The Heist

criticizing your choice of mustard. He was hooked up to Kate for five long years. He wouldn’t be able to simply walkaway from her when he couldn’t tolerate another day of having bright yellow mustard in his refrigerator.
    Kate raised her face and surreptitiously glanced over Nick’s shoulder. “I make three of them, how about you?” she asked softly.
    POP!
The nesting fantasy bubble burst in Nick’s head.
    “I spotted two,” Nick said, relieved that he wouldn’t have to engage in a mustard war anytime soon. “I’ll take your word for the third.”
    Kate led them to a crowd of tourists standing around a clear pane of Plexiglas embedded in the plaza floor. The tourists were all hunched over, taking pictures through the Plexiglas of a deep, subterranean room full of empty white bookshelves, an artistic memorial to the twenty-five thousand books burned by the Nazis in the Bebelplatz on a single night in 1933.
    “Excuse me,” Kate said, taking her iPhone from her pocket and approaching a young man with a Berlin guidebook under his arm. “Could you take a picture of us?”
    “I would be glad to,” the man said with a thick Swedish accent.
    Kate maneuvered Nick so their backs were to Behrenstrasse and Saint Hedwig’s Cathedral. “Be sure to get the cathedral. We just love that dome.”
    Nick put his arm around Kate, and the tourist clicked a picture. Before he could hand the camera back, Kate hustled Nick over so their backs were now to the Old Royal Library. “Can you get us with the library and palace behind us, too?”
    After several more pictures Kate took possession of her phone and huddled with Nick to look at the shots.
    Kate enlarged the photo and pointed to a man in the background. “Gray suit, white shirt, and red tie. He was in the restaurant, reading a newspaper.”
    “What a cliché,” Nick said.
    “He followed us out.” Kate swiped her finger across the screen, bringing up the next photo with the Old Palace as their backdrop and two other men in the background. “This guy started shadowing us when we crossed the Gendarmenmarkt, and this one just pulled up in a car on the other side of Behrenstrasse as we were coming into the square. They’re too far away to see their faces, but they’re all wearing gray suits and white shirts.” She swept the photo away and brought up the one of them against the backdrop of Unter den Linden. “There’s a fourth guy here, leaning against the Audi, looking right at us. They have us boxed in. Do you know these guys?”
    “Not personally, but a year ago, maybe two, I might have tricked a German shipping mogul out of a few million euros for the purchase of a stolen Vermeer that wasn’t actually a stolen Vermeer.”
    “And you came back to Berlin?”
    “If I stayed away from every place where I’ve done business or had a little fun, I’d never leave my igloo in Antarctica.”
    Nick knew that Heiko Balz carried a grudge, but he didn’t think that he’d go to the considerable expense of keeping people on alert for him at airports, train stations, restaurants, and hotels after all this time. Obviously, he was wrong.
    Kate and Nick mixed in with a tourist group that was leaving the Bebelplatz and making their way across Unter den Linden to the German Historical Museum. The museum sat alongside the Spree River by the ornate Palace Bridge. Nick glanced across the bridge and saw a van with dark tinted windows pull up to the curb beside the Berlin Cathedral.
    Kate stole a look over her shoulder. The three men behind them were moving in and not bothering to hide their intent any longer. The fourth man was getting back into his Audi.
    “They’re closing in on all sides,” she said. “How good are they? Are they likely to be trained operatives or just garden-variety bone crackers?”
    “Hired muscle with anger management issues, lousy childhoods, and some street fighting experience,” Nick said, breaking off from the tourists and heading toward the bridge. “The good news is, they want me alive.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because Heiko Balz wants his money back,” Nick said. “So that gives us some wiggle room.”
    “To do what?”
    “Wiggle,” Nick said, and gestured to his left as they passed the edge of the German Historical Museum. The weekend flea market stretched along the banks of the Spree, from the Palace Bridge to the next crossing, which went to Museum Island. “Can you buy me some time?”
    Kate looked over her shoulder