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said. “You’re here now, that’s what counts. And unless you can make a deal with me today, you’ll be spending the rest of your life in prison.”
    He cocked his head, bewildered. “I don’t see why.”
    “Well, for starters, we have you for impersonating a police officer, wiretapping, and possession of stolen property,” she said. “And that’s not even counting the outstanding charges on your last swindle.”
    “What swindle?”
    “You bilked six men in Las Vegas out of a million dollars each for organ transplants that they didn’t get.”
    “Really? There are people who’ve accused me of that?”
    She shifted in her seat. She didn’t know whether he’d guessed, or knew for a fact, that not one of the six men had ID’d his photo, or admitted to paying him a dime, or pressed any charges. They didn’t want to confess to trying to buy their way to the top of the organ transplant lists and they didn’t want him caught to contradict their story. So they claimed they’d come for face-lifts and had only seen a nurse. Each man gave a conflicting description of her.
    “No,” Kate said.
    “Then I’m confused. What swindle are you talking about?”
    “You trespassed on private property. You impersonated an engineer.”
    “Those are federal offenses?”
    “You swindled a hospital for asbestos cleanup that you didn’t do.”
    “Did they say they paid me?”
    “No,” she said, “but—”
    “Is there asbestos in the hospital?”
    “No,” she said.
    “I rest my case,” he said, and smiled at her. “Can I go now?”
    She wanted to hit him with a bus all over again. She was glad her back was to the mirror, to the agents who were watching, so they couldn’t see the flush on her face and her frustration as the interrogation slipped away from her.
    Kate leaned forward against the table. “There are dozens of other swindles and heists we haven’t talked about yet. You’ve been doing this for a very a long time, Nick. Scotland Yard, the Sûreté, and the Russian Politsiya all want a piece of you. We’re only just getting started.”
    He lifted his eyes to hers. “You must have me mistaken for someone else.”
    “Is that the best you can do?”
    “You’ve misinterpreted everything that happened last night,” he said. “You’re making a terrible mistake.”
    “Then by all means, set me straight,” she said, leaning back again. She needed a moment to regroup anyway, to collect her thoughts and regain control of the situation.
    He looked past her, directing his appeal to the audience. “I’m a struggling performance artist. What happened at the Kibbee was a show.”
    “Like the Blue Man Group, only in green and with a diamond?” Kate said.
    “In a sense, yes. Live theater on the stage of life. A big stunt that we hoped would go viral on YouTube. Obviously, it was a dumb thing to do. I’ll gladly do my thousand hours of community service and pay restitution for the scratch we left in the glass display case.”
    “You drove away with a fifteen-million-dollar diamond,” she said.
    “No, I didn’t,” he said. “It was a cubic zirconia, a fifteen-dollar bauble just like the one we left behind in its place. So see, it was theater on both sides. No harm done.”
    It was another bold guess, but an educated one, Kate thought. She’d switched the real diamond before its arrival at the Kibbee, though only Roland knew that. And as the situation was playing out, her unwillingness to gamble with the real diamond would cost her in the courtroom. He wouldn’t do much prison time for this heist. They’d have to nail him for all the swindles he’d pulled before, assuming they didn’t end up having to stand in line behindthe other countries that wanted to extradite him. Either way, though, he was going down. She had to show him how futile it was to fight the inevitable, that now was the time to make a deal.
    “I know all about you, going back to when you were eighteen,” Kate said. “I don’t