The Heist

like it had fallen onto the building from outer space. Kate thought it was a real-life Tomorrowland, without the rides.
    She checked in to her room with two hours to kill before her meeting with Nick Fox. So she did the tourist thing, and walked over to Checkpoint Charlie and the replica of the guard shack that once stood on the western side of the Berlin Wall on Friedrichstrasse. Kate was wearing black slacks and a white sweater, but she didn’t have her usual fashion accessories. She’d given her gun and handcuffs to her father to spirit back to the States, using whateverblack bag method he’d employed to get them to Greece. She didn’t have Mace, a Taser, or a telescoping baton. This made her purse about fifteen pounds lighter, and she felt like the strap practically floated off her shoulder.
    There was a double line of cobblestones in the street that marked where the Berlin Wall had once stood. She followed the line, which ran under parked cars and along sidewalks as it meandered over several streets. Nobody but her seemed to notice it. The memorial to a wall that once divided a country, that was the bloody front line of the cold war, got less attention than Jack Webb’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Eventually she found her way to the Fassbender & Rausch Schokoladen-Café at the Gendarmenmarkt, an eighteenth-century market square with ornate cathedrals at either end.
    Fassbender & Rausch, Berlin’s oldest and most renowned chocolatier, occupied the first two floors of a corner building that faced the Gendarmenmarkt. There was an enormous chocolate sculpture of the Reichstag in one of the first-floor windows, and beyond it Kate could see a burbling chocolate volcano in the center of a store filled with an astonishing assortment of handmade chocolate delicacies that would have made Willy Wonka mess his pants.
    Kate was afraid she’d lose control in the store, racing up and down the aisles, stuffing her mouth with candy. For sure a good time, but not an attractive picture if she ran into Nick Fox. It might be hard to establish authority after he saw her with chocolate dribbling out of her mouth and running down her chin. So she skipped the store entirely and went straight to the elevator, which took her to the second-floor café. She was expecting an ice cream shop like Ghirardelli in San Francisco, but the café at Fassbender & Rauschwas an elegant wood-paneled space that had the feel of a private club.
    Nick was already seated at a corner table, overlooking the Gendarmenmarkt. There weren’t many other people in the café: a young couple in their twenties, two businessmen in suits, a guy in a leather jacket reading
Der Spiegel
, and a family of tourists with four excited kids.
    Nick rose when she came to the table. “I took the liberty of ordering when I saw you walk up the street,” he said.
    “What did you get?”
    “Everything.”
    A waiter in a crisp white shirt, gray vest, and red tie approached, wheeling a cart. He set down four cups of hot chocolate and a platter of chocolate pastries and candies.
    The Mokka-Creme-Sinfonie had chocolate musical notes atop layers of mocha cream, chocolate ganache, and biscuits. The Mousse au Chocolat-Törtchen was a dome of smooth, dark chocolate filled with chocolate mousse and crowned with gold leaf. And that was only the beginning. Kate got a hot flash just looking at it. It was sex on a platter. She glanced up at Nick and saw that he was watching her. His expression was pleasantly bland, but she knew that somewhere deep in the murky crevices of his diabolical brain he was plotting against her. He was luring her into stupefied complacency with chocolate. The man was pure evil.
    “I know what you’re up to,” Kate said, popping a Törtchen into her mouth. “You’re trying to drug me with chocolate.”
    “Guilty as charged.”
    She did a test drive on the hot chocolate. “Do you have any other reasons for being here?”
    “I thought we should talk.”
    “Yes, but why Berlin?”
    “For the symbolism,” he said. “A wall used to divide this city, two bitter enemies on either side. After decades of conflict, the wall came down almost overnight to jubilation on both sides.”
    “I’m not jubilant.” That wasn’t entirely true. Her taste buds were ecstatic. She’d never be able to drink Swiss Miss instant cocoa again.
    “The point I’m making is that people from two very different worlds put their deep distrust of one another aside and