The Job: A Fox And O'Hare Novel Part 1

The job.

A Fox and O'Hare novel.

Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg.

FBI Special Agent Kate O'Hare slouched back in her tan leather executive office chair, looked across her desk, and surveyed the lobby of the Tarzana branch of California Metro Bank. The desk actually belonged to the a.s.sistant manager. Kate was occupying it because she was waiting for the bank to get robbed. She'd been waiting four days, and she was wis.h.i.+ng it would happen soon, because she was going gonzo with boredom.

The boredom vanished and her posture improved when two businessmen wearing impeccably tailored suits walked through the bank's double gla.s.s doors. One of the men wore Ray-Bans and had a Louis Vuitton backpack slung over his shoulder. The other man was stylishly unshaven and had a raincoat draped casually over his right arm. It hadn't rained in L.A. in two months, and no rain was expected, so Kate figured these might be the guys she'd been waiting to arrest, and that one of them wasn't all that good at hiding a weapon.

The man wearing the Ray-Bans went directly into the manager's gla.s.s-walled office. The man with the raincoat approached Kate's desk and sat down across from her. His gaze immediately went to her chest, which was entirely understandable, as she was wearing a push-up bra under her Ann Taylor pantsuit that made her b.r.e.a.s.t.s burst out of her open blouse like Poppin' Fresh dough. This wasn't a favored look for Kate, but she was the job, and if it took cleavage to capture some slime-ball, then she was all about it.

"May I help you, sir?" Kate asked.

"Call me Slick," the man said.

"Slick?" she said. "Really?"

He shrugged and adjusted the raincoat so that she could see the Sig Sauer 9mm semiautomatic underneath it. "Keep smiling and relax. I'm simply a businessman talking to you about opening a new account."

Kate glanced toward the office of the manager. FBI Special Agent Seth Ryerson was behind the manager's desk, and the real manager was working as one of the bank's four tellers. The Ray-Bans guy was giving Ryerson instructions. Ryerson turned to look at Kate, and she could see that sweat was already beading on his balding head. As soon as any action started, Ryerson always broke out in a sweat. In five minutes, he'd be soaked. It was never pretty.

Kate and Ryerson had been working undercover, following a tip, hoping the men would show up. The bank fit the profile of the six other San Fernando Valley banks the Businessman Bandits had held up over the last two months. The Tarzana bank was a stand-alone building in a largely residential area and was within a block of a freeway on-ramp and a major interchange.

Kate knew there was a third "businessman" in a car idling in the parking lot. She also knew that an FBI strike team was parked around the corner waiting to move in.

"What do you want me to do?" Kate asked Slick.

"Sit there and be pretty. Here's how it's going to work, sweetie. My a.s.sociate is telling your manager to take the backpack to the vault and bring it back filled with cash or I will put a bullet in your chest. My a.s.sociate will then leave the bank, but I will stick around for a minute flirting with you. If any dye packs explode, or any alarms go off, I will shoot you. If nothing goes wrong, I'll simply get up and walk out the door, no harm done. All you have to do is stay calm, and this will all be over soon."

It was the same speech he'd given to the women at the other banks the Businessman Bandits had held up. Slick always picked a young woman with cleavage to threaten with his gun, which was why Kate had worn the push-up bra. She'd wanted to be his target.

Kate looked past Slick to the lobby and the bank tellers. There were seven customers in the bank, four at the counter and three in line. No one seemed to notice that anything unusual was happening. Ryerson left the Ray-Bans guy in his office and took the Vuitton backpack to the vault.

Kate's iPhone vibrated on her desk. JAMES BOND showed up on the caller ID.

"Ignore it," Slick said. "Look at me instead."

Kate s.h.i.+fted her gaze back to Slick's carefully unshaven face, his stubble a shadow on his thin cheeks and sharp chin. The phone went still. After fifteen seconds it began to vibrate again. James Bond wasn't a man who gave up easily.

"That's annoying," Slick said. "Do you always take personal phone calls during work hours?"

"If they're important."

The phone continued to vibrate.

"Shut it off," Slick said. "Now."

Kate shut the phone down. A moment later her desk phone rang.

"I don't like this," Slick said. "On your feet. We're walking out of here."

"It's just a phone call," Kate said. "It's probably my mother."

"Up!" he said. "And start walking. If anyone approaches you, I'm shooting you first and then whoever else gets in my way. Clear?"

This isn't good, Kate thought. There were customers conducting business, coming and going, and there was a possibility that one of them would accidentally cross their path.

"Should I take my purse?"

"No."

"Won't it look odd if I walk out of the bank without my purse?"

"Where is it?"

"The bottom drawer, to my right."

"Stay where you are, and I'll open the drawer. Do not move."

He stood and moved around the desk, all the while keeping his eyes on Kate. He held the Sig in his right hand and reached down to open the drawer with his left. The instant his attention s.h.i.+fted from Kate to the drawer, she smacked him hard in the face with her keyboard. His eyes went blank, the gun dropped from his hand, blood gushed out of his smashed nose, and he crashed to the floor, unconscious.

Kate picked the gun up and aimed it at his partner in the manager's office.

"FBI!" she yelled. "Don't move. Put your hands on your head."

Mr. Ray-Bans did as he was told. Everyone in the bank froze, too, startled by her outburst and shocked by the sight of her holding the gun.

Ryerson rushed out of the vault, his gun drawn, big sweat stains under his armpits. He looked confused. "What happened?"

"I had to go to Plan B," Kate said. She turned to the customers in the bank. "Relax, everyone. We have the situation entirely under control, and you aren't in any danger."

Kate's desk phone wouldn't stop ringing. She kept her gun aimed at Mr. Ray-Bans in the manager's office, and s.n.a.t.c.hed at the phone with her other hand.

"What?" she said.

"Is that any way to talk to James Bond?"

"You're not James Bond."

It was Nick Fox, and truth is, Kate thought Nick was pretty darn close to James Bond. A little younger and mostly on the other side of the law, but just as lethal and just as s.e.xy.

Fox was a world-cla.s.s con man and thief. Kate had tracked him for years and finally captured him, only to have her boss, Carl Jessup, and Fletcher Bolton, the deputy director of the FBI, arrange Nick's escape. In return for conditional freedom, Nick had agreed to use his unique skills to nail big-time criminals the Bureau couldn't catch using conventional means.

Kate had been given the unwanted responsibility of helping Nick neutralize the bad guys. She was also supposed to make sure Nick didn't go back to his life of crime. The Bureau didn't have Nick under constant surveillance or wearing a tracking device between a.s.signments, so it was up to Kate to keep him on a loose leash. It had been a few days since she'd last spoken to him.

"Did I catch you at a bad time?" Nick asked.

"Yes. What do you want?"

"I didn't do it."

Kate went silent for a beat. She had no clue what he was talking about, but whatever it was, at least he hadn't done it. That was good, right?

"I'm kind of busy right now," she said.

"No problem. I just thought you'd want to know."

Kate hung up, and the phone rang again. It was Carl Jessup.

"Your cellphone isn't working," Jessup said.

"That's because I'm in the middle of a bank robbery thing."

"We've got a big problem," Jessup said in his distinctive Kentucky tw.a.n.g. "Yesterday, Nicolas Fox stole a five-million-dollar Matisse from the Gleaberg Museum of Art in Nashville."

"Are you sure it was Nick?" she asked, watching as Ryerson called in the troops and cuffed Mr. Ray-Bans.

"I've just texted you a photo from one of the museum's security cameras."

Kate turned her phone on and clicked on MESSAGES. The photo showed a man in an oversize hoodie holding a painting under his arm. The man's face was partly obscured by the hood, but she could see enough to recognize Nick.

"I've never seen Nick in a hoodie before," Kate said.

"I'm not interested in his fas.h.i.+on choices," Jessup said.

"You don't understand, sir," Kate said. "Nick shops on Savile Row, not at the outlet mall. He wouldn't wear a hoodie from Old Navy."

"He was trying to blend in with the local yokels."

"How did he steal the painting?"

"He walked into the museum in broad daylight and took it off the wall."

"Where's the fun in that?"

"He got away with it, didn't he?"

"Yes, but that's not why he steals or swindles. It's all about the challenge of the crime or the person he's targeting. What's the point of just lifting a painting? Anybody could do that."

"Maybe he lacks impulse control," Jessup said. "The reason doesn't matter. What matters is that he did it. He broke our deal."

"It doesn't add up. If he wanted to break the deal, he'd pull off something really big, an ambitious hustle with a payoff in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This is small-time."

"Five million dollars isn't small-time to me," Jessup said. "We've kept him too busy to pull off anything more elaborate. So he grabbed the low-hanging fruit."

Kate thought about it as she looked through the bank's double gla.s.s doors. The strike team agents, guns drawn and wearing Kevlar vests, were converging on a BMW and pulling a man out of the driver's seat. Five million dollars would probably be a dream score for the three guys they were arresting today, but not to a master criminal like Nick Fox. He'd had the chance to run off with a half billion dollars during their first a.s.signment together, and he'd resisted the temptation. This felt wrong. Not to mention he'd just called, and she a.s.sumed that this theft was the thing he hadn't done.

"Nick is smart and discreet," she said. "Why would he let himself be caught on camera?"

"To give us the finger. The Gleaberg is only a block from the Davidson County Sheriff's Office. He's really rubbing our nose in it."

This was the first aspect of the crime that felt to Kate like a Nick Fox caper. It took chutzpah to take a painting from a museum so close to hundreds of cops. Even so, she wasn't sold.

"I want you to get on a plane to Nashville and take him down fast," Jessup said, ending the call.

Kate blew out a sigh, hung up the desk phone, and stuffed her iPhone into her pocket. She looked down at Slick, who was still on his back, bleeding from his nose. His eyes were open but unfocused.

"Hey," she said to him. "Are you okay?"

"I don't know. How do I look?"

"Like a train wreck." She stuck his gun under her waistband and yanked him to his feet. "Let's go."

Kate turned Slick over to the strike team and joined Ryerson.

"So what's the big crisis?" Ryerson asked.

She pulled her phone out and showed Ryerson the photo. "Fox has come out into the open again."

"Lucky you."

Kate walked to her car, a white Crown Vic police interceptor she'd bought at an LAPD auction. Like many FBI agents, she kept a go bag, a packed duffel bag of clothes and toiletries, in the trunk. The duffel bag had been in there for three months and her clothes probably smelled like her spare tire, but she could head straight to LAX and catch the next flight to Nashville. Before that happened, she needed to talk to Nick.

He answered on the second ring. "Remington Steele, at your service."

"Remington Steele? You've got to be kidding."

"Is it too on the nose?"

"I thought you were James Bond today."

"I'm trying to keep things interesting."

"My fear is that you're trying to keep things too interesting."

"Everything I've done lately I've done with you," Nick said.

"Not everything."

"Not for lack of trying. But a man has his needs."

There was a time not so long ago when Fox's s.e.xual banter annoyed Kate. Now she was annoyed to find that she was enjoying it.

"Where are you?" she asked him.