The Heist

hangar. “Spiro’s too drunk to fly.”
    “He’s a better pilot drunk than most pilots are sober.”
    That didn’t give Kate much comfort, but it wasn’t like she had any choice. It had to be tonight. She had to jump during a full moon so she could see where she was landing. And there weren’t many pilots who were willing to drop her over Athos, and probably none who’d do it for nothing. But Spiro was grudgingly repaying a debt to her father, and neither one of them would tell her what it was. All she needed to know, her father insisted, was that Spiro had a plane and two choppers and could fly them, even if he couldn’t pass a field sobriety test.
    Spiro returned to the table, drained the last drop from the ouzo bottle, and chased a flock of roosting hens out of his plane. He said something in Greek and made some hand motions that Kate interpreted as
Let’s get this stupid mission over and done so I can crack open another bottle of ouzo
.
    So here she was, flying twelve thousand feet above the Halkidiki peninsula at midnight, a mere two weeks after laying out her plan to her father. Her hair was cut pixie-style under her helmet, and her breasts were minimalized by a compression sports bra. She had her Glock and a pair of handcuffs in special pockets on the thighs of her jumpsuit, an altimeter strapped to her left wrist, gloves on her hands, and the tracking device for Nick’s satellite phone in a pack on her stomach.
    Judging from the smile on her father’s face, Kate was guessing this was definitely more fun than another round of golf at the Calabasas Country Club.
    Kate gave her father a kiss on the cheek, and he put his arm around her.
    “You’re going to be fine,” he said.
    “I know that,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re here.”
    “So am I,” he said. “We should do this more often.”
    Spiro peed into the coffee can at his feet, and Kate couldn’t help seeing it as an expression of his feelings about their conversation.
    Jake checked his handheld GPS. “We’re at the drop point,” he said, turning to Kate. “Are you ready?”
    “I can’t wait.”
    Kate stood up, adjusted her goggles, and opened the door. A blast of air roared through the plane, making it shake and rattle.
    “Good luck,” Jake yelled, and Kate jumped into the darkness.
    She stretched out into the box position, belly to the earth, her arms out at her sides, her legs bent. Although she was dropping at 120 miles per hour, she didn’t feel like she was falling. She felt like she was flying. Kate moved through the air as if she’d been born with wings. It had been two years since her last skydive, and she’d forgotten how exhilarating and liberating it could be.
    She flew over fortresslike monasteries rising dramatically out of the sea mist, and over honeycombs of earthen hermitages clinging like mud dauber nests to the jagged faces of gorges and cliffs, and over the stone huts that blended into the meadows and forests. It was like no landscape she’d ever seen before. She felt as if she’d traveled into the past, not as it ever existed but as imagined by the Brothers Grimm.
    At three thousand feet she reached down with her right hand and yanked the small leather strap behind her, releasing her canopy. The chute caught the air and yanked her up, feet to the earth, so she was now dropping in a standing position.
    Kate headed into the wind to slow her descent and steered toward a clearing that was a safe distance from the monasteries and far from the dangers posed by the cliffs and dense chestnutforests. She’d been trained to land within a ten-foot square on a drop zone, so she knew she could be precise.
    The drop was smooth, fast, and silent. She landed on her feet, quickly gathered up her chute, and dragged it into an olive grove that bordered the clearing. Kate stood for a moment to get her bearings. It was so quiet that the silence was unsettling, as if the volume of the entire world had been shut off. She saw lights coming from within the fortified walls of an imposing monastery on the nearest peak, but she wasn’t concerned about that. The monks were already deep into hours of prayer. She wasn’t likely to run into any of them as she made her trek, unless Nick was hiding in the monastery, but she doubted that.
    She took the tracking device out of her pocket, hoping she’d made a good choice in landing on the western side of the peninsula. If Nick was on the eastern edge she’d face an arduous