Jake reached for another cold beer. "She gets that from me."

"I'm not devious," Kate said. "I'm diligent and determined in my pursuit of justice."

"There's still one crucial aspect of this scheme that neither of you have talked about," Jake said. "How you're going to find Lester Menendez, a fugitive who has a new face, a new body, a new name, no fingerprints on file, and could be anywhere on earth. No law enforcement agencies have been able to find him."

"That's because they've been chasing Menendez instead of making him come to them," Kate said.

"I don't see how you can make Menendez come to you," Jake said.

"It's how I was caught," Nick said, smiling at Kate, toasting her with his beer bottle.

In 1807 the Nuestra Senora de Santa Maria, laden with fifteen tons of gold from South America, was on its way back to Spain when it sank in a fierce storm off the coast of Portugal. More than two hundred years later, a UK-based treasure hunting company, Global Marine Ventures, found the wreckage. They quietly salvaged five hundred thousand gold coins, worth a half billion dollars, over the course of three weeks. They didn't announce their find until they'd taken the coins back to London in thousands of sealed plastic buckets full of water for preservation.

The Spanish government took the treasure hunters to court in the UK, claiming the coins were valuable cultural artifacts that belonged to Spain and had been stolen from the ocean floor. Global Marine Ventures argued that the sunken ship was in international waters outside of any country's jurisdiction and that the treasure was fair game for anyone who found it.

The case stretched on for years, but the court ultimately agreed with Spain, and not only awarded the Spanish government all of the plunder, but also reimburs.e.m.e.nt of their legal costs, plus interest. The judgment sank Global Marine Ventures. The buckets of coins, still encrusted in sediment, were flown to the National Museum of Underwater Archeology in Cartagena, Spain, for restoration and eventual display.

Three months after the delivery of the coins to Spain, and five days after Nick, Kate, and Jake met on the yacht in Marina del Rey, Nick and Kate stood sipping coffee on the veranda of Nick's south-facing fifth-floor suite at the NH Cartagena Hotel. Nick had been in the city for several days preparing for the theft of the coins. Kate had just arrived.

"Nice view," Kate said, looking out at the harbor and the museum, a sleek atrium of stone, gla.s.s, and sharp angles.

Their hotel was on the edge of the old town, just north of the sea wall and the Paseo Alfonso XII roadway that went along the waterfront. Down below and straight ahead was a wide plaza and wharf leading to the cruise ship terminal, where an ocean liner was docked. The museum was on the east side of the plaza. A small shopping center and the yacht marina were to the west. Further south, Kate could see a lighthouse at the edge of the bay and, beyond that, the sun glistening off the swells of the Mediterranean.

Nick gestured to the museum. "That's where our gold is. What you're seeing is basically a large skylight. The bulk of the museum is underground to give the visitors the sensation of going underwater. That's a plus for us."

"How do you figure that?"

"The broad plaza between the museum to the east, the cruise ship dock to the south, and the shopping center to the west is a multilevel underground parking garage. The thing about underground garages is that they need lots of ventilation to prevent people from dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. They pump a lot of air in and out. So does the museum, because it's almost entirely underground and there wouldn't be enough fresh air circulating otherwise. The two networks of large air ducts run alongside each other to the surface."

She could see where this line of thought was going. "We're going to break into the museum tonight through the air ducts in the garage."

"This afternoon," Nick said.

Kate stared at him. "In broad daylight?"

"It's the best way not to be noticed when we're breaking in and leaving. There are people everywhere."

"Not in the conservation lab grabbing handfuls of coins."

"You'll just have to make sure you're not seen."

"Me? Where are you going to be?"

"I'll be in the ceiling duct holding the rope that you'll be dangling from."

She'd seen this plot before, and Tom Cruise had played her part. "You stole this whole operation from Mission Impossible."

"Actually, they got the idea from Topkapi, which, I can tell you from personal experience, really works."

"So you claim," she said.

"You'll find out for yourself in a couple hours."

"Why can't I be the one to hold the rope, and you get to be the dangler?"

"I'm the big strong man. If you held the rope you might drop me on my head."

"It would be tempting."

At noon Nick drove a panel van identical to the ones driven by city utility workers into the underground parking structure and went down to the lowest level, the fourth floor. There were almost no cars on this level, and the few that were parked looked as if they'd been there for days. A single surveillance camera was pointed at the elevator and stairwell. Nick parked the van in front of one of the large circular air vents, which was three feet in diameter and partially covered by a metal grate.

Nick and Kate were dressed as city utility workers in white jumpsuits, and wore work gloves, rock-climbing harnesses around their waists, and headbands with tiny headlights attached to them. Kate also wore a backpack containing a rope and pulleys, among other things.

They used the van for cover as they crouched in front of the vent and removed the metal grate. After the grate was removed, they opened the rear doors on the van and pulled out another backpack, and a large handheld masonry saw with vacuum dust control and a circular diamond blade the size of a serving plate. Nick attached the saw to an industrial extension cord and plugged the cord into a nearby outlet. He switched on his headlamp and climbed into the duct, pushing the knapsack with the saw on top of it ahead of them. Kate followed, pulling the grate back into place, crawling along behind Nick.

"How do you know where you're going?" Kate asked Nick.

"I did some research, and I've got a sketch. It's pretty straightforward."

They went a few yards farther and reached a junction with another duct that went up to the vent in the plaza, four stories above their heads.

"X marks the spot," Nick said.

He unzipped the knapsack, removed two respirator masks, goggles, and ear protectors, and handed one set to Kate. He took the saw, lifted it into the duct above his head, and stood. He checked his watch. Two minutes until showtime.

Willie Owens drove along the Cartagena waterfront on Paseo Alfonso XII in a rented Opel Corsa hatchback with the windows rolled down and the music on the radio cranked up as loud it could go.

She headed into the underground garage at the port plaza, stopped at the automated kiosk, and punched the b.u.t.ton for a ticket. The gate arm went up. She made sure her seat belt was securely latched and then lifted her foot off the brake and let the car pick up speed as it went down the steep ramp.

The car sped on pure momentum across the first floor of the parking garage and rocketed onto the ramp down to the second level. As she rounded the tight curve without using her brakes, she purposely sc.r.a.ped the car along the wall, shearing off her driver's side mirror and setting off a spray of sparks. The car continued to pick up speed, helped by a tap on the gas pedal.

She shot off the ramp like a batted pinball and grazed a row of parked cars on her driver's side, ripping off fenders and shattering taillights. Car alarms shrieked in her destructive wake.

Willie wrenched the wheel sharply to the right to avoid the next ramp and drove down the next aisle, sideswiping another row of cars along her pa.s.senger side. She sheared off her remaining mirror and triggered more alarms before she finally turned the wheel hard to the left and intentionally slammed into the rear of an Audi. She clenched her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut, antic.i.p.ating the impact. The airbag in her steering wheel burst in her face. She quickly pushed it away and decided that the little car she'd thought might be a hunk of junk was really a lot of fun to drive.

Willie was still extricating herself from the airbag when a security guard wrenched the driver's door open and helped her out of the car. Two more guards arrived, all asking questions, shouting to be heard over the alarms and the music. They were able to turn off the radio, but the car alarms continued to blare, the sound echoing off the concrete walls.

One of the guards helped Willie walk up the ramp to the plaza, where an ambulance was pulling up, siren wailing.

"I'm okay," Willie said, waving the ambulance attendants away. "I don't need a doctor."

"What happened?" the guard asked in halting English, holding her arm to keep her steady.

"The brakes on my rental car went out as I was going down the ramp. I tried to slow myself down by grazing the wall, but it didn't do much good. It's a good thing I signed up for the insurance."

Nick began cutting into the duct the instant he heard the first car alarm. Over the next ten minutes, he cut an opening through the four inches of sheet metal and concrete that was large enough for him and Kate to climb through.

By the time the alarms were extinguished and the chaos in the garage had subsided, Nick and Kate had climbed into an adjoining duct, dropped into a cross duct, and were crawling over the museum ceiling. It was an antiquated system with larger ducts than would be used now, but even at that it was tight.

Nick stopped when he reached the air grate above the conservation room that contained the treasure from the Nuestra Senora de Santa Maria. He looked down through the vent, playing his flashlight beam over the rows of hundreds of sealed white plastic buckets full of gold coins.

Kate shrugged out of her backpack, removed a pulley and a battery-operated drill, and handed them to Nick, so he could secure the pulley to the floor of the duct. While he worked with the drill, Kate threaded a coil of rope through the loops in her harness.

"Done," Nick said, discarding the drill.

"Me, too. I'm all looped up."

Kate handed the end of the rope to Nick. He ran it through the pulley, back over his body, and attached it to his harness. He would use his weight to anchor the rope while she lowered herself down to the lab.

Nick removed the air grate, set it aside, and Kate maneuvered herself to the edge of the opening in the duct.

"Have you got a grip on the rope?" she asked.

"I'm ready when you are."

Kate eased through the opening and realized she was loving this. Okay, so it was a little illegal, but she was taking steps to make the world a better place. That was why she'd joined the military. And that was why she'd gone to work for the FBI. It was because she wanted to make a difference.

And as if all this wasn't an odd enough realization, she also admitted that Nick was a good partner. He was smart and strong and reliable. He was everything you would want from a man who was dangling you in midair. True, he could be exasperating and a bit of a loose cannon, but he had good instincts under fire.

She looked back at Nick, gave him a thumbs-up, and slowly lowered herself to the floor, her headlamp shining a narrow beam of light into the dark room. The buckets were numbered and labeled with grid coordinates indicating where the coins had been found on the debris field. She pulled a collapsible pouch out of her pocket, opened the nearest bucket, and recoiled at the smell.

"Are you okay down there?" Nick asked.

"This water reeks. It's like rotten eggs."

"Good to know. For a minute there I thought it might be you."

Kate gave him a stiff middle finger and was about to stick her gloved hand into a bucket when the lab door crashed open.

A man and a woman came into the conservation lab They were kissing and groping, not looking in Kate's direction. The door closed as quickly as it had opened, and the room was plunged into total darkness. Kate's heart skipped a couple beats. She snapped off her headlamp, dropped to the floor, and slithered behind a cl.u.s.ter of buckets. She could hear fumbling and grunting and clothes getting discarded.

The overhead lights flashed on, revealing that the woman was now naked and the man bare-a.s.sed, with his pants down around his ankles. Kate couldn't believe this was happening. It was like being in a p.o.r.n movie.

The lights had come on because the guy had the woman backed up to the light switch. The woman moved and the lights went out. After a moment the lights came on again and Kate saw that the woman had her legs wrapped around the guy's waist. He pushed into her, slamming her against the wall, and the lights went out.

c.r.a.p on a cracker, Kate thought. Could it get any worse?

Bang. The lights went on. Every time the guy slammed the woman into the wall, the lights would turn on or off. Bang, flash. Bang, flash. The pace picked up, and Kate thought if the flashes didn't stop soon she'd have a seizure.

She heard m.u.f.fled laughter in the vent above her and decided it was a good thing she didn't have a gun because she would for sure shoot someone ... possibly Nick.

There was a last big bang, the room went dark, and there was a moment of silence. Someone sighed and Kate a.s.sumed it was the woman, who had to have a headache after all the wall banging. There was some shuffling around and the rustle of clothes getting pulled on. No words were spoken. The door was eased open, the man peeked out, and something was whispered, but Kate couldn't catch it. The man and woman slipped out of the room and closed the door.

Kate blew out a sigh of relief. She grabbed a chunk of coins out of a bucket and carefully stuffed it into her pouch, thinking the clumps of coins were stuck together in bits of rock like chocolate chips in a cookie. She took a couple more chunks, put the lid back on the bucket, and clipped the bag of coins to her belt with a carabiner. She was on the rope, midway to the vent, when the door suddenly opened again, spilling in light and exposing her hanging from the ceiling.

It was the man. He turned on the light and began searching the floor around the door and under the light switch.

Kate hung as still as she could, utterly exposed, willing the man not to raise his head and look deeper into the room.

He spotted something, reached between two buckets, and picked up a laminated ID badge. He clipped it to the lapel of his lab coat, turned his back to the room to kill the light, and paused.

d.a.m.nation, Kate thought. Now what?

The man felt all his pockets and checked to make sure he was zipped up. He turned the light off, and walked out.

Kate wasted no time climbing the rest of the way up the rope and through the duct opening. She looked at Nick and caught him smiling.

"Really?" she said to him.

"You're lucky I didn't completely lose it. When he started slamming her into the light switch I almost fell out of the ceiling."

"It was freaking frightening! And it was icky. I'm going to have to pour bleach into my brain."

Nick reached out and hauled her across the opening in the duct so that she was on his side of the air vent. He kissed her on the top of her head and flipped her light on. "You've led a sheltered life."

"Not true," Kate said. "I saw two dogs doing the deed in a parking lot once, and they were stuck together when they were done."

"Forever?"

"For about ten minutes. They weren't happy about it."

"You do the crime, you pay the time," Nick said. He replaced the vent and glued it in place. "Let's move out."

They made their way back through the duct toward the garage, gathering up their equipment as they went along and patching the hole they'd cut.

They packed everything into the van, replaced the vent, and drove up to the second level of the garage, where police officers were busy taking reports from angry car owners. A tow truck was. .h.i.tching up Willie's bashed-up Opel. A police officer stepped in front of their van and cleared a path for them through the crowd. Kate tried to look tired, bored, and unmemorable in the pa.s.senger seat and apparently succeeded. The cop didn't seem to notice her.

Nick nodded and smiled his thanks to the officer, drove up the ramp to the first floor, and then out of the garage, into the sunshine on Paseo Alfonso XII.

An hour later, Nick parked the van on a dirt road in the forested countryside. They wiped the van down for prints and left their jumpsuits and the ignition key inside. Kate carried the bag of gold to a Renault hatchback Nick had hidden previously in the trees. She put the bag of gold in one of the suitcases in the trunk.

Nick got behind the wheel and took them to the A-92 freeway for the 582-mile drive to Lisbon. They stopped four and a half hours later at a gas station to refill the Renault's tank, stretch their legs, get some food, and change drivers.

"We're going to be pa.s.sing close to Seville," Nick said to Kate. "We should take a detour and make a stop at my favorite tapas bar. It's a little place in the old town, and it serves the most extraordinary Jabugo pata negra bellota."

Kate was driving with one hand on the wheel and the other hand stuffed into a bag of Vicente Vidal patatas fritas sabor jamon. She'd gotten the patatas fritas when they'd stopped at the gas station, and they were the most awesome potato chips she'd ever eaten.

"I've never heard of Jabugo whatever," Kate said. "It sounds awful."

"It's cured ham from pigs raised in the mountain village of Jabugo and fed only acorns."

"By hand, I suppose. By virgins."

"You have no appreciation for fine cuisine," he said.

"I'm eating prosciutto-flavored potato chips fried in olive oil."

"That's not fine cuisine."