smiling with him. The man was irresistible. What’s with that? she thought. It was like wanting to bake cookies for the spawn of Satan.

“Would you like some wine?” he asked her. “Why don’t you sit down and relax?”

She kept her gun trained on him. “This is how I relax.”

“Okay, that’s just scary. Would you like half of my corned beef sandwich?” he asked. “It’s direct from the Carnegie Deli in New York.”

“Meat is forbidden on Athos.”

“So are women,” Nick said. “But here you are.”

“Did you really think a thousand years of sexist doctrine would keep me from getting you?”

“No, I didn’t. In fact, you might ask yourself how this corned beef got here.” He took a bite of the sandwich. “Or how I did.”

“You had help from whoever is behind that curtain.” She gestured to it with her gun. “How many men are there?”

“Two,” Nick said. “I was getting a little midnight snack while they slept, but thanks to you slamming the door they’re probably awake now.”

“Are they armed?”

“I don’t think so, but unlike you I don’t make a practice of patting down everyone I meet.”

Kate aimed her gun squarely at Nick and faced the curtain. “Both of you come out nice and slow, because if you startle me, I might accidentally splatter the wall with Nick’s head.”

A man’s hand reached out from behind the curtain, grabbed the edge, and slowly lifted it to one side. Kate gaped at the man and felt all the air leave her lungs in a single
whoosh
. It was Carl Jessup, her boss. He stood there in a cable-knit sweater and old jeans and he didn’t seem all that worried at being discovered.

The sting of betrayal that Kate felt was every bit as sharp as a physical slap and raised the same red tint on her cheeks that his hand would have. Now she knew how Nick was able to slip out of the courthouse, and the country, so easily and without leaving a trace. He had help at the highest level of law enforcement.

“Well, now I know why you wanted me off the case and put a boob like Ryerson on it,” Kate said to Jessup. “You engineered Nick’s escape, and you knew if I was on the hunt I’d get him. Your mistake was that you believed I’d actually sit on the sidelines if you
assigned the case to someone else. You should have known me better. Then again, I guess I hardly knew you either, did I?”

“It’s not what you think,” Jessup said.

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, but I’m not alone.”

Jessup stepped aside to allow the man behind him to come out.

The second man behind the curtain was gray-haired, ten years younger than Jessup, and looked like he’d been born wearing a tie. He was in his casual wear, a cardigan sweater that would have made Mister Rogers proud, a long-sleeved blue dress shirt buttoned at the cuffs, a pair of khaki pants, and shiny loafers. He was Fletcher Bolton, deputy director of the FBI, the highest position an agent could reach within the agency without being appointed by the president of the United States.