The Pursuit (9 page)

“He's right, Kate,” Nick said. “We'll do our parts and trust that everyone else is doing theirs.”

“So you're in?” Dragan asked.

Nick smiled. “Like you said, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

More diamond robberies, Kate thought. I'm going to spend the rest of my life in jail and then I'm going to burn in hell.

They spent the next hour going over the exact details and timing of the robbery, their escape, and their rendezvous afterward with Dragan, who would not be participating in the crime. The fact that he'd be sitting it out really bothered Kate. It meant that Dragan would be avoiding all the risk and, if things went bad, he'd be able to walk away and go right back to business.

“Now that we have the details straight, you are free to enjoy my property,” Dragan said. “A light lunch will be set on the patio. You can help yourself to refreshments. Your guest suite is just down the hall.”

D
ragan left Kate and Nick and was on his way to his first-floor office when he ran across Litija sitting on a couch, drinking
limoncello
from the bottle.

“I don't understand you, Dragan,” she said in their native Serbian.

“Good. If I was easily understood, I'd also be predictable. I'd be imprisoned or dead by now.”

“
You
told Zarko to leave Nick behind in the vault. You wanted Nick to become the focus of the police investigation and distract them from you. When you lied about it to Nick today, Zarko backed up your story with more lies.” She took a swig from the half-empty bottle. “You rewarded Zarko by pushing him off a cliff to protect your lie from ever being revealed.”

Dragan pitied her. She was a versatile operative, able to go undercover to lay the groundwork for a heist, or use her body to seduce a useful person of either sex, or participate as a pinch hitter in any aspect of the robbery itself. But as effective as she was, she lacked imagination, a chess player's ability to see several moves ahead. She would never become more than she was today, a pawn in someone else's game.
His game.
He didn't like explaining himself to anyone, but he saw it would be necessary if he wanted to keep her.

“You are mistaken, Litija, about why I did it. I made a strategic decision to achieve our objectives. I hadn't counted on Nick escaping, but since fate stepped in and brought him to me I decided he would be an asset. Zarko and Nick would never have worked well together, and I needed the skills that Nick has more than those that Zarko possessed. The only asset Zarko retained was the benefit I could derive from his death. It sent a message to Nick that I was clearing the path for him to join us. So I sacrificed Zarko for the mission.”

This was all true. But Dragan had also been eager to try out his Tiberius Drop. Zarko happened to be standing in the right spot, and Dragan had almost no impulse control. He didn't see the need to share any of that with Litija.

“You see no value in loyalty,” Litija said. “Everyone is expendable to you. You sacrificed Zarko, a fellow Serbian, a man who had loyally served you for years. You have no heart.”

It was a good thing they weren't outside standing on the terrace when she'd said that, or she would have experienced the Tiberius Drop herself. Dragan had zero tolerance for criticism. He supposed he could break her neck, but that would require more effort than he was willing to expend right now. And finding her replacement would be tedious. It would take weeks of interviews, watching candidates demonstrate weapons skills, watching them in hand-to-hand combat with his men, watching them fuck his entire staff, including ugly old toothless Maria, who tended the garden and smelled like dead fish. A shiver of revulsion ripped through him at the memory of Litija with Maria. He had to give it to her. The girl had stamina. And as if all that wasn't exhausting enough, he would have to personally test out the few women who survived. He didn't have the time right now to go through that, so he ignored the insult and answered the underlying question.

“Nick is brilliant, but he doesn't always work alone,” Dragan said. “He often assembles a highly skilled crew for his jobs, and individually they're nearly as good as he is. Until his escape, I didn't know that his crew had any lasting allegiance to him. Now we not only get Nick, but his people, too, to help us on the next phase of our plan, assuming that he passes the place Vendôme test first. We'll be able to accomplish our near-term and long-term objectives much sooner, and with a greater chance of success, than we could have without him.”

Nick and Kate left the house and walked to the far edge of the pool to stand by the waterfall where they couldn't be overheard.

“Airborne?” Kate said. “Are you kidding me? We're going airborne and then we're going to crash through a storefront and smash jewelry cases with a hammer. What is this, Hollywood? That stuff only happens in movies. They use stunt drivers and fake storefronts. People don't actually do this stuff. It isn't done!”

“I think I can do it,” Nick said.

“Think? That indicates doubt. That's right next to I
don't
think I can do it. I want no part of this ridiculous scheme. I'm not robbing a jewelry store in place Vendôme.”

“It could be fun,” Nick said, grinning at Kate. “Flying through the air, smashing into stuff.”

“Seriously?”

Nick shook his head. “No. When I pull a heist I make sure there's no danger to innocent bystanders, and for the most part I only con people who deserve it. This is not something I would ever choose to do. I'm participating in this because there's a lot at stake. We've been tasked to get the smallpox vial, and that's what we're going to do.”

“If we get caught, it will create an international scandal, and we'll lose our best chance at stopping Dragan. He'll go underground. We won't know what he's done with the smallpox until people somewhere start dying horrible deaths.”

“We won't get caught,” Nick said.

“How do you know?”

“Because Dragan and his crew are great at this.”

“You say that like you admire him.”

“I appreciate his skills,” Nick said. “He's a criminal mastermind.”

“He's a homicidal psychopath.”

“That's definitely a character flaw, but he's exceptionally good at what he does. His robberies look like quickly improvised smash-and-grabs. But the truth is they are the result of careful preparation, undercover work, and split-second timing. Dragan has the patience to play the long game. There aren't many people in this business who do.”

“You're willing to play the long game,” Kate said. “On the surface you seem like a spontaneous kind of guy, but you actually have a lot of patience.”

“You noticed.”

“Hard not to.”

“You're referring to my expertise as a master criminal, right?”

“Of course.”

Nick grinned and Kate grinned back.

“There are other times when patience comes in handy,” Nick said.

“Are you bragging?” Kate asked.

“Just saying.”

Place Vendôme, originally called place Louis le Grand, was built in 1699 as a luxury townhouse development for the rich. That's what it was until one day in 1792, during the French Revolution, when nine aristocrats got their heads cut off and stuck on spikes in the middle of the square. Overnight the neighborhood became place des Piques (Place of Spikes) and a popular setting for public executions. It took another hundred years before the square got its new name and once again became an enclave for the rich, not only as a place to live, but more important for the job at hand, to spend outrageous amounts of money on precious jewels.

At exactly 3:57 
P.M.
on Thursday Nicolas Fox drove a black Audi A4 into place Vendôme. Kate O'Hare sat in the passenger seat thinking about all of those heads on spikes and how hers could soon be on one, too, figuratively speaking. The Boucheron jewelry store was directly ahead. The Ministry of Justice was to their left, and there were four police officers armed with M16s standing outside and even more of them inside. This was an extremely dangerous heist, and they were entrusting their escape, and possibly their lives, to the Road Runners and their ability to stop the police from responding. Kate didn't like putting her safety into anyone's hands but her own.

At the same moment that Nick drove into place Vendôme, an identical Audi with two Road Runners inside entered the square from the opposite end of rue de la Paix and headed in their direction. The two cars passed without seeing each other because the sheathed scaffolding and plywood fencing around the 144-foot-tall Colonne Vendôme in the center of the plaza blocked opposing traffic from view.

“I ambushed a police transport on Monday to rescue a crook and here I am on Thursday, robbing a jewelry store,” Kate said. She and Nick were buckled tight into their seats and wore matching crash helmets with tinted visors that obscured their faces. “They didn't train us for this at Quantico.”

“That's why the FBI needs me to catch people like me. Sometimes you have to commit crimes to prevent bigger crimes,” Nick said. “The curriculum at Quantico needs to be changed. They should invite us in to teach.”

The very thought gave Kate a queasy stomach.

Ahead of them, four construction workers emerged from behind the
colonne
's fence, crossed the street, and laid the ends of two scaffold platforms down on the small steel pillars that stuck out from the sidewalk in front of Boucheron.

“I'll be sure to mention the change in curriculum when I testify in my defense,” Kate said. “Maybe I can get the charges against me reduced.”

“Keep that positive attitude,” Nick said. He floored the gas pedal and pressed the horn to warn anyone in the store about what was coming.

The four construction workers scrambled out of the way an instant before the Audi hit the improvised ramp.

Kate's heart stuttered as the car went airborne and headed straight for the elegant limestone façade of the jewelry store, with its large windows and ornamental columns. The building looked monumental and foreboding, daring them to do what the centuries, revolutions, and wars seemingly could not—break down the walls.

Even though she knew the front end of the car had been structurally reinforced for the collision, all of her instincts told her that driving into anything at high speed was suicide. It didn't help that she also knew that the Audi's air bags were disabled. She placed her gloved hands flat on the dashboard and braced for impact.

The Audi blasted through the window in an explosion of glass, plaster, and limestone, smashed through a display case in a spray of diamonds and splintered wood, and came to a stop in the center of the store.

Kate opened her eyes, relieved that she was conscious and in one piece. The windshield was shattered. She could hear alarms ringing. She drew her gun, unbuckled her seatbelt, and got out of the car. Dust was settling like snow. Four store employees were backed up against the far wall in terror. The guard, dressed in a suit like a secret service agent, was rising from the floor near the door and reaching for the gun in his shoulder holster in the same motion.

“Don't do it,” Kate said, aiming her gun at his forehead. “Drop the gun and kick it under the car.” He did as he was told and she gestured to him to join the others against the wall.

Nick smashed display cases with a pickax, scooped up the diamonds, and dumped them into an open backpack that he wore on his chest instead of his back. Kate kept the five employees covered and glanced at the watch on her wrist.

By her estimate, unless something incredible was done, they had less than thirty seconds before the police officers from the Ministry of Justice took them down.

A few moments before the two Audis crashed into the two jewelry stores, two large dump trucks full of rubble that had been parked beside the
colonne
simultaneously pulled out into the rue de la Paix and turned across it, blocking the street and sealing off the plaza from traffic. The drivers leaped out of their trucks and ran away as their vehicles emptied their loads into the street.

At that same instant, a dozen police officers poured out from the Ministry of Justice and ran across the plaza toward the jewelry stores on the two ends of rue de la Paix. That was when a series of carefully timed small explosions started going off like a sequence of fireworks. The blasts released the massive scaffolding around the
colonne,
which unpeeled itself like a giant banana. The poles and scrim tumbled to the plaza and forced the police officers to scramble back to avoid being crushed.

It was in the midst of that smoke, chaos, and destruction that Nick and Kate ran out of the jewelry store, jumped onto two motorcycles parked on rue de la Paix, and sped northwest toward place de l'Opéra, one of the busiest and most crowded intersections in Paris. Seven streets branched off the plaza outside of the grand gilded Paris opera house, creating an enormous churn of man and machine.