by John L. Monk
With the hall empty of both unsavory sex fiends and the women who loved them, I ducked to the kitchen, placed the backdoor key in the drawer where I’d found it, and left, locking the doorknob behind me.
It was four in the morning when I walked through the whisper-quiet sliding doors of the Comfort Suites in plain view of the security camera, the night guard on duty, and the lady working the front desk. Okay, she was asleep in her chair, but the security guard … no, he was asleep in one of the cushy chairs over by the little espresso lounge. But the camera worked, so there was a record of my coming and going. It wouldn’t get me caught, but if I got caught some other way the police would pull that tape and use it against me. And if whoever’s job it was to put a new tape in had gotten lazy, the police would convince the night guard he’d actually been awake the whole time. Same for the lady behind the desk. Both would swear the Bo Mosley-looking guy in the lineup looked exactly like the man shown to them in a hasty snapshot on the way to the station.
When I got to my room I wasn’t tired, so I stayed up for a while and watched cartoons. Everyone loves cartoons, especially guys who needed to unwind.
I’d count the money tomorrow.
***
I woke up to the loud chirp of the alarm clock, which I’d moved to the other side of the room to keep me from hitting snooze. I ignored it anyway. For a while. Five minutes later, my survival sense overrode my need for a brick and I got up.
It was nine thirty and time to call my boss, Lucas.
I lurched over to the table, grabbed my phone and dialed the Bahamas number for Simple Call, an international phone service I’d signed up with the night before my flight. It was pretty popular with the Indian IT community, who used it to talk cheaply with relatives back home.
I dialed Simple Call’s main number. When it prompted me, I entered my account code, then my boss’s number at Milestone and waited for it to start ringing.
He picked up immediately and said, “Lucas here.”
“Hi, Lucas,” I said. “It’s me, Ted. How are you?”
There came a pause on the other end—possibly lengthy. Then he said, “Uh, hey—hey. Ted, how’s your vacation?” Awfully pleased to hear from a guy who’d ditched work for two weeks without notice.
“It’s not a vacation, Lucas. My uncle’s sick.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Hey listen, hold on a minute. I got something I want to talk to you about, but I, uh, have to use the bathroom. I’ve been holding it because I get so busy. Can you give me a minute, maybe two?”
Who knew Lucas was such a hard worker?
“Sure, Lucas, take your time.”
“Be right back.”
And then I was on hold.
He took four minutes.
“Sorry,” Lucas said in a shaky voice. “I’m back.”
“Tough time in the bathroom, Lucas?”
“Huh? Oh—heh heh. No, uh. I got sidetracked. Hey, where did you say you were taking that vacation? Been meaning to get away, myself.”
With a sinking feeling I said, “You got a sick uncle, too?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “So, uh—”
“Lucas, you’re a decent guy,” I said. “But maybe I should talk to whoever’s listening.”
Before he could manage another uh, a man’s voice cut in.
“Beauregard?” he said. “This is Agent Tucker with the FBI, computer crimes task force—Lucas, go ahead and hang up.” I heard a click. “So, where’d you go? Did you leave the country?” He had an older, graveled voice, and he sounded frighteningly calm talking to a stranger he wanted to arrest. He was in his element.
This was bad. Not only wasn’t this a simple HR issue, but the FBI was involved—and they knew my real name. My insides felt like they were crawling with daddy longlegs, and my hands began to tremble and sweat. Rather than wimp out and admit everything wrong I’d ever done, I gripped the phone tighter.
After all, I was in my element.
“Ah, yes,” I said. “Jonathan R. Tucker. Graduated from Harvard with a 3.89 in Criminal Justice. Joined the Bureau in 94. A rising star, you came to the attention of your superiors for your ability to think on your feet. I read your paper on something or other—compelling stuff. How are you, John?”
He gave a short laugh.
“Well, for starters my name’s Andy, but you can call me John if you want to. So, where’s the gold, Beauregard?”
If he was asking about the gold then he knew I’d been intercepting deliveries. Whether he knew where the gold was or not didn’t matter. It wouldn’t be any trouble at all to seize my accounts and safe deposit boxes, so he’d have it all eventually.
“I watched a show on the Discovery Channel,” I said, “where some geologist claimed there’s a billion times more gold in the earth’s core than in every mountain, stream, or bank vault combined. He said it sunk through during Earth’s molten stage.”
“Okay, Beauregard,” he said, patiently. “I get it. You want to jerk me around a little, let me know how smart you are. We can do that if you want. It sure beats sitting in a car somewhere waiting for some rapist or killer to come out of a building. Or sitting in court all day trying to put rapists and killers behind bars. How do you feel about that? Knowing all those guys are getting away with violent crimes because hundreds of agents are out looking for people like you?”
“Jeez, Andy,” I said. “If that’s the way you feel, you should go do that and leave me alone.” Before he could reply, I added, “I’ll tell you where the gold is if you tell me how you know my name—and if I have to call you Andy, you should call me Bo.”
“Well, Bo, I’m going to keep that to myself, for now. Now listen, this is important: we got a warrant this morning and searched your apartment. Guess what we found?”
“Rapists and killers?”
“Plenty of those where you’re going,” Andy said. “But starting in your living room, we found ten years for fraud related to activity in connection with access devices. Then we went to an apartment somehow belonging to the late Ted Randall of Newport, Vermont, and found another two years for aggravated identity theft. Here at your job, we got you on computer fraud, fraud in connection with electronic mail, interception and disclosure of wire and electronic communications, and unlawful access to stored communications. But that wasn’t enough, was it? You had to go and tamper with the U.S. mail?” He chuckled. “You think you got it bad with me, now you’re gonna piss off the Postal Inspector?”
I was just a burglar. All that other stuff … well yeah, I’d done all that. But he made it sound like a lot more than it was.
“I’m not a hacker,” I said, and hated how lame it sounded.
“Sorry, Bo, from this side of the law you sure look like one. The question is, are you going to be a hacker who goes to jail for thirty years or one who comes in, cooperates, shows us how you did what you did, and hopes for an easy couple of years in a minimum security prison?”
Andy wasn’t my friend. I knew that. But I also knew he had the authority to make a deal, and I knew I’d be a fool to dismiss it outright.
“Hold on a second,” I said. Then I dug through my wallet for the card Mrs. Swanson had given me for that lawyer in Arlington.
“Tom P. Harrington,” he said back to me after I read it to him. “Got it. So where are you? We’ll come get you, no trouble at all.”
“Come on, Andy, do I look like the kind of guy who falls for lines like that? I’ll come when I’m ready.”
I wasn’t sure what to do. I needed to think, and giving him that number was better than having him whip out with the fugitive task force. He still might do it. I had no idea how they operated internationally.
“Uh huh,” he said. “Just so you know, life on the lam isn’t easy or glamorous. You’re smart, but even smart guys mess up, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’m offering easy time and it’s worth it. Talk to your lawyer, he’ll tell you.”
Feeling like a whipped kitten, I told
him I would.
Before I hung up, I said, “Oh, Andy?”
“Yes?”
“Be honest—there was no paper on something or other, was there?”
With a smile in his voice, Andy said, “Hang in there, Bo, we’ll get through this. So long as you do the right thing.”
Feeling like I’d been punched in the soul, I hung up first. Also, I wasn’t sure if I was unhappy about being caught or not, and I thought that perhaps the most bizarre feeling in the world. Not that I wanted to go to prison, understand. More like I’d worried my youth and inexperience would one day trip me up and now I didn’t need to worry anymore. The weird part was, I’d always hoped it’d be for simple burglary. But those wire fraud charges… That was serious time.
Tired of talking to people smarter than me, I fired off an email to Tom so he wouldn’t be totally surprised when a federal agent called him out of the blue. In it, I summarized the likely charges against me and the evidence they might have. I was careful to keep from incriminating myself because I couldn’t be sure if they were monitoring my email account. Without admitting to it, I imparted to Tom how it would only be possible to get me for reading people’s email if they could find the script I’d used to do it with. As for the identity theft, I suggested we talk about that in person.
I still couldn’t get my head around how I’d gotten caught. I’d purposely left a few weeks of inactivity between every score. It had only been after my last one that they’d caught on and sent Brian, the curiously competent Linux guy, to come work the night shift with me. Brian had creeped me out enough that I hadn’t tried anything with him around. Beyond that, I knew I hadn’t screwed up anything obvious during my break-ins. Otherwise they’d have picked me up already. This seemed more like a serious investigation, long in the making, and the boys in blue and yellow had gotten a break somewhere.
I replayed the timeline from my last score, back at the Osters’. Like every other heist, I’d found their house through a simple scan. This one about a month after another such theft from a condo in Maryland. After the Osters’ house, I’d fenced the jewels at Scott Horton’s shop in Jersey City. Again, nothing unusual. He’d paid me half up front and taken the rest on consignment. Then I’d gone home.
Well, no, that wasn’t true. Actually, I’d made one more stop—to a post office a block away, where I’d mailed that damned jade bracelet back to the Osters.
I slipped off the bed and planted my head on the floor, then pounded the soft carpet with my fist. Dammit, what was I thinking? Like I was fifteen again, playing at cat burglar, that’s what.
I could see how it played out from there: Doug or Linda received the envelope with the bracelet and immediately called the cops. Or in this case, whatever federal agent contacted them after the theft they really cared about: the intercepted gold delivery. Then, being Feds and royal pains in the ass, they’d descended on Jersey City like giant societal antibodies. They’d enlisted the local authorities, who’d swept through every pawn shop and bad-apple jeweler they knew about, and that’s when they found Mr. Horton—with a fortune in hot jewels gleaming in his display cases threatening to send him to prison unless he gave up the guy who sold it to him. Then out comes the store camera and any information Horton had gotten about me over the years.
I rolled over and stared at the plastered ceiling. Yeah, I may have been stupid, but I’d also been successful until I’d turned into my own biggest admirer. May as well have left calling cards everywhere if I wanted to be famous—something good thieves never did. I knew better, that’s what galled me. I liked my heroes, sure, but the greatest thief who ever lived was the one nobody’d ever heard of.
I got up, tacked “Hugs and Kisses, Bo” at the end of the lawyer email, and hit Send.
Sometime later, after a shower, I got around to counting my haul from Danny’s safe. About thirty stacks of fifty, all in hundreds. A $150,000 in great big conspicuous bills. More money than I’d ever seen in one spot, let alone stolen, and I couldn’t even feel happy about it.
Chapter 14
The nice lady at the Bank of the Bahamas didn’t raise an eyebrow when I plopped down five thousand in hundreds to open an account. Because I couldn’t be sure what prison I’d eventually be staying in, I gave her Mrs. Swanson’s Great Falls address. With the door closed permanently on Ted Randall, I opened the account under Beauregard Mosley. A real honker of a name, sure, but it was mine.
Watching the somewhat bored, professional manner she handled the money, the anxiety I’d felt coming in with so much cash quickly fell away. So long as I didn’t do anything foolish and wire all my Ted Randall money in, nobody would ever know about it. Really, this is how it was meant to be. A man’s money is his own business.
After she handed me all the brochures and useless stuff they give you when you open an account, I asked if I could take yet more of her time.
“No problem, sir, what would you like?”
She had a great smile. More than happy to help the American with the oddly relieved look on his face lease a safe deposit box. After some show of looking over box sizes and weighing the costs, I chose a big one for $400 a year. She said they’d withdraw the fees from my account. So long as I didn’t get more than twelve years in prison, I figured I’d have something waiting when I got out. It all depended on what kind of deal the lawyer could get me.
In the original Italian Job, Michael Caine hid his money in a car he’d stored before going to prison. With my hundred and forty in the bank and an additional five thousand in my backpack, I felt I’d done a considerably better job than that. If I managed to pull off the Poseidon score, I’d add whatever I got to the box.
That’s right, I was still going to do it. Not just because of the money, and not because of some pathological need to steal I couldn’t control. I could control my pathological needs fine, thank you. Twenty-seven years old and alone in a foreign country, I knew my life was at stake. By that, I mean the life I’d made for myself outside the system. In school, I’d never listened to guidance counselors or teachers or bumper stickers or the stuff normal people got their inspiration from. Quitting because a bunch of ordinaries had plans for me seemed like a waste of potential, as those guidance counselors were fond of saying. With prison waiting for me when I got home, who knew when I’d get to have this much fun again? I hated that I’d gotten caught. I was supposed to be the smart guy, thumbing my nose at the world. Not the caught guy, picking my nose behind bars with all the other losers.
Damned right I was doing it. I just needed to stay free long enough to finish it.
***
It was Thursday, a day out from my check-in at the Poseidon, and my gung-ho attitude was neither ho nor all that gung anymore. With nothing to do and no one to rob, I spent most of my time researching how the FBI could find me.
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like I’d caught Agent Andy by surprise when I’d left the country in the middle of his investigation. By now, the TSA’s record of my reservation had aged out of their Secure Flight Database, so I was probably safe there unless I’d missed some finer point of their procedures. Andy could pull every manifest from every airline for the last two weeks and assign teams to pour over them, but that seemed like too massive an undertaking.
Or he could get a warrant for my bank records, and then another one for the online agency I’d purchased the tickets through. Less time and commitment, but still time and commitment.
Before I knew they were onto me, I’d reserved my hotel at the Poseidon with my Visa card, and Visa probably had a whole department for dealing with FBI requests.
Maybe Andy knew where I was and maybe he didn’t. Realistically, I had to assume he did. The question was: what would he do about it? I’d acted like a jerk on the phone, sure, but I’d also indicated a willingness to deal by giving him my lawyer’s contact information. That had to help.
Didn’t it?
“Ah, screw it,” I said, startling an old lady walking by. I wa
s at my favorite table by the pool, taking a break while the hotel worked on their flakey Internet connection. I waved at her as if to say, No, I’d never screw you, or something to that effect. She gave me a mean look and muttered something I couldn’t quite hear. That’d teach me.
Now on my fourth piña colada in a row, I started feeling dish-tink-tly like the criminal offspring of my perpetually pickled parents.
Raising my glass, I took a sip and said, “Perpetually pickled parents.”
It was two in the afternoon, and my nerves had been frayed all day from reading what happened to people who flew home on international flights with warrants out for them. I’d almost talked myself into stealing a new identity and living as a fugitive—on account of me being so smart. Despite my hours in Ripper’s Gym, I didn’t feel prepared enough for jail, and didn’t think I belonged there in any event. I’m more of a probation guy, or an ankle-bracelet tracker guy. Not a raped-in-the-showers guy. Per se.
“Screw it,” I said again.
I got up and found an empty table away from the guest traffic and called the lawyer.
“Tom Harrington,” he said.
If he thought I’d like him more because he answered his own phone, I didn’t. It just made me think he lost so many cases he couldn’t afford a secretary.
“I’m sure you are,” I said.
“Uh … to whom am I speaking?”
“You know whom it is, and if you don’t know whom then I’m pretty well screwed now, ain’t I?”
I thought the ain’t was a nice touch, let him know I was street. Really, I had no idea where the attitude was coming from, but it was there all the same. Something about talking to another foster. One of the good ones.
