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understand.”
    “I was sitting in a dark alcove across the street from the building and I fell asleep.”
    “You’re kidding me.”
    “I wish I was, because it’s humiliating. But I’d barely slept for the last week and I’d been watching the building all day. I was exhausted. When I woke up, a van was pulling away and the garage door was closing. It didn’t feel right so I made a run for it.”
    “You could have gone to the police instead. They were right up the street.”
    “I am the police,” Kate said.
    “Not here.”
    “It’s who I am everywhere, and since I only had a split second to act, my reflexes took over. I managed to roll under the garage door right before it closed,” Kate said. “I took the stairs down to the vault and discovered that the three-ton door was wide open. I was sure that the vault had been emptied, that the thieves were long gone, and that I’d slept through the heist. I lowered my guard, which is how Fox got the jump on me when I went into the vault. We fought and I won.”
    Janssen stopped taking notes and set her pen down. “What was Fox doing there?”
    “I assume that he was double-crossed and left behind,” Kate said. “Maybe we’ll find out, and get a lead on the missing diamonds, when you stop wasting valuable time questioning me and we begin interrogating him.”
    “You aren’t getting near him,” Janssen said. “You’re out of this.”
    “He’s my prisoner.”
    “You have no authority here to arrest anybody. You can stand in line to extradite him with all of the law enforcement agencies in Europe. That is, after he’s released from our prison, in thirty years.”
    There was a knock on the other side of the mirror. Janssen threw a glance at the mirror and saw her own irritated expression reflected back at her.
    “Stay here.” Janssen gathered up her notebook and pen and left the room.
    Kate thought she’d given a good performance. Her story unfolded like a farce but it would be very hard for Janssen to prove it wasn’t the truth. However, it was just the beginning. The U.S. State Department, Justice Department, and the FBI would demand answers too, and probably her badge, if not her head.
    Janssen came back in and held the door open. “You can go, but you can’t leave Antwerp. We’re holding on to your passport and your badge until we decide what to do with you.”
    Kate stood up. “What about Nicolas Fox?”
    “He’s not your problem anymore.”
    —
    Kate stepped out of the monolithic police station into the Saturday morning sun. She walked up the street, past coffeehouses and upscale clothing shops, with no particular destination in mind.
    She was emotionally numb. She’d come to Antwerp to save Nick, and instead she’d put him in prison. There was a time, not so long ago, when she would have celebrated his capture. Instead, she was already thinking about how she was going to manage to get Nick free.
    She caught a glimpse of a familiar figure reflected in a shop window. It was Jake. She didn’t turn to acknowledge him. He’d approach her when he was certain nobody else was on her tail. She wanted to be sure too. So now her wandering had intent.
    She crossed the Groenplaats, a large plaza ringed by cafés and bars, and headed for the Cathedral of Our Lady, a Gothic monument to failed dreams that had taken two hundred years to build and yet was still incomplete. The cathedral was supposed to have had two matching four-hundred-foot towers. But in the 495 years since the church opened its doors, only one tower had been finished, and could be seen all over the city, while the other tower remained uncompleted and half as tall.
    To reach the cathedral’s entrance, Kate had to go down a narrow cobblestone street, a bottleneck of restaurants, coffeehouses, and Leonidas chocolate shops, all crammed tightly together and stuck to the side of the church like barnacles. At the base of the cathedral’s unfinished tower was a sculpture of four stonemasons