The Heist

Sûreté, and the Russian Politsiya all want a piece of you. We’re only just getting started.”
    He lifted his eyes to hers. “You must have me mistaken for someone else.”
    “Is that the best you can do?”
    “You’ve misinterpreted everything that happened last night,” he said. “You’re making a terrible mistake.”
    “Then by all means, set me straight,” she said, leaning back again. She needed a moment to regroup anyway, to collect her thoughts and regain control of the situation.
    He looked past her, directing his appeal to the audience. “I’m a struggling performance artist. What happened at the Kibbee was a show.”
    “Like the Blue Man Group, only in green and with a diamond?” Kate said.
    “In a sense, yes. Live theater on the stage of life. A big stunt that we hoped would go viral on YouTube. Obviously, it was a dumb thing to do. I’ll gladly do my thousand hours of community service and pay restitution for the scratch we left in the glass display case.”
    “You drove away with a fifteen-million-dollar diamond,” she said.
    “No, I didn’t,” he said. “It was a cubic zirconia, a fifteen-dollar bauble just like the one we left behind in its place. So see, it was theater on both sides. No harm done.”
    It was another bold guess, but an educated one, Kate thought. She’d switched the real diamond before its arrival at the Kibbee, though only Roland knew that. And as the situation was playing out, her unwillingness to gamble with the real diamond would cost her in the courtroom. He wouldn’t do much prison time for this heist. They’d have to nail him for all the swindles he’d pulled before, assuming they didn’t end up having to stand in line behindthe other countries that wanted to extradite him. Either way, though, he was going down. She had to show him how futile it was to fight the inevitable, that now was the time to make a deal.
    “I know all about you, going back to when you were eighteen,” Kate said. “I don’t get it, either. You had such a bright future. You had the smarts to get yourself into Harvard, but you threw it all away by running a massive, multifaceted cheating operation for rich students. Your scams ran the gamut from hiring impostors to take tests to creating entirely fake transcripts that you planted in the registrar’s office. When you were finally caught, you and a dozen students were expelled and seventy-eight of your other victims were quietly forced to repeat entire academic years.”
    “They weren’t victims. They came to me to take advantage of the unique services that I offered so they could have more time for their leisurely pursuits,” he said. “Harvard taught me how to be an enterprising entrepreneur in a global marketplace.”
    “What you learned was to target the rich and the venal, people who could afford to be swindled and would rarely report the crime or press charges because they wouldn’t want to be seen as fools,” she said. “That’s what’s kept you out of jail. Until now.”
    “It’s odd to hear you talking to me about jail,” Nick said.
    “I don’t see why,” she said. “I’m an FBI agent and you’re a crook.”
    “Your mother died when you were seven. Your father, a career soldier, took you and your younger sister with him from base to base, all over the world, so you lived the same regimented life that he did. Instead of escaping from the military life when you were eighteen, you joined up, becoming a Navy SEAL, until your commanding officer tried to cop a feel.”
    “He was a jerk.”
    Nick grinned. “You broke the jerk’s nose, and the good ol’ boynetwork made you settle for an honorable discharge instead of court-martial. You joined the FBI after that, which is like the army only there’s no uniform and no saluting. You don’t play well with others. You work alone, because you’re too driven and emotionally distant for anyone to last as your partner, and you live alone for the same reason. So you’re in your own kind of prison. Which is really a shame because you’re very pretty, frighteningly competent, and compellingly complex.”
    Kate was momentarily speechless. She was shocked that he knew all those things about her. And she was gobstruck that he thought she was pretty.
    “I usually look better,” Kate said, “but I threw up.”
    “I hope it wasn’t on my account.”
    “I’m pretty sure it was the breakfast burrito.”
    “You should take better care of yourself and stop