The Faberge Heist

by David Leadbeater

  He couldn’t, and that was the worst of it. With people like Kovalenko and the Devil at large it was never going to be safe. He’d been forced to explain to her what the Devil did and how he did it. His past exploits. Johanna had found it hard to believe such people existed.

  “Who would bring down an entire airliner to kill one person? Who would blow up a house to kill a single woman? Who would engineer a riot at a parade to kill a wife and two children?”

  “It’s his occupation,” Dahl had said.

  “No,” she’d spat at him. “It’s his vocation.”

  The days with the kids were small slices of heaven. It was only on these days that he managed to relax. Weeks went by. He kept in touch with Drake and Hayden, and kept abreast of Kenzie’s exploits, fully expecting her to revert to some clandestine, underworld activity. It was with disbelief that he heard she and Dallas had joined a task force whose job it was to track down relic smugglers. He even found himself wondering if she was working undercover, making sure the smugglers got away. But he didn’t really believe that, and she proved him right.

  When things became difficult at home, Dahl took a trip. He went to see Kenzie, not just to see how things lay between them but to observe her new operation. It looked good. The team had gained some valuable victories.

  During the visit when he’d joined one of their missions, he’d felt free again. It told him everything he needed to know.

  Dahl returned to Washington, miserably certain he needed to finalize things with Johanna. But it was the weekend. The children were off school and demanded all his attention. He was happy to oblige. Another two days went by before he talked to Johanna.

  He didn’t have to explain anything. Johanna had already seen it on his face.

  “I tried so hard,” she said. “Followed you to America. Explained night after night to the children why you weren’t there for them. I can do anything for them, but I can’t save them from professional killers.”

  “You shouldn’t have to,” Dahl said. “You three mean the world to me. But I can’t see you unhappy. Trapped. We’re different people to the ones that married years ago. We haven’t grown together. You need to look to yourself as well as the kids.”

  There was very little else to say. They decided to explain it to the children together, and Dahl knew it would be one of the hardest nights of his life.

  Now, four weeks later, they had gone. Dahl was alone days and nights, alone in an apartment that now echoed with silence as loudly as it had once echoed with the voices of his children. It was a terrible, deep silence, bereft of all joy. Who knew the sound of a child’s voice could bring so much life to a place? It was only when they were gone that you understood.

  He spent nights checking the digital HQ, scrutinizing jobs and wishing Hayden would take one of them. Several looked promising. There was everything from robberies to a small war, but their hiatus continued. Dahl realized he was finding it harder to rest than to fight.

  Days were spent keeping in shape, staying close to the edge of where he needed to be. He spoke to Johanna and the kids, to Drake and Hayden. They asked him to join them for a while. He told them he needed to get back to work.

  “It’s gonna take time, mate,” Drake told him. “All this R&R bollocks. It takes some getting used to. But you know as well as anyone, we couldn’t stay at the level we were. Friends have died along the way, and maybe it was because we never took a fucking break.”

  Dahl thought about that. He didn’t believe it and neither did Drake. “That’s not true and you know it.”

  “Maybe. Listen, we’re headed back to DC soon. How about Alicia and I surprise you, blindfold you, take you to some alley and kick the shit out of you?”

  “Sounds bloody perfect. Thanks, Drake. I really need something like that to perk me back up.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “Just . . . don’t let Alicia shag me. The kicking will be torture enough.”

  “Piss off, Torsty!” Alicia cried in the background.

  They ended the call. Dahl’s outlook improved. It felt good to connect with the team again. Maybe if they saw each other, even socially, it wouldn’t be so bad.

  His phone rang five minutes later. He knew the ring tone and when he checked the screen it read: Strike Force One.

  Hallelujah!

  CHAPTER SIX

  Karin and Dino took Mai’s advice. They found a room in DC and rarely surfaced for the first two weeks. They lost track of time. They emerged only for food, grabbing takeaways, supermarket essentials and snacks, sometimes not knowing if it was early morning, late evening or the middle of the day. Karin enjoyed the closeness, the passion, and the diversity of it all until the newness started to wear off. Time passed by in a blur after that. Every day blended into the next. They kept in touch but barely remembered which day of the week it was.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” she said during the third month.

  “What?” Dino sat up in bed, his dark half-Italian features scrunched in concern, his short black hair sticking up in tufts.

  “I don’t mean us,” Karin clarified. “I mean this.”

  Dino continued to frown.

  “The downtime.”

  “I guess. We only just became soldiers and thank God we escaped the deserter charge. But it’s not like it is for the other guys. Fighting is all they’ve ever known. Especially Alicia. Didn’t she leave home at sixteen or so, to join the Army?”

  “Something like that.”

  “It’s harder for them.”

  “I guess. Most of them feel the same. But that doesn’t make me feel any different.”

  Dino pulled the covers around him. “So now you’ve gotten lucky you want to go back to war?”

  “Gotten lucky?” Karin raised an eyebrow at him. “I’d say you were the one that got lucky.”

  “You’re kidding, right? Have you seen this body and felt what it can do?”

  Karin shook her head. “You’re a knobhead, you know that?”

  Dino reached out for a half-drunk bottle of water. “All right. Seriously, what do you want?”

  Karin arranged her pillows behind her back and sat up straight, hugging the top sheet to her neck. Finally, it seemed, Dino was sincere.

  “What do I want?” she echoed, thinking. “Well, a lot has changed since I joined up. Since Komodo died.” She was silent for a long time, remembering the love of her life and the happy, respectful relationship they’d shared.

  “I want to help,” she said in the end. “Not just our countries, our people. But my friends. I want to make a difference so that when it’s my time to retire I can look back and say—I helped. They say the noblest art is that of making others happy. Well, the greatest art is making others feel safe.”

  Dino threw the covers aside. “I guess we didn’t expend all that blood, sweat and tears training for nothing. We know we’ve got skills, so let’s use them.”

  Galvanized, Karin felt a surge of enthusiasm. She knew what she wanted. She knew where she wanted to be. There was only one problem.

  “We don’t have a job.”

  “Eh? I didn’t know we needed one.”

  “No, I don’t mean a job. I mean a mission. We’re stuck here until Hayden chooses a new one.”

  Dino sat back, deflated. “Shit.”

  Karin broke out the laptop. They’d checked the new HQ regularly but had relied on their cellphones for crucial updates. She took a moment to scrawl through the chatter and ops that had been turned down.

  “At least two we could have sunk our teeth into.”

  “Maybe we could join one of the other Strike Forces,” Dino suggested. “I mean three and four look pretty active.”

  Karin looked up when her phone rang. Dino caught her eyes. “Wow,” he said. “I shoulda said that before.”

  * * *

  Molokai drifted. He hired a car and followed a route that took him across the center of North America. Weeks passed. He enjoyed it. He was used to being t
he loner. The big coat and the robes he wore to spare the public’s feelings were washed and then replaced. Molokai didn’t continue wearing them because he felt embarrassed or conspicuous. He wore them to save others from seeing the old welts and scars that crisscrossed the lower part of his face, neck and shoulders. He ignored the looks, suffered the attention of the cops when they stopped him, and proceeded to lose himself.

  Molokai drove in a western direction, never knowing which town he was passing or where he would end up. It was about as free as he could get. Every day he checked the Internet HQ, wondering if another mission would pop up but never sure he wanted to be part of this team. To date, he’d been caught in an irrepressible flow. One job led to another and the danger never let up. Luther was fully invested, but then Luther had Mai.

  Molokai ended up in San Francisco. He spent some days wandering the city, took a tourist trip he enjoyed over to Alcatraz, and watched what remained of the seals in the harbor. He walked in the rain, helped a pair of cops out of some trouble with a local gang, and then decided to take a longer trip.

  He flew to Tokyo to see Mai and Luther. It was a good few days, and took his mind off things. He even managed to open up about a part of his past he hated, and although the conversation merely skirted the subject it was a therapeutic start.

  “He was the best bomb tech of the Iraq War,” Luther told Mai late one night to Molokai’s surprise. “Never broke a sweat.”

  Molokai was surprised to find himself expanding on that. “Five years, four tours, I didn’t have to hide anything there. I was a soldier, among soldiers. The men I met were outstanding. They still are . . . the ones that returned.”

  They talked and talked. Molokai usually avoided the subject because it always came down to one fateful day, but after two hours of healing conversation he was almost ready to discuss it.

  “October 2010,” he said. “My final tour. The cost of the war was into trillions by then, mostly because it was financed on borrowed money, but they didn’t have enough funds to outfit our troops properly. Our weapons were over-used, our equipment always breaking. They lost Abrams tanks like children lose toys. Anyway, an IED was reported close to a checkpoint. It turned out to be an artillery shell to which a detonating mechanism had been attached. Nothing fancy, but incredibly volatile. I went over, got to work. They didn’t disturb me because they knew I needed my space, some soft music on the earphones, and time to breathe. It turned out to be a diversion. Whilst I worked, four snipers took out eight friends and I never even knew. Didn’t hear the commotion.”

  “You were doing your job,” Luther said, big fist clenched in concern.

  “Sure, and so were the insurgents. It turned out that I lived, eight of our number died and, when I joined the fight, they blew up the IED anyway, injuring two more. The rest of the war went by in a blur.”

  Molokai found the events hard to discuss, and just as hard to reflect on. He kept moving after that, soon leaving Tokyo and returning to the US.

  When the cellphone call came he was incredibly relieved.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When Mai Kitano landed in Tokyo, both she and Luther were still sore and bruised from their escape from Devil’s Island. Not only that, they were mentally tormented by losing both the Blood King and the Devil, agonized to know that two such extreme dangers still walked the earth like malevolent monsters.

  Since London though, since they were attacked in the Knightsbridge restaurant and thrown headlong into death and hellfire, they had both sporadically wondered the same thing.

  Where would that night have ended up?

  Mai knew Luther thought about it, because he told her so. Outside of an ongoing op, she was more reserved and preferred to choose her words carefully. Especially when she was with a guy she didn’t know that well. Her relationship with Drake had been different. They’d met under fire and when they were much younger, which made it easy to get into each other’s life stories. Now, she was older; she’d been to hell and back. And she didn’t want to make another mistake.

  It turned out Luther felt the same way. Beneath the larger than life exterior he was quite the thinker.

  They agreed to repeat the early part of that fateful London night, found a restaurant in Tokyo, and a table in the corner. Only days had passed since they split from the team and they hadn’t checked the Internet HQ out yet. They had more important decisions to make.

  “Where’s this going?” Mai asked bluntly, having done all her thinking on the plane journey. “What do you see?”

  “A steak,” Luther said. “Definitely a steak. No garlic butter though. I wouldn’t want it to come between us later.”

  Mai waited. She knew him well enough to have expected the standard response. Now she watched him thinking about the question.

  “I see a start,” he said finally, struggling to keep his voice at a lower level. “A chance to get to know each other properly. And I don’t think . . .” He paused but then continued, “I really don’t think we’re gonna get a better chance.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t mean with other people. I mean for this relationship. The team’s new initiative means we can recuperate between missions. It means we can have a life too. It means we don’t have to go relic hunting every week but can choose a wide variety of missions. Who knows what diverse and wonderful ops might come up?” He shrugged and grinned. “But that’s digressing. We now have time to think, to process, to make up our minds over weeks and months rather than days. I say, let’s take it steady and see where we are tomorrow. Next week. Next month.”

  It was exactly what Mai wanted to hear, and it clearly came from the heart. Three hours later they were throwing back the covers of a double bed on the third floor of an expensive hotel room. Luther again checked she was okay with it, but that only made her jump at him. She was fast, but he managed to catch her, holding her up with his large arms as she wrapped her legs around his waist.

  “Stop checking with me,” she whispered. “If I didn’t want this, you’d definitely know about it. Are you nervous?”

  Luther coughed. “Well, it’s been a while.”

  “Ah, well try to keep up. I’ll teach you as we go.”

  “Hey, it’s not been that long!”

  They damaged the room a little, spending fun-filled, exhausting hours losing themselves in each other. They ordered room service and called Chika and Dai, Mai’s sister and her boyfriend, to tell them they’d be late. They were expecting to stay at Chika’s house that night but didn’t turn up until three days later.

  And still, they took it steady.

  Luther left for a couple of days, heading out to visit some army buddies at a nearby US base. It was little more than a barracks, a bare-bones base, but Luther wouldn’t pass up getting reacquainted with a couple of old friends, men he’d shared action with. The time he spent with them tempered his happiness when he learned about colleagues lost and injured on the field of battle. It was with a wrench that he left them two days later, but he greeted Mai with a smile when he met her at Chika and Dai’s front door.

  “Hey.”

  She pulled him inside and introduced him to her sister and old friend. Both Mai and Luther checked in-house security—it would be beefed up until both the Blood King and the Devil were captured or killed—and found it to be top-notch. They even had a panic room.

  Mai rang Drake and Hayden every so often, staying in touch. Molokai came to visit. Mai found she understood the reserved outsider a little better.

  Almost three months later, Luther and she were fighting each other daily. In the ring, on the mat, keeping fit, staying sharp. Numerous phone calls from various members of the team told an interesting tale. Once the first week of inactivity had passed, they were all raring to go.

  She checked on Yorgi who seemed to have lost touch with the team. The young Russian thief was still recovering from being shot in the back. He’d been discharged from hospital but had suffered complications and was being made
to undergo a strict protocol of exercise and rest. The prognosis was that he’d be back to normal in two to three months.

  What “normal” was Mai didn’t know. She read between the lines. She knew how hard it had to be hitting Yorgi. His expertise had been bouldering, climbing where others couldn’t. He relied on his total fitness.

  And then, one late night as she and Luther were in a deep sleep, her cellphone rang. A rush of adrenaline shot through her. She rolled over but Luther was already holding the phone up, showing her the screen.

  “Strike Force One,” he said.

  She pushed the answer button. “Hello?”

  “It’s G,” a voice said, which she knew belonged to their coordinator. “We have a job. I need you on a plane as soon as possible.”

  “What job?”

  “You’ll be briefed when you land. I’ll text you the details. It’s a hotel in Utah, outside Salt Lake City.”

  G signed off. Mai blinked at Luther.

  “Vacation’s over,” she said. “Let’s get back to work.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  On Thursday, Cara drove into Las Vegas with the other members of her team, the One Percenters, the greatest heist team never to be caught. The vibe in the car was ice cold. She hated what Jax had become—a grim, emotionless leader happy to cause unnecessary harm to others—and couldn’t understand how it had happened in just a few months. She expected it from Steele, the pair of them had been at loggerheads for many years. But Jax?

  Their leader was usually the consummate professional. He came from a Special Forces background, but had always professionally reined in his violent tendencies. He’d always been the voice of reason with overarching perspective, able to see issues as they arose. He was the major reason the team had never been caught or seen beyond a few grainy photographs.

  What’s happened to him?

  Maybe he couldn’t help this demise. Steele certainly couldn’t. Cara hadn’t joined them for the danger, the thrill, or even the money. She was in it for the art of thievery, to see a job perfectly executed. It was the thing that drove her more than anything. Three months ago, when the Fabergé heist had been proposed, she’d fallen under its spell. It sounded legendary, just perfect. She’d been unable to say no. And as they planned, as the team’s joint skills blended together into a flawless, beautiful, complete jigsaw, she allowed the excitement to infuse her.