The Heist

hadn’t raised the alarm,” Nick said. “It was Eunice who insisted I come for you.”
    “My new best friend is playing it smart,” Bob said. “His ransom was a retainer for my ongoing protection from people like me.”
    “Your escape could have jeopardized that arrangement,” Griffin said.
    Kate gave her head a shake. If she didn’t have bad luck, she wouldn’t have any luck at all. She’d underestimated the possiblity that Griffin would turn, that he’d work out a deal of his own that would make it more attractive for him to stay than to escape with them.
    Bob gave an order in Indonesian to his men, and she heard everyone moving outside. Probably this wasn’t a good sign. Like when they shot Nick they didn’t want to get blood splatters on the wallpaper. Time for the big diversion, she told herself. Time to blow the operating room to smithereens.
    She broke the candle in half, so what remained was about an inch tall. She lit the candle, and set it on the floor at the end of her liquid fuse. She figured she had maybe five minutes to make her play, whatever it was going to be, before the explosion.
    Willie reached the point on the path where the forest met the beach. Still hidden in the brush, she paused to see if there was anybody on the sand, or on the dock, or visible on the schooner anchored in the cove. The seaplane and a speedboat rocked gently on the swells and bumped against the dock, making the wood slats creak. She took a deep breath, hung tight to her AK-47, and dashedacross the sand and onto the dock. She jumped into the speedboat, set her rifle on the floor, and yanked a bunch of wires out from under the cockpit dashboard. Good luck chasing us now, she thought. She turned and choked down a scream. A man dressed in black stood in the stern of the boat. The black paint on his craggy face made his eyes huge, horrifying, and unnaturally white. And he was pointing the AK-47 at her chest.
    Kate made as much noise as she could climbing out of the guest bedroom. First she threw her suitcase out, then she jumped down after it. She fussed around for a couple beats, thinking the pirates were the most inept band of kidnappers to ever have walked the earth. When they finally rushed out of the darkness at her with guns drawn, she had her suitcase in hand. She made a quick show of being startled, and then wasted no time getting herded to the front of the house, worried she wouldn’t be in place when the OR blew.
    Nick was standing in the grassy area where they’d had breakfast, his back to the sea. Bob was next to him, casually holding his gun at his side. The pirates and tribe members stood to one side, as if watching a performance in a park. The Torajans seemed intrigued, but distant from it all. They knew that none of this involved them, that they were mere observers, like the effigies of their ancestors looking down from the mountain. They were here before this little drama unfolded and they’d still be here long afterward.
    Nick shook his head in disbelief at Kate. “You went back for your bag?”
    “It’s Louis Vuitton. Besides, you didn’t expect me to wear this for the next three days, did you?”
    Griffin didn’t expect her to wear anything at all. Griffin wanted her dead. If Eunice’s father paid her ransom and she was set free, her father and the United States government would undoubtedly exert enormous pressure on the Indonesian authorities for an investigation into the kidnapping. And the Indonesians would comply because a story like this would be very, very bad for tourism. The wealthy would take their vacation dollars, and their resort investments, to some other tropical locale. And that meant things could get very bad for Griffin. The U.S. didn’t have an extradition treaty with Indonesia, but the local authorities could arrest him, put him through a show trial, and lock him away in one of their hellhole prisons, even though he had nothing to do with the crime. He’d be sacrificed to the Gods of Tourism.
    There was only one way out of this. He’d fork over the ransom money himself and get Bob to kill Eunice and her crew. Bob would be very rich. And Griffin could keep his island and get some long-term protection out of the deal, too.
    “We need to talk,” Griffin said to Bob.
    “We can talk after I kill this guy,” Bob said to Griffin, pointing his rifle at Nick.
    “It’s rude to point a gun at someone,” Nick said, grabbing the AK-47 by the barrel, pivoting, and yanking