The Job

by Janet Evanovich

  “Wife?” Gooley asked into the radio. “What wife?”

  The question was clearly meant for Kate, the Nicolas Fox expert. She picked up the radio and replied. “He’s got to be referring to Serena Blake. She and Nick must have been running a con on Violante.”

  On the screen, she saw Violante walk to the rear of the Range Rover and open the back.

  “They were swindling him?” Gooley said. “That changes everything.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Kate said. “He’s still here buying stolen goods.”

  “We don’t know what he’s buying. Or what he thinks he’s buying. He could be an innocent sucker.”

  “He’s not,” Kate said. “Be patient.”

  Hartley whistled when he saw the silver cases. “So that’s what twenty-five million dollars looks like.”

  “I hope you have a very big bathtub.”

  “We do.” Hartley smiled and clapped Violante on the back as if they were old buddies. “Give me a hand unloading these.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Violante said. “Keep the car.”

  “Wow. Are you sure?”

  Violante didn’t want to unpack the car. He wanted to get the treasure map and leave as soon as possible. “Consider it an apology for the misunderstanding in Marbella.”

  “Thank you,” Hartley said, turning his back to Violante to take another look at the Range Rover and the money. “That’s very generous of you.”

  “Blue team,” Gooley said on the radio, giving the go-ahead for the police chopper to launch from Lippitts Hill base in Loughton, thirteen miles northeast of central London.

  “Affirmative,” the pilot replied.

  “Approach the nest from the south,” Kate said into the radio. “Don’t frighten the birds.”

  “What birds?” Gooley asked.

  “The robin and the pigeon,” Kate said. “The two in the bush.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Fox will be spooked if he sees a police chopper heading his way. He’s the robin, right? Or is he the pigeon?”

  Kate was actually more concerned about spooking Violante.

  “Roger that,” Gooley said. “Blue team, stay wide, approach from the south.”

  Hartley lifted one of the suitcases out of the back of the SUV, took it to the coffee table, and opened it up. The euros were packed neatly inside. He took out a few stacks, set them on the tabletop, and selected a bill at random. He snapped it in his fingers, sniffed it, and held it up to the light.

  “Are you an expert at authenticating cash?” Violante asked.

  “Nope.” Hartley took a magnifying glass from his pocket. “But I am a quick study. I’ve been reading up on the subject for a few weeks now.”

  While Hartley examined the bill, Violante went to one of the display cases and admired a gleaming jewel-encrusted golden goblet that had probably been salvaged from the bottom of the sea. He wondered how many wonderful treasures just like this that he’d find in the wreckage of the Santa Isabel.

  “This appears genuine to me.” Hartley dropped the bill on the table.

  “So do we have a deal?”

  Hartley walked over to Violante, took the goblet out of the display case, and handed it to him.

  “Our treasure is all yours,” Hartley said.

  “That’s it,” Gooley said over the radio. “The exchange has been made. All units, move in!”

  It was all in motion now, and Kate knew there would be no going back. Within a few seconds, police vehicles filled with officers in tactical assault gear would speed toward the Excelsior Tower from the north, across the Battersea and Albert bridges, and from the southeast from Battersea Park. Plus a police chopper would close in from the air.

  In ten minutes it would all be over, and Demetrio Violante would be in custody for purchasing stolen art, and on the road to being revealed as Lester Menendez. And Nicolas Fox would be gone, to everyone’s bewilderment and frustration.

  That was the plan.

  Nick popped the cork on the bottle of champagne while Violante examined the goblet.

  We’re counting down, Kate thought, watching Nick. Don’t take too long to enjoy the champagne. Her attention turned to Violante when she saw him touch his ear and look over at the window. Holy crap, she thought, he’s wearing an earbud.

  “Are you sure?” Violante asked.

  Nick stopped midpour with a glass in one hand and the bottle in the other. “Excuse me?”

  “I wasn’t talking to you, you idiot,” Violante said to Nick.

  “Who were you talking to?”

  Violante ignored Nick and rushed to the window. His face, which was normally as smooth as custard, was contorted in rage.

  He’s wearing an undetectable earbud, Nick thought, and he’s just been warned that the police are swarming in from the park and driving across the bridge. Kate had reached the same conclusion. The cop who was watching the monitors back at headquarters figured it out as well.

  Violante gaped out the window at the police cars racing across the bridges and knew they were coming for him. Somehow, they’d discovered that he was Lester Menendez. Somehow, somewhere, he’d made a mistake or had been betrayed. How it happened didn’t matter now, and neither did getting the treasure. The only thing that mattered was escaping from the police. If he could temporarily prevent them from locking down the building, and keep them too occupied to quickly regroup, he had a chance of getting away in the chaos.

  Violante touched the earbud again. “Buy me some time.”

  “What’s going on?” Nick asked.

  “The police are surrounding the building. Is there another way out of here?”

  “There’s a maid’s elevator in the utility corridor,” Nick said. “You can take it to any floor you want or all the way down to the garage.”

  It’s Reyna, Kate thought. Reyna was feeding information to Violante, and she had to be nearby. Close enough to have seen the police moving in. She had no way of knowing if Reyna was on land or on water, but Kate was guessing water. She hadn’t seen Reyna in either of the vehicles that had transported Violante and his money. And it would make sense to have a backup river getaway.

  Kate grabbed the binoculars, ran to the flybridge, and scanned the water in front of her. BANG. A flare streaked across the sky toward the Albert Bridge and landed with a blinding flash of light on the roadway. There was a lot of thick red smoke coming off the bridge, and instantly police band radio chatter indicated that the bridge had taken a hit and traffic had come to a standstill.

  BANG, BANG, BANG. More flares. Two landed on the Battersea Bridge, and the third landed on the Albert. There was a lot more red smoke followed by the screech of tires and the crashing of cars.

  Kate had a fix on the source of the flares. They were coming from a small powerboat that was sitting in the middle of the Thames, in front of the Excelsior Tower, and midway between the two bridges. She focused the binoculars on the boat and saw Reyna alone at the helm.

  Three Scotland Yard armored personnel carriers rolled up in front of Excelsior Tower. Violante’s four security guards instantly threw their weapons onto the ground and put their hands over their heads, hoping to avoid being shot by adrenaline-pumped cops.

  The rear doors of the personnel carriers flew open, and dozens of officers spilled out, looking more like soldiers than cops. They were in full tactical gear—Kevlar duty vests, ballistic helmets, combat goggles, and flame-retardant balaclavas that almost entirely masked their faces.

  A third of the officers took positions in front of the Excelsior, another third stormed the lobby and the garage, and the remaining third split up and moved toward the back of the building from both sides to begin drawing a perimeter.

  Gooley stayed inside the command unit, which was now also parked in front of Excelsior Tower. He watched the monitors that showed him the feeds from Nick’s flat, from the helmet-mounted cameras worn by his ground-team leaders, and from the CCTV cameras showing the chaos on the
bridges.

  He was determined not to let the traffic mess, and losing half his strike force, distract him from completing the mission. He’d still lock down the building. It was time to show Fox and Violante who was in charge.

  The police chopper streaked overhead, and Gooley radioed the pilot with orders.

  “Say hello and tell them they are under arrest.”

  Violante had watched Reyna dispatch the flares and knew the police officers advancing across the bridges were trapped behind the snarled traffic. Now all he had to do was create a disaster that would distract the officers arriving at the building. He got into the Range Rover, turned the ignition key, and released the parking brake. He shifted into drive and charged across the room, leaping out of the vehicle a beat before the front bumper touched the floor-to-ceiling window.

  The police chopper came around the tower, went into a hover directly in front of the condo window, and the Range Rover smashed through the glass and shot out of the building. The chopper pilot peeled away, the Range Rover missed the helicopter by mere inches, and millions of euros were sucked out of the flat’s broken window.

  Gooley saw the astonishing sight from three angles. He saw the Range Rover burst out of the flat and fly head-on toward the chopper’s camera. He saw the terrifying view from the ground leader’s helmet camera as he glanced up at the sky to see the SUV dropping toward him. And the third view was from the surveillance feed.

  The Range Rover plummeted to the ground and exploded on impact into an enormous fireball. The blast shattered hundreds of windows, raining down shards of glass, and euros fluttered in the air like butterflies.

  “This is bad,” Nick said to Violante. “These paintings need to be in a humidity-controlled environment, and you’ve broken the window.”

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about the paintings,” Violante said, getting to his feet. “How do I get out of here?”

  Reyna saw the chopper swerve to avoid the Range Rover, and she took aim with a handheld rocket launcher. It wasn’t every day that she got a chance to shoot down a helicopter. She was about to squeeze the trigger when she heard the roar of an engine off the stern. She turned and saw that a yacht was bearing down on her, a woman in a yellow police windbreaker at the wheel on the flybridge. She was pretty sure it was Kate Hartley. Wasn’t that perfect. She always knew the woman wasn’t what she seemed, but she hadn’t guessed cop.

  Reyna shouldered the rocket launcher and fired one off at the yacht. It streaked over the water and smashed through the front window of the main cabin, rocketed straight through the galley, and out the open door at the stern before hitting the water fifty yards away.

  Kate ignored the grenade and kept the throttle fully open, plowing into the powerboat, ripping it apart, and sending Reyna into the river. The yacht didn’t fare much better than the powerboat. It sustained a huge gash in the bow and immediately began to take on water. Kate ran to the dinghy at the back of the boat, untied it, and jumped in. She floated free of the yacht and was about to crank up the outboard when Reyna burst out of the black water, levered herself onto the dinghy, and lunged at Kate.

  The two women rolled around in the bottom of the dinghy, scratching and clawing and punching. Reyna pulled a switchblade out of her pants pocket, slashed at Kate, and Kate felt a searing flash of pain as the blade sliced into her.

  Kate stuck her thumb into Reyna’s eye, and flipped Reyna out of the boat. Reyna sank below the surface, and after a moment a blood slick appeared on the black swirling water. The blood slick dissipated, and Kate saw no more sign of Reyna.

  The chopper swung away from the shoreline and hovered over the dinghy. Kate acknowledged the chopper with a nod of her head. She was bleeding from the stab wound in her side, and she suspected she had a broken bone in her hand. She had no clue if Reyna was alive or dead.

  Nick led Violante across the apartment to a door he unlocked by typing a code into a wall-mounted keypad. The door opened and the two men stepped into a narrow windowless service corridor that contained the maid’s entrance to the next condo, the stairwell, and the elevator.

  “That’s your way out,” Nick said, gesturing to the elevator, “unless you want to take the stairs.”

  Violante pressed the elevator call button.

  “If you help the police, or sell the treasure to anyone else, I will behead you,” Violante said to Nick.

  “You haven’t escaped yet.”

  “I will,” Violante said. “I have nine lives, and I have used up only two of them.”

  Nick punched Violante with a right hook that dropped him to the floor. Violante’s head bounced off the concrete, his eyes went blank, and he was out cold.

  Nick felt for a pulse, and found that it was still strong. He returned to the condo, grabbed a pen from the desk in the office, and used it to write MENENDEZ across Violante’s forehead.

  Nick walked down the corridor, opened the servant’s entrance to the unsold unit next door, and stepped inside. A police officer’s full tactical suit and weapons were laid out on a drafting table.

  Kate sat on the edge of the bed in the emergency room at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. She had two fingers taped together on her right hand and fourteen stitches in her side just under her rib cage. The stab wound had been painful and bloody but fortunately not deep enough to do bad damage.

  The curtain surrounding the bed was pulled aside, and Gooley stepped in. He was no longer in tactical gear but back in his leather and sheepskin coat. He handed Kate a bag of Krispy Kremes.

  “At least we don’t have to go to the bother of auctioning off that yacht,” Gooley said, “being that it’s at the bottom of the Thames.” He rocked back on his heels. “You ever drive a boat before?”

  “I spotted Violante’s bodyguard, Reyna Socorro, in the powerboat. She was positioned between the two bridges, shooting off the flares. Sorry about the yacht, but it was my only weapon.”

  “Not your only weapon,” Gooley said. “We pulled Reyna out of the Thames with her eye gouged out and a broken nose.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “She was full of river water,” Gooley said.

  “What about Violante and Fox?”

  “We got Violante. He was found knocked out in a stairwell, and he had ‘Menendez’ written across his forehead. It looked like he’d been punched in the face. Fox got away.”

  “He usually does.”

  “We had the building surrounded. It was like he sprouted wings and flew out the open window.”

  Not wings, Kate thought. Nick had made himself invisible by wearing the same tactical outfit as the police who were storming the building. He probably walked right past Gooley.

  “At a press conference tomorrow, Scotland Yard will flog this as a successful joint operation with U.S. law enforcement agencies,” Gooley said. “The press will be told it resulted in the apprehension of a highly dangerous international felon. We’ll also hint that a stunning revelation about the true identity of that felon is forthcoming, pending further investigation. Privately, the Yard is getting a slagging from Downing Street for a monumental cock-up that turned a half-kilometer stretch of the Thames into a war zone.”

  “Have you heard from Hollywood yet?”

  “No, but I told dispatch to put Russell Crowe straight through to me when he calls.” Gooley offered Kate his hand. “What you did on the Thames today took guts. You’re one hell of a copper.”

  “So are you.”

  “Cheers, then.” He nodded his thanks and walked out.

  Kate looked into the donut bag, and a doctor in surgical scrubs, mask, and cap came in.

  “We’re ready to remove your spleen,” he announced in a British accent that sounded remarkably like Roger Moore’s.

  “Can I eat my donuts first?” Kate asked.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you. You’re already pushing the limits on those jeans you’re wearing.”

  “I know it’s you,” Kate said to Nick. “That’s the worst British accent
ever. What are you doing here?”

  “I was hoping you’d show me your stitches.”

  “I’m not showing you anything.”

  “I took a big risk coming here to visit you. You could at least show me something.”

  Kate showed him the two fingers that were taped together, one of which was her middle finger.

  “Nice,” Nick said. “Just what I’d expect from the woman who intentionally rammed a yacht into a powerboat.”

  “I hear someone punched Violante in the face.”

  “Only because I didn’t have a yacht handy to plow into him. He had it coming.”

  “That and more,” Kate said. “We’ve destroyed him.”

  “Yeah, this assignment is done, but I have a loose end to tie up.”

  “Serena?”

  “I need to give her the good news.”

  “And break her out of prison?”

  “You don’t really want to know, do you?”

  “No.” Kate grimaced. “Yes.”

  “Which is it?”

  “It’s yes, and I’m going with you.”

  “What about the stitches?”

  “There are only fourteen of them. Let’s not overdramatize this.”

  “I can’t take you into the prison with me, but I’ll let you drive the getaway car,” Fox said.

  “Deal.”

  This wasn’t a gig assigned by Jessup, but Kate had been given the responsibility of babysitting Nick and she was going to do it. She couldn’t talk him out of springing Serena, but she could hang in there and try to minimize the damage.

  La Maison d’arrêt d’Orléans was built in 1896 on the outskirts of the city to hold seventy-five men and a dozen women. Now the prison was surrounded by apartment buildings, and it held more than two hundred men and women awaiting trial. One of those women was Serena Blake.

  Security at the prison was notoriously lax, and the prison had the distinction of being the noisiest one in the country, at least on the outside. People gathered day and night on the sidewalks, and on the rooftops and decks of nearby apartment buildings, to communicate with the prisoners by yelling back and forth, infuriating local residents who couldn’t get any peace. These same people routinely threw cellphones, cigarettes, knives, sandwiches, drugs, and other items over the low stone and concrete walls to prisoners on the other side.