The Heist

easily scaled but at least shielded the grounds from prying eyes. The former barn housed a beautifully restored red 1966 Jaguar E-type convertible and a three-year-old Mercedes GLK. The house and grounds were tended during his long absences by his neighbor, a gregarious horse trainer by trade who, in his free time, built ships in a bottle and gave them away. There were probably twenty bottled ships around Nick’s house.
    Nick arrived in Bois-le-Roi, checked in with his neighbor/​groundskeeper, got briefed on all the local gossip he cared nothing about, then stopped by the baker, the butcher, and the grocer. For dinner he made himself a thick steak, fresh vegetables, and a warmed-up baguette, and he washed it down with a bottle of wine from his well-stocked cellar.
    While he ate he opened his laptop and did some basic research into Burnside and Griffin. Most of what he read he already knew. Neither man was a shrinking violet, and their private lives were public record. Their professional lives were legend. Nick finished his steak, sipped his wine, and logged in to his encrypted cloud account, where he browsed through the files he’d been compiling of potential new crew members. His late-night diversion was online poker, where he targeted someone calling himself “Le Chiffre,” handily winning $15,000 from him. By the morning of his third day in Bois-le-Rois, Nick had come up with the broad strokes of his plan.
    Jake O’Hare knew how to keep a secret, so three days after Kate’s return from Athos, she shared hers with him. She needed someone she could turn to for advice and support as the operationunfolded, someone who didn’t have any hidden agendas. She didn’t trust Nick or her own bosses. They were all looking out for themselves. Her father was the one person she could always depend upon to look out for her.
    They were sitting at a café in the airport in Athens, waiting for his flight back to the States and hers to Berlin, when she finally told him about the outrageous scheme Nick had sold to Fletcher Bolton.
    “I think it’s brilliant,” Jake said.
    “You’re being sarcastic.”
    “I’m being straight. For once, your hands won’t be tied by bureaucracy, civil rights, and the law.”
    “Oh,
those
pesky things,” she said.
    “You’ll be able to bring down a lot of bad guys who’ve played the system to their advantage.”
    “But I’ll be teamed up with a criminal.”
    “The pilot who flew you to Athos was a criminal, but you didn’t seem to mind. Sometimes a criminal is exactly who you need to get a job done. But I don’t have to convince you, you’ve already signed on. So what are we really talking about here, Kate?”
    “I’m technically in charge, but I know ultimately it’s Nick who’ll be running the cons. I can’t count on him to tell me everything he’s doing and what the dangers might actually be. I’m going to need a safety net of my own, a plan B he doesn’t need to know about,” Kate said. “I’m hoping it can be you.”
    “It’s always been me, didn’t you know that?” Jake said. “That’s what fathers are for.”
    “What I am asking could be above and beyond.”
    “Hell, Kate, that was my profession for forty years,” he said. “It also happens to be my motto.”
    “You have a motto?”
    “I do now. It’s ‘Above and Beyond.’ ”
    Kate hadn’t ever been to Berlin, nor had she ever had the desire to visit. Her image of the city was shaped by cold war spy movies where everything was in shades of gray, the streets were frosty and bleak, the trees were spindly and bare, and the people were pale, oppressed, and haunted. So she was unprepared for how colorful, vibrant, and energetic Berlin appeared to be as her taxi driver took a long, roundabout, fare-inflating route from the airport to the Hyatt in Potsdamer Platz.
    They drove through the lush, sprawling Tiergarten, a forest within the city that made Central Park look like a vacant lot, and cruised by the iconic Brandenburg Gate and a skyline of bold, edgy architecture that embraced the old while also breaking with the past. That architectural philosophy was epitomized by the Reichstag. Built in the late nineteenth century and virtually destroyed in World War II, the Reichstag was restored in the 1990s to its original grandeur as the seat of the German parliament, but its Neo-Baroque dome was replaced with a steel-and-glass version, with a dazzling spiral of 360 mirrors in its center, that looked