The Pursuit (3 page)

On a Thursday at 11 
A.M.
, three days after Nick's abduction, Litija walked into the Executive Merchants Building. She sashayed through the marble-paneled lobby and blew a playful kiss to the elderly guard who sat in the control center behind a thick window of bulletproof glass. He waved back at her with a friendly smile as she approached the turnstile that controlled access to the first-floor offices, the elevators, and the stairwell. Litija swiped her tenant ID card over a scanner and walked through the turnstile as it unlocked.

She bypassed the elevator and took the stairwell. She paused on the landing just inside the door for a moment, listening for voices and looking around to make sure she was alone. There were no cameras in the stairwell. No footfalls of anyone else climbing the stairs.

She hurried down to the next landing, crouched beside an air vent near the floor, and took a screwdriver out of her purse. She quickly unscrewed the grill, reached into her purse again, and pulled out a radio-controlled red Lamborghini with a tiny camera taped on top of it.

Litija placed the car into the vent, and it sped off.

N
ick and Dragan sat in the back of a panel van parked directly across the intersection from the police kiosk on the southwest corner of Schupstraat and Lange Herentalsestraat, which also happened to be the northwest edge of the Executive Merchants Building. Borko and Vinko were in the front seats, trying very hard to look anywhere but at the uniformed, heavily armed officers they were facing.

“Do we really have to park here?” Borko asked.

“Any further away and we wouldn't have a signal,” Nick said. He used a joystick to steer the Lamborghini while watching the camera's view on an iPad that sat on his lap.

“But we're parked right outside the building we're going to rob,” Vinko said. “The police can see us and our van.”

“Relax,” Nick said. “A thief planning to rob that building would have to be insane to sit here to do his recon.”

Dragan gave him a hard look. “You're reading my mind.”

“That's what makes this spot the safest place to be,” Nick said. “Besides, the police aren't on the lookout for thieves plotting to break in. Everybody knows it's impossible. The police are for show.” Nick steered the Lamborghini past several air vents and around a tight corner. “How long have the guards worked in the building?”

“One guy just got his thirty-year pin. The others have been here nearly as long.”

“That proves my point,” Nick said. “They've stayed so long because it's a very cushy job. Nobody has tried to break in to the vault since the day the building opened, and they know that nobody ever will.”

Nick parked the Lamborghini at the end of an air vent that gave their camera a view down into the vault foyer. They could see the open vault door and the closed gate. Something caught Nick's eye. He zoomed in on a door a few feet from the vault.

“You don't have that door on your set,” he said.

“Because it's a supply closet,” Dragan said. “We aren't interested in stealing toilet paper and file folders.”

Litija came in, and Nick adjusted the camera view to a wider angle. She walked past the open vault door, stood in front of the inner gate, then turned to wave at the security camera and the guards watching in the control room. It looked like she was waving at Nick and Dragan.

“The security camera that's mounted outside the vault is only watched during business hours, when the door is open,” Nick said. “But at night and on weekends, there's nobody watching the monitors. The feed is recorded and taped over every thirty days. In fact, there isn't a single guard in the building after hours. Do you know why?”

“Because a break-in is impossible,” Dragan said.

“You're catching on,” Nick said.

Litija was buzzed through by the guards upstairs. She pushed the unlocked gate to let herself in and stumbled a moment after the gate swung closed behind her. She dropped her purse in the process and crouched down to pick it up.

“When the vault is open during the day, the heat and motion sensor is deactivated, of course, or everyone who walks in would set off the alarm,” Nick said. “More important, to protect the privacy of the tenants and the contents of their safe-deposit boxes, there aren't any cameras in the vault.”

So nobody saw Litija take a tiny bottle of hairspray from her purse and spritz the combination heat and motion sensor, coating the surface with a thin, milky film. She got up, tugged on her miniskirt, and presumably went to her safe-deposit box, disappearing entirely from view.

A few moments later, Litija walked out of the vault again, closed the gate behind her, and, before she left, offered a parting wave to everyone who was watching.

“That takes care of the heat and motion detector,” Nick said. “In the morning, our camera will be parked right here, so we'll be able to see the building manager enter the combination and open the vault. Then we can do it, too.”

“We're still using a car to open the vault,” Dragan said. “I love it.”

“You have a reputation to maintain.”

“You have style, Nick, I'll give you that.” Dragan pointed to the magnetic plate on the vault door and the matching one on the jamb beside it. “But the instant we open the vault door, we'll break the magnetic field, setting off the alarm in the police station. And if we cut the power to the magnets, that will activate the alarm, too.”

“Don't worry,” Nick said. “I've got that covered.”

“How?”

“If I tell you now, it would ruin the surprise.”

Nick was sharing details only as they were needed so Dragan couldn't proceed without him. It was a way to extend his life expectancy for as long as possible. He figured if he hung in there long enough, Kate would track him down and rescue him. He'd been under constant watch and hadn't been able to contact her, but he knew she was like a dog with a bone when she had a job to do. And right now, like it or not, her job was to retrieve him. He was government property.

“What about the gate?” Dragan asked. “It can only be opened with a key that can't be duplicated.”

Nick smiled. “We'll rely upon human nature for that.”

While Nick and Dragan were parked on Lange Herentalsestraat, Kate O'Hare and her father were standing on Schupstraat, outside the Executive Merchants Building. They were lost amid the stream of tourists, police officers, and bearded men in yarmulkes carrying attaché cases full of diamonds chained to their wrists.

Kate had identified the men who grabbed Nick by running their pictures and fingerprints through FBI databases. She had pinpointed their location when she gleaned a non-cell number from the throwaway phone. The call had been to an office in the Executive Merchants Building. The number was no longer in service, but it was a credible enough lead to get Kate and her father on a plane to Antwerp, the medieval Belgian port city that was home to 80 percent of the world's trade in rough diamonds. Their first stop was Stadspark, a triangular park in the city center, where they picked up two Glocks and plenty of ammo that an arms-dealing friend of Jake's had hidden for them in a prearranged spot. From there they went to Schupstraat.

Kate's phone rang and she recognized the number as coming from the Federal Building in West Los Angeles where she was currently based.

“O'Hare,” Kate said.

“Hey, Katie Bug. It's Cosmo Uno. Whatcha doin'? What's shakin'? Haven't seen you in forever. Heard you zipped in here and zipped out. Like you were here for a nanosecond, right? And I must have blinked and missed you. Bummer, right? Am I right?”

Kate stared at her phone. Cosmo Uno was the annoying idiot in the cubicle next to her. He was shorter than her, single and desperate, slicked his hair up with what looked like goose grease, and was a foot jiggler. All day long when she was in her cubicle she could hear him jiggling his foot.

“Why are you calling me?” Kate asked him. “And how did you get my number?”

“You're gonna love this. Wait until I tell you. Like I thought I was the luckiest guy in the building to get the cubicle next to you, and now we're working together.”

“What?”

“That's over the moon, right? I mean, we're practically partners. Do you love it? I love it.”

Good thing she wasn't in the building, Kate thought, because she'd have to shoot him.

“See, here's the thing,” Cosmo said. “Jessup thought it would be a good idea if you had someone to help you keep track of expenses.”

Kate narrowed her eyes. “Un-hunh.”

“So I'm going to be your expense guy. For instance, there's an item we just received for a rental car in Hawaii. That's a mistake, right?”

“I'm busy,” Kate said. “Good talking to you.”

She disconnected, turned to her father, and pointed at the building directly in front of them.

“The office that one of the Road Runners called on the throwaway was in this building,” Kate said. “A building, incidentally, with a vault that holds a fortune in diamonds.”

“A vault that's impossible to break in to,” Jake said, holding up the Antwerp guidebook he'd bought so they'd look like tourists. “Rick Steves says so right here.”

“That's one mystery solved,” Kate said. “Now we know why a gang of international diamond thieves kidnapped Nick.”

“We don't actually
know,
” Jake said.

“Okay, we
think
we know.”

“Good enough for me,” Jake said. “What's the plan?”

“We'll get a room at the hotel across the street.” Kate pointed in the general direction of Lange Herentalsestraat, where, unbeknownst to her, Nick had been sitting in a panel van only a few minutes earlier. “Then we'll watch for an opportunity to rescue Nick. We need to be ready to take it when it comes.”

“I'll call my friend who left the guns for us in the park,” Jake said. “He can get us a rocket launcher.”

“We don't need a rocket launcher.”

“Sure we do,” Jake said. “Nothing creates opportunity like a rocket-propelled explosive.”

“It would also create an international incident. I'm going to be in enough trouble as it is.”

Kate hadn't informed her bosses, Special Agent in Charge Carl Jessup or Deputy Director Fletcher Bolton, that Nick had been taken, or that she was pursuing him to a foreign country. She couldn't take the risk that they wouldn't let her go.

“Not if we don't get caught,” Jake said.

“We aren't blowing up anything, Dad. Whatever we do will have to be quick and quiet.”

“We're dealing with the same thieves who drove a bulldozer through a jewelry store in Saint-Tropez in broad daylight and escaped in a speedboat,” Jake said. “So this might end quick, but it won't end quiet.”

Kate's phone rang again. Same L.A. number. “Oh for the love of Pete,” Kate said, opening the connection. “Now what?”

“You haven't filed your form S-Q-zero-zero-niner,” Cosmo said.

“I'm pretty sure I filed that,” Kate said, having no idea what he was talking about.

“We can't find it.”

“If you call me again I'll have you killed,” Kate said. “I can do it. I know people.”

And she disconnected.

S
hortly after 1 
A.M.
on Saturday, a panel van drove up to the Executive Merchants Building's underground parking garage on Lange Herentalsestraat, half a block down from the police kiosk at the intersection with Schupstraat.

Nick was one of five men in the back of the van. Zarko, Vinko, Borko, and Dusko were on the team. Dragan was not. They were all dressed in regular street clothes.

Zarko took a remote control out of his pocket, aimed it at the garage door, and pressed a button. The garage door rolled open. Even before they'd kidnapped Nick, the Road Runners had easily captured the frequency of the forty-year-old garage door system and programmed a remote to match it. It was easy because there were fifty-seven videos on YouTube that explained how to do it. There were no videos that explained how to get into the vault and bypass the multiple alarm systems.

Nick and the four men spilled out of the van carrying duffel bags. They ducked under the garage door, and the last one, Zarko, closed it behind them. The van drove off, made a U-turn, and parked half a block down with the headlights off. The driver was sticking around as their lookout.

“They're inside,” Kate told her father on her disposable cellphone. She stood in the shadowed alcove of a closed falafel joint on the west side of Lange Herentalsestraat, midway between the garage and the parked van where the driver was watching for signs of trouble. She cupped the phone in her hands so it wouldn't emit any light. “One of the men is definitely Nick.”

“It's dark out and you're twenty yards away,” Jake said from a car parked up the street, just above the intersection with Schupstraat and the police kiosk. “How can you be sure it's him?”

“I know how he moves.”

He moved like a panther. She'd had the crazy urge to run out the instant she saw him, but Kate remained very still. She didn't want to attract the attention of the driver in the parked van.

“Now what?” Jake asked.

It was a good question. She hated the idea of sitting there while one of the biggest heists in history was pulled off right in front of her. But her top priority was Nick. For a moment she considered overpowering the driver in the van and either taking his place or putting a gun to his head to get him to do as she wanted, but there were too many ways that scenario could go wrong.

“We wait,” she said.

In the garage, the five thieves put on night vision goggles. Vinko went up to the locked door that led into the building and ran Litija's tenant ID over the scanner. The door unlocked. Vinko bent down, stuck a rubber wedge under the door to keep it open, and the men headed down the main corridor. When they reached the lobby, Borko went off to deactivate the DVR in the control center while Nick and the three other men took the stairs down to the vault.

They walked out of the stairwell into the foyer that faced the imposing vault door. Nick unzipped one of the tote bags he carried and removed a suction cup tool commonly used to carry heavy panes of glass. There was a vacuum-tab suction cup on either end of the horizontal handle. Nick placed one suction cup against the magnetic plate on the vault door, the other on the matching plate beside it, and pulled back the locking tabs. The suction cups held. He used an electric screwdriver to unscrew the magnetic plate from the doorjamb.

Nick pocketed the screws and looked at Zarko, who stood in front of the vault door, bouncing on his heels, anxious to get started. The stitched cuts on Zarko's face were swollen and red. Nick thought he should probably see a doctor about that.

“You can open the vault now,” Nick said. “But very slowly.”

Zarko entered the combination, turned the three-pronged spindle wheel to retract the locking pins, and pulled the heavy door open. As he did, the magnetic plate on the jamb came away with the door, dragging wires out of the wall socket. Nick stared at the magnetic plate. If it fell, they were finished. But the suction cup device kept the two plates together, maintaining the magnetic field as if the door was still closed.

Nick watched closely to make sure the wires didn't break. He waited until the door was open just wide enough for a man to enter the vault by slipping under the taut wires that were attached to the magnetic plate.

“Stop,” he said.

Zarko did. Now the iron gate was all that separated them from a bank of safe-deposit boxes filled with millions in diamonds.

Zarko bounced on his feet again and tipped his head toward the gate. “How do we open it?”

The other three Road Runners looked at Nick too, eager to see what he'd do next.

“With a paper clip,” Nick said.

Nick reached into his pocket. He held up a paper clip between his index finger and thumb for them to admire. The four men stared blankly at him.

“Trust me,” Nick said. “Best tool ever designed by man.”

Nick unbent the paper clip into a straight wire, went to the supply closet door, and effortlessly picked the deadbolt lock. He opened the door, reached inside the closet, and came out holding a bizarre four-sided key that looked both ancient and magical. The thieves stared, astounded.

“How did you know it would be in there?” Dusko asked.

“Human nature.” Nick slipped past the open vault door to get to the gate. “There's only one key and the guards don't want to lose it. They also want it handy if something ever goes wrong with the remote locking mechanism. So they hung the key in the closet. I'm sure it wasn't kept here to start with, but it's probably been there for at least a decade or two.”

“Morons,” Zarko said.

Nick slid the key into the gate's lock. “That's what happens when the same security people do a job for forty years without any incidents. They get lazy.”

He opened the gate and slipped the key into his pocket as a souvenir. He reached up and stuck a piece of black electrical tape over the light sensor on the ceiling. He pulled off his night vision goggles.

“You can turn on the lights now,” Nick said.

Zarko hit him from behind with a lead sap, once to get him down, and once more to keep him there.

Kate was still standing in the dark alcove, leaning her back against the front door of the falafel joint, when she saw the garage door roll open at the Executive Merchants Building and the van begin to slowly drive up the street.

She called her father. “They're coming out.”

Jake started his car but kept his headlights off. “I'm ready.”

When the van passed Kate's hiding place, she bolted across the street and ducked behind a car that was parked close to the garage. The van stopped in front of the open garage. Four men carrying heavy duffel bags dashed out of the garage and jumped into the van. Nick wasn't one of them.

Damn!

“Follow the van,” Kate said into her phone. “Don't lose those men and the diamonds. Ram them and call the police if you have to.”

“Where are you going?”

“To find Nick. He didn't come out.”

She stuck the phone into her pocket and got ready to move. The van drove off. The garage door started to come down. Kate raced for the garage, dove to the ground, and rolled under the descending door an instant before it closed.

And this is why I don't spend a lot of time ironing my clothes, she thought, getting to her feet, noticing that the knee was ripped out on her jeans.

The door to the building was wedged open. Kate ran inside to the lobby, went straight for the stairs, and took them down to the bottom floor. The vault door was open, with some kind of suction tool stuck to the front and wires dangling from the wall. She ducked under the wires and into the vault. Nick was on the floor sprawled motionless among hundreds of mangled safe-deposit boxes, loose cash and papers, assorted jewelry, gold bars, silver coins, and scattered diamonds.

Kate dropped to her knees beside him and quickly scanned his body for injuries. Blood matted the side of his head, but he was breathing, and his eyes were fluttering open.

“Nick? It's Kate. Can you hear me? Nick!”

He winced as he regained consciousness. “Crashing headache,” he said. “Blurred vision. Think I see an angel.” He managed a small smile. “You found me.”

“I swore to you a long time ago that I'd never let you get away.”

“I didn't think I'd ever be thankful for that,” he said.

Kate helped Nick up, sitting him against the wall for support. “You have a concussion. We should take this slowly. I don't think the police know about what just went down yet.”

She surveyed the pile in the center of the vault. “There's got to be millions of dollars' worth of jewelry, diamonds, and cash that they left behind.”

“It was an embarrassment of riches. They only took the very best and left when they had as much as they could carry. Not that I saw what happened. They took me out before the action started.”

“You're lucky they didn't kill you.”

Nick blinked hard, trying to focus his vision. “I'm no good to them dead. They wanted me to get caught to distract the police and buy them time to get away.”

“They weren't afraid you'd talk?”

“What could I possibly tell the police that they don't already know?”

Kate gestured to the bank of safe-deposit boxes. Most of the slots had been forced open, but there were still at least a third of them that hadn't been touched. “How did they decide which boxes to break open?”

Nick's head was starting to clear a bit. “No idea. I wasn't involved in that part of the planning stage.”

Kate's phone vibrated in her pocket. She retrieved her phone and answered it. “Where are you, Dad?”

“Still parked on the street.”

Nick squinted at her. “You brought your dad?”

“I told you to follow the thieves!” Kate said to Jake.

“I don't care about them or the diamonds,” Jake said. “I care about you. You have two minutes, maybe less. The police are swarming the place. I bet now you wish I'd gotten that rocket launcher.”

“Get out of here and burn your phone.”

She split open her own phone, removed the micro SIM card, and swallowed it.

Nick stared at her in disbelief. “Did you just eat your SIM card?”

“I don't want anyone finding it. The phone is a disposable, and to my knowledge I didn't make any traceable calls, but better safe than sorry.” She dropped the phone onto the floor, smashed it under her foot, and kicked the debris away. “The police are coming. Something must have triggered the alarm.”

Nick had a sinking realization. He moved aside and glanced with dread behind him. He'd been leaning against the heat and motion sensor and had wiped the hairspray off it with his back.

“You have to arrest me,” he said to Kate.

“Think again. Get up, we'll find a way out.” She reached for him but he resisted, grabbing her wrists to get her attention.

“There's only one way out of this vault,” Nick said.

“You'll find another,” she said. “You're Nick Fox. That's what you do.”

“Not this time. You have to arrest me. If you don't, we'll both go to prison. You need to get in touch with Jessup. Find out what was in this vault. I'm thinking it might have contained more than diamonds.”

They could hear a rumbling upstairs, like a herd of cattle running through the halls. The police were in the building. They had only a few seconds left.

Kate took out her gun and tossed it onto the pile of stuff the thieves had left behind. “Lie facedown on the floor.”

“You're so hot when you take charge,” Nick said.

Nick lay facedown on the floor, and Kate straddled him. She pinned one of his arms behind him, reached into her coat pocket with her free hand, and whipped out her badge just as a half dozen police officers spilled into the vault, their guns drawn.

“I'm Special Agent Kate O'Hare, Federal Bureau of Investigation,” she said. “This man is mine.”