But always with Jack was, “We gotta wait.”
Jack, he couldn’t trust something that he couldn’t control himself. If he couldn’t be here to plan the job himself, move the stones himself, then none of them were going to fucking do it. That kind of meticulous attention to detail probably kept them both out of prison over the years, but it hadn’t done them any good in a situation that none of them saw coming.
Worse, Enzo feared what was really happening was that Jack was losing his edge.
So, Enzo took the decision off the table.
He was going to steal them back from Vito. Jack would be pissed, fucking furious, no doubt, but when Enzo handed him a six-pound bag of goddamn diamonds in a few days, Jack would forget all about being angry.
Focus, Enzo told himself. There was a door to his left and a hallway to the right. He doubted the safe would be down here, and he could discount the doors to the right. There’s no way Vito would put a safe in a ground-level room with a window. Enzo tried the door handle next to him. It was unlocked, so he pulled the door open just enough for him to slide through. The room inside was cold and completely, utterly black. He paused several long seconds, listening for breathing. Hearing nothing, Enzo took out his penlight and turned it on. He’d dialed in the lowest setting beforehand. The tight beam of light revealed a wine cellar.
Not a bad place for a safe, honestly, if it wasn’t so close to a door. Still, it was worth a look.
The wall to his left curved outward in a semicircle, following the contour of the exterior wall. Wine racks, mostly full, lined the walls, and there was counter, boxes stacked on top. Enzo moved over and checked the counter and the cabinets, testing for false bottoms or back panels. Even with the low light, he determined quickly that Vito wasn’t stashing anything here but Tuscans. It didn’t follow, anyway, with no lock and it being steps away from an exterior door, but with no advance intelligence on the job, Enzo had to be thorough. Satisfied, he turned the penlight off, slithered out the door, and closed it behind him.
With his eyes fully adjusted now, Enzo could see the fuzzy outline of the staircase leading up to the main floor. He was grateful to find it was tile. That wouldn’t creak like wood. Slowly, inexorably, Enzo made his way up the stairs. He moved cautiously, pausing every few steps to listen for signs of movement. Hearing nothing, he continued. The top of the staircase was a rectangle of dark gray light; the windows on the main floor must be open.
Enzo paused at the top of the stairs to listen again. Hearing nothing, he crept into the hallway. There was an open door directly across from him. Even in the darkness, Enzo could discern the depth and size of the room, could see the large bed in the center of it. This would be the master. The bed was empty and looked made. On the far wall, there was a glass door that opened to a balcony that faced the lake. The curtains hung by the side of the window, silent guardians. A bedroom was a common location for a home safe. People wanted the psychological security of having their treasured property close to them. In America, he knew, it was just as common for them to be built into the floor and hidden by carpet. Not in Europe, however, where floors tended to be tile and covered by rugs rather than wall-to-wall carpet. No, Vito Verrazano would have a wall safe or a larger standing model, though Enzo found that unlikely. Most thieves tended not to advertise that they had something to hide.
The walls in the master bedroom were spartan. Either Vito didn’t spend a lot of time in here or didn’t value decoration. The point was that there wasn’t anything on the walls that would hide a safe. Enzo turned from this room, dismissing it for now, and continued down the hallway. He paused at the next door, this one on his left, which meant that it would also face the lake. The next room down the hall would be the floor’s main living area. There was no door, and Enzo could see the dark gray half-light drifting into the hallway, giving some ghostly shape to the larger room beyond.
Enzo paused again to listen, and he heard no sound but his own breathing. He should’ve at least heard Vito sleeping, passed out in a chair or something, if he wasn’t in his bed. But there was nothing. Enzo was starting to get concerned now because he’d staked out the front of Vito’s house for several hours and saw no sign of the son of a bitch. Enzo sat, parked in the driveway of a vacation home that he knew was unoccupied, until night fell. Vito’s lights went out a little after ten, and Enzo assumed that meant he was going to bed.
All that said there should be some sign of Vito Verrazano in the house, but Enzo found none.
Maybe Vito went out for the evening? Called for a ride instead of driving? Was it possible to leave in the time it would take for Enzo to make it from the front to where he’d accessed the shoreline? If so, that meant Vito could be home at any time.
You’re spooking yourself, he scolded himself. The mind had a way of playing tricks when you were creeping around a place that you weren’t supposed to be.
Enzo could practically hear Jack lecturing him about already being in this place too long, about never doing a job in someone’s house and sure as hell not while they were in it. Or if you didn’t know for certain when they’d be home. He could hear Jack saying, “This is why we’re not burglars.”
Well, doing it Jack’s way got us into this.
The door was closed, so Enzo grasped the handle, the metal cold to his touch. He turned it slowly, and the sound of the lever disengaging was like spring-loaded thunder in the silent house. Enzo pushed the door open and slid inside, closing the door behind him but not all the way.
This was where it would be.
The room was small, with a floor-to-ceiling bookcase running from the door to the far wall. Vito had a small writing desk next to the glass door that, like the bedroom, led out to the patio that wrapped around the semicircular portion of the house. There was a patterned rug on the floor, for which Enzo was grateful because it would mute some sound. There was a painting on the wall behind the writing desk, which would be large enough to conceal something, but Enzo decided to start his search with the bookcase. The bottom row was a series of small built-in cabinets. Enzo knelt down, chose the center cabinet, and opened it.
And there it was.
Enzo retrieved his penlight and inspected it.
The safe filled the cabinet, which suggested that the bookcase was built around it. The sides of the safe were flush with the cabinet, and Enzo figured he could slide a few pieces of paper between the safe and the cabinet but little else. It would be anchored to the back wall with masonry screws and a plate. He couldn’t tell the make or model; the manufacturer’s branding didn’t appear on the exterior, not that it mattered much. The safe was a traditional dial-combination entry. Enzo never trusted electronic safes. There were techniques to figure out which buttons were pressed most often, and from there it was a relatively simple process of determining what the right combination was. Which one usually got from some basic research about the target—most of the time it was a meaningful date or other number. It was actually amazing the number of people that had their combination written down and stashed in a desk drawer so they wouldn’t forget it. There were newer models that incorporated biometric security, such as fingerprints, but those too could be spoofed. That was a more involved process and usually required being able to lift a fingerprint off another surface. Enzo had the capability to do that, but it was messy and time-consuming. Most home safes were designed to protect against run-of-the-mill burglars, not safecrackers.
Enzo shrugged his backpack off and set it on the rug next to him. It was a tactical-style pack that allowed him to access the contents while it was lying flat. Enzo’s tools were organized by type and secured to the interior in pouches with MOLLE webbing.
Given enough time and force, any safe could be opened. What separated licensed safecrackers from thieves was time, noise, and ambient lighting.
And permission, Enzo noted ruefully.
On that latter score, this was an admitted gray area, since Enzo was just stealing back something that was his and his
friends’ already.
Enzo’s tool kit was as simple as his approach. There were no high-tech gadgets to use, no computers, no plasma torches (not that one would fit in his bag, but he knew people that used them). Somehow, he’d known Vito wouldn’t have an electronic safe, wouldn’t trust it. That was wise. The irony was, the more technologically advanced a lock was, the more tools there were to crack it. That theory had upper limits, of course, but for what even a wealthy person could afford to put in their home, it didn’t. The tools were a safety net in case he couldn’t open the safe by hand. If he was forced to use a drill, he’d first need to find and subdue Vito so that he would be free to make noise. As much as Enzo wanted to tie Verrazano up and make him watch, Enzo knew revenge moves were stupid and only gave you away.
For this, Enzo would just use touch.
Which was not to say it was fast.
It took him about twenty minutes—longer than normal because he was working in the dark—to be sure that he had all of the numbers. Then it was another five to get the correct number of spins in each direction before disengaging the lock. The fastest way would be an acetylene torch, which technically was portable, but it wasn’t the kind of thing one could sneak easily. Enzo wouldn’t risk using that unless he knew that Vito wouldn’t be home. There would be no mistaking the sound, or the smell, when it was powered on.
The silence in the house was deafening.
Enzo’s pulse pounded and his heart raced, nearly drowning out anything else he might hear.
He could feel the last tumbler fall into place, and he rotated the dial back to zero. On this model, he’d learned that you had to turn past zero one full rotation before coming to a stop and then opening. If he was found, it would be then. In a quiet house, there would be no mistaking the sound of pulling the handle down and opening the safe door.
Enzo paused. He wasn’t sure if he heard something or not, but the hairs on the back of his neck raised up. He reached over and quietly retrieved the compact Beretta he’d stashed in the pack. The gun was clean; Rusty had gotten it for him on a previous job. Enzo had driven here, all the way from his home in Calabria on the southern tip of Italy, so that he could bring the gun and his safecracking gear. Those sorts of things tended to draw attention at airports.
Before he opened it, Enzo made one last check for wires around the safe, trying to determine if there was a secondary alarm on it. He’d checked once before, but best to do so again. Finding none, he proceeded with the final step.
Enzo rotated the dial, and the lock disengaged. He knew it was his imagination telling him that the sound was thunder, but it still sounded goddamn loud to him. He pulled the handle down, which also sounded like a cacophony, and opened the door.
He had to bite back the words, the spiteful gotcha phrase he wished Vito would hear him say. To know Enzo had gotten the better of him, had gotten him back. Had equalized.
He paused again, listening for any movement in the house in response to the safe opening. Enzo patted the gun, just to reconfirm its location again in his mind’s eye. He didn’t think he heard anything, but it was so eerily quiet in that house, he felt like he was hearing nothing rather than there being nothing to hear. Enzo took in a shallow breath and shone the light into the open safe.
It was empty.
That was when the lights came on in the room.
3
Jack liked to stay late at the winery, particularly during the summer and early fall, before the rains started. When the lights were off, looking above the inky outlines of the Mayacamas, the heavens opened up and it seemed as if you were staring directly out into space. It was breathtaking and incredible. Jack relished the solitude.
Though it was quite warm during the day, the temperature fell quickly when the sun went down. Jack pulled a black leather bomber jacket on for his usual evening walk through the vineyard. Jack poured a small glass from one of their tasting bottles and stood near the barn, looking out at the rows of vines. They were now just dark shapes against a background of darker shapes. His phone jangled—a different tone than the standard ringtone, this one sharp and jarring.
This would be a call through the encrypted messaging app Jack, Enzo and Rusty used to communicate safely.
Jack checked the phone. It was Rusty. It would be early morning in Switzerland.
“Hey, Rusty,” Jack said. “What’s up?”
“We have a problem.”
Jack was in the middle of asking the obvious reply when Rusty simply continued.
“I got an alert on an old bank account that you and I used to use. It wasn’t one that I set up for you, but you used to pay me from it.”
“Wait. How did you get an alert on one of my bank accounts?” Jack had anonymous accounts tied to shell corporations or false identities in banks across the globe, dozens of them, if not more. Most of them he hadn’t bothered closing down because they would be impossible to trace back to him.
“After the Carlton job, when everything started going sideways and you figured out Reginald was working against you, I created a back door into the offshore accounts that I knew about. Once we figured out that Reginald was an informant, I was concerned that he might have given some of that information up to the authorities.”
Anger welled up inside him, and Jack bit back words. This was wrong and a complete betrayal of trust. Not the action itself—that was smart. It was the fact that it was almost a decade later and he was just hearing about it now. Jack had worked with Rusty for a number of years leading up to the Carlton InterContinental heist in 2013, but it was strictly professional and transactional. When Jack needed something—a clean car, a weapon, a way out, he’d call Rusty. He’d paid for the services rendered with a wire transfer from one quiet account to another. Their relationship had been professionally distant for years. It wasn’t until Reginald double-crossed him and Jack knew that he needed help that he brought Enzo and Rusty in. Though Jack and Enzo went back almost twenty years at that point, Rusty was more of a business associate at the time. Their friendship didn’t develop until later. Jack was furious that Rusty would do that without telling him. Even angrier that he never figured it out.
Or thought to check. There would be time for that later. First, he needed to understand what exactly the problem was that Rusty called him about.
“Jack, Reginald is the only person I know of who had access to that account. He created the dummy corporation that set it up.”
“But he’s still in prison,” Jack said. “His sentence is barely halfway through.”
“No. He’s out now.”
“What?”
“I just found this out. He was moved to a minimum security prison in 2018 and then released the following year on parole. I started digging into this when I got the alert on the account. According to court documents, given his age and status as a ‘model inmate,’ Reginald was deemed to pose no further threat to the public.”
“He’s been out of prison for two years and we didn’t know,” Jack said. Whatever anger he felt toward Rusty faded well into the background as he tried to process what he’d just learned. Reginald LeGrande was free. He’d been sentenced in 2014 for fifteen years for embezzlement and passport fraud.
Rusty continued. “The bank account was registered to a Consolidated Holdings International. Someone just dropped a hundred and fifty thousand dollars into it and used that to charter a plane from Rome to Los Angeles. I’ve been up since about four tracking this down. Once I saw the transaction in the account, I called the company, Cirrus International Aviation, to confirm the flight. Told them it was a security measure.” Rusty paused to give Jack a chance to ask questions, but he didn’t have any. “The customer is Vito De Angeles and two other passengers, Tommaso Benedetti and Lucio Greco. So, the question is, why is Reginald LeGrande using a shell corporation to charter an airplane from Italy to the United States? I think I know the answer to this, but I’ll let you have the honors.”
Jack exhaled. He turned and began walking
back to the tasting room. It was the only light in the murky indigo of the long dark matte painted by the mountain’s shadow and the drooping black oak trees that surrounded the property. “Vito De Angeles is obviously our Vito.” Having lived and worked so long with aliases, Jack understood the psychology all too well. The hardest part was getting the first name down, because you’re conditioned your entire life to go by that. It took Jack years of practice, and at one point, he actually studied method acting, of all things. A common trick that criminals used when working with false identities was to only change the last name so that they would reduce the risk of an accidental slipup. “Because Reginald and Vito know each other,” Jack said finally. “They worked together as far back as the eighties. They were on the Knightsbridge job together.”
“Knightsbridge?” Rusty said. “I’m not familiar with that.”
“In 1987, a crew tunneled into a security deposit in Knightsbridge in London. They had someone on the inside who helped out with security. They made off with something close to a hundred million. I think Reginald and Vito each got about fifteen. Most of the crew was rounded up within months, but Reginald and Vito played it smart. Reginald told me they knew the other guys were a little shaky, his phrase for ‘untrustworthy.’ So, he and Vito stashed their money somewhere in London and left. Everyone else started spending money like crazy, and that’s how they got pinched. Anyway, Reginald and Vito worked together on and off for the next couple of years. After a job we did went south in ’95, Reginald bought me a plane ticket and sent me to Italy to study under Vito. That’s how I ended up in the School of Turin.” Jack walked across the patio, now cold and dark, and back into the glass-walled tasting room. He went to the counter and refilled his glass. He had a feeling this was going to be a long night.
Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3) Page 3
