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born with it. He just hadn’t been born with money. Then again, he felt he’d been better off being born with brains. With brains and certain talents you could take what you needed—or wanted—from people who barely noticed the sting. The job kept the adrenaline going. The result, the money, just let you relax until the next time.
    He knew how to plan for it, how to plot, how to scheme. And he also knew the value of research. He’d been up half the night going over every scrap of information he could decipher in the envelope. It was a puzzle, but he had the pieces. All he needed to put them all together was time.
    The neatly typed translations he’d read might have just been a pretty story to some, a history lesson to others— aristocrats struggling to smuggle their jewels and their precious selves out of revolution-torn France. He’d read words of fear, of confusion, and of despair. In the plastic-sealed originals, he’d seen hopelessness in the handwriting, in words he couldn’t read. But he’d also read of intrigue, of royalty, and of wealth. Marie Antoinette. Robespierre. Necklaces with exotic names hidden behind bricks or concealed in wagon-loads of potatoes. The guillotine, desperate flights across the English Channel. Pretty stories steeped in history and colored with blood. But the diamonds, the emeralds, the rubies the size of hen’s eggs had been real too. Some of them had never been seen again. Some had been used to buy lives or a meal or silence. Others had traveled across oceans. Doug worked the kinks out of his arm and smiled. The Indian Ocean—trade route for merchants and pirates. And on the coast of Madagascar, hidden for centuries, guarded for a queen, was the answer to his dreams. He was going to find it, with the help of a young girl’s journal and a father’s despair. When he did, he’d never look back.
    Poor kid, he thought, imagining the young French girl who’d written out her feelings two hundred years before. He wondered if the translation he’d read had really keyed in on what she’d gone through. If he could read the original French… He shrugged and reminded himself she was long dead and not his concern. But she’d just been a kid, scared and confused.
    Why do they hate us? she’d written. Why do they look at us with such hate? Papa says we must leave Paris and I believe I will never see my home again.
    And she never had, Doug mused, because war and politics go for the big view and trample all over the little guy. France during the Revolution or a steamy pit of a jungle in Nam. It never changed. He knew just what it felt like to be helpless. He wasn’t going to feel that way ever again.
    He stretched and thought of Whitney.
    For better or worse, he’d made a deal with her. He never turned his back on a deal unless he was sure he could get away with it. Still, it grated to have to depend on her for every dollar.
    Dimitri had hired him to steal the papers because he was, Doug admitted honestly as he sucked in smoke, a very good thief. Unlike Dimitri’s standard crew, he’d never considered that a weapon made up for wit. He’d always preferred living by the latter. Doug knew it was his reputation for doing a smooth, quiet job that had earned him the call from Dimitri to lift a fat envelope from a safe in an exclusive co-op off Park Avenue.
    A job was a job, and if a man like Dimitri was willing to pay five thousand for a bunch of papers, a great many with faded and foreign writing, Doug wasn’t going to argue. Besides, he’d had some debts to pay.
    He’d had to get by two sophisticated alarm systems and four security guards before he could crack the little gem of a wall safe where the envelope was stored. He had a way with locks and alarms. It was—well, a gift, Doug decided. A man shouldn’t waste his God-given talents.
    The thing was, he’d played it straight. He’d taken nothing but the papers—though there’d been a very interesting-looking black case in the