The Heist

security company you two work for,” Willie said, “and they’re going to send a strike team to rescue us.”
    “No,” Kate said. “I called my father.”
    “Does he have three million dollars?”
    Kate shook her head. “We’re on our own here.”
    Willie poured herself another shot of Scotch. “You better know what you’re doing,” she said to Nick, “because I don’t want to meet my maker in these stupid khaki shorts you made me wear.”
    “What about Griffin?” Nick asked Kate.
    “I assume he’s negotiating his own ransom since he’s got nobody that he can call to pay it,” Kate said.
    “That’s perfect for us,” Nick said. “He’ll have to access his account with his laptop to move the money to Bob’s bank, or arrange to have the cash withdrawn and delivered to him, all of which will leave a digital trail on the hard drive that we can follow later.”
    “Assuming we can get our hands on his laptop again.”
    “We will,” Nick said.
    “And that you’re right about his password.”
    “I am,” he said.
    “What makes you so sure it’s ‘Sikander’ or ‘Sikandergul’?”
    “Because Daniel Dravot was a character in Rudyard Kipling’s
The Man Who Would Be King
. And because of the quote from the book that Griffin put above all those water buffalo horns in front of his house.”
    “I didn’t know you were such an avid reader,” Kate said.
    “I haven’t read the book, but I loved the movie,” Nick said. “Sean Connery and Michael Caine star as two nineteenth-century con men and soldiers of fortune, Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan. They hatch a plot to become kings by teaching modern warfare techniques to one of the uncivilized mountain tribes of Afghanistan. Then the plan is to lead them to victory over their adversaries. Once the tribe is dominant, the two men intend to betray the king, take his throne, and lord over the dynasty they created.”
    “I don’t understand,” Willie said. “What does that have to do with Derek Griffin?”
    “In one of the early battles, Dravot is hit in the chest with anarrow but doesn’t bleed. That’s because he has a bandolier hidden under his shirt that stops the arrow from hitting his flesh. So now the tribe thinks Dravot is a god and they basically make him their king. They give him a collection of gold and jewels that Alexander the Great, who they call Sikander, left with them centuries before in a sacred city they call Sikandergul. The problem is, Dravot begins to believe his own hype. His buddy Peachy wants to sneak out of there right away with the treasure, but Dravot wants to stick around, enjoy being a god for a while, and take one of the chieftain’s beautiful daughters as his lover. But when Dravot goes to bed the girl, she freaks out and bites his lip, drawing blood, revealing to everyone that he’s not a god.”
    “Not god, not devil, but man,” Kate said, repeating the quote inscribed above Griffin’s door.
    “That’s bad news for Dravot,” Nick said. “Everybody in the tribe feels suckered, so they force Dravot out onto the middle of a rope bridge across a deep gorge and then cut it down. Dravot falls to his death and they beat the crap out of Peachy, who crawls back to civilization with Dravot’s decapitated head in a burlap sack.”
    “You could learn a lot from that story,” Kate said.
    “I have,” Nick said. “Griffin’s password.”
    “I’m lost,” Willie said.
    “Griffin thinks his own life is tragically mirroring Dravot’s,” Kate said, “that he’s a king with a vast fortune who is stuck in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of uncivilized natives.”
    “Aha!” Willie said. “And like Dravot, a big part of his undoing is his desire to nail a woman. I almost feel sorry for the guy.”
    “You shouldn’t,” Kate said. “He’s a crook, and he’s sleeping in his own bed while we’re sitting in a cave full of corpses.”
    “A short-term situation,” Nick said. “Twenty-four hours fromnow, we’ll be on our way to the Indian Ocean in a seaplane with Derek Griffin and his money. We just have to figure out how to escape.”
    Kate thought that should be easy for a man who managed to talk his way out of prison by convincing the deputy director of the FBI not only to let him go but let him continue to commit massive frauds and help him do it. Compared to that, how hard could it be to escape from an island overrun with pirates in the middle of Indonesia?
    “No problemo,” she said.