“Agreed,” Dragan said.
“Second, Kate comes along, too,” Nick said. “I need someone in the crew I can trust to watch my back.”
Dragan studied Kate. “How do I know she’s up to the task?”
“I broke Nick out of police custody,” Kate said. “I planned it and executed it within forty-eight hours of his arrest. I think that speaks for itself about my capabilities and experience.”
“I only work with the best,” Nick said to Dragan. “In fact, as far as I’m concerned, this job tomorrow is your audition. I expect to see precision and professionalism at every level, or I’m out.”
“There he goes,” Litija said. “Turning it around on you again, Dragan. I’ve never met anyone so slick.”
“Neither have I,” Dragan said. “Nick is one of a kind, and he continues to prove it, which is as irritating as it is impressive.” He shifted his gaze to Kate. “You’re in, but your share will come out of Nick’s pocket.”
“I don’t care whose pocket it comes from as long as it ends up in mine,” Kate said.
“Then it’s settled. You’ll both be staying here tonight and traveling with us to Paris by private plane tomorrow morning,” Dragan said. “I’ve already taken the liberty of checking you out of the hotel and having your things brought here.”
“You were pretty sure of yourself,” Nick said.
“I’m a hard man to say no to,” Dragan said.
Kate was hoping that if Dragan had checked them out he also took care of the bill. God knows what the champagne and sfogliatelle cost.
—
Dragan left Litija behind in the refectory and took Nick and Kate into a windowless room decorated with framed antique maps on the walls and an antique floor globe in one corner.
“This is a remnant of the old fortress and served as the commander’s map room. It’s where he planned tactics and strategy,” Dragan said. “I use it for the same purpose. I stare at the ceiling and hope for inspiration.”
Kate looked up. The ceiling was covered with a fresco of the heavens and the Greek gods that commanded them. She was about to look away when something caught her eye, and she did a double take. The illustration of Zeus, the god of gods, had Dragan’s face, pockmarks and all. What a lunatic, she thought.
He walked over to an architect’s model of a building that was displayed on a table in the center of the room. “Do you recognize this?”
It was an octagonal building with an open square in the middle. A street ran through the middle of the square, and there was a tall, slender box standing upright in the center. The box had a drawing of a column that had a statue of a Roman Caesar on top. There was another box that had been cut to fit over a portion of the building on one corner of the model.
Nick bent down and studied the model. “Place Vendôme.”
“You know Paris,” Dragan said.
“I know where the best jewelry stores in the world are,” Nick said. “You aren’t seriously considering hitting them?”
“Why not? It’s a great score, and the location is perfect. There’s only one way in and out.” Dragan pointed to the street that ran through the middle of the octagon. “Rue de la Paix. The buildings on either side of the square are continuous and essentially form two walls. That makes it easy for us to control the flow of traffic.”
“It also makes it easy for the police to box you in,” Kate said.
“That’s not going to happen,” Dragan said in a dismissive tone that did not invite argument.
“Is this going to be another smash-and-grab?” Nick asked.
“You make it sound so crude,” Dragan said. “But yes, it is.”
“I see two problems. The biggest one is right here, next door to the Ritz hotel.” Nick pointed to the building next to the one covered with the box. “That’s the Ministry of Justice, which runs the nation’s courts and prison system. There are police officers armed with automatic weapons inside and outside the building at all times. They can show up at any of the jewelry stores within the plaza in seconds.”
“Set that quibble aside for now,” Dragan said. “What’s the other problem?”
“After your smash-and-grab on the Champs-Élysées, the city installed solid steel pillars a couple feet apart to prevent cars from leaving the street and smashing through the storefronts. They run all along the inner circumference of the octagon.”
“Ordinarily, those pillars would be an impediment, but not now. We have a once-in-a-lifetime window of opportunity. The Colonne Vendôme and the Ritz are currently being renovated. They are entirely covered in scaffolding and hidden behind decorative shrouds.” Dragan tapped the slender box in the center of the square and then the one covering the building in the corner. “Usually, it’s an open square, but now there are plywood fencing and trucks around the base of the colonne and construction workers everywhere.”
Nick smiled. “And you’ve had your men working among the construction crew for months.”
“Indeed I have. At four o’clock tomorrow, several of our construction workers will place the ends of two parallel scaffold platforms on two of the steel pillars in front of Boucheron jewelers at the northeast corner of place Vendôme and rue de la Paix.”
Nick nodded, getting the picture. “Transforming the pillars from obstacles into an inclined ramp for a speeding Audi.”
“Your speeding Audi,” Dragan said. “You and Kate will go airborne and crash through the front window of the store. You will get out, smash the display cases with hammers, steal the jewels, and exit on foot to rue de la Paix, where two motorcycles will be waiting for you both to make your escape. While you are doing all of that, the same sequence of events will be happening at the opposite end of the square, at the Bulgari store on the western corner of place Vendôme and rue de la Paix, with another set of thieves.”
“Two robberies at once?” Nick said. “Isn’t that pushing your luck?”
“We’ll never get an opportunity like this again to strike place Vendôme,” Dragan said. “We’d be fools not to take full advantage of it.”
Nick tapped the Ministry of Justice building. “And what about this building full of police? You haven’t explained how you are going to deal with that quibble.”
“No, I haven’t. It’s not necessary for you to know those details. It’s a separate operation. But let me give you some peace of mind. There are construction office trailers, stacked on top of each other, that have created a temporary four-story building in front of the Ritz that significantly blocks the view of Boucheron from the police officers stationed at the front door of the Ministry of Justice,” Dragan said. “The scaffolding, scrim, and plywood fencing around the Colonne Vendôme blocks their view of Bulgari, too, not that you should be concerned about what is happening there, either.”
“The police may not see the robberies go down, but they are certainly going to hear them,” Kate said. “They can get across the square while we’re still smashing display cases and seal up the two ends of the street, boxing us in. It will be like shooting fish in a barrel. How are you going to stop that?”
“All you need to know is that we will,” Dragan said. His voice was sharp. It was clear he didn’t like the questioning. “There is no point in cluttering your head with irrelevant information. I want you concentrating on your jobs. I don’t want you distracted thinking about what someone else is supposed to do. That would jeopardize the entire operation. You have enough to think about as it is and a strict timetable to follow.”
“He’s right, Kate,” Nick said. “We’ll do our parts and trust that everyone else is doing theirs.”
“So you’re in?” Dragan asked.
Nick smiled. “Like you said, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
More diamond robberies, Kate thought. I’m going to spend the rest of my life in jail and then I’m going to burn in hell.
They spent the next hour going over the exact details and timing of the robbery, their escape, and their rendezvous aft
erward with Dragan, who would not be participating in the crime. The fact that he’d be sitting it out really bothered Kate. It meant that Dragan would be avoiding all the risk and, if things went bad, he’d be able to walk away and go right back to business.
“Now that we have the details straight, you are free to enjoy my property,” Dragan said. “A light lunch will be set on the patio. You can help yourself to refreshments. Your guest suite is just down the hall.”
Dragan left Kate and Nick and was on his way to his first-floor office when he ran across Litija sitting on a couch, drinking limoncello from the bottle.
“I don’t understand you, Dragan,” she said in their native Serbian.
“Good. If I was easily understood, I’d also be predictable. I’d be imprisoned or dead by now.”
“You told Zarko to leave Nick behind in the vault. You wanted Nick to become the focus of the police investigation and distract them from you. When you lied about it to Nick today, Zarko backed up your story with more lies.” She took a swig from the half-empty bottle. “You rewarded Zarko by pushing him off a cliff to protect your lie from ever being revealed.”
Dragan pitied her. She was a versatile operative, able to go undercover to lay the groundwork for a heist, or use her body to seduce a useful person of either sex, or participate as a pinch hitter in any aspect of the robbery itself. But as effective as she was, she lacked imagination, a chess player’s ability to see several moves ahead. She would never become more than she was today, a pawn in someone else’s game. His game. He didn’t like explaining himself to anyone, but he saw it would be necessary if he wanted to keep her.
“You are mistaken, Litija, about why I did it. I made a strategic decision to achieve our objectives. I hadn’t counted on Nick escaping, but since fate stepped in and brought him to me I decided he would be an asset. Zarko and Nick would never have worked well together, and I needed the skills that Nick has more than those that Zarko possessed. The only asset Zarko retained was the benefit I could derive from his death. It sent a message to Nick that I was clearing the path for him to join us. So I sacrificed Zarko for the mission.”
This was all true. But Dragan had also been eager to try out his Tiberius Drop. Zarko happened to be standing in the right spot, and Dragan had almost no impulse control. He didn’t see the need to share any of that with Litija.
“You see no value in loyalty,” Litija said. “Everyone is expendable to you. You sacrificed Zarko, a fellow Serbian, a man who had loyally served you for years. You have no heart.”
It was a good thing they weren’t outside standing on the terrace when she’d said that, or she would have experienced the Tiberius Drop herself. Dragan had zero tolerance for criticism. He supposed he could break her neck, but that would require more effort than he was willing to expend right now. And finding her replacement would be tedious. It would take weeks of interviews, watching candidates demonstrate weapons skills, watching them in hand-to-hand combat with his men, watching them fuck his entire staff, including ugly old toothless Maria, who tended the garden and smelled like dead fish. A shiver of revulsion ripped through him at the memory of Litija with Maria. He had to give it to her. The girl had stamina. And as if all that wasn’t exhausting enough, he would have to personally test out the few women who survived. He didn’t have the time right now to go through that, so he ignored the insult and answered the underlying question.
“Nick is brilliant, but he doesn’t always work alone,” Dragan said. “He often assembles a highly skilled crew for his jobs, and individually they’re nearly as good as he is. Until his escape, I didn’t know that his crew had any lasting allegiance to him. Now we not only get Nick, but his people, too, to help us on the next phase of our plan, assuming that he passes the place Vendôme test first. We’ll be able to accomplish our near-term and long-term objectives much sooner, and with a greater chance of success, than we could have without him.”
—
Nick and Kate left the house and walked to the far edge of the pool to stand by the waterfall where they couldn’t be overheard.
“Airborne?” Kate said. “Are you kidding me? We’re going airborne and then we’re going to crash through a storefront and smash jewelry cases with a hammer. What is this, Hollywood? That stuff only happens in movies. They use stunt drivers and fake storefronts. People don’t actually do this stuff. It isn’t done!”
“I think I can do it,” Nick said.
“Think? That indicates doubt. That’s right next to I don’t think I can do it. I want no part of this ridiculous scheme. I’m not robbing a jewelry store in place Vendôme.”
“It could be fun,” Nick said, grinning at Kate. “Flying through the air, smashing into stuff.”
“Seriously?”
Nick shook his head. “No. When I pull a heist I make sure there’s no danger to innocent bystanders, and for the most part I only con people who deserve it. This is not something I would ever choose to do. I’m participating in this because there’s a lot at stake. We’ve been tasked to get the smallpox vial, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
“If we get caught, it will create an international scandal, and we’ll lose our best chance at stopping Dragan. He’ll go underground. We won’t know what he’s done with the smallpox until people somewhere start dying horrible deaths.”
“We won’t get caught,” Nick said.
“How do you know?”
“Because Dragan and his crew are great at this.”
“You say that like you admire him.”
“I appreciate his skills,” Nick said. “He’s a criminal mastermind.”
“He’s a homicidal psychopath.”
“That’s definitely a character flaw, but he’s exceptionally good at what he does. His robberies look like quickly improvised smash-and-grabs. But the truth is they are the result of careful preparation, undercover work, and split-second timing. Dragan has the patience to play the long game. There aren’t many people in this business who do.”
“You’re willing to play the long game,” Kate said. “On the surface you seem like a spontaneous kind of guy, but you actually have a lot of patience.”
“You noticed.”
“Hard not to.”
“You’re referring to my expertise as a master criminal, right?”
“Of course.”
Nick grinned and Kate grinned back.
“There are other times when patience comes in handy,” Nick said.
“Are you bragging?” Kate asked.
“Just saying.”
—
Place Vendôme, originally called place Louis le Grand, was built in 1699 as a luxury townhouse development for the rich. That’s what it was until one day in 1792, during the French Revolution, when nine aristocrats got their heads cut off and stuck on spikes in the middle of the square. Overnight the neighborhood became place des Piques (Place of Spikes) and a popular setting for public executions. It took another hundred years before the square got its new name and once again became an enclave for the rich, not only as a place to live, but more important for the job at hand, to spend outrageous amounts of money on precious jewels.
At exactly 3:57 P.M. on Thursday Nicolas Fox drove a black Audi A4 into place Vendôme. Kate O’Hare sat in the passenger seat thinking about all of those heads on spikes and how hers could soon be on one, too, figuratively speaking. The Boucheron jewelry store was directly ahead. The Ministry of Justice was to their left, and there were four police officers armed with M16s standing outside and even more of them inside. This was an extremely dangerous heist, and they were entrusting their escape, and possibly their lives, to the Road Runners and their ability to stop the police from responding. Kate didn’t like putting her safety into anyone’s hands but her own.
At the same moment that Nick drove into place Vendôme, an identical Audi with two Road Runners inside entered the square from the opposite end of rue de la Paix and headed in their direction. The two cars passed without seeing ea
ch other because the sheathed scaffolding and plywood fencing around the 144-foot-tall Colonne Vendôme in the center of the plaza blocked opposing traffic from view.
“I ambushed a police transport on Monday to rescue a crook and here I am on Thursday, robbing a jewelry store,” Kate said. She and Nick were buckled tight into their seats and wore matching crash helmets with tinted visors that obscured their faces. “They didn’t train us for this at Quantico.”
“That’s why the FBI needs me to catch people like me. Sometimes you have to commit crimes to prevent bigger crimes,” Nick said. “The curriculum at Quantico needs to be changed. They should invite us in to teach.”
The very thought gave Kate a queasy stomach.
Ahead of them, four construction workers emerged from behind the colonne’s fence, crossed the street, and laid the ends of two scaffold platforms down on the small steel pillars that stuck out from the sidewalk in front of Boucheron.
“I’ll be sure to mention the change in curriculum when I testify in my defense,” Kate said. “Maybe I can get the charges against me reduced.”
“Keep that positive attitude,” Nick said. He floored the gas pedal and pressed the horn to warn anyone in the store about what was coming.
The four construction workers scrambled out of the way an instant before the Audi hit the improvised ramp.
Kate’s heart stuttered as the car went airborne and headed straight for the elegant limestone façade of the jewelry store, with its large windows and ornamental columns. The building looked monumental and foreboding, daring them to do what the centuries, revolutions, and wars seemingly could not—break down the walls.
Even though she knew the front end of the car had been structurally reinforced for the collision, all of her instincts told her that driving into anything at high speed was suicide. It didn’t help that she also knew that the Audi’s air bags were disabled. She placed her gloved hands flat on the dashboard and braced for impact.
The Audi blasted through the window in an explosion of glass, plaster, and limestone, smashed through a display case in a spray of diamonds and splintered wood, and came to a stop in the center of the store.