Gooley popped the trunk, grabbed Kate’s duffel bag, and led her down to Cadogan Pier. It was underneath the first span of the Albert Bridge and ran parallel to the Chelsea Embankment. A dozen barge-like houseboats, a couple sporty yachts, and some small pleasure craft were moored there.
Gooley stopped in front of a sixty-five-foot yacht that looked like a smaller version of the one Nick had borrowed in Marina del Rey. A small motorized dinghy was tied to the yacht’s swim deck.
“We seized this yacht a month ago from a villain in the white slavery trade,” Gooley said. “It’s due to go up for auction, but in the meantime it’s just bobbing around here. So far as I know it’s just as it was when we took possession with bed linens and such. I figure you might as well use it. As I remember there’s even a pair of binoculars inside, unless someone’s snitched them. I’ll pick you up tomorrow, bring you back to the Yard, and we’ll go over the details of the operation. The key is under the doormat.”
The yacht was furnished like a five-star hotel, with lots of marble, leather, and polished wood. The binoculars were on the dinette table. Kate picked them up and looked at the eighteenth-floor river-facing suite where the exchange would go down. The lights were off and she couldn’t see anything. Only one condo was lit in the building. It was on the ninth floor. Most likely the Malcolms’.
Nick called on her cellphone.
“I see you’ve settled in beside the Trembling Lady,” Nick said.
“Is that the yacht parked beside mine?”
“It’s what they call the Albert Bridge. It’s been structurally unsound and shaking since the day it opened in 1874. There’s still a sign on either end warning soldiers not to walk across it in step or the mechanical resonance could cause the bridge to collapse.”
“Not much chance of any soldiers doing that today.”
“What you’ve got to worry about is a dog relieving himself. Over a hundred and forty years of dog urine, from pooches being walked across the bridge to Battersea Park, have rotted the timber decks. This could be the day a pooch lifts his leg and takes the bridge down.”
“You’re making that up,” she said. “Or it’s an urban legend.”
“It’s the truth,” Nick said. “I read it in a scholarly book on bridge engineering.”
Kate shook her head in the dark privacy of the boat salon. Nick Fox was so full of baloney, and was such a convincing liar, that it was impossible to consistently separate fact from fiction. Even after working with him on several jobs she couldn’t always tell when he was handing her a load of horse pucky.
“I’ve set up the meeting with Violante,” Nick said. “We’re good to go.”
“It’s going to be a major police operation. One tiny miscalculation and you’ll end up in prison.”
“Just another day at the office,” he said.
She remembered her father saying the same thing over breakfast at Denny’s a few weeks ago. The casual observation had been as true for Jake then as it was for Nick now. It wasn’t the first time she’d been struck, and more than a little creeped out, by what the two most important men in her life had in common, besides her.
“Scotland Yard is running this,” she said. “I won’t be able to help you.”
“What matters to me is that you wish you could,” Nick said. “I think you’re falling for me.”
“That’s a frightening thought,” Kate said. “It sends chills down my spine.”
It was a flip reply, but it had some truth to it. She lived in mortal fear of falling for him. What woman wouldn’t fall for him? He was exciting and sexy and rich. He even smelled good. Appreciating his value as a partner was acceptable. Falling for him was terrifying.
Kate spent the next day at Scotland Yard planning the logistics of the stakeout and arrest with Gooley. He’d beefed up the plainclothes police presence in the Battersea Park area. The video feeds from the CCTV cameras were under constant observation. The dedicated surveillance camera and laser microphone were in place in the Chelsea apartment building, trained across the Thames at the Excelsior Tower’s eighteenth floor.
Kate drank coffee and watched the live feed on monitors that were mounted on the wall of the squad room. The drapes of the Excelsior flat were closed, and no lights were on. Gooley assured Kate that if there was a fly in that room, they’d hear it buzzing. She’d been given a police radio, a Kevlar vest, and a yellow windbreaker with the word POLICE printed across the back, but it had been made clear that she was an observer and not a participant. Standard operating procedure, Kate thought. It was what it was.
At the end of the day, Gooley and two dozen of his detectives gathered in a conference room for one last briefing. The long table was covered with laptops, scattered papers, coffee cups, and takeout food containers. The walls were plastered with pictures of the Excelsior Tower, blueprints of the building, various photos of Nicolas Fox, and street maps.
Gooley took out a laser pointer and aimed the beam at the maps. “Let’s go over it one more time. Fox is a pro. He’s going to spot us on the street if we’re watching, so we’ve got to hang back and rely on our cameras. We’ll have our strike teams waiting in Battersea Park, and on the Chelsea side of the Battersea and Albert bridges, far enough away not to be noticed, but close enough to move in quickly when I give the word. And we’ll also have a chopper in the air. Nobody moves in until I give the green light. At that point, we’ll surround the building. We’ll land blue team on the roof by chopper while red team secures the parking garage, yellow team secures the lobby, and green team seals the perimeter. The goal is complete containment.”
Kate felt déjà vu throughout the briefing. She’d tried to spring a trap like this on Nick many times before and had given basically the same instructions to her teams. It took her quite a while, and several failures, to realize her mistake and think outside the box to capture him. Luckily for Nick, Gooley was still firmly inside the box.
“We can’t assume the blueprints we have of the flats are accurate,” Gooley said. “There could be hidden safe rooms and escape routes that we don’t know about. What we do know is that many of the flats have a private lift and, in some cases, a lift for the car as well. The good news is that it’s a tower. There are basically only two ways out, from the top or from the bottom, and we’ll have both ends covered. So once both men are inside that building, they are ours.”
“But you can’t move in until the exchange goes down,” Kate said. “Or we’ve got nothing on Menendez.”
“Exactly,” Gooley said. “And we need to remember that whether it’s Violante or Menendez, he’s carrying the equivalent of twenty-five million dollars to this party. He’s going to have a small army along with him for protection. We don’t want this to become a firefight. But if it does, take them down hard and fast.”
Kate and Gooley picked up fish and chips to go on the way back to the yacht. They ate the beer-battered cod and thick-cut fries outside on the flybridge with the Albert Bridge brightly lit behind them.
“Is it true that the Albert Bridge is rotted with dog pee?” Kate asked, dipping her fish in tartar sauce.
“Yeah, but they say they’ve fixed it. On the other hand, they’ve been fixing the bridge since the day it was opened, and it still shakes, so I don’t buy it. This is a lousy stretch of the Thames for bridges.” Gooley gestured to the Battersea Bridge behind her. Composed of five low cast-iron arches supported by granite pillars across a sharp bend in the Thames, it wasn’t lit up in a showy fashion like the Albert. “That one is sturdier, but ships have been ramming into it for hundreds of years. A whale even got stuck underneath it a few years back. They’ve got the poor sod’s skeleton in the natural history museum. I wouldn’t want to be immortalized for the humiliating accident that killed me.”
“How about as the guy who captured Nicolas Fox and Lester Menendez?”
“That’d be nice,” Gooley said. “I could retire on that one.”
“Aren’t you too young to put in for your pension
already?”
“Yeah, but I could live off the money from the hit movie based on the arrest,” he said. “Russell Crowe can play me.”
“He wouldn’t wear that coat,” Kate said. “And he’s Australian.”
“So what? Renée Zellweger wasn’t British and she was Bridget Jones.”
“Good point. Who is going to play me?”
“Renée Zellweger,” Gooley said. “She could use her American accent this time.”
Their radios crackled to life and a detective’s voice came over the speaker. “The robin is in the nest.”
Kate and Gooley turned in unison to look at the Excelsior Tower. Lights were on in the eighteenth-floor flat.
“Showtime,” Gooley said, hauling a laptop out of a beat-up computer bag.
He set the laptop on the table, and pulled up the video feed from the Chelsea apartment building. The screen showed a large sparsely furnished space that looked more like an art gallery than a home. There were paintings on the walls and antiquities in display cases. The furniture was Swedish, contemporary, and looked as if it had been designed to stretch and dry hides. And standing in the middle of the room, stylishly dressed in a lightweight black sweater and black slacks, was Nicolas Fox. He was sipping from a mug, admiring a painting of a woman in a red dress.
“Can we zoom in tighter on him?” Gooley said into the radio.
The camera pushed in and it was clear that Nick was drinking from a golden jewel-encrusted goblet.
“The bugger is drinking from Suleiman the Magnificent’s goblet,” Gooley said. He squinted at the screen and tapped the painting with his finger. “Do you recognize that?”
Kate nodded. “It’s the Vermeer that Serena Blake stole from Heiko Balz’s bedroom while he was sleeping. Next to it is the Matisse from the Gleaberg Museum in Nashville. I’ll bet the other paintings are stolen, too.”
In fact, they were all pieces of art that Serena Blake had stolen over the years. This flat was her London pied-à-terre, compliments of a very wealthy, very old, very absent, very crooked German banker. On the three days out of the year that he used the flat he enjoyed looking at the art collection and didn’t especially care how it happened to be on his walls.
Nick walked across the living room, and the camera panned to the kitchen, which had more stainless steel than a morgue. He opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle of Coke, and refilled the goblet.
Kate knew that drinking Coke was something she’d do, not Nick. That was a hat tip to her.
“He’s using the goblet to have a Coke? Bloody hell,” Gooley said. “We ought to arrest him just for that.”
“It’s a goblet,” Kate said. “They’re made for drinking.”
“If you’re going to drink from a four-hundred-year-old goblet covered with jewels, it had better be the most expensive whisky that you can buy.” He turned to Kate. “So what do you think? Should we take him down now? A bird in the hand?”
“Hell no. What kind of a movie would that make? I say we go for the big finale.”
“Keep all eyes on the robin but do not approach,” Gooley said into his radio. “Repeat. Do not approach.”
“Russell Crowe will be pleased,” Kate said.
Two silver Range Rovers crossed the Battersea Bridge from the Chelsea side of the Thames at 11 A.M. the next day.
Two armed men in business suits sat in the front seat of the lead Range Rover. The backseat was folded down to accommodate eight aluminum hard-shell suitcases, each containing the euro cash equivalent of slightly more than $3 million that had been withdrawn from a half dozen banks around London.
The second Range Rover carried two more armed men and, in the backseat, Demetrio Violante, who’d flown into London that morning. He wore a blue two-button Brioni wool and silk suit, an azure and blue micro-checked cotton shirt, a sky-blue silk tie, palladium cufflinks, and polished black calfskin derby dress shoes. He wasn’t dressed for Hartley, for whom he had no respect. He was dressed for the money, which he respected enormously.
The cars drove to the south-facing entrance, which had the requisite grand portico adorned with polished marble and a large elaborate fountain.
Violante called Hartley on his cellphone.
“It’s Demetrio Violante. I’m outside your building.”
“Excellent. Come on up. Drive the car with the money into the garage. Do not bring anyone else with you. Park in lift number eighteen, roll down your driver’s side window, and press the button on the wall. It will bring you up to my flat.”
Violante didn’t like it, not because he was concerned for his safety, but because he didn’t want to unload the money from the car. Each suitcase weighed about seventy pounds. He’d had fat sucked out of every part of his body and the slack skin stitched tight. He didn’t want to rupture something with physical exertion. Not to mention he was wearing a very nice suit.
“So you want me to drive the car into a lift in the garage and ride it up to your apartment,” Violante said, getting out of his Range Rover and dismissing the guards in the other with a wave of his hand.
“Yes, that’s right,” Hartley said.
The guards got out of their car, and Violante climbed into the driver’s seat. “How high up am I going?”
“The eighteenth floor.”
“The eighteenth floor,” Violante said.
“I hope you aren’t afraid of heights.”
No, he wasn’t. He was repeating the instructions so Reyna, who was observing the exchange from a distance, would know exactly where he was and what he was doing. She was listening to everything through the flesh-colored radio device hidden deep in his other ear. He’d thought about holding the cellphone to that ear so she’d hear everything, but he was afraid that putting the two devices so close together might cause a shriek of feedback that would make him permanently deaf.
“We’ve got another pigeon in the coop,” Gooley said over the radio.
Gooley was in Battersea Park, the staging area for the primary strike teams that were waiting to converge on the Excelsior Tower, a half block to the northwest. The other teams were waiting for the go-ahead on the Chelsea side of the Albert and Battersea bridges.
Kate didn’t understand why Gooley didn’t identity the suspects and locations by name. She practically needed a glossary to keep track of the code names for everything. Confusing officers about who was who, and what was what, was more dangerous than the possibility that bad guys might be listening in. Gooley’s announcement that Violante had entered the Excelsior Tower had been redundant anyway. She’d heard Nick’s instructions to Violante through her laptop, thanks to the laser mike pointed at his apartment from the building across the river.
She was in the yacht and was dressed for action in the Kevlar vest and bright yellow police windbreaker. She would have liked to accessorize the outfit with a Glock, but since she didn’t have one with her, she settled for her collapsible baton.
The laptop was open in front of Kate, showing her a live close-up camera view of Nick’s apartment. And if she lifted her head, she could look out her window at the Excelsior Tower directly across the river. It was like having a luxury suite at the Super Bowl. All that was missing was a buffet and a bartender.
She watched Nick bring out a bottle of champagne and an ice bucket and set it on a coffee table. He knew he was under visual and audio surveillance, that a ruthless killer was on the way up to his apartment, and that more than fifty heavily armed cops were close by, itching to arrest him. And yet he seemed completely at ease.
Kate was impressed by his control. Nobody was watching her, or coming to get her, but she could feel the mounting tension like a heat lamp over her head. Maybe he was just wired differently than the rest of humanity. Maybe this was how he relaxed, and being safe made him anxious.
If so, he was in for a very relaxing hour.
The lift moved with surprising speed and comfort, considering it was basically a freight elevator hauling a two-and-a-half-ton SUV up eighteen s
tories. When the lift reached the apartment, the doors opened and Violante was treated to a spectacular unobstructed view of the London skyline. Hartley was standing off to one side, like a master of ceremonies. It was a stunning effect, and Violante was impressed. Hartley waved at him to bring the car forward.
“I’m inside,” Violante said for Reyna’s benefit.
“I see the car,” she said.
“Want me to wave?”
“Only if you need to be rescued.”
Violante drove the car a few feet into the living room, put it into park, and switched off the engine.
Hartley approached the driver’s side door and opened it. “Welcome to our humble home.”
“There’s nothing humble about it.”
This was not at all how Violante expected an archaeologist to live. He thought it would be an old house filled with dusty books, ratty furniture, and lots of maritime crap. But this was more like the upscale apartment of a wealthy art collector. Once again, he’d misjudged Hartley. It was disturbing.
“I suppose you’re right,” Hartley said. “If you’ve seen the extraordinary riches that we have in our business, it’s hard to satisfy or impress us with the usual trappings of success. So we have very expensive tastes.”
It made sense to Violante after seeing the Santa Isabel treasure. He would soon have the same problem as the Hartleys. It would be difficult to impress him with any object once he possessed a solid gold table.
“Where’s your lovely wife?”
“Somewhere safe, with her finger on the button, waiting to hear from me that everything has gone smoothly.”
Just like Reyna is watching out for me, Violante thought.
“Wife?” Gooley asked into the radio. “What wife?”