The Job (21 page)

The captain picked up his tray and left.

Nick shook his head. “Sorry about that. It’s not often that Captain Bridger has a fresh audience for his stories.”

Violante thought he wouldn’t mind stabbing his fork into the one eye Bridger had left. “No problem. I found him to be entertaining. Are we there yet?”

“You need to be patient,” Nick said. “It’s a virtue.”

“I am not a virtuous man,” Violante said.

Nick had to suppress a grin. Building up Violante’s frustration was a necessary but tricky element of the con. It would make Violante’s happiness more intense when he finally saw the treasure.

The con was going perfectly. The only thing Nick was worried about now was Kate.

After the encounter at the pool, Kate showered, dressed in a T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes, and spent the rest of the day in the guesthouse, binging on episodes of
Game of Thrones.
She ate smoked salmon, assorted cheeses, potato chips, and chocolate ice cream. It was a hostage ordeal she wouldn’t share with Nick or Jessup.

At 7
P
.
M
., she walked to the main house and went upstairs to the outdoor living room. There was an enormous seafood tower brimming over with oysters, shrimp, and crab legs in crushed ice on the same patio table where the golden chocolate had been before.

Reyna rose from her seat to greet her. She was dressed in a slinky black bandage halter top and shorts. She was barefoot. The AK-47 was nowhere in sight.

“You must feel naked without your rifle,” Kate said.

“You’re right,” Reyna said. “I do.”

“I’m sure you have other weapons.”

“All women do,” she said with a smile.

Kate wasn’t sure if Reyna wanted to seduce her or kill her. Maybe it was both.

“Help yourself to the seafood. It was all caught fresh today. Mr. Violante doesn’t like eating anything that has been dead for more than a few hours. The oysters are particularly good.”

And supposedly they were an aphrodisiac, though definitely not for Kate. They looked like snot in a shell to her. Oreos were her idea of a culinary turn-on. And a Toblerone bar gave her ideas.

Kate picked up a plate and took a few shrimp and some crab legs while Reyna poured them both sangrias from a large pitcher filled with sliced fruit.

“How did you and Mr. Violante hook up?” Kate asked, taking a seat.

“He wanted the best security in Marbella. That was me. Pretty straightforward.” Reyna swallowed an oyster and tossed the shell onto the table.

“Where did you get your training?” Kate broke open a crab leg and sucked out the meat.

“That’s classified,” Reyna said, and ate another oyster. “Where did you get yours?”

“University of Washington, followed by a few years at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.”

“I meant military,” Reyna said.

“I’ve never served.”

“You’re comfortable around weapons. You weren’t afraid of the AK-47.”

“That’s because it wasn’t pointed at me.”

Kate had been counting down the minutes. She had a small window of opportunity to bug the house communications system, and that window was about to open. She grimaced and clutched her stomach. “Uh-oh.”

Reyna raised an eyebrow. “What’s wrong?”

“I think the crab is fighting back, or maybe I ate some bad cheese this afternoon. Where’s the bathroom?”

“Behind you and to the left.”

Kate already knew that. She’d seen it the first time she was here, and she’d spotted the bathroom window on her reconnaissance run earlier that day.

She hurried to the bathroom, closed the door, and locked it behind her. The bathroom was huge, with two sinks and enough marble for a family mausoleum. She figured that she had five minutes, tops, before Reyna came to check on her.

Kate opened the window, hiked herself up into it, and climbed out. She wasn’t worried about being seen by security cameras. They were all aimed to watch for intruders on the grounds and along the perimeter. She checked her watch one last time.

There was a wrought-iron balcony outside the study and the bathroom, and an awning over the French doors that opened to the study. She climbed onto the railing, grasped the awning’s
wrought-iron supports, and hoisted herself onto the awning, careful to put her weight on the support struts and not the fabric. She crawled onto the roof and went straight to the satellite dish. Crouching down, she slipped off her right shoe and slid the sole off, revealing a hidden compartment. She removed the thin thumb-drive-size bugging device that she’d picked up in Lisbon.

She clipped the device to the cable that ran from the satellite dish to the house. The device was designed to bug the data stream and send a copy to the FBI using the same satellite that it was all flowing through. It was simple and ingenious. Jessup would be able to take down Violante and his whole organization with the information obtained from the bug.

Kate slid down the awning, slipped back into the bathroom, and closed the window behind her. She splashed water on her face and flushed the toilet. She left the bathroom and returned to Reyna.

“I’m going to skip dinner and go to bed,” Kate said. “I’d avoid the crab if I were you.”

Back at the guesthouse, Kate found a large platter of golden chocolates on the kitchen table. She doubted it was delivered as a gesture of hospitality. More likely, it was a pretense so the guards could nose around and see what she’d been up to all day. Or maybe it was like a maid checking the hotel minibar. Maybe they were keeping track of what she’d eaten so they could deduct the cost from the $17.5 million.

She settled herself onto the couch and switched on the television. She surfed around, looking for a show she wanted to watch, and fell asleep before she found one. When she awoke, the television was off and her father was standing at the kitchen table.

“We’re going to have to work on your unconscious alarm system,” he said. “I’ve been here moving around for five minutes, and you’ve only now opened your eyes.”

He was dressed in black and was studying the platter of chocolates.

“I don’t see much difference between these and a Hershey’s Kiss except that you can eat the wrapper on these,” he said.

“What the heck are you doing here?”

“You told me to have fun,” Jake said. “This is fun.”

“How did you get past the cameras and the guards?”

“I came in through Violante’s secret escape tunnel. I found the hidden exit at the bottom of the gorge. It wasn’t hard to spot if you know what you’re looking for. The other end is right here in the coat closet.” Jake gestured to a closet beside the front door. “The whole closet is actually a small elevator. You turn a particular coat hook counterclockwise and off you go.”

“They’re holding me hostage in the same room as their secret escape route?” Kate shook her head. “How dumb is that?”

“You didn’t know it was here, did you?” Jake said, taking a bite of chocolate.

“No,” she said.

“There you go. That’s why they call it a
secret
escape route.”

She was glad to see Jake, but having him here complicated things for her, and it left Nick and the crew vulnerable.

“What about the boat?” she asked. “Without you, there’s nobody in charge or watching out for the crew. And what about Willie? She can’t handle the boat on her own. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

“Relax. They are all in good hands. Billy Dee has hijacked plenty of boats, most of them a lot bigger than this one, and steered them through the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea with just two men. So this is a pleasure cruise for him. And Nick is on top of everything else.”

“Does he know you’re here?”

“Nick didn’t send me,” Jake said. “But he was glad when I told him where I was going.”

“He wasn’t concerned that you were putting the entire operation at risk?”

“He cares more about you than any operation.”

“Only because I keep him from being arrested.” She saw her father sway and grab the table for support. “Dad? What’s wrong?”

“Feeling sleepy … too sleepy. Gotta be the chocolates.”

Kate rushed forward, catching her father before he hit the floor. She took his pulse and noted his color. He was out cold, but he wasn’t critical. His vital signs were all strong. She looked over at the candy display.

Reyna had drugged the chocolate.

At least she was fairly certain the candy wasn’t laced with
lethal poison, and that her father would eventually be fine. There was no upside for Violante or Reyna in killing her. At least not yet.

So why did Reyna need her helpless and compliant? There were only a few possible answers, and none of them were pleasant. The one thing Kate was sure of was that Reyna would be paying her a visit tonight.

Kate dragged Jake into the bedroom and stretched him out beside the bed, out of sight from the door. She turned the lights off in all the rooms and waited in the darkness for Reyna.

Reyna arrived about an hour later. Kate could see her outside, through the edge of the closed drapes, propping her AK-47 outside the door. Kate assumed the rifle was a sign for the guards, letting them know where she was. Reyna adjusted the large satchel that she had over her shoulder, slipped inside the house, and crept toward the bedroom with remarkable stealth.

Kate flattened herself against a wall in the bedroom, and when Reyna entered the room, Kate whacked her in the head with a frying pan she’d commandeered from the kitchen. Reyna went dead still for a moment, then crumpled to the floor with a hiss of air.

Kate flipped the light on, lifted the satchel off Reyna’s shoulder, and emptied it out onto the bed. It contained four nylon cords, rubber gloves, a pair of needle-nose pliers, and a filet knife. She looked back down at Reyna. “I don’t even want to think about what you were going to do with this.”

Jake started coming around as the tiny, rickety elevator dropped down the narrow shaft. He was on the floor, his back against one of the three elevator walls. Kate stood across from him, watching the sharp, rocky face of the shaft passing by on the open side where the closet door had been. The only light in the pitch-dark shaft came from the flashlight app on her father’s cellphone.

“Take it easy, Dad,” Kate said. “We’re in the elevator.”

“What happened after I passed out?”

“Reyna paid me a visit with pliers, a filet knife, and some nylon cords.”

“She was going to tie you up, pull out some fingernails or teeth, and maybe peel off a few layers of skin,” he said. “That wasn’t very friendly.”

“I’ll say.”

“Did you strangle her with your underwire?”

“Nope,” Kate said. “The garrote is in my other bra.”

“Another missed opportunity,” Jake said. “Is she alive?”

“Of course she is. Killing her would have messed up the whole con. But she’ll be tied up for a while. I bound her arms and legs to the bedposts with the nylon cords and gagged her with a towel. She’d left her AK-47 outside the guest house, warning off the guards, so we have some time before she either escapes from the ropes or is discovered.”

They hit bottom, and Jake got shakily to his feet. “There’s a deer trail through the gorge,” he said. “I left a Jeep on a fire road about two miles south of here.”

“Are you up for a walk?”

“Sure am,” Jake said. “I had a nice, restful nap.”

“What’s the plan after we get to the car?”

“We’ve got rooms at the Marbella Club.”

It was a five-star hotel, the posh resort of royals and movie stars. It had put Marbella on the map back in the 1950s, and it hadn’t lost any of its cachet since then.

“Nick has been a bad influence on you,” Kate said.

“Nick made the reservations for us. He said it was the FBI’s treat to thank us for our trouble.”