The Heist

journey on foot, over a mountain pass. The tracker looked like a standard handheld GPS, but was designed to pick up a signal from a satellite phone. If it turned out Nick didn’t have a satellite phone or didn’t have it powered up, she was screwed. She turned the tracker on and nearly collapsed with relief when, almost immediately, a red dot began pulsating on the map of Athos. There was a satellite phone emitting a signal a few miles north of her present position. The good news was that there was a satellite phone nearby. The bad news was that its location appeared to be on the edge of a cliff, and she hadn’t brought any rappelling gear.
    She headed north and had only walked a short distance when she came upon a collection of primitive huts arranged around a lopsided church no bigger than a double-wide mobile home. In the front yard of one of the huts was a small vegetable garden, a pile of cut wood, and a clothesline strung between two crookedchestnut trees from which several pairs of pants and shirts had been hung to dry. The clothes looked as if they’d been sewn together from gunny cloth and old potato sacks.
    Kate snatched a shirt and a pair of pants that seemed to be about her size and slipped them on over her jumpsuit. She crept out of the village, following the course set by her tracking device. She hiked along a narrow footpath through the dense woods, across a crystal-clear creek, and then up a steep, rocky hillside that had a rope strung through bolts hammered into the stone to use as a handrail.
    After about an hour of climbing she came to a centuries-old stone and earthen hut built out from the mouth of a cave. A curl of smoke rose from its chimney. A stream originating from the wooded peak high above spilled down from a wide crevice beside the hut and turned a paddle wheel. She assumed that the paddle wheel powered the steady light that glowed warmly behind the single small window. The setting had such a storybook quality to it that she half expected the Seven Dwarfs to pop out, singing as they headed off to work.
    Kate doubled-checked the tracker. The satellite phone was inside the hut, and it was on. Her gut told her she’d found Nick Fox’s hideaway, and judging by the light and the smoke, he was awake. She put the tracker back into the stomach pocket of her jumpsuit and removed the Glock from the pocket on her thigh. She tiptoed slowly up to the large wooden door and pressed her ear to it. She could hear the crackle of the fire, the burbling of the stream, and the churn of the paddle wheel.
    Pressing her left side against the door, she carefully tested the latch and decided it wasn’t locked. She took a deep breath, threw her entire weight against the door, and burst into the room.
    Nick Fox smiled at her from across a small table. He was wearing an aloha shirt, board shorts, and flip-flops. And he was eating a sandwich and drinking tsipouro, a clear liquor made on Athos from the residue of the wine presses. He didn’t seem especially surprised to see her or alarmed that she had a gun pointed at him.
    “You’re under arrest,” she said.
    “Is that how you greet everyone?”
    “Only international fugitives.”
    She kicked the door closed and looked around the tiny room. It was a bleak hermit’s cell, built for quiet spiritual contemplation and little else. A small fire burned in the stone hearth behind Nick, and a ragged curtain was drawn across an archway leading back to the cave.
    “You really ought to try ‘Hello, Nick, it’s nice to see you’ as a greeting one of these days.”
    “I’ll try it the first time I visit you in prison.”
    Nick’s eyebrows raised a fraction of an inch. “You’d visit me in prison?”
    “No,” she said. “I lied.”
    Nick smiled, and Kate sank her teeth into her bottom lip to keep from smiling with him. The man was irresistible. What’s with that? she thought. It was like wanting to bake cookies for the spawn of Satan.
    “Would you like some wine?” he asked her. “Why don’t you sit down and relax?”
    She kept her gun trained on him. “This is how I relax.”
    “Okay, that’s just scary. Would you like half of my corned beef sandwich?” he asked. “It’s direct from the Carnegie Deli in New York.”
    “Meat is forbidden on Athos.”
    “So are women,” Nick said. “But here you are.”
    “Did you really think a thousand years of sexist doctrine would keep me from getting you?”
    “No, I didn’t. In fact, you might ask