The Job: A Fox And O'Hare Novel Part 5

"It's human nature," Nick said. "Context is a huge part of how we process information. This is the last place the police expect to see me, so they don't."

Kate thought that was a load of baloney, but she didn't want her nose to wrinkle so she moved on.

"Okay, now what?" she asked him.

"I want to talk to her. You can make it look real by telling Bernard there's the possibility of a plea bargain."

Kate opened the door and gestured for Bernard to come back in. "I told Picard that we'd make a deal, trim some time off Serena's sentence, if he convinces his client to tell us where she's stashed everything that she's stolen. I can talk the U.S. Justice Department into it. Will you back me on that with the French prosecutor?"

Bernard didn't look too happy about it, but he nodded anyway. "We have her, and we have our paintings back, that's what matters to us. So yes, I think I can talk him into it. I can also have a word with my counterpart in Germany, but I doubt Turkish authorities will be so generous."

"They will if they want their goblet back in pristine condition," Nick said.

"All right, Picard," Kate said. "Let's see what you can do for us."

Bernard opened the door to the interrogation room. "Your lawyer is here to see you," he told Serena.

Nick squeezed past Bernard, whose body filled the doorway, and Serena went wide-eyed with surprise.

"Yes, it is I, Jean-Luc," Nick said. "I'm always here for you."

He went to her and kissed both of her cheeks. Bernard grabbed Nick's shoulder and pulled him back with a stern warning. "Gardez vos distances, Picard. You may speak to your client, but you must not touch."

"Oui, bien sur, je m'en excuse." Nick apologized to him, took a seat across the table from Serena, and looked soulfully into her eyes. "Tell me, what horrors have you endured?"

Bernard groaned and closed the door, leaving the lawyer alone to speak with his client.

"I wouldn't call pulling off a string of international heists the most ideal way to communicate with someone," Nick said to Serena.

"You didn't give me any choice. You completely disappeared after your escape from the courthouse in Los Angeles."

"I'm on the FBI and Interpol's most wanted lists," Nick said. "I didn't think it was a good idea to tweet."

"Since I couldn't find you, I came up with a way to make you find me."

He had to admire her for that. At least she'd learned something from him.

"Here I am," he said. "What's so important that you'd risk going to prison in four different countries just to get my attention?"

"Are you familiar with Lester Menendez?"

"A really lovely guy," Nick said. "An international thug who got his start in Colombia, worked his way up in the cocaine and heroin trade by murdering the people he worked for, including his own father and uncles, and taking over their operation. He quickly expanded into the United States and Europe by butchering his compet.i.tion, literally and with s.a.d.i.s.tic delight. He got very rich and very fat. He narrowly escaped a raid by the DEA, FBI, and ATF on his New Mexico compound two years ago. Rumor is that he fled to Europe, where he had full-body plastic surgery and killed everybody on the surgical team to protect his new ident.i.ty."

Serena was rigid while Nick was talking. Her lips were pressed tight, her jaw clenched, her eyes steely and unblinking.

"The rumors are true," Serena said. "The bodies of the plastic surgeon and his two a.s.sistants were found stuffed into an oil drum off a highway in Spain. Their throats were slit so deeply, they were nearly decapitated. But before they were killed, they were tortured, probably to find out if they'd shared details about Menendez's new ident.i.ty with anyone else. The plastic surgeon was Sean."

Nick took a moment to absorb the shock. "I'm sorry," he said. "I had no idea."

"It wasn't made public. Sean was quietly buried in the family plot. His obituary said he'd had a short illness."

Nick had never met Serena's older brother, but he knew all about him. Sean was a hardworking, straight-arrow, responsible young man who'd graduated from Oxford University Medical School, married a nice girl, and never had so much as a speeding ticket. Serena, on the other hand, had graduated from Oxford with a bachelor's degree in fine art and started breaking into estates, galleries, and museums.

"Why did Sean agree to operate on Menendez?" Nick asked.

"Sean had big gambling debts. He was about to lose his practice, his wife, his house, everything. He was embarra.s.sed to ask the family for help. The loan sharks put Menendez on to him. I suppose Sean thought the operation would get him out of the hole he'd dug for himself. Instead, he dug himself a grave." She shook her head. "The two of us had it all. We came from a wealthy Oxford family, we had Oxford University educations, and what happened to us? He became a compulsive gambler who got himself killed, and I became a thief who will probably die in prison."

"How can I help?" Nick asked.

"I want to find Menendez and destroy him, but I don't have the skills to do it. You do."

"I'm not an a.s.sa.s.sin."

"I don't want you to kill him. I want you to take him down. Gut his empire. Empty his bank accounts. Reduce him to nothing. For Menendez, that would be even worse than death. And I want to help you do it, so you'll have to break me out of jail, too."

"I'll do what I can to take down Menendez, but I'm temporarily leaving you behind bars. I don't want to raise any red flags that might spook Menendez."

More than that, he couldn't take a chance on Serena tagging along and discovering he was working for the FBI.

Kate and Bernard were in the conference room having an early breakfast of French bread and b.u.t.ter and a few slices of aged ham when Nick knocked once on the doorjamb and stepped in.

"Do we have an agreement?" Kate asked Nick. "Will she tell us where to find the stolen property?"

"Not until she has written a.s.surance from the United States, German, and Turkish authorities that her sentences will be reduced," Nick said.

"That could take weeks," Bernard said.

"She's not going anywhere, no?" Nick said. "We can wait. But the same can't be said for the things you want. The paintings must be kept in climate-controlled conditions, away from moisture and heat. Who knows if they are?"

"She does," Bernard said.

Nick shrugged. "I'd move quickly if I were you, just to be on the safe side. A bientot."

"Ca.s.se-toi," Bernard muttered when Nick left the room. "Debile."

Kate didn't need to speak French to know a profanity and insult when she heard one.

"That goes double for me," she said, earning a smile from Bernard.

Kate returned to her room at the Ibis Orleans Centre Gare, a modern three-star hotel directly across from the train station with the charm of a budget chain in the States. She'd been looking forward to a moment of calm to reorganize, but she'd walked in to the sound of the shower running and Nick's fake mustache lying on the bed like a tiny dead hairy animal.

"Debile!" she yelled in the vicinity of the bathroom.

There was no answer so she kicked off her shoes, stretched out on the bed, and put the pillow over her face. She heard the water stop running, then sensed she wasn't alone.

"You're going to miss the good stuff with that pillow over your face," Nick said.

"What good stuff did you have in mind?" she asked.

"Me naked."

Kate took the pillow off her face and looked at him. He was wearing a towel that hung low on his hips.

"You're not naked," Kate said.

"I could be."

She pulled the pillow back over her face.

"I get the feeling you're not happy to see me," Nick said.

"Gee, how'd you figure that one out?"

"I can't hear you," Nick said. "You're talking into the pillow."

Kate ripped the pillow off her face and sat up, pop-eyed, arms flailing. "You have to stop breaking into my room! I need privacy sometimes. I need to get away from you. We're partners, not lovers."

"Your loss," Nick said.

He dropped his towel and stepped into boxer briefs.

"Good grief," Kate said.

Wow! She thought. The man was freaking perfect.

"It turns out that Serena's brother was the plastic surgeon who gave Lester Menendez a new face and a new body," Nick said. "When the operation was complete, Menendez tortured and killed Serena's brother."

"Oh my gosh, how horrible."

"A few years back, a con to trick a Somali warlord out of a piracy ransom went very wrong, and I found myself locked in a tiger cage, facing a sunrise execution. Instead of cutting and running with the rest of my crew, Serena stayed behind, crept into the heavily guarded compound in the middle of the night, and rescued me. We barely made it out of Somalia alive."

"So you owe her."

"Big-time. Even if I didn't, I would still help her. She's a good person, and Menendez is evil."

"She wants you to kill him?"

"No. She wants me to destroy him."

"Nice. I like it."

"I imagine your boss will also like it," Nick said.

"Every law enforcement agency in the world wants Menendez. He still controls a big chunk of the drug trade in North America and Europe. Unfortunately, no one knows what he looks like now or where he is. And even if we did, we don't have his DNA or any fingerprints we can use to identify him. He set fire to his house, so we lost our chance to collect anything we could use to create a DNA profile. And I can guarantee you he also burned off his fingerprints. He could be anybody."

"He's still the same person inside," Nick said. "He still has the same strengths, weaknesses, longings, and obsessions. Before his radical surgery, Menendez was a fat man who put on the pounds devouring the most expensive and rare chocolates in the world. I can guarantee he still likes them. He's also been obsessed with finding sunken treasure ever since he was a kid in Colombia and found doubloons that washed ash.o.r.e from a seventeenth-century s.h.i.+pwreck. Those are the weaknesses we're going to exploit."

"You think you can just wave a Hershey bar and some gold coins under the right nose, and he'll introduce himself to you?"

"Pretty much. I came up with something in the shower."

The image of Nick naked was burned into Kate's brain, and she had a vision of what else came up in the shower.

"We're going to use Menendez's l.u.s.t for rare chocolate to narrow down his new ident.i.ty," Nick said. "Once we've found him, we're going to convince him that we've discovered the legendary Santa Isabel, a Spanish galleon that sank in a storm in 1502 off the coast of Portugal with over a billion dollars' worth of treasure on board."

"That's the bait," she said. "What's the trap?"

"I'm still refining some of the details on the trap."

"Oh boy," Kate said. "You don't know the details."

"I know some of them." He flipped the quilt back and sat on the edge of the bed.

Kate's eyes got wide. "What are you doing?"

"Going to bed. I've been up all night."

"This is my bed."

"It's our bed."

"No, no, no. There's no our. Get out of my bed," Kate said.

"No."

"I could shoot you, you know. I'm an FBI agent and you're a felon."

"You don't have a gun."

d.a.m.n. He was right. She hated not having a gun. And she missed her FBI windbreaker. This whole out-of-country thing sucked.

"What about the trap details?" she asked him. "Don't you want to work out the details?"

"I know we want to recruit your dad, and probably the crew we've used in the past. Tom Underhill, Willie, and Boyd Capwell. I'll work out the rest of the details while I sleep." He slipped under the quilt and patted the spot next to him. "Come to bed and leave it all to me. I do some of my best work when I'm in bed."

Kate was sure that was true.

Jake O'Hare approached his Denny's Grand Slam breakfast like one of the many covert military operations he'd led for Uncle Sam before his retirement. He nibbled at it from various angles, picking away at the egg whites until the yolk was completely exposed, conquering the yolk with some strategic stabs of bacon, then attacking the unprotected mountain of b.u.t.termilk pancakes in a full frontal a.s.sault that didn't leave a surviving crumb. When he was done, he carefully mopped everything up with his toast until the plate was clean and there was no evidence he'd ever touched it.

Kate had just come back to L.A. on a red-eye from Paris, and had cleaned her plate with a lot less cunning than her dad.

"I love watching you eat, Dad," Kate said. "You're so methodical about it."

Jake took a sip of his coffee, black with no sugar, and leaned back in the booth, resting a tan, muscled arm on the top of the vinyl seat. He kept his body in lean fighting shape and his gray hair trimmed in a regulation buzz cut, more out of habit than anything else.

"I'm methodical about everything," Jake said. "And I'm cute. Yesterday I was in the supermarket and the checkout lady told me I was adorable."

"Kittens and baby shoes are adorable," Kate said. "Do you really want to be lumped together with kittens and baby shoes?"