The Heist

Burnside,” Nick said. “I was tempted to hire him when you arrested me. The guy is brilliant.”
    “He’s scum,” Bolton said.
    “You didn’t think so when he was a Justice Department prosecutor,” Nick said.
    “He uses what he learned about our tactics and our personnel to get scores of high-profile crooks and murderers off the hook and make the FBI look inept in the process,” Bolton said. “There’s a word for men like him.”
    “Expensive,” Nick said.
    “Traitor,” Bolton said.
    “So you want the two of us to use Burnside to find Griffin, bring him to justice, and recover the half a billion that he stole,” Kate said.
    “Yes,” Bolton said.
    “No problem,” Nick said.
    “Huge problem,” Kate said. “How are we going to get Burnside to give up Griffin without resorting to torture?”
    “I’ll come up with something,” Nick said.
    “And even if Burnside does betray his client,” Kate said, “what makes you think Griffin will tell us where his money is?”
    “I’ll figure out a way,” Nick said.
    Kate stared at him. “That’s it?”
    Nick shrugged. “It’s a start.”
    “It’s nothing,” she said.
    “Let’s get together four days from now, at four P.M. , at the Schokoladen-Café in Berlin,” Nick said. “And I’ll tell you how we’re going to do it.”
    “No way. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
    “So you want us to live together?”
    “No, of course not,” she said.
    “Then how did you think this was going to work? Did you assume you’d just lock me up in a dungeon somewhere each night?”
    “I like the sound of that.” Kate glanced at Bolton and Jessup for backup on this key point, but she could see from the looks on their faces that she wasn’t going to get it. “C’mon, guys, help me out here.”
    “He’s a free man,” Jessup said. “With restrictions.”
    Nick smiled. “Is speaking in contradictions some secret language they teach you at Quantico? Because you and Bolt are both very good at it.”
    “It’s ‘Bolton,’ ” the deputy director said again.
    “He could be captured by some other law enforcement agency in the meantime,” Kate said. “And there is nothing to stop him from committing his own scams between assignments.”
    “That’s a risk we have to take,” Jessup said.
    Kate looked at Bolton, who was obviously in agreement with Jessup. She looked at Nick, who was way too pleased with it all.
    “So what am I supposed to do for four days?” Kate asked.
    “Enjoy your vacation,” Jessup said.
    She had been, right up until the time Bolton and Jessup stepped out from behind that curtain.
    It was decided that the four of them would leave Athos separately, to avoid any chance of them all being seen together, and that Kate would go first, since there were others awaiting word from her.
    She stepped outside the hut and called her father on the satellite phone. She told him that the mission was a bust, that Nick Fox wasn’t on Athos, and that she’d take the ferry to Ouranoupoli and then the bus back to Thessaloniki, where she would meet him later that day at their hotel.
    “You’re lying about Fox,” Jake said. “But I can respect that.”
    “You respect lying?”
    “Sometimes it’s necessary,” he said. “I only hope that you made the right decision.”
    “So do I,” she said.

Nick had to admit there were some undeniable benefits to working for the FBI instead of hiding from them. They made it easier to move around and look legitimate, and even better, he was now operating on someone else’s dime. Bolton had supplied Nick with a new alias, Nicolas Raider. Raider had a U.S. passport, a platinum AmEx card, a bank account, and detailed histories in the IRS, the DMV, Experian, and other major government and private sector databases. The flip side, of course, was that every time Nick used the alias a blip popped up on Bolton’s computer telling him exactly where Nick was located. No problem, Nick thought. I can deal. It’s a new game.
    Nick swiped his brand-new credit card through the machine at the airport, flashed his brand-new passport, and flew from Greece to his three-hundred-year-old stone farmhouse in Bois-le-Roi, France. Bois-le-Roi was a small village on the Seine just outside of Fontainebleau. It was one of Nick’s many properties, and it had been chosen primarily for the solitude it offered.
    The rambling single-story house, and the two acres it sat on, were surrounded by a stone wall that could be