Blake smiled. “Close.”
“Oh, you've got to be kidding me.”
“Don't worry,” Blake continued, “we'll be waiting for you. Engine running.”
“That's a terrible plan.”
“I knew you'd like it. Didn't I say he'd like it?”
“You did,” Porter said.
“No, you assholes. It's a terrible plan because it’ll never work. The gallery has a laser grid. You break the laser, it doesn't just set off the alarm, it closes steel fire doors on all the gallery exits. I'd need C4 to get out of there.”
Blake was nodding. “Believe it or not, we actually thought about that. We couldn't get any C4, but we got something just as good. Tell him what we got Porter.”
“Two AT4 rocket launchers.”
That's what Foster had in that enormous canvas bag.
“They make doorways appear wherever you need them,” Blake said.
The three of them were grinning at Thorne. He knew they'd held something back, but he hadn't expected this. Anti-tank rockets.
“You're resourceful, Blake, I'll give you that. But if you think I'm going to fire one of those inside a building you’re out of your mind.”
“We're not giving you a choice, Thorne.”
“All you want is the painting, right? You don't care how you get it?”
“That's right,” Blake said.
“So if I have a better idea, you'll think about it?”
Blake's head tilted over, a trace of amusement around his eyes.
“Okay, let's hear it.”
“We know the painting gets shipped tomorrow. Judging by the labels on these boxes, it will be transported in an armored truck. Depending on where the owner lives, the truck will either transport it all the way to the owner's home direct, or via an airport. The truck is the weak link. Once we know where it's going, we can work out the best place to ambush it. A natural pinch point. The parking lot outside even, there are no cameras. Wave your rocket at them, they'll open right up. By the time the cops arrive, we'll be long gone.”
Blake frowned, then turned to Porter. “We hadn't thought about the truck.”
“That's not bad,” Porter said.
“I don't like it,” Lynch said. “It'll be during the day, there'll be people about we can’t control. Witnesses. The guards on the truck for one thing.”
“So we wear ski masks,” Thorne said. “If you like, Lynch, you can wear your mother's pantyhose over your face. Pretend it's a regular Saturday.”
Lynch lunged at him. Blake grabbed the back of his jacket and pulled him back. Lynch didn't fight it long. He was six inches shorter than Thorne and at least fifty pounds lighter.
“What is it with you two?” Blake asked. “You can get yourselves a room when we're finished, otherwise I don't want to hear it.”
Thorne held up his hands in mock surrender.
“Say we do this,” Porter said. “What would we need?”
“The shipping address for the painting. The name of the security company. Flight details, if any. Collection time. The manifest will be on the computer next door.”
“I'm pretty certain all that is written on this piece of paper.”
Porter held up a pad of paper that was lying on a desk next to him. It was spiral-bound and had tear off sheets and carbon paper. The gallery was the definition of old school. Thorne grabbed the pad and scanned the filled-out sheet.
Ashcroft, James A, 1032 Glen Canyon Road, Santa Cruz County, CA.
There was a crackle in Thorne's earpiece. Stockton.
“Guys? A white Impala just pulled up out front.”
“Shit,” Blake said. “Cops?”
“Uh…negative. Some old dude in glasses as thick as your finger. Looks like he just got out of bed. He's walking over to the front door. Seems kind of nervous, looking around. Okay, he’s just sort of standing there staring through the glass.”
Blake turned to him.
“Why would he be here if we didn’t trip the alarm?”
Thorne knew exactly why; his insurance policy.
One of the key selling points of Blake’s robbery had always been its simplistic nature. Get in, grab the painting, get out. On this basis, he’d estimated they’d be looking at no longer than ten minutes inside, beginning to end. If they were still inside after half an hour, it likely meant he’d been double-crossed and lay dead somewhere while Blake’s crew goofed around. His insurance policy was a timer circuit designed to cut power to the the electro-magnet thirty minutes after activation. Without power, no force was applied to the magnetic sensor and the alarm would register the door as open.
He shrugged, casually.
“There’s something we missed, a secondary system.”
Blake glared at him, his jaws clamped together in rage.
“Okay,” Thorne continued, his voice calm. “We’re in here because we jammed the sensors, right? It’s possible the system had some kind of automatic sensor polling. A protocol to ping each sensor unit to check for malfunction or flat battery, not only every time the alarm is turned on or off, but at a set interval, say every half hour. That being the case, it would get no response from any of the jammed units, tripping the failsafe.”
“You didn’t think of this before?”
“Of course.”
“Really? Because I don’t remember you saying squat.”
“Blake, if I told you every possible thing that could happen tonight, we’d still be outside in the van and you’d have scratched right through your head.”
He heard Stockton laughing in his earpiece, but Blake bared his teeth.
“Don’t get smart with me, motherfucker.”
“Hey,” Lynch said, “I got an idea.”
“Go for it,” Blake said.
“Okay, for the old man to check the gallery, he has to switch the alarm off first, right? I mean, he doesn’t want it to ring any more than we do. Once the alarm’s off, we put a hole in his head and help ourselves.”
Blake sighed. “It’s not a car alarm, Lynch. The art is still alarmed, you can’t pull it off the wall without triggering everything. That shit is active all the time, otherwise we’d have come here during the day.”
“Isn’t that Plan B anyway? Once the interior alarm is off we can walk right in there. No laser grid, no steel doors, none of that. Maybe we can convince the old man to disable the alarm on the painting as well. We got nothing to lose.”
Blake appeared to think it over, Thorne couldn’t believe it.
“You can’t be considering this. Do you know what that guy’s out there waiting for? Cops. He’s not coming in here on his own, he’s going to be escorted by L.A.’s finest, or whatever passes for it in Beverly Hills. They’ll do a floor by floor sweep of the building and will only leave when they know it’s clear. We need to bail before it’s too late.”
“It’s already too late, Thorne. Cops or no cops, I’ve come too far down this road to turn back now. I’ve done things that can’t be undone. You understand? I can’t make this right until we get to the end.”
He understood just fine.
“The security guy that worked here before: he’s dead isn’t he?”
Blake glanced sharply at him but said nothing. Thorne knew it was as close as he’d get to an admission, but the silence bothered him. It wasn’t in Blake’s nature to let things slide, it was something else.
“It’s not just him, is it? Did he have a wife? Kids?”
“Leave it alone, Thorne. We’ve both killed before. Don’t pretend it’s different just because some happened on the other side of the world. It’s all the same.”
“I’m not letting you kill cops or some old man.”
Blake squared off in front of him, the muscles in his neck popping out. His head moved in a small circle as it assessed him, as if he were listening to classical music. Thorne stared back. He knew the fight they’d had in the hotel bar had been fake, that Blake had deliberately not defended himself, but it nevertheless felt lik
e a victory. He had the memory of beating him and that was enough. He could beat him again.
“This again. You know, there’s a reason why I didn’t arm you, Thorne. I knew when it came right down to it you wouldn’t have the balls. Lynch’s idea isn’t perfect, but it beats jacking a security truck in broad daylight. We’re doing this, and if you have things you still want to say to Kate Bloom, you are too.”
He stared at Blake, fury boiling over inside him.
“What happened to you, man?”
Blake turned away from him.
“People change. This is who I am now.”
SEVEN
Blake stared at him, braced for a fight. The moment drew out, tension building, until Thorne turned and walked toward the door. It couldn’t have gone any other way, he had him outnumbered and outgunned. For a second it seemed none of that would matter. Something elemental had flashed across his friend’s face. The desire to kill. Thorne pressed his gloved fists on either side of the door like he was stretching, his head tilted forward until it touched the steel. Blake sighed. It was a pose he knew well enough. Uncontrollable anger burned inside Thorne. He walked up behind him and spoke calmly, as if nothing had happened.
“Can you open that, brother?”
Thorne drew back from the metal and pressed a key on the keypad. There was a beep followed by a click as the lock opened. Thorne worked the lever and the steel opened into the corridor where Foster stood waiting.
“That’s it? One key?”
“That’s it.”
“Why’d we spend all that time in a crawlspace?”
“You need a code to get in, not to get back out.”
Blake sighed. In the end, it didn’t matter. They didn’t have the painting, everything else was noise. He turned on his Maglite. After a couple of seconds, the light faded and went out. He shook the flashlight vigorously and it came back. He’d had the same thing happen twice before on missions, and each time it was before something went south in a bad way. He pushed the thought aside.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s book.”
They set off down the corridor, back the way they’d come. His mood was dark and there was the bitter taste of failure in his mouth. He didn’t need Thorne fighting him every step, or talking to him like he was an idiot. It was hard to ignore the fact that after close to an hour they were no closer to the painting than they were when they started.
In his earpiece, Stockton spoke again.
“Two black and whites just rolled up out front. No strobes.”
“How many cops?”
There was a pause.
“Four.”
“What’re they doing?”
“Talking to the old man. You want me to drop them?”
“Jesus,” Thorne said. “I’ll do your Plan B. The rocket launcher, the whole bit. Leave the cops and the guard alone. They probably have kids back home waiting for them.”
Blake smiled to himself in the dark. You apply the right pressure, you can get someone to do almost anything. They reached fire doors at the stairs and he stopped, his hand ready to push the door aside. They all bunched together.
“The truth is, Thorne, you were right before. It was a stupid idea and since the cops are here now, it’s too late. Lynch’s plan is the best we got, so that’s what we’re doing.”
“Think about that. A plan of Lynch’s is the best you got. It's time to go home.”
“Screw you, Thorne,” said Lynch.
Blake pushed through the doors into the stairwell. If he had to hear one more argument between Thorne and Lynch he was going to shoot them himself. The RF jammer sat on the floor in front of him, picked out with his flashlight. Thorne bent down to retrieve it before they continued down the stairs.
“Will that thing jam the sensors in the gallery?”
“Not if they’re wired.”
“What about cameras?”
“Same answer.”
At the bottom of the stairs they took the second exit, toward the gallery. There was a small section between the two buildings where one alarm system stopped and the next had yet to start. A blind spot. Thorne had theorized the gap prevented one alarm triggering the other. Blake’s plan was to hold there until the main alarm was deactivated by the security guard. They soon reached the spot and he signaled them to stop. Ahead, the corridor intersected with another at 90 degrees. Left led to the front of the building, right to the gallery where the painting was located. He saw Porter looking back.
“What?”
“I hate to say it, but Thorne has a point. Our original plan had a higher chance of success than this. We should get gone while we can.”
“Are you serious? We’re literally eighty feet from that painting. You’re suggesting we hit the snooze button on a million dollar payout and hope nothing goes wrong next time?”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Thorne said. “What original plan?”
Blake ignored him.
“It’s an old man and some half-asleep cops. We’re goddamn Marines!”
“All I’m saying,” Porter said, “is that if we shit the bed here our intel will be worthless and we’ll be left with nothing.”
Blake said nothing for a moment. In his mind, the original plan had remained his fallback position. Without realizing it, he’d assumed it would still be there if everything else turned bad. Like all the best military operations, he’d allowed for failure, even multiple failures. He just hadn’t considered the impact of one plan on another. Blake shook his head.
“I can’t do it. I can’t be this close and not go the extra step.”
“So don’t kill them.”
He turned to Thorne.
“Think about it, Blake. We catch the cops by surprise and get them to handcuff each other. They think this is a bogus alarm check, right? I bet they get them all the time. Most of the time it’s a broken sensor, a flat battery, or an open window. It’s boring, it’s routine. We don’t need them dead, Aidan, just immobilized. Whatever happens after that, we’re gold. The cops will be embarrassed. They’ll want to pretend the whole thing never happened. But you put four of them in the morgue, that’s different. Every cop in the state will be after us.”
Blake nodded. It made sense. Just the same, he didn’t trust Thorne. His old friend had forgotten how to get his hands dirty. Forgotten his own hands had ever been dirty. The best thing would be to remove him from the equation until he was needed.
“They’re coming,” Stockton said.
In the distance he heard beep beep beep.
“All right,” Blake said. “Porter, Lynch, you’re with me. We’ll intercept them at the entrance, secure the cops and have a chat with the guard. Thorne, Foster, you go to the gallery and get ready to grab the painting. If the old man can’t disable the painting alarm we’re switching to Plan B immediately. I don’t want to be here a second longer than necessary.”
He glanced at each of them in turn, gauging the mood. Porter and Lynch were smiling, their faces animated at the prospect of some action; Thorne, meanwhile, stared at him with lidded eyes and a clenched jaw. Foster looked the same as he always did, like a horse had kicked him in the face as a child.
The beeping stopped.
“Kill the lights,” Blake said. “It’s time.”
He stowed his flashlight and drew his automatic. The hard shape in his hand, the weight. It was an incredible feeling. He felt invincible. If a dozen cops were on their way, it would make no difference to him. Blake walked across the ten foot blind spot into the main east-west corridor. He was now firmly in the gallery building. Even without a flashlight, he could see where he was going. The lights at the front of the gallery bled around corners, reflected off glass, all the way back to where he stood. Porter and Lynch formed up on either side of him, guns front and center. They turned to the left, following the light to the source.
They entered a room filled with sculptures and large items in clear display cases. He’d seen pictures of the same items on the gallery’
s website and even brightly lit he didn’t know what they were. Art, they said. He kept his head down, his baseball hat masking his face from the security cameras mounted on all four corners of the room.
Thorne was right. Dead cops created problems he didn’t need. He was here to steal a painting and make money, not kill. Where he disagreed with Thorne, was that they could surprise five people at once. It wasn't possible, not when they were here with the specific purpose of looking for intruders. Maybe cops did deal with a lot of false alarms, but for sure they’d go into every situation hoping this was the time they’d catch someone. Whatever way he looked at it, there was only one play here.
Shooting the cops as soon as they appeared.
As if reading his mind, Lynch spoke, his voice barely audible.
“We’re not really taking these fools hostage, are we?”
“No.”
There’d be no eye witnesses left to give descriptions, or call for backup.
They entered another corridor with a slow bend to the right. It came out in a second gallery packed with small paintings. The space was considerable, but the floor had only two squat sculptures in the middle to provide any kind of cover. Blake moved to quickly cross the floor and enter the next corridor. A place like this presented few good spots for a shoot-out. He waited for Porter and Lynch to catch up, then moved along the hallway. The next room was the one visible from the entrance. It was the largest space and had small offices off it that would all need to be searched. The cops had to still be there.
They weren’t.
All he had to do was sweep his eyes around a complete 360 and it told him everything he needed to know. The cops had come and gone. He glanced to the left, remembering the street outside. They were on full view to anyone walking or driving past. He licked his lips. Not much passing traffic at this time of night, but still. If the cops weren’t here, and they hadn’t passed them in the corridor, it followed that the cops and the guard had gone the other way around the building, toward the gallery where the Picasso was on display. That room held the most valuable items and represented the best target for thieves. The guard would want to check that first, make sure all the good stuff was safe.
Night Passenger Page 8
