The Black Echo

by Michael Connelly

  An old tramp with scary eyes and white hair shuffled up to the pay phone next to the one Lewis was at and checked the change slot. It was empty. He reached a finger toward the slot of the phone Lewis was using, but the IAD detective batted it away.

  “Anything there, it’s mine, pop,” Lewis said.

  Undeterred, the tramp said, “You got a quarter so I can get something to eat?”

  “Fuck off,” Lewis said.

  “What?” a voice said.

  “What?” Lewis said, and then realized the voice had come from the phone. It was Irving. “Oh, not you, sir. I didn’t realize you were — uh, I was talking, uh, I’m having a problem here with someone. I—”

  “You speak like that with a citizen?”

  Lewis reached a hand into his pants pocket and pulled out a dollar bill. He handed it to the white-haired man and shooed him away.

  “Detective Lewis, are you there?”

  “Yes, Chief. Sorry. I’ve taken care of the situation now. I wanted to report. There has been an important development.”

  He hoped this last would draw Irving’s attention away from the earlier indiscretion.

  Irving said, “Tell me what you have. Do you still have Bosch in sight?”

  Lewis exhaled sharply, relieved.

  “Yes,” he said, “Detective Clarke is continuing surveillance while I make this report.”

  “All right, then give it to me. It is Friday evening, Detective, I would like to get home at a reasonable hour.”

  Lewis spent the next fifteen minutes updating Irving on Bosch’s tail of the gold Mercedes from Orange County to the Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. He said the tail was terminated at the safe and lock, which appeared to have been the intended destination.

  “What are they doing now, Bosch and the bureau woman?”

  “They are still in there. It looks like they are interviewing the manager. Something’s going on. It was like they didn’t know where they were going but once they got to this place, they knew this was it.”

  “Was what?”

  “That’s it. I don’t know. Whatever it is they are up to. I think the guy they followed made a deposit. There is a vault, a large vault in the front window of the place.”

  “Yes, I know where you are talking about.”

  Irving did not speak for a long period, and Lewis, his report completed, knew better than to interrupt. He started daydreaming about cuffing Bosch’s hands behind his back and walking him past a battery of television cameras. He heard Irving clear his throat.

  “I don’t know their plan,” the deputy chief said. “But I want you to stay with them. If they don’t go home tonight, neither do you. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If they allowed the Mercedes Benz to go on, then it must be the vault they wanted to find. They will place the vault under surveillance. And you, in turn, will continue to keep them under surveillance.”

  “Yes, Chief,” Lewis said, though he was still lost.

  Irving spent the next ten minutes giving his detective instructions and his theory of what was happening with Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. Lewis pulled out a pad and pen and took some quick notes. At the end of the one-sided dialogue, Irving entrusted Lewis with his home telephone number and said, “Don’t move in without my prior approval. You can call me at the number at any time, day or night. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lewis said urgently.

  Irving hung up without saying another word.

  Bosch waited in the reception area without telling Grant or the other salesmen what was going on until Wish arrived. They stood behind their fancy desks with their mouths open. When Eleanor came to the door it was locked. She knocked and held up her badge. The guard let her in and she walked into the reception area.

  As the salesman named Avery opened his mouth to say something, Bosch said, “This is FBI Agent Eleanor Wish. She is with me. We are going to step into one of your client offices for a private conversation. Just take a minute. If there is a head man here, we’d like to speak to him as soon as we come out.”

  Grant, still flustered, just pointed to the second door in the alcove. Bosch went in the third door and Wish followed. He closed the door on all three of the salesmen’s eyes and locked it.

  “So, what have we got? I don’t know what to tell them,” he whispered as he looked around the desk and two chairs in the room for a scrap of paper or anything else Tran might have mistakenly left behind. There was nothing. He opened the drawers of the mahogany desk. There were pens and pencils and envelopes and a stack of bond paper. Nothing else. There was a fax machine on a table against the wall opposite the door but it was not turned on.

  “We watch and wait,” she said, speaking very quickly. “Rourke says he is putting together a tunnel crew. They’ll go in and have a look around. They’re going to get with DWP first to see exactly what’s down there. They should be able to figure what the best spot for a tunnel would be and then they’ll go from there. Harry, you really think this is it?”

  He nodded. He wanted to smile but didn’t. Her excitement was contagious.

  “Did he get a tail on Tran in time?” he asked. “By the way, here they know him as Mr. Long.”

  There was a knocking on the door and someone’s voice saying, “Excuse me. Excuse me.” Bosch and Wish ignored it.

  “Tran, Bok, now Long,” Wish said. “I don’t know about the tail. Rourke said he was going to try. I gave him the plate and told him where the Mercedes was parked. Guess we’ll find out later. He said he’d also send over a crew to work the surveillance with us. We are going to have a surveillance meeting in the garage across the street at eight o’clock. What did they say here?”

  “I haven’t told them what’s going on yet.”

  There was another knock, this one louder.

  “Well, then, let’s go see the head man.”

  The owner and chief operating officer of Beverly Hills Safe & Lock turned out to be Avery’s father, Martin B. Avery III. He was of the same stock as many of his customers and wanted everybody to know it. He had a private office at the rear of the alcove. Behind his desk was a collection of framed photographs attesting to the fact that he was not just another chiseler feeding off the rich. He was one of them. There was Avery III with a couple of presidents, a movie mogul or two, and English royalty. One photo was of Avery and the Prince of Wales in full polo regalia, though Avery appeared too thick around the middle and loose in the jowls to be much of a horseman.

  Bosch and Wish summarized the situation for him and he was immediately skeptical. He said his vault was impregnable. They told him to save the sales pitch and asked to see design and operation plans for the vault. Avery III flipped his $60 blotter over, and there was the vault schematic taped to the back. It was clear that Avery III and his blow-cut salesmen were overselling the vault. Starting from its outermost skin and going inward, it was one-inch steel plating followed by a foot of rebarred concrete followed by another inch of steel. The vault was thicker on the bottom and top, where there was another two-foot layer of concrete. As with all vaults, the most impressive thing was the thick steel door, but that was for show. Just like the hand X ray and the mantrap. Only a show. Bosch knew that if the tunnel bandits were really down below, they would have little trouble coming up for air.

  Avery III said that there had been a vault alarm on each of the past two nights, including two alarms on Thursday night. Each time he was called at home by the Beverly Hills police. He in turn called his son, Avery IV, and dispatched him to meet the officers. The officers and the heir then entered the business and reset the alarm after finding nothing amiss.

  “We had no idea that there might be someone in the sewers below us,” Avery III said. He said it like the word sewers was wholly beneath his usage. “Hard to believe, hard to believe.”

  Bosch asked more detailed questions about the vault’s operation and security devices. Not realizing its significance, Avery III mentioned matter-of-factly that unl
ike conventional bank vaults his vault had a time-lock override. He had a code he could enter into the computer lock which would purge the time-lock coordinates. He was able to open the vault door anytime.

  “We must accede to our client’s needs,” he explained. “If a Beverly Hills lady should call on a Sunday because she needs her tiara for the charity ball, I want to be able to get that tiara for her. You see, it is the service we sell.”

  “Do all your clients know about that weekend service?” Wish asked.

  “Of course not,” Avery III said. “Only a select few. You see, we charge a hefty fee. We must bring in a security guard to do it.”

  “How long does it take to do the override and swing the door open?” Bosch asked.

  “Not long. I tap in the override code on the keypad next to the vault door and it is done in a matter of seconds. You then set the vault unlock code in, then turn the wheel and the door opens under its own weight. Thirty seconds, perhaps a minute, perhaps less.”

  Not fast enough, Bosch thought. Tran’s box was located near the front of the vault. That’s where the bandits would be working. They would see and probably hear the vault door being opened. No element of surprise.

  An hour later, Bosch and Wish were back in his car. They had moved to the second level of the parking garage across Wilshire and east a half block from Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. From there they had an open view of the vault room. After they had left Avery III and taken the surveillance position, they had watched as Avery IV and Grant swung the huge stainless steel vault door closed. They turned the wheel and typed on the computer keypad, locking it. Then the lights inside the business went out, all except those in the glass vault room. Those always stayed on to display the very symbol of the security they offered.

  “You think they’ll come through tonight?” Wish asked.

  “Hard to say. Without Meadows, they’re down a man. They might be behind schedule.”

  They had told Avery III to go home and be ready for a callout. The owner had agreed but remained skeptical of the whole scenario Bosch and Wish had spun for him.

  “We are going to have to get them from underground,” Bosch said, his hands holding the steering wheel as if he were driving. “We’d never get that door open fast enough.”

  Bosch idly looked to his left, up Wilshire. He saw a white LTD with police wheels parked at the curb a block away. It was parked next to a fire hydrant and there were two figures in it. He still had company.

  Bosch and Wish stood next to his car, which was parked on the second level of the garage facing the retainer wall at the south end. The garage had been virtually empty for more than an hour, but the drab concrete enclosure smelled of exhaust fumes and burning brakes. Bosch was sure the brakes smell was from his car. The stop-and-go tail from Little Saigon had taken its toll on the replacement car. From their position they could look across Wilshire and west a half block to the vault showroom of Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. Farther down Wilshire the sky was pink and the setting sun a deep orange. Evening lights were coming on in the city and traffic was thinning out. Bosch looked east up Wilshire and could see the white LTD parked at the curb, its occupants shadows behind the tinted windshield.

  At eight o’clock a procession of three cars, the last a Beverly Hills patrol car, came up the ramp and cut across the empty parking spaces to where Bosch and Wish stood at the wall.

  “Well, if our perps have their lookout in any of these high rises and they saw this little parade, you can bet he is pulling them out now,” Bosch said.

  Rourke and four other men got out of the two unmarked cars. Bosch could tell by the suits that three of them were agents. The fourth man’s suit was a little too worn, its pockets baggy like Bosch’s. He carried a cardboard tube. Harry figured him for the DWP supe Wish had said was coming. Three Beverly Hills uniforms, one with captain’s bars on his collar, got out of the patrol car. The captain was also carrying a rolled tube of paper.

  Everybody converged at Bosch’s car and used its hood as the meeting table. Rourke made some quick introductions. The three from BHPD were there because the operation was in their jurisdiction. Interdepartmental courtesy, Rourke said. They were also on hand because Beverly Hills Safe & Lock had filed a design plan with the local police department’s commercial security division. They would only observe the meeting, Rourke said, and be called on later if their department was needed for backup. Two of the FBI agents, Hanlon and Houck, would work the overnight surveillance with Bosch and Wish. Rourke wanted a view of Beverly Hills Safe & Lock from at least two angles. The third agent was the FBI’s SWAT coordinator. And the last man was Ed Gearson, a DWP underground facilities supervisor.

  “Okay, let’s set the battle plans,” Rourke announced at the end of the introductions. He took the cardboard tube from Gearson without asking and slid out a rolled blueprint. “This is a DWP schematic print for this area. It has all the utility lines, the tunnels and culverts. It tells us exactly what is down there.”

  He unfurled the grayish map with smeared blue lines on it across the hood. The three Beverly Hills cops anchored the other end with their hands. It was getting dark in the garage and the SWAT man, an agent named Heller, held a penlight with a surprisingly wide and bright beam over the drawing. Rourke took a pen out of his shirt pocket, pulled on it until it telescoped into a pointer.

  “Okay, we are. . . right. . .” Before he could find the spot Gearson reached his arm into the light and put a finger on the map. Rourke brought his pen point over to the spot. “Yes, right here,” he said and gave Gearson a don’t-fuck-with-me look. The DWP man’s shoulders seemed to stoop a little more in his threadbare jacket.

  Everyone around the car leaned in closer over the hood to study the location. “Beverly Hills Safe & Lock is here,” Rourke said. “The actual vault is here. Can we see your blueprint, Captain Orozco?”

  Orozco, who was built like an inverted pyramid, broad shoulders over thin hips, unrolled his drawing across the top of the DWP print. It was a copy of the drawing Avery III had shown Bosch and Wish earlier.

  “Three thousand square feet of vault space,” said Orozco, indicating the vault area with his hand. “Small private boxes along the sides and free-standing closets down the middle. If they are under there, they could come up through the floor anywhere along these two aisles. So we are talking about a range of about sixty feet in which they could come through the floor.”

  “Now, Captain,” Rourke said, “if you pick that up and we look back at the DWP chart, we can place that breakthrough zone right here.” With a Day-Glo yellow underliner he outlined the floor of the vault on the utility map. “Using that as a guide, we can see the subterranean structures that offer the closest proximity. What do you think, Mr. Gearson?”

  Gearson leaned over the car hood another few inches and studied the utility map. Bosch also leaned in. He saw thick lines he assumed indicated major east-west drainage lines. The kind the tunnelers would seek. He noticed that they corresponded to major surface streets: Wilshire, Olympic, Pico. Gearson pointed out the Wilshire line, saying it ran thirty feet below ground and was large enough to drive a truck through. With his finger, the DWP man traced the Wilshire line east ten blocks to Robertson, a major north-south stormwater line. From that intersection, he said, it was just a mile south to an open drainage culvert that ran alongside the Santa Monica Freeway. The opening at the culvert was as big as a garage door and blocked only by a gate with a padlock on it.

  “I’d say that’s where they could’ve come in,” Gearson said. “Like following surface streets. You take the Robertson line up to Wilshire. Take a left and you’re practically here by your yellow line. The vault. But I don’t think they’d dig a tunnel off the Wilshire line.”

  “No?” Rourke said. “How so?”

  “Too busy is how so,” Gearson said, sensing he was the man with the answers as nine faces peered at him from around the car hood. “We got DWP people underground all the time in these main lines. Checking for c
racks, blockages, problems of any sort. And Wilshire’s the main drag down there, east and west. Just like up top. If somebody knocked a hole in the wall it’d get noticed. See?”

  “What if they were able to conceal the hole?”

  “You’re talking about like they did a year or so ago in that burglary downtown. Yeah, that might work again, maybe somewhere else, but there is a good chance on the Wilshire line that it’d be seen. We look for that sort of thing now. And, like I said, there’s a lot of traffic on the Wilshire line.”

  There was silence as they took time to consider this. The engines of the cars ticked away the heat.

  “Then where would they dig, Mr. Gearson, to get into this vault?” Rourke finally said.

  “We got all manner of linkups down there. Don’t think us guys don’t think of this from time to time when we’re working down there. You know, the perfect crime and all that. I’ve hashed stuff like this around, especially when I read about that last one in the papers. I think if you are saying that’s the vault they want to get into, then they’d still do just like I said: come up Robertson and then over on the Wilshire line. But then I think they’d move down one of the service tunnels to sort of stay out of sight. The service tunnels are three to five feet wide. They’re round. Plenty of room to work and move equipment. They hook up the main artery lines to the street storm drains and the utility systems in the buildings along here.”