The Zoo Job

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  Sophie said, “Yes. The deal was brokered for the zoo by someone named Declan McAllister in Vermont.”

  Nate frowned. “Hardison, that name ring a bell?”

  “Not that I can think of.” Hardison’s fingers tapping on some keys could be heard in the background. “He doesn’t work for the zoo, and he isn’t an immediate family member or known business associate of anyone who works there. I’ll dig around.”

  Nate had only been listening to Morgan’s conversation with half an ear while he talked with his crew, but the word zoo caught his attention when one of her companions said, “Hey, I got an e-mail from the zoo—the black rhino exhibit’s been canceled? I was really looking forward to that.”

  Morgan held up both her hands. “Don’t get me started on that nonsense. McAllister put Marney onto those rhinos, and I knew it would go badly. Everybody else thinks McAllister walks on water, but I think he’s a snake in the grass, I’ll tell you that for free.”

  “Hardison,” Nate muttered as Morgan continued to bitch and moan about McAllister, “whoever this guy is, the board knows him. He may have had dealings with the zoo before.”

  “I’m diggin’ into it, Nate,” Hardison repeated defensively.

  “So what happened?” Morgan’s other companion asked.

  “Marney paid a hundred grand each for the rhinos, and the rhinos never showed up.”

  The companion nodded. “But the insurance is taking care of it, right?”

  Morgan shook her head. “Marney won’t file a claim, and the board can’t do it without the general manager’s approval. Anyhow, enough of that. Tell me about the new guy in your office.”

  Nate frowned. That didn’t sound right. “Hardison, can you call up the Brillinger Zoo’s insurance policy with IYS?”

  “Yeah, gimme a sec.” A few keystrokes later. “Got it.”

  “Okay, I need you to look at—”

  “Nate, I’m gonna stop you right there. I can follow pretty much every programming language out there, I can make a two-hundred-year-old diary out of some really nasty ingredients, I can even make sense out of the instruction booklets that come with IKEA furniture, but I cannot make heads or tails of this nonsense right here.”

  Pulling his phone out of his pocket, Nate started, “Hardison—”

  “Seriously, man, what language is this written in?”

  “Hardison—”

  “I have seen some—”

  “Hardison!” At Nate’s barking the hacker’s name, the few other occupants of the bar turned to look at him. Luckily, he was holding his cell phone, so he just continued in a normal speaking voice so that they would think he was using a Bluetooth device hidden by his hair. “Just send it to my phone, okay?”

  “A’ight, but I can’t promise it won’t make the phone explode from all the gibberish.”

  “If it hasn’t exploded from all the cat photos Parker sends around to everyone, or those ridiculous motivational posters you send—”

  “De-motivational posters: they’re jokes. And hell, I didn’t even get those until I met you. I figured you’d appreciate it, since you know all that corporate stuff.”

  “Just—send it, please?”

  “Done.”

  Looking down at the display on his phone, Nate saw that he had new e-mail to the nate@leverage.org account Hardison had created when the team had first started. Calling it up, he downloaded the attachment and started reading through it.

  At one point, he heard Parker let loose with the giggle she always uttered whenever she jumped off a roof, which led him to believe that her surveillance of Sal Tartucci was going well. Either that or she was just jumping off a roof for fun. With Parker, he was never entirely sure.

  The policy had dozens of riders that had been added on at various points, including one that stipulated that all insurance claims had to be made via the general manager, and that no other entity connected to the Brillinger Zoo could make a claim on this policy without the express permission in writing of the general manager of the zoo.

  “Uh, Nate?”

  Nate looked up from his phone. “Yes, Parker?”

  “What was the name of the guy you wanted Hardison to find out more about again?”

  “Declan McAllister.”

  “That’s what I thought you said.”

  ONE HOUR AGO

  Parker found that her second board member, Sal Tartucci, managed to be considerably less boring than Steven Fischer, but he wasn’t any more interesting.

  Tartucci led a much more active and random life. And unlike Fischer, he wasn’t a widower or retired. He lived in a large house in Brookfield with his wife and three kids, and worked in an office in Worcester, where he served as the chief operating officer for a small money-management firm called Elm Capital.

  Hardison had hacked his e-mail and online calendar, but unfortunately the latter was blank and the former included about sixteen exhortations from his assistant to fill out his online calendar already and stop using the blotter calendar on his desk.

  Elm only had a dozen employees, and their offices took up only half the floor of this building in Worcester’s industrial park. The rest of the floor was taken up by a medical testing center, where doctors sent patients to get blood tests. Since it was designed for clients who came in off the street, the testing center left their door open. So Parker just went in, sat down, and got a clear view of the comings and goings without anybody noticing or caring that she was sitting on one of the uncomfortable couches in the waiting area for a couple of hours.

  Parker occupied herself between openings of the door to Elm—signified by a loud clack—by reading up on Time’s coverage of the 2008 presidential election, since that was the most recent magazine on the coffee table in front of the couch. She had no idea who was president now—or, indeed, ever, though she was pretty sure that it was Abraham Lincoln who won World War II—so she wondered if it was the old white guy or the young black guy.

  Another clack, and this time Tartucci was the one leaving the office, cell phone at his ear. “Yeah, I know the Little League game’s tonight. I told you I’m gonna be there. The meeting won’t last longer than six. We just gotta figure out what to do with AA’s portfolio now that they’ve been shut down. Beth’s leavin’ early anyhow, her cat has to go to the vet. Yeah. Yeah, I’m off to that stupid lunch meeting in Newton. Love you, too!”

  Parker got up and left and joined Tartucci at the elevator bank. He was making another phone call.

  “Yeah, listen, I can’t take the tickets for the Sox game. Well, for starters, they’re playin’ the Royals. Like I wanna watch that. Also, my boy’s been after me to take him to the TD Center. Yeah, he likes hockey. How the hell should I know?” A ding, and then: “Elevator’s here. Take care.”

  Tartucci and Parker joined the other four people in the elevator and went down the three flights.

  While Tartucci headed toward the parking garage—he was probably driving to Newton for his meeting—Parker went out the main entrance toward a fast-food joint across the street and ordered some food to go. She then brought it back across the street. The guard at the desk didn’t even look up from his e-reader tablet as she walked by. Several doctors had offices in the building, plus there was the medical testing place. All of them regularly accepted walk-ins, so each office took care of its own security—there was none for the building. Parker made a mental note to come back to this place and rob them blind.

  She rode the elevator back up to three, this time approaching the door to Elm. She could easily have lifted Tartucci’s ID and used that to get in, but Elm was too small a company to risk that. The very same clear view from the medical testing facility that allowed her to know when Tartucci left his office also made hacking the lock impractical. Which was too bad, as it was a pretty standard Simms-Mazur Mark III card reader—
she could get past it in her sleep, but it would require taking the faceplate off, and someone would probably notice that.

  With the usual thief avenues closed, she went with something Sophie would do: grifting her way in.

  She rang the intercom buzzer next to the door. The speaker crackled with staticky noise for a second.

  “Food delivery!” she shouted.

  The door emitted a low buzz and made that clacking sound again, allowing Parker to pull it open.

  Looking around, she saw a bullpen area. These people didn’t even have cubicles—just desks all arranged in a big open space. Against the back wall were three offices, all with nameplates Velcro’d to the wall next to them and small windows with blinds showing the offices’ insides. The one on the far left belonged to the chief executive officer—unsurprisingly, since it was in the corner, thus getting two windows instead of one. Parker could see him through the blinds (which were down, but open) typing away on his laptop. On the far right was an office occupied by a woman in a suit who was talking animatedly on the phone; this was the chief financial officer, who kept her blinds up.

  The nameplate for the middle office read SALVATORE TARTUCCI, CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER. This office was closed and presumably locked, with the blinds down.

  Parker glanced over at the CEO’s and CFO’s offices: they had rear windows with metal latches that held them locked in place when the windows were down.

  Parker smiled.

  She approached the reception desk, where a round-faced woman wearing a headset was talking. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Tartucci is out of the office, I can send you to his voice mail. No, I’m sorry, we can’t give out his cell number. Thank you.” The receptionist pushed a button on the phone unit on her desk and then looked at Parker. “Can I help you?”

  “I got a food order here for Jones?”

  The receptionist frowned and started looking nervous. “Karen Jones doesn’t work here anymore.”

  “Isn’t this Dr. Jones’s office? I was told to come to the fourth floor . . .”

  Now the receptionist was relieved. “You’re on the third floor, dear. You want to go up one.”

  Parker made herself go wide-eyed the way she usually did whenever Eliot was explaining something. “Oh! Okay! Thanks!”

  She turned around, exited the office—the door could be opened by anybody from the inside—tossed the bag of food into a garbage can by the elevator, and took the stairs down to where she’d parked the Chevrolet Aveo she’d rented.

  Popping the Aveo’s trunk, she pulled out her harness, climbing wire, and her birthday present from Apollo, the thief she’d met a couple of years ago. She stuffed them into a backpack, then went back to the building. The guard still hadn’t looked up from his tablet.

  When she boarded the elevator, she pushed the button for the top floor. Other people got in and went to other floors, and some got on at intermediate floors—but no one else was going up to twenty as she was. After the last person got off at eighteen, Parker put on a pair of gloves and smiled.

  Early this morning, she’d gotten Hardison to provide her with the schematics of the building, which she’d quickly memorized. This building was adjacent to another building, with an alley between them. Pedestrians often used the alley as a shortcut from one building to the other, so Parker didn’t want to risk being seen by approaching the third-floor window from the ground. That left making a descent from the roof.

  Besides, seventeen-story falls were way more fun than three-story climbs.

  Not that there wasn’t some climbing. After she got the maintenance hatch open with ridiculous ease—it was an old building—and jumped up to grab the sides of the open hatch, she climbed onto the top of the elevator, then started clambering up the elevator cable.

  The gloves protected her hands from the thick metal cable, but grease and grime soon covered her white blouse and slacks, which she belatedly realized she’d forgotten to change out of. Sophie was going to kill her for ruining such nice clothes.

  Suddenly Sophie’s voice sounded over her earbud. “Nate, are you there?”

  Nate’s voice came next: “I’m here.”

  Parker breathed a sigh of relief. Sophie was there to talk to Nate. Maybe she wouldn’t even find out about the blouse and slacks being destroyed. Even though Sophie herself had picked them out for Parker when they went shopping that time at Newbury Street.

  Maybe Parker just wouldn’t tell her.

  She focused on climbing the cable to the roof while Sophie filled Nate in on her and Hardison’s end of the job. Apparently it had something to do with file cabinets, manual typewriters, Hardison bursting a blood vessel, an appendix, and someone named Declan McAllister. Parker didn’t worry about it too much as she reached the top of the shaft and unscrewed the vent cover.

  Once she climbed through the vent and found herself on the roof, she switched to a different pair of gloves, ones that were both lighter and cleaner. It wouldn’t do to lose her grip on the climbing wire because her gloves were covered in gunk.

  She shrugged out of her backpack and pulled out the harness inside it. After securing it to her torso, she hooked her special carbon-steel wire to it, then unspooled the wire up to a hundred and eighty feet, sticking a marker on the wire at that point. Placing the marker on the roof’s cornice, she unspooled the wire from there to an air exhaust pipe, then wrapped the wire around the pipe several times before hooking it tightly to itself.

  After tugging on it several times to make sure it wouldn’t budge, she turned toward the roof’s edge.

  Then she smiled again.

  “Hee hee heeeeee!”

  The wind rushed past Parker’s face as she plummeted, her heart racing with excitement as she saw the pavement growing closer and closer and closer. Parker liked to smile, but the only time she ever grinned was when she was in free fall. There was no rush remotely like it.

  Well, except for all the other times she grinned and all the other rushes. Like the first time she broke into the Louvre. Or the time she discovered that the safe she was breaking into had actual cash instead of artifacts that she’d have to turn around and sell for cash, thus saving her a step. Or whenever she mastered something Archie taught her. Or when she was around Hardison. Or when she stole those shoes in the Philippines.

  Aside from those rushes, though, this was the best.

  Then she came to a sudden, violent stop as the wire hit its full length. The harness absorbed the impact of the jolt, so Parker only felt a slight tug.

  Still hanging upside down, Parker pulled out Apollo’s birthday present. The other thief had been hired by a grifter named Starke to do a job that ended up conflicting with one of Nate’s jobs. But everything had worked out okay in the end, and Parker and Apollo—who was a great thief—had stayed in touch. For her birthday, he’d gotten her a magnetic “repeller,” which was the size and shape of a TV remote and could push metal at short distances. Apollo said he had named it “Leslie” after a former lover whom he now found repellent.

  Apollo’s birthday was coming up. She needed to convince Hardison to build another one of his safecracking robots so she could give it to him as a present. He’d love it.

  Placing Leslie at the window to Tartucci’s empty office, Parker pushed the button. The gadget hummed, and then the metal window latch started to slowly inch forward. After a few seconds, the latch had moved completely around and out of its socket, thus freeing the window to be opened.

  She was definitely going to rob this building blind at some point . . .

  Parker jumped into the office, unhooking the climbing wire from her harness, and looked down at Tartucci’s desk, shoving aside two manila folders, a laptop, a memo pad, and a mug filled with half a cup of coffee to reveal the blotter, which was also a calendar.

  Today had LUNCH MTG IN NEWTON scrawled on it, which
matched what Tartucci had said on the phone, and there was also a mention of a meeting last week with someone named Andrechuk, which was the same name as the guy the team had just taken down—but then something else caught her eye.

  “Uh, Nate?”

  “Yes, Parker?” Nate said in reply.

  “What was the name of the guy you wanted Hardison to find out more about again?”

  “Declan McAllister.”

  “That’s what I thought you said. I’m in Tartucci’s office, and he’s spending the weekend with ‘Declan McA’ in Vermont. He’s leaving after work Friday.”

  Hardison’s voice came on then. “All right, Nate, I’ve got a Declan McAllister who lives in Vermont. He’s got a massive estate near Weston, but it’s in the middle of nowhere. Turns out he and Tartucci went to grammar school together at some private academy in the Berkshires. And he—oh, man.”

  Parker frowned. “What is it, Hardison?”

  “He’s got permits to keep wildlife on his property.”

  “There’s our connection,” Nate said. “Parker, finish up there, and then you need to head up to Vermont.”

  Parker smiled. “Let’s go steal a rhino?”

  Nate let out a quick breath. “Just surveillance for now, Parker. Just because he has permits doesn’t mean anything. Yet.”

  “Okay.” Parker reached into the pocket of her grease-stained slacks and pulled out a jump drive, which she stuck into Tartucci’s computer. He had not only left his computer on (with a screen saver composed of a slide show of pictures of his wife and kids), but hadn’t even password-protected it. While Hardison’s drive copied everything off the computer, Parker stuck a bug under the desk. Then she looked at the stuff lying on the desk, which included a letter thanking him for his donation to PETA, as well as the office electrical bill.

  Once the download was complete, she collected the jump drive, put everything on the desk back where she found it, and climbed back out the window, hooking the wire back onto the harness. After closing the window, she put Leslie on reverse and pulled the latch toward her, locking it up again.