The Good Thief

From: [e-mail]

To: [e-mail]

Re: negotiator, Lindsey Novak

Christine,

Congratulations to you and your team for recovering Lena Poole. I know her family was overjoyed at her safe return. However, I was devastated by your news that Teal Arnett is still in the hands of her kidnappers. This isn’t the first time, or likely to be the last, that an Athena student’s bravery has gotten her into trouble.

You asked about contacts in Europe. I have the woman you want. Lindsey Novak. She’s a professional negotiator very experienced in taking back stolen goods, from art thieves or kidnappers. She’ll have the contacts you need. I’ve attached her most recent info.

If there’s anything else I can do, my resources are yours.

D.

Dear Reader,

I have loved writing every one of my Bombshell action-adventure/thriller books. I groove on the idea of powerful women who take charge of saving others, and maybe even saving themselves, while falling in love with a man who finds their moxie a turn-on. And so it was a delight to be invited to write The Good Thief as part of the Athena Force series, stories of truly fabulous women and their heroism. The added plus for me in this adventure was that Lindsey travels to beautiful, mysterious Prague, Czech Republic, in its winter wonderland time of year.

I’d love to hear from you. You can contact me and read about my other books at www.jhand.com.

Judith Leon

The Good Thief

Judith Leon

www.millsandboon.co.uk

JUDITH LEON

In July 2004 Silhouette Books showcased Judith’s women’s action-adventure, Code Name: Dove, to launch their new Bombshell line, and the book made the Waldenbooks bestseller list. The second and third books in the series, Iron Dove and Captive Dove, were released soon after.

Her epic historical Voice of the Goddess, a love story about a Bronze Age heroine, written under the name Judith Hand, won numerous awards, and her second epic historical, The Amazon and the Warrior, was published by Tor/Forge as a tie-in with the Brad Pitt movie Troy. Her book won the San Diego Book Award in 2005 for best historical novel. With friend and colleague Peggy Lang, Judith has completed a political suspense novel about a woman who runs for the U.S. presidency.

Her great passions now are promoting her two nonfiction books, Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace and A Future Without War, and her Web site about ending war, www.AFutureWithoutWar.org.

To Hal, the Marko of my life.

Acknowledgments

There are many friends and colleagues to whom I owe profound thanks. I created this story with my friend and writing partner, Peggy Lang.

She is a brilliant story editor, and we have begun to write novels together. She helped me to envision and compose The Good Thief. I am also profoundly indebted to my long-standing writers groups for their always-honest reviews: A. B. Curtis, Donna Erickson, Pete Johnson and Judith Levine, the Friday team; and Chet Cunningham, Al Kramer, Bev Miller, Tom Utts and others of the Monday faithful. And for their story input and editing, I have two delightful editors to thank at Silhouette Books: Tara Parsons and Stacy Boyd.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Prologue

Lindsey Novak fought a rising sense of panic, fought an image of standing before her father having failed. She couldn’t let that happen.

A waning moon, still nearly full, shone above the White Tank Mountains northwest of Phoenix on the last Thursday night in March. The mild night air made conditions perfect for the final event of the Athena Academy’s unique senior triathlon. Seventeen-year-old Lindsey checked the glowing display on her watch: 3:32 a.m.

She stifled an urge to shout at Gloria Muñoz, the current leader, that they needed to move faster—shouting would do no good whatsoever.

With her five teammates, Lindsey had been hiking and jogging for exactly four hours and thirty-two minutes, working their way southwest from their original helicopter dropoff at an elevation of 2,800 feet in the northernmost ridge of the regional preserve.

She heard the whump-whump of the helicopter first. “Down!” she said in a hushed voice to the others. “The chopper!”

Their single-file lane instantly broke, each girl diving toward the nearest mesquite bush or darting into a moon shadow cast by a boulder. Lindsey’s shoulder hit a rock. The nearest bush snapped. She winced in pain and inhaled the pungent scent of sage. Gloria killed the light of the one allotted flashlight.

Damn. Even if they weren’t spotted, hiding would cost them precious minutes. At sundown, Lindsey’s team, the Dianas, won the horseback relay on the Sonoran Loop of the competitive track. By 10:30, they had come in second on the bicycle course. This put them in a close second overall with the Persephones, their most serious competition. With a bit harder push, they could capture the lead. All girls at the Athena Academy for the Advancement of Women were assigned upon admission to a support group—a sort of team or coven or sisterhood—and each group picked their name from a character in Greek or Roman mythology.

The Dianas were tired but pumped, and Lindsey needed the big win as much as she’d ever needed anything. Her dad would be waiting in the park’s amphitheater along with the other girls’ parents. Mom would be there, too, of course, but Dad would be so incredibly proud of Lindsey if—no, when—the Dianas won this major test. His high expectations for her were the main reason he’d sent her to Athena, the extremely low-profile, highly selective, and premier high school for girls in America, really in the whole world, and Lindsey simply couldn’t bear the thought of disappointing him. Not even once since she was twelve and she’d lost her nerve and didn’t even place in a skiing race had she disappointed her stern but loving dad.

She felt something, looked down, and realized that her legs were exposed—and that a scorpion had crawled up onto her boot, tail raised. Lindsey froze.

The searchlight of the chopper sliced back and forth through the darkness, approaching them and driving critters skittering in the brush toward them. If the scout in the chopper ID’d the Dianas, they’d be penalized fifteen minutes. The Academy, partially supported by secret Department of Defense funding and from such government agencies as the CIA, NSA and FBI, also had close ties to nearby Luke Air Force base. The men there enjoyed helping out in the annual event.

Rachel Stein gasped and swatted at Lindsey’s shoulder. “Your legs.”

“Freeze, chicas!” Gloria commanded, just before the beam missed Rachel by inches.

They wore desert camouflage hats with leafy twigs stuck into the band, black turtleneck shirts, camo pants, fingerless black gloves and hiking boots. Each carried a two-liter water bottle, Lindsey’s now less than half full, ChapStick and simple food items. The team also carried water-based paint balloons for tagging, one knife, one pen flare and one simple first-aid kit. The designated leader always held the flashlight and the rappelling line and pitons, which had come in handy twice so far.

When the chopper finally passed, Lindsey flicked the scorpion off. She started to stand, but what felt like claws tore through her shirt. She swore. A cluster of razor-sharp thorns from a scrubby cat’s claw acacia had shredded her forearm. Man, oh, man, she hated this plant. Ecologist Edward Abbey had said that everything in the desert either “bites, stabs, sticks, stings or stinks.” He was right.

The way her classes had combined concepts, like biological adaptations and survivalist training, constantly amazed Lindsey. If women were to make things better, they had to hone every asset, every ability. Be all they could be, as her dad, a former army special forces commander, would say. Principal Christine Evans even brought in accomplished instructors to teach Lindsey’s favorite subject, art. Her dad, however, encouraged art studies only as a hobby. Mom’s income as a textbook illustrator hadn’t brought in much money and so didn’t measure up to what Dad believed Lindsey could achieve.

“Water break and alpha change,” Gloria said. “Lindsey, take us in.”

“Right.” A quick swig of water, a chunk of power bar and a handful of peanuts, and they were off again, Lindsey in the lead. “Okay, they almost caught us because we’re in the wash. We need to bend south, anyway.” She set a faster jogging pace.

The chopper followed trails and the long, meandering dry washes that gleamed white in the moonlight, the idea being to drive the five teams into challenging terrain. The White Tank Mountains were essentially a series of ridges running east and west. The Dianas had already crossed or skirted three main ridges. With one more to go, they’d soon be in the public area with its many trails. Before coming in, though, they had to find a “treasure” in Waterfall Canyon. Each team’s prize would be in a different location and they would know it because it would bear the initial of their name.

The distant lights of Phoenix lay like a spill of diamonds to the southeast, and even in the ravines, gullies and canyons, the city’s ambient light was obvious. The girls kept Polaris shining over their left shoulders. In this park, Lindsey knew where she was, even at night. She hiked through it several times a year and had spent the previous evening poring over maps.

She risked sweeping the flashlight beam across a rocky stretch. From the other side of the ridge, coyotes suddenly yipped the way they did over a fresh kill. Chills ran up her back at the sound. She held up her hand for a stop signal, and listened hard. When the yips grew fainter, team members audibly breathed again.

Leaving the wash would slow them down but the chopper was a bigger problem. “Go!” Lindsey said, and they scrambled over the rocks toward a protected arroyo.

This was a good time for one of their cheers. In a low voice, she chanted, “Dianas know no fear!” The others responded, instantly and softly: “No way, Jose!”

Lindsey called, “Dianas persevere!”

The response: “You bet, Suzette!”

Then all together, “Go, Dianas!”

They normally screamed the last line, but now each spoke barely above a whisper. If they alerted other teams to their location they risked getting pelted with dye balloons. If yellow glow-in-the-dark paint splattered a team member’s clothing, the team would suffer a ten-minute loss for each girl hit. The Dianas were definitely the team to beat. Pelting any of them would be a bragging-rights victory. All Athena girls wanted to be like the famous Cassandra team that graduated five years ago, and the Dianas were shaping up to match the Cassandras’ exploits and achievements.

“Over rock and ridge, gully and gravel, the Daring Dianas trekked on,” Crystal said softly in her exaggerated movie voice-over tone, “jogging with goat-footed precision, panting and sweating, moving ever closer to victory.” She wanted to become a screenwriter.

Out of the inky silhouette of a stand of organ-pipe cactus, black blots seemed to spew toward them, emitting tiny screams and squeaks. Bats. Lindsey raised her arms around her head, and the high-pitched noise rose and then apparently stopped as the bats’ echo-location went into an overdrive inaudible to humans. They veered off then, shy things that they were, perhaps scared up by a great horned owl.

She’d felt no panic, no pounding pulse. Lindsey had seen only one snake so far, a mildly venomous nocturnal lyre snake coiled in a rock crevice, its head raised. She’d not even blinked as she faced its stare and directed others to move back, and then, finally, moved away herself.

Athena and the desert had been good for her courage. Understanding the desert’s creatures had erased a lot of blind fears. Snakes. Bats. Coyotes. Scorpions. She understood them now, knew how to act and so had conquered the terrors they had given her at first. She could rappel down cliffs that once would have paralyzed her. She could handle guns and knives and wield a bow and arrows. Athena girls were being prepared to protect and defend as well as change the world for the better. She did have a fear, though, that she hadn’t admitted to anyone. Little eight-legged things. Even a picture of a spider sometimes gave her goose bumps. She’d been that way since childhood. But she loved it that the other girls considered her the most daring, so if this particular hang-up ever seriously threatened to freak her out, she would just use force of will to get past it.

She inhaled deeply. The pervasive sage and creosote smells had freshened with moisture. The team crossed what Lindsey was sure was Goat Canyon Trail. When they entered the wide wash of Dripping Spring Canyon, Lindsey knew her direction was true. If all went well, they were a mere hour from the amphitheater. By 4:00 a.m., they’d found the treasure underneath dried cactus wood beneath a park sign bearing the letter D. Lindsey noted that the letter, unlike the sign, wasn’t weathered. It had been placed recently. The sign explained the formation of the “white tanks,” natural stone cisterns sculpted by flash floods. Underneath some dried cactus wood, they found their treasure: chocolate bars and something shiny. The girls gasped at the beautiful gold pendants cast with the image of Athena.

Someone hissed, their secret sound for stop. Everyone crouched and froze.

“Voices,” Portia whispered, “eight o’clock.” Heads turned west. Nothing.

And then the chopper returned, following the bends of the wash. They eased into shadows, pressed into bushes, again losing time as the chopper whomped by.

The sounds gradually faded, the team heard voices more clearly. Portia hand signaled where she thought their competitors’ course lay. Lindsey calculated her options. Since, in true Athena thinking, no points would be gained in paint-tagging another team, only a point loss in getting tagged, she would not let them be sucked into losing time in an ambush. She signaled by pointing away from the voices and toward the rocks.

Soon they were nearing the area with the most vegetation. This would probably be a shorter route in the long run, anyway. And wasn’t there a cistern, up ahead, a “white tank”?

An image of the new sign posted above their treasure flashed in her mind. Had that been a clue, the key to success from that point? Lindsey felt a flush of certainty. Going through this region of tanks was the fastest way.

Dropping down the rock face by rope took less than ten minutes. They reached a passageway so narrow, only one girl at a time could go through.

“It’s black as starless space down there,” Crystal said.

Lindsey signaled the others to wait. She moved a limb of a paloverde tree, stepped into the passage, and switched on her flashlight. Left behind, the Dianas blended into shadows. Within ten paces she came upon a rock “tank” filled with water, a deep pool of ink. It would be cold, and no telling what things lurked in it, but they’d be heroes if they pushed through and down to the amphitheater in record time.

The edges gave no footing, so the only way out was through. She shined her light into the leafy gorge beyond and saw a sight that chilled her to the bone. The beam shimmered across dozens of giant gray spiderwebs. A scream rose in her. She bit her hand in time to keep the scream inside.

Above her shoulder, a spider dropped along the rocky wall from its line of sticky web, doing a little rappelling of its own. White speckles sprinkled its body. She scurried back to the team, grateful for the dark. Otherwise, they’d see a completely white face. Her hands were sweating and her heart’s beating throbbed in her throat.

“Can’t go that way. The…uh…water…something moving in it. Like a snake.” She couldn’t return her teammates’ look of surprise, her lie forcing her gaze to the ground. She was the designated leader from this point. The decision was hers to make. Moaning quietly and sulkily complaining of lost time, the girls climbed their way back out, and when they nearly reached the top, the Persephone team popped up, whooping.

“Kowabunga!”

Paint balloons flew at the Dianas, Lindsey taking the first hit. Persephones scurried away before Dianas could reach the top and fire back. A clean getaway.

It was all Lindsey could do to keep from crying. They came in well behind the Persephones, and because of the paint splatters, their score put them at third in the overall triathlon.

“We’re so proud of you, honey,” Lindsey’s mother gushed at the closing ceremony.

She stood there with some paint still caked in her hair, wanting to disappear.

“Third, huh?” Her dad patted her on the cheek. He swiped a finger over her bangs, noting the paint. “Let’s talk about this later, before your mother and I leave. See what you could have done differently.”

She’d failed. At the big party in the gym the other girls would talk. Her father would hear about the dark passageway and about her retreat.

For two days, Lindsey could scarcely eat, and her father’s disappointed pat dug itself a nasty little spot in her memory to remind her of the costs of fear.

Chapter 1

Perfect pizza!

So many reasons to come to Naples, Lindsey thought as she finished off the final bite of a slice she’d ordered while waiting to meet her backup man. The fabulous view of Vesuvius and the bay; masterpieces at the Capodimonte Art Museum that took her right out of the here and now and into a different world; an exciting air of danger and intrigue from the city’s long history with the Mafia; and, of course, the best pizza in the world.

Eager to get into action, she drummed her fingertips on her water glass. She was waiting for Marko Savin at a patio table in the restaurant across the street from the world-famous National Archaeological Museum where she loved to browse, on quieter days, the best finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum.

A sudden strong breeze stroked her neck. February winds off the bay could be quite chilly. Yesterday it had rained. She flipped up the collar of her black leather jacket, guessing the air temperature probably hung around fifty-six degrees. Billowy, gray clouds raced across the sky.

She pushed the plate away and took a drink of bottled water. A sturdy Chianti, as the waiter had suggested, would make the wait easier, but she needed to be at her clearheaded best for today’s buyback.

After a month of investigation and then wangling, wheeling and dealing with a thief, she would buy back a painting, a small masterpiece, for its rightful owner. She would purchase an exquisite work by Artemisia Gentileschi. The little-known oil—three feet by four feet—was entitled Cleopatra at the Bath.

Artemisia had painted this Cleopatra in 1650. Lindsey loved the artist because she was one of the few acknowledged women masters of the time. During WWII the Germans stole the painting from the parents of Lindsey’s clients. Recently, the grandson of an ex-Nazi officer who’d gone into hiding after the war had apparently stolen the piece from his own grandfather and put it up for sale on the black market. Lindsey’s underground contacts—which were extensive since she had carefully cultivated them after becoming a middle-woman in this business over five years ago—ranged from street sages to shady “fences” to auctioneers, cabdrivers and snooty museum buyers. One had not only been able to help her find the painting, but shared the rumor with her that the grandson, Heinie Gottschalk, wanted the money from the sale to take his little drug-running business to new highs. Or lows, depending on how you looked at it.

She sighed. Maybe that was true. Maybe not. She didn’t allow herself to judge or guess at what people did with the money exchanged in the buys. Her job was to serve clients who could not get justice through the legal system. Insurance companies, private businesses and individuals—at one time or another, she’d negotiated a deal for them all. The black-market buybacks sometimes felt a little shady. After all, her clients didn’t like paying for items they rightfully owned. But if her fees sometimes felt like thievery, she at least had the consolation of knowing she was a good thief, on the side of justice.

A man at a nearby table cleared his throat and stared at Lindsey’s hand. She stopped drumming. Why hadn’t she at least ordered coffee? She recalculated the time to reach Capodimonte Park, the site of the exchange. She’d set up the buyback there not just because the location was convenient and public, but also because of the poetic justice involved. The Capodimonte Palace, built in the late 1700s and now the site of the art museum, displayed what was perhaps Artemisia’s best-known piece, done in the chiaroscuro style of the more famous, but in Lindsey’s opinion not more talented, Caravaggio, and entitled Judith Slaying Holophernes. Lindsey would buy back a piece of stolen art under the caring eye, so to speak, of the artist herself in the sense that Artemisia lived on in her work.

Lindsey checked her watch. 12:56. Still early. But Savin obviously wasn’t. Maybe he’d had a hard time renting a motorcycle on such short notice? She hated last-minute changes.

If she were meeting a friend or even doing business for NSI—Novak Sicurezza Internazionale, her father’s security company—time could be experienced Italian style…casual. She had, however, never worked with Marko Savin before, and today’s exchange, like all buys, was potentially dangerous. Everything had to be executed with care. That included timing.

When Lindsey, in a rush early this morning, had called her father from the Florence airport, explaining that a motorcycle accident resulting in a seriously pulled muscle had put her usual backup, Tito, temporarily out of commission, her dad, former Colonel Anton “K-bar” Novak, had highly recommended Marko Savin. “They don’t come better,” K-bar had said. “I can get him down to Naples for you quickly, no problem.”

She crossed her long legs the other direction, black leather pants creaking with the motion. All five-foot-nine of her was in black: black leather, a black turtleneck cashmere sweater under the jacket, black boots. She’d secured her long, dark-red hair in a French braid at the back of her head, pulling it severely away from her face and slicking her bangs away from her forehead. No gentle femininity when dealing with thieves.

Art thieves as a rule didn’t engage in violence. She didn’t anticipate any problems today, but an unbreakable rule was to show strength—and be prepared for anything. More than once, a seller had tried to double-cross her, taking the money and then attempting to flee with the art. Instant wire transfers were not as common even five years ago and unmarked cash was a terrible temptation. Twice she had barely escaped from attempts by third parties to kill both her and the seller and steal the art. You just never knew. She worked carefully. She did not take unnecessary risks.