The Nightmare Thief by Meg Gardiner

be massive. And it would come home to him, where it belonged, where it should have been all along. But it would arrive only after taking a traipse around the globe, hopping from bank to bank, country to country, account to account.
    At the wheel of the Volvo, Pat Stringer frowned at the highway. He looked like a songbird, so slight and flighty, but Haugen knew he could rely on the man to do what it took.
    “Ease down. Save your mental energy for the hours ahead,” Haugen said.
    Stringer nodded curtly.
    “We’re on the winning side here,” Haugen said. “These kids are cream puffs. They’re Twinkies. This is not the yard at Lompoc.”
    The U.S. Penitentiary at Lompoc, California, was a medium-security facility, hardly Leavenworth or Marion. But it was a real prison, and Stringer had done real time there, for a real financial crime. Bank robbery.
    Stringer was a real criminal and didn’t apologize for it. He had gone after what he wanted, taken the risk for the chance at the reward. It hadn’t worked out, and he had done his time. The problem, as Haugen saw it, was that Stringer wasn’t cut out for management. He couldn’t plan for contingencies and had failed to keep a back door open so that, when his plans went balls up, he had an escape route. So that when his getaway car got clamped while he was in the bank, he had a better way to elude the LAPD than running down Wilshire Boulevard.
    But Stringer didn’t complain. Not once. And Haugen had enlightened him, when he recruited him for this venture, as to what had gone wrong with his heist. Stringer had walked up to a teller in the middle of the day, with a note in his hand. That was a classic move, but not one that gave the best returns. No, to steal real money, you needed to get an investment banker to hand a piece of paper to a hedge fund manager or derivatives trader. Do it with a smile and a stiletto in your voice. Do it big. Do it for hundreds of millions of dollars. Walk all over them. Do it that way, and you were one of the masters of the universe.
    Like Haugen should have been.
    Stringer kept his eyes on the road and said nothing. Outside, farmland was giving way to open countryside. Golden grass was cooked from a dry summer. Live oaks dotted the hills. In the distance, where the road rose, on and on, ponderosa pine began to take over. The sun was beating down, but the wind was stiff and banks of clouds piled up against the hills ahead.
    Haugen glanced into the backseat, at Sabine. “We haven’t heard from Von and Friedrich.”
    “Cell towers are scarce up there.”
    Haugen turned all the way around, slowly, and glared at her.
    She sat up straighter, and dropped the languid pose. She had removed not only her ski mask but the blond wig, and her boyishly short red hair stood as straight on her head as a field of sorghum.
    Haugen kept his voice low and flat. “Put the wig back on.”
    “The windows are tinted.”
    “We don’t break cover. Do it.”
    Indolently, as though it were her own idea, she stretched and reached for the wig. She fit it on her head, smoothed it down with her fingertips slowly, and slid her gaze over him.
    “That’s more like it,” he said. She looked like a woman now. The mannish power was subdued.
    She wanted to seduce him, right then. They all did, women. They latched on to him, would do anything for him. Sabine was no different.
    Except she was. She had a Wharton MBA, and years working for the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and an eighteen-month stint working as a bond trader for one of the big financial players in the City of London. She was a magician. A cruel, vicious, greedy magician, with a lack of scruples he found completely fascinating. But she was loyal. Fanatically loyal to the idea of the money they were going to make. But her lust for him—and her desire not only to get inside his mind, but to burrow under his emotional skin and make him want her —were what truly kept her loyal to him. She might want to take the money