Joseph Finder
Plan B
Book 2.5 in the Nick Heller series, 2011
There’s nothing more dangerous than stealing a powerful man’s most prized possession.
But I had no choice.
I was sitting in the passenger’s seat of an ambulance in a very wealthy neighborhood in Barcelona. It was two in the morning on a moonless night, and since there were no streetlights in this very upscale part of town, we were shrouded in darkness. The ambulance was a boxy white Nissan van whose black vinyl seats were cracked and sprung. The interior stank of stale cigarette smoke. The medical equipment did not inspire confidence. But I wasn’t complaining: The ambulance was borrowed.
“What I don’t get,” said the man behind the wheel, “is why.”
The man was named Benito, and he was a private investigator, formerly an officer with the Cuerpo Nacional de Policía. He was small and scrappy, with dyed black hair and a soul patch and an ugly white scar on his right jaw. He had the small dark button eyes of a rag doll. His teeth were tobacco stained. He smoked almost constantly, but out of deference to me, he hadn’t had a cigarette in over an hour. I’m not one of those antismoking fascists; that’s not why I don’t like being around lighted cigarettes. The problem was that, even though I hadn’t smoked in years, since the army, I was always on the verge of backsliding.
“Why what?” I finally asked.
“Why you do this.”
“I thought I explained.”
“Not what we doing now,” Benito said, “but why.” Benito’s accent was heavy, but his English was almost fluent. His British mother had moved to Barcelona to teach English and ended up marrying a Basque.
“Like I said, a guy hired me.”
“But you don’t need the money. This is risky. Really dangerous. Why would you do this if you don’t have to?”
I didn’t answer. Most people assumed I was loaded because my father was this famous Wall Street financier. “Infamous” was maybe more accurate. The only reason anyone had heard of him was because of all the news stories: how he went fugitive before he was arrested for a massive insider-trading scam, how they caught up with him and put him on trial and locked him up. People assumed he’d left his family a lot of money, hidden somewhere offshore. They didn’t realize that he’d left us with nothing.
“How much this guy pay you, anyway?”
“It’s never enough,” I said. “Not why I do it.”
“Hope it’s good reason, that’s all I say.”
I shrugged. “When it’s a dad trying to get back his daughter, I figure that’s a pretty good reason.”
“Yeah? He must be good friend.”
“I barely know him,” I said.
I’d been hired by a rich Ukrainian I’d met in London. His name was Vadim Kuzma, and he lived in a big white stucco house in South Kensington. He was obviously mega-wealthy. A mutual friend had introduced us at some boring client dinner party at J Sheekey in Covent Garden.
Vadim asked for my card. I told him I didn’t have one, but I gave him my e-mail. A few weeks later he sent me a desperate message that his fifteen-year-old daughter, Svetlana, had been kidnapped in Barcelona. I called him for more details. He was frantic. He never should have let her travel on her own, he said. She was far too young. He’d heard about a big kidnapping case in Boston I’d been involved in, and he offered me a lot of money to get her back, far more than I would have asked for.
“How much is the ransom demand?” I asked.
“I wish this was ransom,” Vadim said, his voice cracking. “Money I can pay.”
“Then what is it?” I asked.
“My intelligence network tells me she’s being held prisoner by José María Soler.”
“I’m sorry to hear this.” José María Soler was one of the wealthiest men in Spain, a billionaire who’d made his fortune in telecommunications. He also owned one of Spain’s most successful football clubs. He was immensely powerful, a man used to getting his own way. A man who probably had half the police in Barcelona on his payroll.
I grabbed the first flight out of Boston.
Benito drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “This thing’s a piece of crap,” he said. He had a friend who ran an ambulance company and had agreed, for a wad of cash, to leave his vehicle yard unsecured for an hour earlier that day.
“If I’m ever hit by a car in Barcelona, remind me to walk to the hospital,” I said. “I think I’d get there faster.”
He looked at his watch. “Let’s just hope we don’t need this ambulance as an ambulance,” he said. “You’re not going to kill nobody, yes?”
“I’m a man of peace.”
“Yeah? You never kill people?”
I looked at him. He wasn’t smiling.
“I was in the Special Forces,” I said.
“I don’t mean in combat.”
“Never.” I paused for a moment. “Hardly ever.”
“Hardly ever,” he repeated, thinking it over.
“Sometimes you have no choice.”
“It’s the, how you say, self-defense.”
“Sometimes.”
“And other than that?”
“Never,” I said. I was staring out the window, but I could feel his doll-button eyes on me. “Hardly ever,” I amended.
“Hardly ever,” he repeated, and snorted.
“It’s always something you want to avoid. If possible.”
Benito grunted. “So it’s a fallback. A Plan B.”
“It’s not going to come to that tonight.”
“You never know what might happen.” Benito was chewing the skin on the side of his left index finger. “The Spanish, they have a saying. ‘Cuando menos piensa el galgo, salta la liebre.’ It means like, just when the hunting dog least expects it, the jackrabbit jumps out.”
“I’m not worried about rabbits,” I said.
“It means-”
“I get what it means. But don’t worry. You and I and the girl are going to get out safe and sound. Anybody gets in the way of that-well, I didn’t bring a Havahart trap.”
He didn’t seem reassured. “We ready?”
“Five minutes,” I said, glancing at my watch. “That’s when the guards’ shift changes.”
Carrer de la Font del Lleó was a narrow street at the foot of a steep, scrubby incline, its sandy soil overgrown with stunted, windswept trees and tangled vines. On one side was a narrow sidewalk bordered by a neatly manicured hedgerow into which were cut driveways fortified by gates and guard booths, the entrances to humbler residences, and the occasional utility pole.
Carved into the steep slope of the Collserola mountain overlooking downtown Barcelona was a vast estate: a sprawling villa with a red barrel-tile roof, an Olympic-size swimming pool and a clay tennis court, a lot of terraces and a manicured lawn and ornamental trees and shrubs and all that.
Between the terrain and the foliage and the high stone wall surrounding the property, you couldn’t see much of the house from the street. But Benito had obtained the architect’s blueprints from the city registry. And for the last two days I’d been conducting surveillance of the house from various vantage points in the area, using a high-powered scope and a good camera with a telephoto lens. I’d borrowed Benito’s Labrador and taken a couple of leisurely strolls around the property. Once I even let him slip the leash and watched him scramble up the slope bordering the southwestern wall. I was a frustrated neighbor with an unruly pet. I followed him through the spiny gorse and the dry, thorny brolla shrubs, nearly losing my footing as the sandy soil gave way, grabbing on to the branch of a gnarled almond tree. Geckos scuttled by.
Soon I knew the make and model of the thirty-six CCTV cameras that ringed the property. I knew that anyone who came within twelve feet of the wall would appear on a monitor inside. I’d noticed the five strands of high-tensile wire atop the eight-foot stone wall through which ten thousand volts pulsed at one-second intervals. If you touched it, you fried. If you tried to cut it, you’d trigger the alarm. Also, I saw the taut steel wire threaded through the anchor posts: an electromechanical anticlimb sensor. Grab it, tug at it, and you’d set off the strain gauge, kicking off the alarm.