The Job by Janet Evanovich, Lee Goldberg

after Nick, Kate, and Jake met on the yacht in Marina del Rey, Nick and Kate stood sipping coffee on the veranda of Nick’s south-facing fifth-floor suite at the NH Cartagena Hotel. Nick had been in the city for several days preparing for the theft of the coins. Kate had just arrived.
    “Nice view,” Kate said, looking out at the harbor and the museum, a sleek atrium of stone, glass, and sharp angles.
    Their hotel was on the edge of the old town, just north of the sea wall and the Paseo Alfonso XII roadway that went along the waterfront. Down below and straight ahead was a wide plaza and wharf leading to the cruise ship terminal, where an ocean liner was docked. The museum was on the east side of the plaza. A small shopping center and the yacht marina were to the west. Further south, Kate could see a lighthouse at the edge of the bay and, beyond that, the sun glistening off the swells of the Mediterranean.
    Nick gestured to the museum. “That’s where our gold is.What you’re seeing is basically a large skylight. The bulk of the museum is underground to give the visitors the sensation of going underwater. That’s a plus for us.”
    “How do you figure that?”
    “The broad plaza between the museum to the east, the cruise ship dock to the south, and the shopping center to the west is a multilevel underground parking garage. The thing about underground garages is that they need lots of ventilation to prevent people from dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. They pump a lot of air in and out. So does the museum, because it’s almost entirely underground and there wouldn’t be enough fresh air circulating otherwise. The two networks of large air ducts run alongside each other to the surface.”
    She could see where this line of thought was going. “We’re going to break into the museum tonight through the air ducts in the garage.”
    “This afternoon,” Nick said.
    Kate stared at him. “In broad daylight?”
    “It’s the best way not to be noticed when we’re breaking in and leaving. There are people everywhere.”
    “Not in the conservation lab grabbing handfuls of coins.”
    “You’ll just have to make sure you’re not seen.”
    “Me? Where are you going to be?”
    “I’ll be in the ceiling duct holding the rope that you’ll be dangling from.”
    She’d seen this plot before, and Tom Cruise had played her part. “You stole this whole operation from
Mission Impossible
.”
    “Actually, they got the idea from
Topkapi,
which, I can tell you from personal experience, really works.”
    “So you claim,” she said.
    “You’ll find out for yourself in a couple hours.”
    “Why can’t I be the one to hold the rope, and you get to be the dangler?”
    “I’m the big strong man. If
you
held the rope you might drop me on my head.”
    “It would be tempting.”
    At noon Nick drove a panel van identical to the ones driven by city utility workers into the underground parking structure and went down to the lowest level, the fourth floor. There were almost no cars on this level, and the few that were parked looked as if they’d been there for days. A single surveillance camera was pointed at the elevator and stairwell. Nick parked the van in front of one of the large circular air vents, which was three feet in diameter and partially covered by a metal grate.
    Nick and Kate were dressed as city utility workers in white jumpsuits, and wore work gloves, rock-climbing harnesses around their waists, and headbands with tiny headlights attached to them. Kate also wore a backpack containing a rope and pulleys, among other things.
    They used the van for cover as they crouched in front of the vent and removed the metal grate. After the grate was removed, they opened the rear doors on the van and pulled out another backpack, and a large handheld masonry saw with vacuumdust control and a circular diamond blade the size of a serving plate. Nick attached the saw to an industrial extension cord and plugged the cord into a