The Heist Read online

  There was a double line of cobblestones in the street that marked where the Berlin Wall had once stood. She followed the line, which ran under parked cars and along sidewalks as it meandered over several streets. Nobody but her seemed to notice it. The memorial to a wall that once divided a country, that was the bloody front line of the cold war, got less attention than Jack Webb’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Eventually she found her way to the Fassbender & Rausch Schokoladen-Café at the Gendarmenmarkt, an eighteenth-century market square with ornate cathedrals at either end.

  Fassbender & Rausch, Berlin’s oldest and most renowned chocolatier, occupied the first two floors of a corner building that faced the Gendarmenmarkt. There was an enormous chocolate sculpture of the Reichstag in one of the first-floor windows, and beyond it Kate could see a burbling chocolate volcano in the center of a store filled with an astonishing assortment of handmade chocolate delicacies that would have made Willy Wonka mess his pants.

  Kate was afraid she’d lose control in the store, racing up and down the aisles, stuffing her mouth with candy. For sure a good time, but not an attractive picture if she ran into Nick Fox. It might be hard to establish authority after he saw her with chocolate dribbling out of her mouth and running down her chin. So she skipped the store entirely and went straight to the elevator, which took her to the second-floor café. She was expecting an ice cream shop like Ghirardelli in San Francisco, but the café at Fassbender & Rausch was an elegant wood-paneled space that had the feel of a private club.

  Nick was already seated at a corner table, overlooking the Gendarmenmarkt. There weren’t many other people in the café: a young couple in their twenties, two businessmen in suits, a guy in a leather jacket reading Der Spiegel, and a family of tourists with four excited kids.

  Nick rose when she came to the table. “I took the liberty of ordering when I saw you walk up the street,” he said.

  “What did you get?”

  “Everything.”

  A waiter in a crisp white shirt, gray vest, and red tie approached, wheeling a cart. He set down four cups of hot chocolate and a platter of chocolate pastries and candies.

  The Mokka-Creme-Sinfonie had chocolate musical notes atop layers of mocha cream, chocolate ganache, and biscuits. The Mousse au Chocolat-Törtchen was a dome of smooth, dark chocolate filled with chocolate mousse and crowned with gold leaf. And that was only the beginning. Kate got a hot flash just looking at it. It was sex on a platter. She glanced up at Nick and saw that he was watching her. His expression was pleasantly bland, but she knew that somewhere deep in the murky crevices of his diabolical brain he was plotting against her. He was luring her into stupefied complacency with chocolate. The man was pure evil.

  “I know what you’re up to,” Kate said, popping a Törtchen into her mouth. “You’re trying to drug me with chocolate.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  She did a test drive on the hot chocolate. “Do you have any other reasons for being here?”

  “I thought we should talk.”

  “Yes, but why Berlin?”

  “For the symbolism,” he said. “A wall used to divide this city, two bitter enemies on either side. After decades of conflict, the wall came down almost overnight to jubilation on both sides.”

  “I’m not jubilant.” That wasn’t entirely true. Her taste buds were ecstatic. She’d never be able to drink Swiss Miss instant cocoa again.

  “The point I’m making is that people from two very different worlds put their deep distrust of one another aside and worked together. And now the city is thriving. That could be us.”

  “What you’re trying to do is smooth-talk me,” she said.

  “How’s it working?”

  “I’m not one of your marks. You want to impress me? Tell me your plan for getting Burnside to reveal where Griffin is and retrieving the half a billion dollars that he embezzled.”

  “It’s simple,” Nick said, breaking into a warm chocolate cake with his fork. “As long as you don’t mind getting killed.”

  Nick watched Kate eat chocolates while she listened to him explain the con. She didn’t interrupt him with questions and objections, as he’d been expecting, and he worried that her focus was more on the dessert display than on him. The woman could really pack it away. An ordinary woman would be having a chocolate-induced seizure by now, but Kate looked fresh as a daisy.

  “And?” Kate said. “Why did you stop talking?”

  “I wasn’t sure you were listening.”

  “Of course I’m listening. Where do we go from here?”

  “I’ve got to put my crew together.”

  “Our crew,” she said.

  “Right. Our crew. Then we have to gather our resources, scout locations, build our sets, and select our wardrobe.”

  “It sounds like we’re putting on a show.”

  “We are,” he said. “For an audience of one.”

  He relaxed back into his seat while Kate polished off a plate of petits fours. This was the first time they’d met face-to-face, outside of that one encounter in the interrogation room, that didn’t begin with her pointing a gun at him. They were actually sitting at a table, like two old friends, not like the hunter and the hunted. And it wasn’t especially awkward. They were comfortable together, despite the fact that they didn’t trust each other or that she’d hit him with a bus. Maybe his scheme would work.

  They left the café and walked side by side out of the Gendarmenmarkt and up Markgrafenstrasse in the general direction of Unter den Linden, the wide, tree-lined boulevard that ran from the Brandenburg Gate to the Spree River. As they walked, Nick briefed Kate on the potential crew members he’d found, what their skills were, where they were now, and what he and Kate would have to do to recruit them.

  Three of the four prospects were civilians with no serious brushes with the law in their pasts. But they all had problems, pressing needs, or unfulfilled desires that Nick could exploit to make them receptive to participating in their con.

  Kate shook her head. “I don’t like it. We’re enticing innocent people into participating in a crime. It’s entrapment.”

  “You have to stop thinking like an FBI agent. It’s only entrapment if you intend to arrest them,” Nick said. “Besides, what we’re doing isn’t a crime. I’d say it’s more like an elaborate practical joke.”

  “That could get us all ten to twenty years in prison.”

  “You worry too much,” Nick said. “If there wasn’t any risk, it wouldn’t be any fun.”

  Markgrafenstrasse ended at a T-junction with Behrenstrasse. The buildings there were all the same height, clad in polished stone and glass, and flush with one another, creating an unbroken roofline that made the structures seem to blend into one solid wall. It made Nick feel like a rat trapped in a labyrinth, and he didn’t like it because he was pretty sure they were being followed. He quickly went to their right, where Behrenstrasse spilled into the Bebelplatz, a wide-open square that was bordered on three sides by the monumental Baroque and Neoclassical architecture of the Old Palace, Saint Hedwig’s Cathedral, the Old Royal Library, and the State Opera House. Unter den Linden ran on the fourth side.

  They’d just stepped into the square when Kate slipped her arm around his, drew him against her side, and laid her head gently against his shoulder. She did it as smoothly and naturally as if she’d sought the warmth and comfort of his closeness a hundred times before.

  Nick would have been less shocked if she’d shot him. Just moments ago she was worried about going to jail, and now she was cuddling up to him. Never underestimate the power of chocolate, he thought. And, he had to admit, he liked the feel of her breast pressed against his arm. Still, it would be awkward if she thought he was boyfriend material. Sure, he was attracted to her, but women always had to go beyond that. Women got nesting fantasies. It wasn’t long before they were redecorating your apartment and criticizing your choice of mustard. He was hooked up to Kate for five long years. He wouldn’t be abl
e to simply walk away from her when he couldn’t tolerate another day of having bright yellow mustard in his refrigerator.

  Kate raised her face and surreptitiously glanced over Nick’s shoulder. “I make three of them, how about you?” she asked softly.

  POP! The nesting fantasy bubble burst in Nick’s head.

  “I spotted two,” Nick said, relieved that he wouldn’t have to engage in a mustard war anytime soon. “I’ll take your word for the third.”

  Kate led them to a crowd of tourists standing around a clear pane of Plexiglas embedded in the plaza floor. The tourists were all hunched over, taking pictures through the Plexiglas of a deep, subterranean room full of empty white bookshelves, an artistic memorial to the twenty-five thousand books burned by the Nazis in the Bebelplatz on a single night in 1933.

  “Excuse me,” Kate said, taking her iPhone from her pocket and approaching a young man with a Berlin guidebook under his arm. “Could you take a picture of us?”

  “I would be glad to,” the man said with a thick Swedish accent.

  Kate maneuvered Nick so their backs were to Behrenstrasse and Saint Hedwig’s Cathedral. “Be sure to get the cathedral. We just love that dome.”

  Nick put his arm around Kate, and the tourist clicked a picture. Before he could hand the camera back, Kate hustled Nick over so their backs were now to the Old Royal Library. “Can you get us with the library and palace behind us, too?”

  After several more pictures Kate took possession of her phone and huddled with Nick to look at the shots.

  Kate enlarged the photo and pointed to a man in the background. “Gray suit, white shirt, and red tie. He was in the restaurant, reading a newspaper.”

  “What a cliché,” Nick said.

  “He followed us out.” Kate swiped her finger across the screen, bringing up the next photo with the Old Palace as their backdrop and two other men in the background. “This guy started shadowing us when we crossed the Gendarmenmarkt, and this one just pulled up in a car on the other side of Behrenstrasse as we were coming into the square. They’re too far away to see their faces, but they’re all wearing gray suits and white shirts.” She swept the photo away and brought up the one of them against the backdrop of Unter den Linden. “There’s a fourth guy here, leaning against the Audi, looking right at us. They have us boxed in. Do you know these guys?”

  “Not personally, but a year ago, maybe two, I might have tricked a German shipping mogul out of a few million euros for the purchase of a stolen Vermeer that wasn’t actually a stolen Vermeer.”

  “And you came back to Berlin?”

  “If I stayed away from every place where I’ve done business or had a little fun, I’d never leave my igloo in Antarctica.”

  Nick knew that Heiko Balz carried a grudge, but he didn’t think that he’d go to the considerable expense of keeping people on alert for him at airports, train stations, restaurants, and hotels after all this time. Obviously, he was wrong.

  Kate and Nick mixed in with a tourist group that was leaving the Bebelplatz and making their way across Unter den Linden to the German Historical Museum. The museum sat alongside the Spree River by the ornate Palace Bridge. Nick glanced across the bridge and saw a van with dark tinted windows pull up to the curb beside the Berlin Cathedral.

  Kate stole a look over her shoulder. The three men behind them were moving in and not bothering to hide their intent any longer. The fourth man was getting back into his Audi.

  “They’re closing in on all sides,” she said. “How good are they? Are they likely to be trained operatives or just garden-variety bone crackers?”

  “Hired muscle with anger management issues, lousy childhoods, and some street fighting experience,” Nick said, breaking off from the tourists and heading toward the bridge. “The good news is, they want me alive.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because Heiko Balz wants his money back,” Nick said. “So that gives us some wiggle room.”

  “To do what?”

  “Wiggle,” Nick said, and gestured to his left as they passed the edge of the German Historical Museum. The weekend flea market stretched along the banks of the Spree, from the Palace Bridge to the next crossing, which went to Museum Island. “Can you buy me some time?”

  Kate looked over her shoulder at the three men as they dashed across Unter den Linden. The van was crossing the bridge toward them. It would park at the curb in front of the flea market to block any chance of Kate and Nick making a retreat. The Audi made a sharp U-turn on Unter den Linden and sped away, probably to the other end of the flea market to cut them off.

  “Sure,” Kate said, and the two of them ambled into the flea market as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Thanks. I’ll see you at the Stony Peak Lodge in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in two days.”

  She stopped to browse at a booth selling vintage jewelry. “If you don’t show up, I’ll find you.”

  “I wouldn’t want it any other way,” Nick said.

  Nick disappeared into the crowd and Kate picked up a necklace, held it to her throat, and looked at her reflection in a mirror hanging from one of the booth posts. She wasn’t looking at herself, of course, but at the three men hurrying her way. She sized them up and decided on a direct approach. She put the necklace down, stepped into the center of the path, and turned to face the three men, cutting them off. She named them Moe, Larry, and Curly. They were all doing their best to look mean.

  “I don’t like being followed,” she said. “So I’d appreciate it if you’d turn around and go back where you came from.”

  Moe shared a look with Larry and then said something to Curly in German. She didn’t speak the language, but from his gestures she figured he’d said something along the lines of “You grab the girl, we’ll take care of Fox.”

  When Moe moved to pass her, she kicked him in the groin, and as he bent over in pain, she elbowed him in the back of the neck, knocking him out and putting him on the ground.

  Larry took a swing at her that he telegraphed so early, and so obviously, he might as well have sent his intentions to her in a postcard three weeks ago. She calmly ducked under the swing, hammered him in the stomach with her fist, then kneed him in the face as he bent over, smashing his nose like a tomato and putting him on the ground beside Moe.

  The whole skirmish was over in less than thirty seconds, and Kate was feeling good about herself. Okay, maybe she wasn’t so great with the finer points of landing a boyfriend, but she could dropkick a two-hundred-pound man without breaking a sweat.

  People were backing away from her, giving her plenty of room. She looked at Curly, who appeared dumbfounded, as if an immutable law of nature had just been broken. The sun rises in the morning and sets at night, two plus two equals four, and women are supposed to be helpless.

  “I know this didn’t work out the way you planned,” she said to Curly, “but I’m okay with how it went down. I’ve got nothing against you. We’re cool. You can walk away from this and take your friends with you.”

  Even if he didn’t understand English, she hoped that the tone of her voice, her body language, and the two guys on the ground would get the point across. But Curly decided to up the stakes, even with witnesses all around. He pulled a knife and rushed at her.

  She waited until the last possible second, turned sideways, grabbed his knife hand, and held it as he passed, yanking his arm behind him and using his own weight and forward momentum to dislocate his shoulder with an audible crack. He yelped in agony and went to the ground. Kate looked back toward Unter den Linden and saw the van speeding off. Scared away by the police sirens one street over, she thought. She hurried in the direction of Museum Island, the people around her giving her a wide berth. She didn’t see the Audi at the next street. She hoped that was because he’d gotten scared off, too, and not because he’d managed to capture Nick. The irony of that thought made her smile. She’d never rooted for Nick Fox to escape before.

  A flash
of something cream-colored caught her eye, and she realized it was Nick’s shirt hanging on a rack in a booth selling vintage clothes. She did a 360 degree scan of the area and spotted Nick on a tour boat moving down the Spree canal. He was standing at the railing wearing a blue watch cap, sunglasses, and a gray East German army shirt with double-buttoned breast pockets and elastic bands at the sides of the waist. He gave her a little nod and Kate nodded back.

  Two green Polizei patrol cars pulled up on Unter den Linden and people pointed in Kate’s direction, so she made a quick exit down a side street and didn’t stop moving until she got to her hotel.

  Kate was done with Berlin. She’d seen everything she wanted to see. She’d had her meeting with Nick. She’d pigged out at the Fassbender & Rausch café. She was ready to get on with it. So she checked out of her hotel, paying for the day without spending the night. She went back to the airport, where she booked the first available flight to London, an evening flight out of Heathrow to New York, and an early morning flight from New York to Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

  Kate crashed in an airport hotel close to JFK for the night, and rushed out first thing in the morning only to find that her flight was indefinitely delayed. She roamed the airport and finally napped in a chair, coming awake when her flight to Cape Girardeau was announced. She hoisted her tote bag onto her shoulder and shuffled her way to the gate, jet-lagged and not in a happy place. She’d had a fast food burger and fries at JFK. By the time she boarded she was wearing most of her ketchup, her short hair was a mess, and her eyes were red and puffy. They were right to boot her out of the SEALs, she thought. She was a wimp. She couldn’t even manage commercial air travel.

  She Googled Cape Girardeau while the plane was still loading and found that it was a big town in the middle of nowhere, midway between St. Louis and Memphis, on the banks of the Mississippi. It was known for having a picturesque old hilltop courthouse and a floodwall covered in murals, and for being the birthplace of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh. She could give a hoot about any of it. She wanted a real burger and ten hours of sleep.