The Job: A Fox And O'Hare Novel Part 19

"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 c.o.ke 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 a.s.sistance?"

"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 n.o.body 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 protege 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. .h.i.t 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 h.e.l.l 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 n.o.body 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 exColombian rebel who joined the Menendez cartel shortly before Menendez disappeared."

"It's still circ.u.mstantial."

"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 gla.s.s 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 cigarette. "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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 b.u.m." 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 b.u.t.t 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."

Gooley popped the trunk, grabbed Kate's duffel bag, and led her down to Cadogan Pier. It was underneath the first span of the Albert Bridge and ran parallel to the Chelsea Embankment. A dozen barge-like houseboats, a couple sporty yachts, and some small pleasure craft were moored there.

Gooley stopped in front of a sixty-five-foot yacht that looked like a smaller version of the one Nick had borrowed in Marina del Rey. A small motorized dinghy was tied to the yacht's swim deck.

"We seized this yacht a month ago from a villain in the white slavery trade," Gooley said. "It's due to go up for auction, but in the meantime it's just bobbing around here. So far as I know it's just as it was when we took possession with bed linens and such. I figure you might as well use it. As I remember there's even a pair of binoculars inside, unless someone's snitched them. I'll pick you up tomorrow, bring you back to the Yard, and we'll go over the details of the operation. The key is under the doormat."

The yacht was furnished like a five-star hotel, with lots of marble, leather, and polished wood. The binoculars were on the dinette table. Kate picked them up and looked at the eighteenth-floor river-facing suite where the exchange would go down. The lights were off and she couldn't see anything. Only one condo was lit in the building. It was on the ninth floor. Most likely the Malcolms'.

Nick called on her cellphone.

"I see you've settled in beside the Trembling Lady," Nick said.

"Is that the yacht parked beside mine?"

"It's what they call the Albert Bridge. It's been structurally unsound and shaking since the day it opened in 1874. There's still a sign on either end warning soldiers not to walk across it in step or the mechanical resonance could cause the bridge to collapse."

"Not much chance of any soldiers doing that today."

"What you've got to worry about is a dog relieving himself. Over a hundred and forty years of dog urine, from pooches being walked across the bridge to Battersea Park, have rotted the timber decks. This could be the day a pooch lifts his leg and takes the bridge down."

"You're making that up," she said. "Or it's an urban legend."

"It's the truth," Nick said. "I read it in a scholarly book on bridge engineering."

Kate shook her head in the dark privacy of the boat salon. Nick Fox was so full of baloney, and was such a convincing liar, that it was impossible to consistently separate fact from fiction. Even after working with him on several jobs she couldn't always tell when he was handing her a load of horse pucky.

"I've set up the meeting with Violante," Nick said. "We're good to go."

"It's going to be a major police operation. One tiny miscalculation and you'll end up in prison."

"Just another day at the office," he said.

She remembered her father saying the same thing over breakfast at Denny's a few weeks ago. The casual observation had been as true for Jake then as it was for Nick now. It wasn't the first time she'd been struck, and more than a little creeped out, by what the two most important men in her life had in common, besides her.

"Scotland Yard is running this," she said. "I won't be able to help you."

"What matters to me is that you wish you could," Nick said. "I think you're falling for me."

"That's a frightening thought," Kate said. "It sends chills down my spine."

It was a flip reply, but it had some truth to it. She lived in mortal fear of falling for him. What woman wouldn't fall for him? He was exciting and s.e.xy and rich. He even smelled good. Appreciating his value as a partner was acceptable. Falling for him was terrifying.

Kate spent the next day at Scotland Yard planning the logistics of the stakeout and arrest with Gooley. He'd beefed up the plainclothes police presence in the Battersea Park area. The video feeds from the CCTV cameras were under constant observation. The dedicated surveillance camera and laser microphone were in place in the Chelsea apartment building, trained across the Thames at the Excelsior Tower's eighteenth floor.

Kate drank coffee and watched the live feed on monitors that were mounted on the wall of the squad room. The drapes of the Excelsior flat were closed, and no lights were on. Gooley a.s.sured Kate that if there was a fly in that room, they'd hear it buzzing. She'd been given a police radio, a Kevlar vest, and a yellow windbreaker with the word POLICE printed across the back, but it had been made clear that she was an observer and not a partic.i.p.ant. Standard operating procedure, Kate thought. It was what it was.

At the end of the day, Gooley and two dozen of his detectives gathered in a conference room for one last briefing. The long table was covered with laptops, scattered papers, coffee cups, and takeout food containers. The walls were plastered with pictures of the Excelsior Tower, blueprints of the building, various photos of Nicolas Fox, and street maps.

Gooley took out a laser pointer and aimed the beam at the maps. "Let's go over it one more time. Fox is a pro. He's going to spot us on the street if we're watching, so we've got to hang back and rely on our cameras. We'll have our strike teams waiting in Battersea Park, and on the Chelsea side of the Battersea and Albert bridges, far enough away not to be noticed, but close enough to move in quickly when I give the word. And we'll also have a chopper in the air. n.o.body moves in until I give the green light. At that point, we'll surround the building. We'll land blue team on the roof by chopper while red team secures the parking garage, yellow team secures the lobby, and green team seals the perimeter. The goal is complete containment."

Kate felt deja vu throughout the briefing. She'd tried to spring a trap like this on Nick many times before and had given basically the same instructions to her teams. It took her quite a while, and several failures, to realize her mistake and think outside the box to capture him. Luckily for Nick, Gooley was still firmly inside the box.

"We can't a.s.sume the blueprints we have of the flats are accurate," Gooley said. "There could be hidden safe rooms and escape routes that we don't know about. What we do know is that many of the flats have a private lift and, in some cases, a lift for the car as well. The good news is that it's a tower. There are basically only two ways out, from the top or from the bottom, and we'll have both ends covered. So once both men are inside that building, they are ours."

"But you can't move in until the exchange goes down," Kate said. "Or we've got nothing on Menendez."

"Exactly," Gooley said. "And we need to remember that whether it's Violante or Menendez, he's carrying the equivalent of twenty-five million dollars to this party. He's going to have a small army along with him for protection. We don't want this to become a firefight. But if it does, take them down hard and fast."

Kate and Gooley picked up fish and chips to go on the way back to the yacht. They ate the beer-battered cod and thick-cut fries outside on the flybridge with the Albert Bridge brightly lit behind them.

"Is it true that the Albert Bridge is rotted with dog pee?" Kate asked, dipping her fish in tartar sauce.

"Yeah, but they say they've fixed it. On the other hand, they've been fixing the bridge since the day it was opened, and it still shakes, so I don't buy it. This is a lousy stretch of the Thames for bridges." Gooley gestured to the Battersea Bridge behind her. Composed of five low cast-iron arches supported by granite pillars across a sharp bend in the Thames, it wasn't lit up in a showy fas.h.i.+on like the Albert. "That one is st.u.r.dier, but s.h.i.+ps have been ramming into it for hundreds of years. A whale even got stuck underneath it a few years back. They've got the poor sod's skeleton in the natural history museum. I wouldn't want to be immortalized for the humiliating accident that killed me."

"How about as the guy who captured Nicolas Fox and Lester Menendez?"

"That'd be nice," Gooley said. "I could retire on that one."