The Job (2 page)

“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 glass 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 assignment together, and he’d resisted the temptation. This felt wrong. Not to mention he’d just called, and she assumed 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 sexual banter annoyed Kate. Now she was annoyed to find that she was enjoying it.

“Where are you?” she asked him.

“On my yacht.”

“You have a yacht?”

“I do this week,” he said.

“I suppose you’re somewhere with clear blue skies and no extradition treaty.”

“Marina del Rey.”

“Really?”

“Come see for yourself,” he said, and gave her the slip number.

The gleaming Italian-made yacht at the end of the dock was eighty feet long with sweeping, forward-striving curves that expressed wealth and an urgent desire to keep moving. Nick was standing on the flybridge, sipping a glass of champagne, watching Kate march down the deck. There was an easygoing, natural elegance about him, accented by his aviator shades, white linen shirt, salt-washed chinos, and the sea breeze ruffling his brown hair. He didn’t look like a man expecting to be hauled back to prison.

Kate reached the yacht and looked up at him. “Where did you get this?”

“It belongs to a playboy sheik whose hobby is spending his family’s oil money making movies. This is where he stays when he comes to L.A. to play producer. I’m yacht-sitting for him.”

“Does he know that?”

“No, but I’m sure it would give him enormous peace of mind knowing someone was taking good care of his boat.”

She came on board and met him on the flybridge, which was outfitted with a wet bar, a grill, and a U-shaped lounge that wrapped around a teak table on which a platter of shrimp was set.

“What’s your connection to the sheik?” she asked, accepting a glass of champagne.

“He invested in one of my movies.”

“You don’t make movies.”

“That was the fun of getting him to invest.” He gestured to her outfit with his glass. “You look like a banker who is very proud of her assets.”

“I was undercover,” Kate said.

“No doubt springing a trap for the Businessman Bandits. Did you get them?”

“Yep.” She took a shrimp from the platter on the teak table and dabbed it in some cocktail sauce. “How did you know that’s who I was after?”

“I like to keep current.”

He stole a glance at her cleavage just as she accidentally dropped a shrimp tail into it.

“Nice catch,” Nick said, grinning.

Kate looked down at herself, retrieved the shrimp tail, and tossed it into the water. “I knew these breasts would come in
handy someday. I assume you know about the theft of a Matisse in Nashville yesterday?”

“It’s what I didn’t do. The theft was a crime of opportunity. High-end shoplifting.”

Kate showed him the cellphone with his picture on it. “That’s you in the picture.”

“That’s someone
disguised
as me, ruining my reputation.”

“And framing you for a crime.”

He waved that off. “I’m already a wanted man. What bothers me is that this heist makes me seem desperate and sloppy. This is obviously a ploy to send the FBI in the wrong direction while the thief makes a clean getaway. But it shouldn’t be too hard for us to catch him.”

“There is no ‘us’ on this.” She put the phone back in her pocket. “I’ll handle it.”

“It’s my good name that he smeared.”

“You don’t have a good name, and the last place you should be right now is in Nashville, where everyone with a badge is looking for you.”

She understood, though, why he was willing to take the risk. He was thinking like a con man and thief, not someone who was secretly working for the FBI. In Nick’s profession, his status within the underworld came from his crimes and the word of mouth they generated among his peers and, to a greater degree, those less skilled than he. His status was important because it determined the quality of crew he could recruit and the buyers
he could line up on those rare occasions when he wanted to sell what he stole.

“You need my help to catch him,” Nick said.

“No, I don’t. Catching bad guys is what I do,” she said. “I caught you, remember?”

“You just love reminding me of that.”

“I certainly do,” she said, helping herself to another shrimp.

Kate called Jessup on the way to LAX and told him she believed Nick was being set up. The fact that Nick wasn’t on the run, and that she’d found him in L.A. on a big-bucks yacht belonging to a former mark, made it much easier for her to convince her boss that she was right.

“I’m relieved to hear Nick didn’t do it,” Jessup said. “We’ve had a lot of success with your covert operation. I’d hate to shut it down now. I want you to find the joker who did this, and do it fast. The Nashville field office is expecting you and will give you all the resources you need.”

Kate caught a nonstop flight to Nashville at 2:30
P
.
M
. and spent the four-hour flight thinking about the stolen Matisse.

In her experience, there were two motives for stealing a masterpiece. Money and ownership.

Sometimes the thief stole the painting because it was worth a fortune. This kind of criminal frequently acted on impulse and had no clue how to sell the stolen art. Guys like this usually got caught very quickly. If they didn’t get caught, they’d end up stashing the painting in their garage, tossing it in a dumpster, or
anonymously returning it. Someone like that wouldn’t go to the trouble to masquerade as Nick Fox.

Other times the thief stole the painting intending to immediately ransom it back to the owners or the insurance company. This was perhaps the most common approach, and it often succeeded for the thief. Collectors were often more desperate for the paintings than they were for justice. Once the owners had been contacted, they would make the payoff and keep the FBI in the dark until they got their painting back.

Art was also stolen for collateral. Kate knew that cash-strapped crooks stole enormously valuable paintings to use as collateral in drug and weapons deals. An unframed canvas was like a truck full of gold bars, only much lighter to carry and easier to move across borders. Paintings used like this could bounce around the black market for years without ever ending up on anyone’s wall. When they did turn up, it was as an unexpected find during police raids on gangs, terrorists, or drug and arms dealers.

And there were the made-to-order heists. Some outrageously wealthy and powerful people had shopping lists of famous works of art they wanted for their personal, very private, collections. Once they got their hands on a masterpiece, it would never be seen again. Kate and Nick had recently brought down someone like that in an elaborate sting.

The second motive, and one that was rarely encountered, was ownership. The thief stole the painting for his own collection. Nick was sometimes that kind of thief.

And now that she thought about it, she realized Nick was a unique thief with a third motive. Nick stole because it was fun and exciting, and because he was good at it.

So what was the motive for this heist? The thief had stolen the painting like an amateur acting out of greed, taking something valuable because it was within easy reach. But masquerading as Nick Fox showed a high level of sophistication, and a knowledge of the players in the big leagues of crime. That didn’t fit the greed scenario.

If the painting was stolen for ransom, then the museum had already heard from the thieves, or they would soon. She’d have to keep the key administrators under watch for any suspicious activity.

Someone taking the painting for collateral wouldn’t waste time on creative flourishes like setting up Nick. They cared only about the painting and what it could bring them in a trade. Super-rich people with shopping lists of masterpieces wanted discretion from their thieves and wouldn’t appreciate the glance at the camera, even if it was intended as misdirection. So she ruled out theft-to-order.

If she took money off the table for now, then the only motive left was ownership, which meant the thief was a world-class criminal in the same rarified league as Nick. And that made her wonder if Nick knew more about the crime than he was telling.

“It’s hard for me to feel much sympathy for Big Mike,” FBI Special Agent Maxine Cutler said.

Cutler was driving Kate to the FBI’s Nashville field office, located two miles north of the airport. Cutler had been waiting at the gate when the plane arrived at 8:45
P
.
M
. She was a big-boned woman in her thirties who looked like she could toss a manhole cover as easily as a Frisbee.

“Who’s Big Mike?” Kate asked.

“Michael Gleaberg,” Cutler said. “It’s his museum that got hit. Serves him right. He discovered and managed some of the biggest country music stars of the seventies and eighties and got stinking rich off them. He looked for kids with lots of talent and no education so they’d foolishly sign contracts that gave him everything but their souls. Big Mike made them famous by bribing DJs to play their songs. He was at the center of a huge payola scandal in the late nineties, but the Bureau couldn’t make any charges stick to him.”

They crossed under the I-40 into a neighborhood of warehouses, office buildings, and airport hotels.

“He never greased any palms himself,” Cutler said. “He always had his flunkies do it. So his flunkies got jail time, and his company was fined millions and barred from the record business, but he didn’t care. His clients were already stars, so he was happy to just sit back and rake in his lion’s share of their earnings.”

“Which he spent on art,” Kate said.

“For a reason.” Cutler pulled into the parking lot of a two-story office building. The only things indicating it was a government office were the American and Tennessee flags
outside the front door. “The big players on the coasts treated him like a dumb hillbilly. He figured they’d respect a man who had Picassos, Rembrandts, and Matisses hanging in his house.”