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The Good Thief
Judith Leon
Mills & Boon Silhouette
When the case is as potentially explosive as that of an Athena student's abduction, Lindsey Novak never enters a negotiation without knowing just who to trust. She thrives on black-market deals with shady characters– even when she has to steal from the thieves themselves.But this time every weapon in her arsenal– including the enigmatic and all-too-sexy bodyguard hired by her father– may not be enough. For recovering the missing girl is only the first phase in thwarting a plan so evil it could change humanity forever.
From: Delphi@oracle.org
To: C_Evans@athena.edu
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 (http://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.
