The Job by Janet Evanovich, Lee Goldberg Read Free Book Online

the small tables on the patio. They were eating breakfast, reviewing guidebooks, and taking lots of selfies standing with their backs against the rooftop railing, the panoramic view of the Sea of Marmara behind them.
    Kate took a warm plate from the stack at the end of the bar and browsed the offerings on the buffet. She’d tried most of the dishes the previous morning with Atalay. She loaded up on the fried eggs, sausage, fruit, and cheese, picked up a glass of tea, and carried her breakfast to the far end of the table with the worst view and the fewest guests. The last thing she wanted to do was engage in small talk with chatty tourists.
    She was working her way through her eggs when a bearded man in a flannel shirt and faded jeans slid onto the bench across from her. His plate was piled so high with food that an avalanche of olives, cubes of cheese, and a portion of bread pudding toppled onto the table when he sat down.
    “If there’s one thing I love,” he said, “it’s free grub.”
    He spoke with an indecipherable American southern accent, a little bit of the Carolinas mixed with backwater Louisiana. He wore a sweat-stained American flag bandana around his head.His bushy mustache and beard were so thick and mangy, it was like he had a wild animal sitting on his face. The only things she could see clearly behind all of that hair were the tip of his nose and his compelling brown eyes.
    “Aren’t you afraid someone will recognize your nose?” Kate asked him.
    “I’m a risk taker,” he said. “What gave me away? Was it the nose?”
    “It was the desire to punch you in the face.” Kate forked in more eggs and a chunk of sausage. “You lied to me, Nick. You said there wasn’t any connection between the heist at the Gleaberg and the one at the Demirkan.”
    “There isn’t.”
    “But here you are.”
    “Whither thou goest …” he said.
    “That’s touching, but I suspect there’s more.”
    And actually it
was
touching, Kate thought. Like it or not, even though she wanted to punch him in the face, it was nice to have him across from her at the breakfast table. It was sort of … connubial.
    “There’s curiosity,” Nick said.
    “So besides me, it’s curiosity that got you on a plane?”
    “As far as I can see, the only thing the Gleaberg job has in common with the Demirkan is me. And the thief might have my fingerprints, but he isn’t thinking like me. I wouldn’t come all the way to Istanbul to smash a display case and take a goblet. I’d steal the Topkapi Dagger.”
    “You can’t steal that.”
    “That’s true,” he said. “I’d just be repeating myself.”
    “You never stole the Topkapi Dagger.”
    “Yes, I did,” he said.
    The diamond-encrusted dagger, renowned for the three huge emeralds on the grip, was displayed in the Topkapi Palace treasury, a museum full of the amazing riches the sultans acquired during Turkey’s reign as the greatest power on earth. It was commonly believed that stealing anything from the treasury was impossible.
    “The dagger is one of the world’s most famous and coveted treasures,” Kate said. “If it had been stolen, I would have heard about it.
Everybody
would have heard about it.”
    “If anybody noticed,” he said. “I swapped the dagger with a fake. Nobody suspected a thing. The next night, I broke into the house of the director general of the Turkish police, and slipped the dagger into his kitchen silverware drawer. He found it when he went to butter his toast for breakfast. Naturally, the police and the palace officials didn’t tell a soul about what happened. It would have been too embarrassing.”
    “Why would you go to the trouble of committing one of the greatest thefts in criminal history only to give back what you stole?”
    “Have you ever seen the 1964 movie
Topkapi
?”
    “Nope,” she said.
    “It’s one of the best heist flicks ever made. I saw it on TV when I was a kid, and it made a big impression on me. Thismaster thief