Just Watch Me Read online

  He goggled at me. “There’s a bomb in the statue?” he said, kind of stupid.

  “Trust—but verify,” I said. “Have a nice day!” Before he could tell me what he thought about that, I was into my waiting car and away, $50 million richer.

  And no happier. In fact, I was feeling dirty, mean, edgy, and antsy. Fifty million reasons to feel good, and I didn’t. I mean, the money was nice. And the whole thing had come off without a hitch, just like I had planned it. No reason to do anything but smile and sing happy songs as I drove away. But I just kept looking in the rearview mirror and hissing. Why?

  Because. It had all been too easy, and I hate that.

  I don’t know why that is. It just is. If it’s too easy, I always feel like it’s got to be a trap, or I made some stupid mistake, or—hell, I don’t know. I just don’t like things to be too easy. And in spite of the cold, this had been a stroll through the fucking park on a summer day. It was done, and I had the money to prove it, and now all my nerves were standing up and vibrating like somebody was whacking at them with a dull machete. Mom had an expression for this feeling. She’d say, “Somebody’s walking on my grave.” And right now, I had the Boston Marathon stomping all over mine.

  Usually I get over that feeling pretty quick. This time, it stayed with me. I drove for half an hour, thinking about why that was. Nothing came to me. I put on the radio, spun the dial, and found Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime.” I like that song a lot. That made me feel even meaner, like somebody was bribing me to cheer up.

  I pulled off at a transfer point I’d set up. It was a deserted spot on a country road, well hidden by a screen of trees. That’s why I’d picked the place, because it was totally isolated. I’d left another car there, along with a change of costume. I peeled off the false scar on my face, and then my admiral’s costume. I dropped it all into the back seat of the car I’d arrived in. Beard, hat, shoes with four-inch lifts. It all went in. From my bag in the trunk of the other car I pulled out a jar of thermite. I took it to the first car and poured the whole thing onto my costume.

  I changed into a charcoal-gray suit and brown oxfords. Hand-tailored shirt, silk tie, gold cuff links, and a Movado Museum watch on my wrist. I tossed a little box on top of the thermite, got into the new car, and pulled back onto the road. I was half a mile away when I heard a muffled WHOOMP behind me. In the rearview mirror I watched a cheery glow climb up above the trees, and for a few minutes I was at least satisfied, if not really happy. The fire was the real end to the job. It wiped away the last link to the admiral, and to the guy who gave the statue to the thugs. It’s one way I stay successful. On every job, I make sure nobody—nobody—knows what I look like.

  Starting with the identities I wear to work. So, thermite and the first rental car exploding, all that. There would be no trace left by the time I hit I-94. Not a scrap that anybody could connect to the guy who stole the statue. More important, not even a microscopic trace of my DNA. I didn’t have to check. I’d done this enough times. That identity was totally destroyed, nothing but ashes—and goddamn it, that had been easy, too. And now I was right back into feeling mean and antsy.

  I drove back toward Chicago. I found a radio station playing really old oldies. Lovin’ Spoonful, Paul Revere, even the Nightcrawlers. Really good background music. It helped me think. By the time I got to Windsor Long-Term Care Nursing Home, I’d figured out why I felt shitty. The thing was, everything had been too easy lately. Everything I tried worked perfectly, the first time. I was just too damn good. Does that sound conceited? It’s not. It’s the plain damn truth. I am the best there is—maybe the best there ever was—and I hadn’t missed since I was sixteen and tried to steal a cop car.

  The last couple of years, almost everything I did had gone like clockwork. No matter how stupid-hard something looked, it never was. It wasn’t that I wasn’t giving myself any serious challenges. I was pulling off stuff that looked impossible—like stealing a twelve-and-a-half-ton statue—and making it look routine. But I just wasn’t finding anything that tested me, and there’s always a tremendous danger that comes from that: a danger of getting stale, smug, so that sooner or later I really would make a mistake. In my line of work, mistakes have very big consequences. Like, life in prison is actually the best one. So the answer was obvious, even if it looked kind of stupid.

  I needed to find something I couldn’t do.

  Find a heist that was beyond impossible, something ridiculous, unthinkable, stupid, totally out of the question. And then I needed to do it.

  Sure, absolutely, why not. I parked the car a few rows back from the nursing home’s front door and sat there for a minute thinking about that. And then I thought, what the fuck, that was a stupid idea anyway. I put it out of my mind and went into Windsor Long-Term Care.

  It took me a little less than an hour to make the arrangements to have Mom moved. The nurses were all sad to see her go. After all, most of their patients sit and complain all day, shit in their pants, and wander off. Mom always behaved beautifully, the perfect patient. She was no trouble at all. Mom had been in a coma for years, what they call a persistent vegetative state. No wonder the nurses loved her.

  I did, too. For different reasons. I gave her a kiss on the forehead and told her that. Maybe she could hear me. Probably not.

  When Mom was loaded into the ambulance and on her way, I drove on to the airport, O’Hare. Seeing Mom hadn’t made me feel any better. I used to think she could get better if I just found the right doctor and threw enough money at him. I don’t believe that anymore. But I still throw a lot of money at keeping Mom alive. And at keeping her near me, wherever I have a job.

  I turned in my rental car and took their shuttle to the terminal. I breezed through security, no problem, and to the gate for my flight out. I fly commercial right after a job. I mean, even before this particular payday I could afford a private jet. But that attracts the kind of attention I like to avoid until things settle down a bit.

  So I drank a cup of coffee until it was time to board. I settled into my seat, pulled the in-flight magazine out of the pocket in front of me, and opened it at random. I glanced at a full-page picture. Then I looked harder.

  Time stopped. I just kept looking.

  The article was nothing. Just a simple, dumb-ass puff piece, like all the stuff in those mags. Stuff to do in far-off cities, other stuff to take your mind off the fact that you’re rocketing through the sky at four hundred miles per hour, and if one little piece of the plane stops working, you’re going to drop like a rock.

  But this article was titled “Coming to America!” I didn’t even need to read it. All I had to see was the picture, and I knew. This was it.

  I had found something impossible.

  I read the article, and I was sure. It absolutely could not be done, not ever, and I had to do it. I studied the picture some more. I’d never seen anything like it. It was so beautiful it made my teeth hurt. I had to see it for real. And then I was going to steal it.

  When the plane landed in New York, I bought a seat on the next flight to Tehran. And I was smiling as I boarded.

  * * *

  —

  Denny Kirkaldi was nervous. He’d done his job and hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d protected the crowd instead of the statue, sure—but who could figure somebody would just take the fucking thing like that? And those were important people, too. He knew he’d done the right thing. But the FBI guy had a way of just looking at you that made you feel guilty even if you weren’t. It made you want to tell him stuff, whatever he wanted. So Kirkaldi tried. “Like I said,” he told the Fed, “I was moving the crowd back. I never even saw the guy ’til he went up the rope into the chopper.”

  “Cable,” Greer said. “He went up a steel cable.”

  “Whatever. Thing is, I didn’t see him. So . . .” He trailed off. The FBI guy was looking away, over at the hole in the ground whe
re the statue had been.

  “The uniform was authentic,” Greer said. “Coast Guard admiral.”

  The Fed went down on one knee beside the hole to look at a sheared bolt, but he still didn’t say anything. That made Kirkaldi even more nervous. “Lookit, Mr.— Uh, hey, what do we call you, anyways?”

  The Fed stood up and looked at them. “Special Agent Frank Delgado,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, lookit, Mr. Delgado. Special Agent, whatever,” Kirkaldi said. “The guy’s in Rio or something by now. You’re never gonna catch him now.”

  Special Agent Delgado looked at Kirkaldi without a word, holding his gaze a little too long. Then he turned away and looked out over the lake.

  “I already know who he is,” Delgado said. He turned back around to face the two guards, and there was something new in his eyes. “His name is Riley Wolfe.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  Iadmit I was surprised. Iran is not at all like what you hear on the news. But there it is—it turns out it’s not a mean, scary, hostile place where they’re all lying in ambush ready to gut every ferenghi infidel who comes in reach. In fact, a lot of the people are friendly and ready to help you find things. Just stay away from the Revolutionary Guards. These are the guys who must have started all the stories about hostile natives. They really don’t like you, and they’re not shy about letting you know it.

  Everybody else? They’re proud of their history and happy to show it off to you. And holy shit, do they have history. Not stuff they teach you in school, either—at least, not any school I went to. For starters, Iran, which used to be called Persia, was once the biggest empire the world has ever seen. It was ruled by the Great King, and he was no dummy. Every place he conquered, he set up a governor—a satrap. He’d choose some local guy so his new subjects wouldn’t get all up in their feelings. And he let the conquered people keep their own religion and customs—just as long as they paid tribute and loyalty to the Great King. Smart—and it made the Persian Empire a pretty good place to live, considering what things were like back then. It also brought in a lot of tribute.

  Important historical note? “Tribute” means “treasure.” Like silver, gold, and jewels. And it poured into the empire for hundreds of years.

  But the empire died, and the new Persia was Iran, which was an Islamic Republic. That meant they were guided by their interpretation of Islam. So they got rid of most of the corrupt, pre-Muslim trappings of the old Persian Empire—except for one really important item:

  The Crown Jewels of the Persian Empire.

  Remember all that tribute the Great King raked in? Like I said, a lot of it was jewels. And I don’t mean cute little diamond chips like you save up for to give your girlfriend. Because the Great King made people really nervous back then. If you pissed him off, he could come down on you with the best fighters in the world, of which he had over a hundred thousand.

  This was a time when “soldier” usually meant a farmer who owned a sword. And an “army” was maybe three or four thousand of these guys.

  But the Great King’s soldiers were full-time killers, trained from birth. So picture this: You flip the finger to the Great King, skip your tribute. And all of a sudden you and a few of your buddies are standing in a line and holding pitchforks, while ten thousand armored Persians on thoroughbred horses ride down at you shooting arrows. And those guys could all put an arrow through a wedding ring while they were riding full speed.

  So most of the conquered people stayed serious about the whole tribute business. They even competed to see who could send the Great King the coolest stuff. And when they sent him jewels, they sent him JEWELS. Huge gems, rich settings, completely unique things like the world had never seen before and hasn’t seen since. It added up to a pretty nice collection, and a lot of it is still there in Tehran, on display at the Central Bank.

  I landed in Tehran, checked in to my hotel, and went. I paid my 200,000 rials to get in, which makes me sound like a high roller—like, for that price, I should get to take a few diamonds home with me. But 200,000 rials is only around six bucks, so I paid it without flinching and went inside to take a look.

  Ask any Iranian. They’ll tell you the crown jewels are the finest, rarest, richest, most dazzling collection in the world. They’re right. I have seen the best, all over the world, and I have snatched a lot of it, and I am very hard to impress. But this stuff? The Crown Jewels of Iran?

  I was knocked stupid.

  I mean, jaw on the floor. Forget to breathe. Just stare—the whole thing. I only saw some of it, the tiny fraction of stuff on display. There’s a whole huge vault filled with more—so much it looks like those old cartoons of Scrooge McDuck’s vault, piled high with riches you can’t even imagine. But just the stuff I saw . . . I mean, you just stare and think it can’t possibly be real. There’s just so damn much bright, glittering stuff—gold and jewels everywhere, stuck onto swords and hairbrushes and mirrors and chairs—it’s got to be fake!

  It isn’t. It’s all real. Nothing else even comes close, not anywhere in the world.

  And how much is all that worth? Forget it. You can’t even begin to put a price tag on the whole collection. But I can tell you it’s so valuable, it’s used to back Iran’s currency, the rial.

  And here’s another clue. Forget about the whole collection for a second and think about this: One single piece is said to be worth more than $15 billion. That’s right. “Billion” with a b. Just that one piece.

  The Daryayeh-E-Noor. The Ocean of Light.

  It’s the largest pink diamond ever, so big you think it can’t be real. And really, you can’t even call it a diamond. That’s like saying Einstein was kind of clever. The Daryayeh-E-Noor is so huge and so freaking beautiful that you just plain can’t compare it to anything else. But when you see it, you start to think $15 billion may be a bargain price.

  And it is real, and I was looking at it. If I was stunned by the other stuff in the collection, I was lights-out when I saw this gorgeous monster. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t do anything but look at it, imagine holding it, feeling the cool pink facets of that gigantic beautiful gem on my hands, my face . . . I’d seen the picture on the airplane, and that had been enough to bring me all this way. It didn’t come close to the shock of seeing it for real—it’s like the difference between looking at a nude picture and hopping into the sack with a real-life Playboy model. It took me away, outside of the world, off to a place where there was no clock, no walls, and no other people, nothing at all but me and the Ocean of Light, and I swam in it until it was closing time and the guards came and led me out. I walked away still feeling it, still dizzy from standing so close. And I went back to my hotel with one thought stuck in my head.

  The Daryayeh-E-Noor.

  I had to have it. And that was impossible.

  The upside? That was just what I’d been looking for. And I had found it. I had my challenge. I’d found something that would not be too easy, no matter what I tried. It was as close to impossible as it gets. That didn’t matter. I was going to take it.

  How?

  Well, it was the biggest pink diamond in the world, but it was still jewelry. If you have larceny in your heart—and some of us just can’t help it—you know that jewels are light, easy to conceal and carry, and they pack a really high value into a small package, the perfect target for anybody with roaming fingers. Even the Daryayeh-E-Noor would be easy to carry away.

  But this is a mean world, and nobody trusts anybody. So sad but true, and the Iranian government had thought of that. If you have anything close to a three-digit IQ, you’ll take one look around you and know none of the crown jewels were going anywhere. Because sitting there in the Central Bank, in the heart of the Islamic Republic, in the middle of eighty million people, including a whole lot of the Revolutionary Guards, who are really well armed and truly don’t like you, the jewels are safer than they would be in a
radioactive pit of cobras rigged with claymore mines and surrounded by SEAL snipers. You might get in, but you would never, ever get out of Iran with any of the jewels. At least not alive, which I consider an important part of any plan.

  So it’s not even a challenge. It’s hopeless. The crown jewels were in Tehran, safe, and they weren’t going anywhere.

  Until now.

  Remember the headline of that article from the in-flight magazine? “Coming to America”? Know what that meant?

  The Iranian crown jewels are coming to America.

  Why? Politics. It was all spelled out in the article I read on the plane. The jewels are coming to America because a few cool heads on both sides were trying to move Iran and the USA a little closer together. So the two nations had decided to “foster a better understanding of each other’s unique cultural heritage in order to promote a spirit of tolerance and mutual respect.” For some reason, they figured that the best way to do that was by swapping national treasures.

  And so the US will send to Tehran an original draft of the Declaration of Independence, the text of the Gettysburg Address—in Lincoln’s very own handwriting—and the US flag from the Battle of Baltimore, the one that inspired F. S. Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  The choice for Iran was a whole lot easier. They’re sending a selection from the crown jewels, including the incomparable Daryayeh-E-Noor.

  That’s right. The Ocean of Light is coming to America.

  After a great deal of debate, it was decided that the imperial collection would be displayed at the Eberhardt Museum, a small private institution in Manhattan. It was established at the turn of the twentieth century to house the art collection of nineteenth-century American robber baron Ludwig Eberhardt. And it’s still privately owned and controlled by Eberhardt’s descendants.

  Weird choice? Not really. Because old Ludwig was a truly heartless, greedy bastard, and he collected a huge fortune. That means the museum has a mind-blowingly huge endowment. And because it’s private they can spend that money any way they want without worrying about government budget restrictions. Which means state-of-the-art electronic security, stuff nobody has ever seen before, regardless of expense. Since it is a smaller venue, human security can be a lot tighter, too.