The Heist

into the house and returned the laptop … or at least the case.
    Bob tossed the satellite phone to Kate. “You have one call, princess. Choose wisely. It should be someone who values your life and is also very rich. Tell whoever it is that I want three million dollars in three days or you die.”
    Kate punched in the numbers and got her father’s voicemail. His greeting was simply a confirmation of his phone number. He didn’t give his name.
    “Dad, it’s me … Eunice. I’ve been taken hostage by pirates, and it’s not nearly as fun as it sounds. They want money. Three million dollars in three days or they’ll kill me.”
    Bob took the phone from her. “You will deliver the ransom in American dollars in a watertight case that floats. You will drop it from an aircraft into the sea at the following coordinates.” Bob rattled off some numbers. “You will see a boat there. If I find any tracking devices in the package, or see any aircraft or boats following us, I will feed your daughter to the sharks.” He disconnected the call. “I hope your father frequently checks his voicemail.”
    “That’s not what you should think about,” she said. “Ask yourself what kind of man gives his daughter an RPG and what he would do to anyone who hurts her.”
    “I’ll try not to piss my pants,” Bob said, gesturing to two of his men. “Take her to the cave.”
    Kate was muscled out of the library at gunpoint, shoved down the hall and out of the house. She was led across the scrub grass, past the huts of the Torajan tribespeople, and then up the windingpath to the narrow cave entrance, where the two armed pirates stood guard. One of the guards pushed Kate into the mouth of the cave and motioned her forward.
    “Go,” he said. “You go there.”
    Kate picked her way through a rocky, twisting passageway, moving toward a flickering light. She rounded a corner and entered a wide cave, about twenty feet high at its highest point, lit with candles and honeycombed with tombs. The tombs were stuffed with crude, crumbling caskets that were spilling bones onto altars. Offerings of clothes, jewelry, walking sticks, and dishes filled with cash and loose change had been set on the altars. And it was all guarded by wooden effigies of the dead.
    When Kate stumbled in, Nick and Willie were sitting on a rock ledge in the dim light, their clothing damp with sweat from the hot, humid air trapped in the cave, eating caviar and crackers from a silver dish on a wooden crate.
    Nick smiled when he saw her. “Sit down and have some caviar. I liberated it from the house when I returned the laptop. I also took this to celebrate.” He produced three tin cups and a hand-blown glass bottle filled with amber liquid, which he placed on the crate. “This is Balvenie Fifty, a single malt Scotch whisky that’s been sealed for half a century in an oak sherry hogshead. Only eighty-eight bottles were produced, and they sell for thirty-five thousand dollars each.”
    He filled the cups and everyone took one.
    “How did you get in here?” Kate asked him.
    “Back door. Fairly easy to get in. Impossible to get out without some sort of ladder.”
    Kate sat on the rock ledge beside Nick. “What are we celebrating?”
    “Our tremendous good luck,” Nick said. “Everything is going our way.”
    “Our yacht has been blown up, we don’t have Griffin or his money, and we’re being held captive in a Torajan mausoleum on an island controlled by a dozen armed pirates,” Kate said.
    Nick tasted his whisky and nodded approval. “Griffin will beg to leave the island with us when we escape.”
    “Good to know you think we’ll escape,” Willie said. “I hadn’t pictured this part of The Big Adventure.” She knocked back her whisky and gasped as it burned down her throat. “Yow!”
    Kate took a sip and savored the delicate blend of oak, peat, and honey flavors that had been in a cask since John F. Kennedy was president. It was the best Scotch she’d ever tasted and probably ever would taste. She just hoped it wasn’t the
last
Scotch she ever tasted.
    “What happened in Griffin’s house?” Nick asked.
    “Bob put a gun to my head and handed me a satellite phone. I called my father and left a three-million-dollar ransom demand on his voicemail. He has three days to drop the money at sea or I’m dead. I’m not sure what happens to you two in that situation, but I’m sure it’s not good.”
    “But you really called the international