The Heist

malaise.
    “Cliff Clavin is a character on the television show
Cheers
,” she said.
    “Yeah, crazy coincidence, right?”
    “What old building?” she asked him.
    He turned to the window and pointed at a five-story building on the other side of the parking lot. “That one.”
    The building was an architectural artifact from the swinging ’60s with its lava rock accents, big tinted windows, and a lobby portico topped with white gravel.
    “That was the original hospital,” Stott said. “We moved out of there a year ago. We built this new one to handle the demand for beds that we wrongly anticipated would come from …”
    Kate wasn’t listening. She was already running out the door. The instant she saw the other building, she knew exactly how she and those six wealthy patients had been duped. The man in the photo on her iPhone wasn’t Cliff Clavin, and he wasn’t an engineer. He was Nicolas Fox, the man she’d been pursuing when she’d stumbled on the organ transplant scheme.
    Fox was an international con man and thief, known for the sheer audacity of his high-risk swindles and heists and for the obvious joy he took in pulling them off. No matter how big his scores were, and he’d had some huge ones, he kept going back for more.
    Kate had made it her mission at the FBI to nail him. She’d come close two years ago, when she’d discovered Nick’s plot to plunder a venture capitalist’s twentieth-story Chicago penthouse of all his cash and jewels at the same time that the self-proclaimed “King of Hostile Takeovers” was getting married in the living room.
    It was a ballsy move, and pure Nick Fox. To pull it off, he somehow got himself hired as the wedding planner and brought in a motley crew of thieves as the caterers. When Kate crashed thewedding with a strike team, Nick’s crew scattered like cockroaches when the lights go on, and Nick parachuted off the top of the building.
    Choppers were called in, streets were closed, roadblocks were set up, and buildings were searched, but Nick slipped away. When Kate finally straggled into her hotel room at dawn, there was a bottle of champagne and a bouquet of roses waiting for her. All from Nick. And charged to her room, of course. The whole time she’d been hunting for Nick, he’d been relaxing in her room, watching pay-per-view movies, ordering room service, and helping himself to the Toblerones in her minibar. He’d even stolen the towels on his way out.
    The bastard is having way too much fun at my expense, Kate thought as she bolted through the hospital lobby, out the door past two surprised agents, and charged across the parking lot.
    When she reached the cyclone fence around the old hospital building, she was sweating and her heart was pounding so hard she could almost hear it. She drew her gun and slowly approached the entrance to the lobby. As she got closer, she saw a red carpet and a sign that had been obscured in the shadows of the alcove under the portico. The sign read:
    Welcome to the St. Cosmas Concierge Medical Center. Please excuse our dust as we remodel to give you more privacy, luxury, and state-of-the art care .
    Hugging the lava rock walls she made her way to the door, yanked it open, and spun into the open space in a firing stance. But there was no one to aim at. Kate faced an elegantly furnished lobby decked out with contemporary leather furniture, travertinefloors, and lush plants. On the wall behind the empty reception desk were photos of the surgical staff. She looked at the photos and immediately recognized two of the faces. One of them belonged to Nick Fox, a stethoscope around his neck, exuding doctorly strength and confidence. The other one was her, with a dopey, drunken smile on her face. Her picture had been lifted, cropped, and photoshopped from the bridal party pictures taken years ago that were now on her sister Megan’s Facebook page. “Dr. William Scholl” was written in bronze letters under Nick’s photo, “Dr. Eunice Huffnagle” under hers.
    Okay, so where was the “surgical staff” now? she asked herself. And what about the six rich patients who’d come from far and wide for organ transplants?
    Kate headed for the double doors that were located to one side of the reception desk. She pushed them open and stepped into a foyer, ready to fire. But once again, there was no one there. Directly in front of her were three more sets of double doors. One was marked “Operating Room #1,” the second “Post-Op