The Job (6 page)

The manhunt in the Old City continued fruitlessly until Atalay finally called it off at midnight.

Kate trudged back to her hotel and up to her third-floor room, which was barely large enough to hold the four-poster bed. The pillows on the bed were flat, and there was only a single rough top sheet. As an ex–Navy commando, she’d slept on much worse. She wasn’t sleeping on rocks, and as far as she knew she wasn’t sleeping with scorpions, so it was all good. She was asleep ten seconds after her head hit the pillow.

She was awakened at 3:30 in the morning by the call to prayer from the mosque, and it took her another hour to fall asleep again, only to be awakened a little over two hours later by the dawn call to prayer.

She lay in bed for another forty-five minutes, mulling over
what investigative steps she could take next to flush out the fake Nick without nailing the real one. No brilliant ideas occurred to her, so she showered, got dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white T-shirt, and went to the rooftop terrace for the hotel’s buffet breakfast.

There were already two dozen hotel guests scattered among the long communal tables inside the dining room and at the small tables on the patio. They were eating breakfast, reviewing guidebooks, and taking lots of selfies standing with their backs against the rooftop railing, the panoramic view of the Sea of Marmara behind them.

Kate took a warm plate from the stack at the end of the bar and browsed the offerings on the buffet. She’d tried most of the dishes the previous morning with Atalay. She loaded up on the fried eggs, sausage, fruit, and cheese, picked up a glass of tea, and carried her breakfast to the far end of the table with the worst view and the fewest guests. The last thing she wanted to do was engage in small talk with chatty tourists.

She was working her way through her eggs when a bearded man in a flannel shirt and faded jeans slid onto the bench across from her. His plate was piled so high with food that an avalanche of olives, cubes of cheese, and a portion of bread pudding toppled onto the table when he sat down.

“If there’s one thing I love,” he said, “it’s free grub.”

He spoke with an indecipherable American southern accent, a little bit of the Carolinas mixed with backwater Louisiana. He wore a sweat-stained American flag bandana around his head.
His bushy mustache and beard were so thick and mangy, it was like he had a wild animal sitting on his face. The only things she could see clearly behind all of that hair were the tip of his nose and his compelling brown eyes.

“Aren’t you afraid someone will recognize your nose?” Kate asked him.

“I’m a risk taker,” he said. “What gave me away? Was it the nose?”

“It was the desire to punch you in the face.” Kate forked in more eggs and a chunk of sausage. “You lied to me, Nick. You said there wasn’t any connection between the heist at the Gleaberg and the one at the Demirkan.”

“There isn’t.”

“But here you are.”

“Whither thou goest …” he said.

“That’s touching, but I suspect there’s more.”

And actually it
was
touching, Kate thought. Like it or not, even though she wanted to punch him in the face, it was nice to have him across from her at the breakfast table. It was sort of … connubial.

“There’s curiosity,” Nick said.

“So besides me, it’s curiosity that got you on a plane?”

“As far as I can see, the only thing the Gleaberg job has in common with the Demirkan is me. And the thief might have my fingerprints, but he isn’t thinking like me. I wouldn’t come all the way to Istanbul to smash a display case and take a goblet. I’d steal the Topkapi Dagger.”

“You can’t steal that.”

“That’s true,” he said. “I’d just be repeating myself.”

“You never stole the Topkapi Dagger.”

“Yes, I did,” he said.

The diamond-encrusted dagger, renowned for the three huge emeralds on the grip, was displayed in the Topkapi Palace treasury, a museum full of the amazing riches the sultans acquired during Turkey’s reign as the greatest power on earth. It was commonly believed that stealing anything from the treasury was impossible.

“The dagger is one of the world’s most famous and coveted treasures,” Kate said. “If it had been stolen, I would have heard about it.
Everybody
would have heard about it.”

“If anybody noticed,” he said. “I swapped the dagger with a fake. Nobody suspected a thing. The next night, I broke into the house of the director general of the Turkish police, and slipped the dagger into his kitchen silverware drawer. He found it when he went to butter his toast for breakfast. Naturally, the police and the palace officials didn’t tell a soul about what happened. It would have been too embarrassing.”

“Why would you go to the trouble of committing one of the greatest thefts in criminal history only to give back what you stole?”

“Have you ever seen the 1964 movie
Topkapi
?”

“Nope,” she said.

“It’s one of the best heist flicks ever made. I saw it on TV when I was a kid, and it made a big impression on me. This
master thief and a team of amateurs steal the dagger and replace it with a fake. It’s the perfect crime, brilliantly conceived and executed, but they’re foiled by a tiny twist of fate. I wanted to see if it was possible, despite all the high-tech security measures available today, to actually pull off the heist. Guess what? It is.”

“How did you do it?”

Nick shook his head. “I’ll never tell.”

“I’m not sure I believe that story. But I
do
believe you pulled off a job here that isn’t widely known.”

Nick selected a piece of salted fish and ate it with bread. “Thanks for the warning last night. I was able to escape with my passports and the complimentary bottle of L’Occitane body lotion in the bathroom.” He took the little bottle of L’Occitane out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Kate. “I thought you might like it.”

“Thank you. I do like it.”

“So what’s our next move?” he asked.

“I don’t have a next move. Do you have a next move?”

“I’m going to continue to chase the imposter. If the pattern continues, there should be another theft soon that will be attributed to me. This person is sending a message and eventually we’ll figure it out.”

Kate met Atalay in the police station lobby. The modern five-story glass-cube building might have been impressive had it not been dwarfed by the skyscrapers of Istanbul’s New City. Atalay was pacing when Kate walked in, and it was obvious that
he’d spent the night in his office. He was in the same clothes he’d worn the day before, his eyes were bloodshot, and his hair looked like a bird’s nest.

“I’m guessing you’ve had a rough night,” Kate said. “Has Ceren Demirkan called you yet?”

“She unleashed her fury on the director general,” he said. “He wants to see me in his office in ten minutes. I don’t think it’s to give me a promotion. Not that it matters, because Fox isn’t my problem anymore. He has not only eluded us, he’s managed to slip out of Istanbul.”

“How do you know that?”

“He broke into a billionaire shipping mogul’s tenth-floor pied-à-terre in Cologne, Germany, last night and stole a Vermeer out of the man’s bedroom while he was sleeping.”

“That’s not possible,” she said.

“A surveillance camera outside a bank across the street got a picture of him leaving the building with the painting tucked under his arm.”

“But he couldn’t have been there,” she said. “We both know he was right here, in the Old City, at six o’clock last night. We saw him with our own eyes.”

“If he slipped into a taxi before we were able to seal off the streets, then he could have made it to the airport in time to take a commercial jet to Düsseldorf,” Atalay said. “It’s only about a three-hour flight, and from there it’s only a forty-minute drive to Cologne. Finding Fox is a matter for the Bundeskriminalamt in Germany and Interpol now.”

“This shipping mogul?” Kate said. “Was his name Heiko Balz, by any chance? From Berlin?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“Four years ago, Fox swindled Balz out of a few million euros by selling him a stolen Vermeer that wasn’t actually a stolen Vermeer. Or even a Vermeer. Ever since then, Balz has been waiting for Fox to step into Germany so he can get his hands on him.”

“Now Fox has a real Vermeer, taken right from under Balz’s nose,” Atalay said. “Fox has guts, I’ll give him that.”

That was true, but she couldn’t see the reasoning behind any of it. First the fake Nick committed robberies in Nashville and Istanbul that were far less clever than anything the real Nick would do. Now in Cologne, the imposter had robbed Heiko Balz, getting Nick into even more trouble with the mob-connected billionaire. And all three crimes were done in rapid succession, within only a few days of each other. What was the big hurry? Why these three cities? What was the point?

Kate said goodbye to Atalay and walked down the street to a coffeehouse. I’m missing the obvious, Kate thought. This is a connect-the-dots puzzle. You connect the dots and you get to see the picture. My dilemma is that I don’t have enough dots yet to guess at the picture, so I’m always a step behind the thief. Truth is, I shouldn’t have tried to keep Nick out of this. We probably would have made better progress working together.

Kate went to the counter, ordered a coffee, and took it outside to a small sidewalk table. She sipped the coffee, took a notepad
out of her bag, and listed out the robberies.
Big Mike, jeweled goblet, Vermeer.
Nothing clicked in her brain. No brilliant flash of insight. She ran through her conversation with Nick at breakfast. The only thing the Big Mike con and the goblet smash-and-grab have in common is me, he’d said. The
me
was Nick.

Kate wrote
Nick
a bunch of times. She drew a heart around the
Nick
s she’d written. She looked at the heart and was horrified. She scribbled all over the heart until it was unreadable. She wrote
Nashville, Istanbul, Cologne.
Holy crap. There it was in black and white on the paper. It wasn’t connect the dots. It was
Wheel of Fortune.
It was fill in the letters and guess the word. And she was pretty sure the word was going to be
Nick
or maybe
Nicolas.
The next city would begin with a
K
or an
O.

She called Nick and was told the number was no longer in service. Great. She was on her own, and she didn’t have much time to make the right educated guess. She searched her memory bank and came up with just one city that fulfilled all the requirements. The French city of Orléans.

Six months before, an alarm sensor system had gone bad on a ground-floor window on the east-facing Rue Fernand Rabier side of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans, France. The museum immediately ordered replacement parts from the security company in Luxembourg that had originally installed the system. The company didn’t have the parts and ordered them from their supplier in Mumbai. The supplier sent the request
to their fabrication facility in Bangalore, which was working at full capacity making a component for Apple’s new iPhone, a job that was far more lucrative than making a run of a tiny obscure part for an outdated window alarm sensor. So the part still had not been made. Exactly eighty-seven people were aware of the gap in the museum’s security. Eighty-eight, if you counted the Nicolas Fox imposter, who had a friend at the security company.

Twenty-four hours after stealing the Vermeer in Cologne, the imposter arrived in Orléans, toured the museum, and paid very special attention to the window with the broken alarm. Like all of the windows on the ground floor, it had an expanding metal grate on the inside that was secured at night with a simple padlock. There weren’t any elaborate interior security systems, like motion detectors or infrared beams, because the galleries were patrolled by armed guards. But the guards couldn’t be everywhere at once, and the imposter knew their patrol schedule.

Later that same night, the impersonator took a leisurely stroll in an oversize hoodie down Rue Fernand Rabier, holding what looked like an open can of beer. After pausing in front of the museum’s unsecured window to admire the magnificent Cathédrale Saint-Croix, the imposter poured the paint thinner he’d been carrying in the beer can onto the screws of the vertical metal strip that divided and secured the window’s two panes of glass.

The imposter returned the following night at 2:00
A
.
M
. He was once again in his hoodie, plus he was wearing rubber gloves
and a Nick Fox mask. He carried two cardboard mailing tubes and a shoulder bag containing a battery-operated screwdriver, a box cutter, and a set of lock picks. The paint thinner he’d poured on the mullion the night before had loosened the screws, and he was able to remove them quickly. He detached the mullion and the panes of glass they’d held in place and set them carefully on the street. He picked the padlock, slid open the grate, and slipped inside the museum. The break-in took less than two minutes.

“
Merde alors! Nom d’un chien!
You were right,” said Commissaire Killian Bernard of the OCBC, the Office Central de Lutte Contre le Trafic des Biens Culturels, the elite art robbery unit of the French judicial police. He was sitting at a window table beside Kate O’Hare. They were inside the dark Café des Beaux Arts on Rue Dupanloup, across the square from the museum. They both watched the break-in unfold with night-vision binoculars.

The French detective, a big, wide-bodied man of Scottish and French descent, had been skeptical when Kate showed up in his office in Paris two days earlier and insisted that Nicolas Fox would strike the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orléans within forty-eight hours. Her explanation had been vague, verging on totally evasive. But given the daring thefts Fox had committed in Europe over the past week, and Kate’s expertise where this thief was concerned, Bernard couldn’t risk ignoring her
warning. So he mobilized his team and went to Orléans, a one-hour drive from Paris, and staked out the museum.

Kate was dizzy with relief when the thief appeared on the scene. She’d been tortured with uncertainty ever since she’d arrived in Orléans. There were tons of cities beginning with the letter
O
or
K.
This was the only one she was certain Nick had struck before. He’d broken into this same museum six years ago. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t committed some con or theft in one of the other possible cities, such as Osaka, Oslo, or Oxford. Not to mention Kansas City, Kathmandu, and Kawasaki.