The Pursuit is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by The Gus Group, LLC
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9780553392777
ebook ISBN 9780553392784
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Liz Cosgrove, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Ray Lundgren
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Acknowledgments
By Janet Evanovich
About the Authors
Nicolas Fox, infamous con artist and thief, woke up in a coffin. His ability to stay calm was partially due to the lingering effects of the tranquilizer shot he’d been given eighteen hours earlier, in Honolulu. It was also due to his belief that if his abductors had really wanted him dead, he would already be dead instead of napping in a high-end casket. Especially after he had thrown one of the kidnappers through a glass coffee table and tried to choke another with a kukui nut lei. So despite the dire nature of his present situation, Nick was optimistic about his future.
He lifted the heavy lid of his coffin and sat up to find himself in a bank vault. Concrete walls were lined with hundreds of safe-deposit boxes. The ceiling was low, outfitted with strips of fluorescent lights. The floor was white tile. A twelve-inch-thick steel door was ajar, as was an iron-barred gate that opened into the vault.
It took Nick only a second to realize that it was all fake. The iron bars of the gate were PVC pipes that had been painted black. The wall of safe-deposit boxes was a large photograph. The floor was linoleum, the steel door made of painted Styrofoam. It was the equivalent of a movie set. Someone was training for a heist and Nick had a good idea which vault they were planning to hit—the basement diamond vault located in the Executive Merchants Building in Antwerp, Belgium.
A man walked onto the set. He was dressed like a fashion-conscious Angel of Death in a black turtleneck sweater, black jeans, and black loafers. He was in his fifties, but had the athletic build of someone thirty years younger. It was his strikingly angular face, and the thinning, pockmarked skin glued like yellowing wallpaper to his sharp cheekbones, that betrayed his age.
Nick had never formally met the man, but he remembered him from Hawaii. He had led the abduction team. He spoke excellent English with a slight accent. Nick knew he was Balkan.
The man tossed Nick a cold bottle of mineral water. Nick caught the bottle and noted that it was Valvert, a Belgian brand. Nick was pretty certain he wasn’t in Hawaii anymore.
“How are you feeling?” the man asked.
Nick took a long drink before he replied. “I suppose traveling to Belgium in a coffin is better than flying coach these days. At least I was able to lie flat.”
“And sleep like the dead.”
“The afterlife looks surprisingly like the diamond vault in the Executive Merchants Building in Antwerp,” Nick said.
“You’re very good.”
“I’m assuming that’s why I’m here and not buried in this coffin.”
“For the time being,” the man said.
—
FBI Special Agent Kate O’Hare closed and locked the door on the high-end Oahu beach house. Her maverick partner Nick Fox had rented the house, and last night he’d disappeared. His red Ferrari was still parked in the driveway. His blood was also left behind. Okay, maybe it wasn’t his blood, but it was someone’s blood. And the blood trail led to the front door. Not such a shocker since a lot of people probably wanted to kill Fox. He was a world-class thief, con man, and an international fugitive. For the past couple years he’d been secretly working with Kate to take down bad guys that the FBI couldn’t touch. Not that he was doing it out of the goodness of his heart. It was either help the feds or go to jail for a very long time.
And lucky me, Kate thought. I got stuck with him. Not only was she stuck with him, but she was also sort of hot for him. Could it possibly get any worse?
The beach house was at the end of a cul-de-sac. Houses to either side were hidden behind gates and tropical hedges. The sound of the surf was a constant murmur in the distance.
Kate walked down the driveway and cut across to one of the neighboring houses. She rang the bell and pulled the FBI badge case from her pocket. She flipped it open beside her head for the benefit of whoever looked through the peephole. The homeowner would see a blue-eyed woman in the vicinity of thirty with a slim, athletic build, her brown hair currently cut in a rakish, chin-length bob that not only met FBI requirements but also was practical. Her hair didn’t require much care and didn’t give an assailant a lot to grab in a fight. She wore a white permanent press polyester shirt, skinny jeans, a holstered Glock clipped to her belt, and a thin-bladed knife in a sheath just above her ankle.
The door was opened by a short woman in her midfifties wearing a purple halter top, colorful floral shorts, and flip-flops. She was more charred than tanned, her skin like tree bark. She held a Bloody Mary in her left hand, her long, polished fingernails as red as her drink.
“Do we really have to do this again?” the woman asked.
“Again?”
“Just because I signed a petition demanding to see a president’s birth certificate doesn’t mean I’m going to take a shot at him from my bathroom window while he’s bodysurfing. When’s he coming?”
“I’m not here about a presidential visit, ma’am. I’m investigating a possible crime that occurred next door.”
“You’ll have to narrow it down. Crimes occur there all the time. It’s party central. That’s why I have a camera aimed at the house. It’s so I have proof of the drunken tourists who drive over my grass, vomit on my flowers, and let their kids pee on my palms. But does anybody care? No.”
This brought a smile to Kate’s face. The woman had security cameras. And one of them was aimed at the beach house Nick had rented. This was good.
“I’d like to look at the footage,” Kate said.
“Hallelujah! You know how long I’ve been waiting for someone with a badge to ask me that?”
Kate edged past her and tried not to scrape herself on the lava-rock wall in the process. The woman closed the door, opened a coat closet behind her, and swept aside some windbreakers on hangers to reveal a shelf holding a DVR, a flat-screen monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse.
“Ta-da,” the woman said. She turned on the monitor and typed in a password. The image on the screen was divided into six squares showing different angles of her property. One angle was a clear view of the rental house, and she clicked on the feed to expand it to full scree
n. “You can rewind using the backspace key. I got this at Costco. Great, isn’t it?”
“Wonderful,” Kate said.
“Can I get you a Bloody Mary?”
“Sure,” Kate said. She didn’t want a Bloody Mary, but it was the easiest way to get rid of the woman.
It took Kate only a few seconds to scan through the footage on the DVR and find what she wanted. Yesterday, late afternoon, a Ford Explorer drove up to the beach house, and four men got out. They drew guns and fanned out around the house. Kate could tell from the way they moved and handled their weapons that they were trained soldiers, just like her. This was a professional strike team. And yet they didn’t try to disguise their faces.
Moments later, Nick emerged from the house, his hands zip-tied behind his back, a gun held to his head by a man with a pockmarked face. Nick was six feet tall, brown-haired and brown-eyed, and even now, in this dangerous situation, he moved with the relaxed grace of a man confident in his ability to take care of himself. She was relieved to see that Nick was alive and uninjured, but she still felt a pang of anxiety in her chest. He was far from safe. Behind Nick and his captor, two other men carried out a third man who was covered with blood, his clothes shredded. A glass coffee table had been shattered in Nick’s rented house. She suspected this bloody guy was the unfortunate missile that had destroyed the coffee table.
The pockmarked man shoved Nick into the backseat of the Explorer while the two other men opened the rear door, hefted their injured comrade inside like a sandbag, and slammed the door closed. The men piled into the car and drove away, giving Kate a good view of the license plate. That sloppiness intrigued her.
The woman returned with a fresh drink in each hand and held one out to Kate. Kate’s drink had a big pineapple wedge on the rim. “Here’s your Bloody Mary.”
“Sorry, I have to pass. I can’t drink on the job.” Kate unplugged the DVR and tucked it under one arm. The last thing she wanted was new footage of Nick Fox, one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted fugitives, floating around. “I’m going to need to take this with me as evidence. Is that okay with you?”
“Be my guest.”
“It might be a while before you get it back. In the meantime, I’ll have a forceful talk with the owners of the rental house about taking responsibility for the bad behavior of their tenants.”
She’d also return to the beach house later tonight to clean up the blood and take Nick’s suitcase, clothes, and toiletries. She wanted to be the only law enforcement agent on Nick’s trail.
“Thank you so much,” the woman said. “Bring back the DVR when you’re off-duty, and I’ll make you the best Bloody Mary you’ve ever had.”
“Deal,” Kate said. She’d never be back, but she’d make sure the woman got a new DVR.
Kate got into her Jeep, took out her cellphone, and found the phone number for the duty agent at the FBI field office in Honolulu. She identified herself and asked the agent to run the Explorer’s license plate for her. The response was almost immediate. The car was registered to the same airport-based car rental agency as her Jeep. That was great news, because she knew that most rental car companies tracked their cars, either with GPS units or theft prevention devices that, in some cases, could even be used to remotely disable the vehicle. She thanked the duty agent and called the rental company.
“This is FBI Special Agent Kate O’Hare. You rented a Jeep to me yesterday afternoon. I need you to ping the locator on a Ford Explorer of yours with the following license plate number and tell me where I can find it. I’ll be stopping by shortly with identification, and I’d appreciate it if you had the information ready for me.”
—
The Ford Explorer was parked under a broken streetlight where Lagoon Drive came to a dead end against the eastern fence of the Honolulu International Airport runway. The road got its name from the Ke’ehi Lagoon that ran the length of its south side and faced Waikiki. On the north side of the road was a line of general aviation terminals, cargo carriers, and tour operators. It was a remote spot and was virtually deserted, the silence occasionally broken by jetliners, fat with tourists, coming in for landing.
Kate drove up to the SUV slowly and parked. She got out of the Jeep, drew her weapon, and approached the Explorer. Abandoned and empty. No surprise there. There was blood all over the cargo area, along with glass shards, soiled gauze, and torn wrappers from bandages and other medical supplies. She holstered her gun, went back to the Jeep, and retrieved her go bag. It contained everything she needed for a few days in the field, including clothes, extra ammo, rubber gloves, and an evidence-collection kit. She took the rubber gloves and kit and returned to the SUV.
It bothered her that whoever had snatched Nick didn’t feel it necessary to properly dispose of the Explorer. It suggested that they were either stupid or already out of the country. She didn’t think they were stupid. She meticulously searched the SUV and found a Walgreens receipt and a disposable cellphone. The cellphone had been wedged into a cranny by the back wheel well. It could have been in the wheel well for weeks or months, or it could have fallen out of the injured guy’s pocket when they tossed him into the cargo area. Kate dropped the phone and the receipt into the evidence bag. If every person called from the phone was also using a throwaway phone, it created a completely closed network. If she lucked out and the phone belonged to the injured guy and he had made at least one call to a nondisposable phone, she had a lead.
If the phone didn’t give her anything, she’d have the fingerprints she was going to lift from the car, the photos of the bad guys she was going to pull from the DVR and the security camera at Walgreens, and the list she was going to get of every private jet or cargo plane that had departed the airport in the last twenty-four hours.
“Why don’t you stretch your legs?” the pockmarked man said to Nick, with a sweeping wave of his hand to express his generosity. “What can you tell me about this vault?”
“Just some useless trivia,” Nick said.
Nick got up stiffly, cracked his back, and began walking slowly around the set, shaking his arms to get the blood flowing again. Still wearing a red aloha shirt with a surfboard motif, khaki shorts, and flip-flops on his otherwise bare feet, Nick stood in colorful, casual contrast to his host.
“Indulge me,” the man said.
“The building was constructed in the mid-1970s and is occupied exclusively by individual diamond merchants who store their inventory in safe-deposit boxes in the vault, which is two floors underground.”
As Nick spoke and continued circling the room, three more men and one woman came in to listen. The men had the demeanor of thugs. The woman was young, graceful, and stunning, with natural blond hair and emerald green eyes. She would have looked elegant even if she’d been wearing a garbage bag instead of Gucci.
“The vault door weighs three tons, has a lock with a hundred million possible combinations, and can withstand twelve hours of sustained drilling, not that it would ever happen, since it’s protected by an embedded seismic alarm that will go off the moment the drill bit touches the steel. Even if you could get the vault door open, it’s protected by a magnetic field.” Nick pointed to a plate on the door that aligned with another, matching, plate on the wall. “If the field between the door and the wall is broken, the alarm goes off at the police substation, which is only half a block away.”
“That’s true at night,” the man said. “But during business hours, the vault is wide open so the merchants can get to their diamonds.”
Nick nodded his head. “But the interior gate remains locked. It’s opened remotely by security guards stationed in a command center upstairs who watch from a video camera mounted outside the vault door. After hours, opening this gate requires a special key that is impossible to duplicate.”
“The bars could easily be cut with a torch.”
Nick reached up and tapped a matchbox-sized unit on the ceiling. “Sure they could, but that’s not an option. The vault is also protected by a light
detector as well as a combination heat and motion sensor.”
“So you don’t come through the door,” the man said. “You tunnel in.”
“The room temperature is maintained at sixty degrees Fahrenheit at all times,” Nick said. “An increase of more than five degrees in the ambient room temperature will trigger the alarm.” Then he added: “Oh, and there are also seismic sensors in the floor and the walls to prevent tunneling your way in.”
The man nodded, impressed. “You’ve studied this vault before.”
“It would be professional negligence if I hadn’t. I could lose my license to steal.” Nick winked at the woman then looked back at the man. “Frankly, I’m surprised you’re even interested in this. It’s not your style. You’re more of a smash-and-grab guy.”
“You know who I am?”
“It’s not a big secret. Your face is on the wall of every law enforcement agency from Stockholm to Perth. You’re Dragan Kovic, leader of the Road Runners, an international gang of diamond thieves who’ve pulled dozens of jewelry store robberies across twenty different countries in the last decade, stealing two hundred million dollars’ worth of diamonds.”
“Closer to two hundred and fifty million,” Dragan said. “But who’s counting?”
“Your gang’s trademark is driving a vehicle, often an Audi, through a storefront. You’ve also used a FedEx truck, a bulldozer, an ice cream truck, a motorhome, a cement truck, and my personal favorite from your repertoire, a police car. Then you smash the display cases with pickaxes, grab the diamonds, and speed off. You’re in and out of the stores in four minutes and out of the country within two hours.” Nick pointed to the vault door. “But this is different. You can’t drive an Audi through that.”