The Heist

faster boat,” Kate said. “Do what you have to do. I’m screaming in terror and going below.”
    “Make a show of it,” he said.
    Kate screamed, waved her arms in the air for good measure, and ran below.
    Nick yelled to Willie, “Stop the boat!”
    “Are you kidding?” Willie yelled back. “They’ll be all over us.”
    “Just do it,” Nick said.
    He took a white towel from a cabinet at the stern and waved it above his head as a flag of surrender. The speedboats were behind them now, almost side by side. One boat hung back while the other one approached. Nick could see two men stepping forward with their grappling hooks to secure the yacht.
    They were about ten yards away, coming up the starboard side, when the men suddenly dove off their boat. Nick looked over his shoulder and saw Kate standing behind him with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher resting on her shoulder. It may have been the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.
    “Get down,” she said calmly to him, and fired.
    The grenade streaked across the water and smacked into the abandoned speedboat, igniting the fuel on board and setting off a massive white-hot blast of flame, smoke, and shards of fiberglass.
    Willie didn’t wait to be told to punch it. She used the distraction, and the cloud of smoke, to hit full throttle. Kate stood her ground, staring into the cloud of black smoke as the other speedboat circled back to pick up the men splashing in the water.
    Nick got to his feet, grinning. “
That’s
what you had delivered? A rocket-propelled grenade launcher?”
    “No girl should ever leave home without one,” Kate said, and tossed it onto the settee as if it was her purse.

The three of them regrouped in the cabin with Willie at the helm, while Kate used a rolled-up navigational chart to wipe glass fragments off the dinette table.
    “I want to see how close we are to Griffin’s island,” Kate said, smoothing the chart out in front of her. “We need to get out of the open sea and into a protected cove. Those two speedboats weren’t out here alone. There’s a mother ship out there somewhere.”
    “And we can’t call anybody for help,” Willie said. “They shot off the top of our mast, taking out our nav and communications array.”
    “We don’t need them,” Nick said. “We’re in terrific shape.”
    Kate hated to be the one to ask the question, but she knew someone had to do it. “How do you figure that?” she said.
    “Look around,” Nick said, and swept his arm in front of him, gesturing to the shattered windows, the bullet-pocked couches, and the chunks of scorched fiberglass that littered the stern. “Thepirates were a godsend. Now Griffin won’t question why Eunice is seeking shelter on his island. It will be obvious. She’s terrified, in desperate need of comfort and security, after being attacked by a horde of bloodthirsty pirates. If I had their address, I’d send them a fruit basket. They did us a huge favor.”
    “It might have turned out differently if I didn’t have that grenade launcher,” Kate said.
    “But you did,” Nick said. “Because that is who you are. Sometimes when a plan is right, everything else, all the things you can’t control, falls into place just the way it should. I’ve got a good feeling about this.”
    “You’re the only person I know who’d consider nearly being hijacked by pirates as a positive sign,” Kate said, and tapped a location on the map. “We’re only thirty or forty minutes from Griffin’s island. If our luck holds, we can make it there before the mother ship comes looking for us.”
    “And if it doesn’t,” Nick said, “what else have you got in that crate?”
    “The usual touristy things.”
    “Like what?”
    “Handcuffs.”
    “Kinky,” he said.
    “A Glock,” she said.
    “Naturally.”
    “A garrote.”
    “Always handy.”
    “Night-vision goggles, a switchblade, a Kevlar vest, plenty of ammo, and a spare rocket-propelled grenade launcher.”
    “The bare necessities,” Nick said.
    “My God.” Willie looked back at Kate. “What kind of vacations do you take?”
    “Ones like this,” Kate said.
    A few years ago, Derek Griffin realized that it would soon be impossible to hide the monumental extent of his fraud from his clients or the SEC. So rather than wait to get caught, he began quietly arranging his inevitable flight from justice. With Neal Burnside’s help, Griffin bribed Indonesian government officials to allow him to lease a beautiful