The Heist

pirates. “And they were glad to help, especially if it gave ’em a chance to shoot at pirates.”
    Kate gestured to Griffin. “Can you take him and the suitcase back to Mexico?”
    “Mexico?”
Griffin stood. “What the hell is really going on here?”
    “Diego de Boriga sends his regards,” Jake said. And he punched Griffin in the face, sending him back down to the ground.
    “This face punching thing must run in your family,” Nick said to Kate.
    “About Mexico?” Kate asked her dad.
    “It’ll be no problem, honey,” Jake said. “I was doing extraordinary renditions back when they were still called foreign abductions. You’re not coming with us?”
    “It’ll be less risky if it’s just the two of you,” she said. “We’ll make our own way back.”
    “Willie has the plane fired up and ready to go,” Jake said, looking at Nick. “You surprised me, Fox. Instead of saving yourself,you stayed to fight beside my daughter. For that, you will always have my respect.”
    “I never abandon my crew,” Nick said.
    “Then we’ve got something in common.” Jake studied his daughter. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
    “Never better,” she said. “That was fun.”
    She kissed her dad on the cheek and headed down the trail with Nick.
    Jake watched her go and smiled to himself. “That’s my girl.”

Thirty-six hours later, Derek Griffin woke up on the floor of a cinder-block prison cell and squinted into the harsh blast of sunlight that blazed through the barred window. The air was hot as a pizza oven and smelled like rotting carcasses. He sat up, slid over to the wall beside the stainless steel sink, and leaned against it to get out of the light and assess his situation.
    The last thing he remembered was being on the floor of a boat, looking briefly into the black-painted face of the man who’d hit him on the island, and then getting jabbed in the neck with a syringe that knocked him out again.
    He had a skull-splitting headache that made it hard to focus his eyes. His throat was raw, his lips were chapped, and his body felt as if it had been run over by a truck, twice. His clothes, the same ones he’d been wearing on the island, were drenched with sweat. He rubbed his face and felt two days’ growth of beard.
    His first thought was that he was in an Indonesian prison, butthe air was too dry, the texture of the light was wrong, and the stainless steel toilet was Western-style. Then he remembered what Eunice, or whoever that bitch
really
was, had said to the man in black face paint.
    Can you take him and the suitcase back to Mexico …
    Griffin grabbed hold of the sink, pulled himself to his feet, and almost collapsed again from light-headedness. He turned on the faucet, held his face under the lukewarm water for a long moment, then drank from the stream, his head crooked at an angle that nearly got him stuck in the sink. It wasn’t until after he’d maneuvered his head out from under the faucet that he saw the tin cup on the rim of the sink.
    Across from him was a cinder-block shelf with a thin mattress on top that served as a bed. He went over to the bed and sat down on it.
    “Hey, Derek, are you awake over there?”
    The voice came from the other side of the wall and he recognized it immediately. Neal Burnside.
    “Yeah,” Griffin said. “You in a cell, too?”
    “The lap of luxury, isn’t it?”
    “Where are we?”
    “Somewhere in Mexico, guests of Señor Diego de Boriga.”
    Griffin remembered the name. It was the last thing he’d heard before he woke up here. “Who is he and what does he want with us?”
    “There’s no point lying to me,” Burnside said.
    “Because you’re my lawyer and we have attorney-client privilege?” He said it derisively, knowing full well that Burnside was probably the reason he was sitting in that cell. Burnside was the only person on earth who’d known where he was.
    “Because we’re prisoners of a brutal Vibora drug lord who invested his mob’s money with you and wants it all back.”
    Griffin had never met Diego de Boriga, but then a drug lord probably wouldn’t introduce himself as one, or reveal that his money was dirty, to someone he thought was a legitimate investment banker.
    “I had no idea I was laundering anybody’s drug money.”
    Not that it mattered. Griffin never cared where the money came from, whether it was from little old ladies or from mob bosses, as long as it kept coming in.
    “You told him where to find me,”