Ghostman

by Roger Hobbs

  Regular banks use the same sort of technology, just without the GPS. If you walk into a bank and ask for all the money, as I have a few dozen times, sometimes there’ll be ink packs hidden in that loot too. They’re usually set to go off after about two minutes, so once you walk outside, the cash explodes and the police know to look for the guy covered in indelible ink. Those kinds of ink packs can be beaten by segregating the money into different thick plastic bags, so if one ink pack goes off, it doesn’t ruin the whole load. But Fed packs are different. The Fed packs are all bound together. Imagine if the truck broke down, or the electromagnetic plate stopped working. Think about all the time that Fed money spends in the depot, sitting on a big pallet roller while someone finishes the paperwork. Think about how long it must take for a couple of strong guys to load a hundred million dollars off one truck and into another. The system is slow. The Fed timer’s set for forty-eight hours, partly because of inefficiencies in the system, and partly because forty-eight hours is the maximum time frame that law enforcement has to reasonably catch the criminals and recover the money using the GPS.

  I swallowed. “What the hell was Fed money doing at a casino?” I said.

  “Going into circulation,” Marcus said. “The average casino moves more cash in a week than half a dozen banks. Hardly anybody brings cash anymore. Customers buy chips with plastic and expect to cash out winnings in bills. All of the bank vaults in Atlantic City combined couldn’t cover a hotel casino like the Regency on a busy weekend like this, so the casino got itself classified as a bank. It can draw down directly from the Federal Reserve, because none of the private banks can come close to filling their cash needs. There are a hundred ATMs and thirty gold-rated teller windows in the Regency. That’s like ten banks. It’s been like that for two years.”

  “How were you going to deal with the tracking device? GPS jammer?”

  “Lead-lined bag. Easiest trick in the book.”

  “How the hell were you planning on getting around the payload?”

  “That isn’t your concern.”

  “Like hell it isn’t.”

  “The money was for a drug deal,” Marcus said.

  “That doesn’t explain anything.”

  “The money is on a forty-eight-hour clock that started at six Eastern. I was supposed to get rid of it before six Eastern on Monday. It’s almost ten in the morning there now. That means I’ve got less than forty-four hours left to deal with this thing, or else I’m a dead man.”

  “How were you going to do it?”

  Marcus stared at me like I was the slow guy at the table.

  People like him do deals every day. Nothing goes wrong. Of course Marcus was going to do deals with his cut. It isn’t just good money, it’s smart. It’s the fastest, easiest, most profitable way of passing off stolen goods. Of course Marcus was going to do it.

  I said, “Answer my question.”

  “You’re not understanding me, Jack.” Marcus’s words came slowly.

  “We were going to use the cash for a drug deal.”

  Silence.

  My hands slid off the table.

  “It was never your intention to disarm the money. You were going to pawn it off on some poor bastard who didn’t know what he was getting,” I said.

  A drug buy is exactly as simple as it sounds. One person brings the drugs. The other brings the cash. They trade. It’s rarely more complicated than that. I did my first drug deal when I was fourteen. I put a nickel on the park bench, my dealer put a nickel sack in my lap and walked away. If I could do it then, anyone could do it now. Child’s play.

  Marcus’s buy was no different. It was just bigger. With a million in cash, Marcus and his two jokers could buy a whole car full of product at cartel prices. A million in pure acid could fit in a small water bottle. A million in heroin would fill the trunk of a sedan. Coke would take the backseat too. Pot would need a truck. The seller wouldn’t even question the shrink-wrapped money. He’d take it and go.

  Boom.

  Thirty hours later, there’d be one less drug dealer in town. Once the casino blew the cash, Marcus’s supplier would find himself with ten thousand or more useless hundred-dollar bills and a direct homing beacon to the federal government. Dealers on Marcus’s level can handle losing a million or more if things go south, but very few dealers can survive a swarm of Secret Service agents coming in for the kill by helicopter. Marcus didn’t rob a casino because he wanted the money. He robbed it because he wanted a weapon. Marcus wasn’t stealing from a casino. No.

  He was stealing from a cartel.

  I said, “You’re kidding me.”

  Marcus moved forward an inch. “For you it’s just a cleanup job. It doesn’t matter what trouble I’m in. I’m not paying you for the heist. I’m not paying you to tangle with the casinos. I want to pay you to make sure, make damn sure, that Ribbons calls in, doesn’t get caught and delivers the money where it needs to go before the two-day clock runs out. You’re my insurance policy, Jack.”

  “You’re completely insane.”

  “Do you know how many people smoke crystal meth in the Pacific Northwest?” Marcus said. “Everybody. Demand is huge. Pure rock goes for sixty to ninety a gram. Half as much as cocaine, but at fifty times the volume. And that’s assuming the meth is just average quality. That’s twice as expensive as it is on the border. That’s fifty times what it costs to cook up. Think of the profits. On this one deal alone, with one major competitor eating prison or worse because of the bad money, we could stand to make eight-figure profits. Start a half dozen labs. Be on every street corner from here to San Francisco. I could turn the hundred thousand dollars I paid Moreno into a seventy-five-million-dollar industry in six months. So when I said it was a big payday, it was the big payday. It all comes down to what’s sitting in front of you. Mounds and mounds of it.”

  I took a long look at the cash.

  “It’s all the same to me,” I said, “whether you’re buying straight meth or trying to cook it yourself. I don’t do drug deals. You know my rules. I only work for cash or art, nothing else. No exceptions.”

  “What makes you think you have a choice?”

  “Because you’re going to let me walk out of here alive,” I said. “And I still owe you.”

  Marcus chewed his lip and gave me a withering look. “I have a jet waiting to take you to Atlantic City. When you get there, I know a few people who’ll help you pick up what you’ll need. If you won’t deal for me, I want you to find the money and call me. I’ll figure out what to do from there. I just need this mess cleaned up before it comes across the contiguous forty-eight and shuts me down. I’m not serving time because Moreno got plugged, and I don’t care what happens to you afterward. Go ahead, disappear. You clean this up, we’re even, got it?”

  Marcus gave me a look, then another at the money sitting in front of me. He reached forward and flicked one of the bullets with his finger. It rolled toward me, then off the table.

  I pursed my lips.

  “I don’t like your new face,” Marcus said. “Too innocent.”

  I put the bullet back on the table.

  “Why are you a dead man if the cash blows?”

  Marcus didn’t say a word for a moment. He didn’t have to. I could hear sounds from the kitchen. Coffee was percolating behind the counter. Marcus’s words were as dry as a stone, as if they’d sucked all the moisture from the air.

  He said, “I made the deal with the Wolf.”

  5

  PACIFIC CITY, OREGON

  Let me get one thing straight. I despise Marcus with all of my being. But he was right. I owed him.

  It happened almost five years ago, on something we called the Asian Exchange Job. Marcus had invited seven of us out to a resort hotel in Oregon to pitch us a heist. It was a huge job for huge money, so he wanted a handpicked crew. I’d been in the game since I was fourteen years old, more or less, but I’d never been handpicked like that before. It was the first time, in fact the only time
, I ever broke my rigorous system of anonymity. Marcus got a message to me, through one of my e-mail accounts, which included a latitude and longitude deep in the woods, and I went without knowing a thing about the job. I had no idea what was in store for me. The only reason I agreed to it was that the message also said my mentor would be there. Angela. When my limo pulled up to the hotel, she was waiting, leaning against an ivy-covered brick column and smoking a cigarette. I hadn’t seen her in six months. I smiled at her through the glass.

  The resort was small and surrounded by forest, but it looked very expensive and Marcus had booked every room in this old brick building that looked like it might once have been a school. The rooms had real keys, not those magnetic swipe cards, and the bathrooms were down the hall. It was like stepping back in time. When I got out of the limo, I couldn’t tell if Angela was happy or angry to see me. She took me by the arm and smiled cleverly, like she always did, as she walked me through the lobby. There was no reading her. She was the kind of woman who could talk her way out of anything, even her own emotions. She was an actress and a con artist and at least ten years older than me. She liked to call me kid.

  We went right to her suite without saying a word. When the door closed, she ran her fingers through my new hair and told me that even with all the changes, she could still remember my face. We had made love once, when I was still fresh meat on the bank circuit and she was money-crazy from a strip-bond job worth five hundred grand. It had been her mistake, she said. We sat at opposite sides of the room now and talked for a while. It was difficult to get used to her new voice, but she smelled just the same. Cigarettes and passion fruit.

  The evening came, and Marcus sent word through the porter for all of us to gather around the fire pit outside. He introduced himself with one name only. Marcus. I stood next to Angela and listened to him do his cryptic spiel. Angela chain-smoked like it was nothing and whispered in my ear about all the different specialist bank robbers around us, pointing each out with the ember of her cigarette as she went around the circle.

  A well-dressed, handsome blond kid named Alton Hill was the wheelman, which means he’d drive the getaway car. If it had wheels and an engine, he could drive it. He sounded like he was from California somewhere. There was a sort of crispness to his voice that didn’t fit his pressed and professional appearance. The leather on his driving gloves was worn through, and he was only half-listening to Marcus speak.

  The guy next to him, Joe Landis, was a boxman. Boxmen don’t open safes, they literally crack them. The safes rarely survive. Joe was a short little guy with big eyes and a small mouth. He was from some part of Texas, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell if Angela hadn’t told me. A boxman is half computer programmer, half demolition expert. There are still a few guys who can crack a combo with nothing but their ears and fingertips, but they are a dying breed. These days safecracking’s done with a computer, a fiber-optic cable, a high-powered drill and homemade nitroglycerine called “soup.” Amateur boxmen have a tendency to go deaf before they get it right. Joe stood off by himself and avoided eye contact.

  Nearby was a grifter from mainland China named Hsiu Mei. She had more master’s degrees than space on her wall to hang them, Angela told me, and she certainly had the rumpled appearance of an academic. She was beautiful, however. Her skin was the color of brown eggshells, and her black hair was so soft it looked like a strong wind might blow it away. She spoke half a dozen languages and was scribbling in a notebook. She was our controller and linguist.

  After that, there were a pair of buttonmen named Vincent and Mancini. Brothers, Angela said. They didn’t seem tough, but buttonmen rarely do. They hurt people for a living. These two were small Italian guys who cultivated that greasy Mediterranean look, wore the most hideous matching green ties I’d ever seen and radiated tough-guy body language. They stood next to each other in front of the fire with their legs wide open and their arms crossed across their chests. Vincent spoke, Mancini listened.

  And then there was us.

  There isn’t a proper name for what we do, but we used to call ourselves ghostmen. Angela and I were in the business of disappearing. I’ve helped maybe a hundred bank robbers escape over the years. Not all of it is disguises and fake passports and driver’s licenses and stolen birth certificates, either. Most of it is confidence. A ghostman has to be confident in the way he acts, talks and behaves. You could be on the FBI’s top-ten list with your picture up in every post office from Bangor to South Beach, but if you know how to act like somebody else and you have the chops to prove it, you could live on Park Avenue and nobody would ever notice. People see what you tell them to see.

  Angela and I were professional impostors.

  She got her start as an actress in Los Angeles. She was very good at it, like you’d expect, but that didn’t translate into success on the screen. Her acting was pathological. She was pure Method. She didn’t act, she changed who she was. Casting directors hated her for it. A man might pull off spending his whole life in character, but not a beautiful young woman. She was a different person for every person she met. She’d get cast as a trophy wife and show up as a little girl. Her first measure of success was as a corporate spy. She bluffed her way into an executive-assistant position for a major aeronautics company. Got paid a hundred grand to steal a blueprint for a military jet and deliver it to the next company over. I don’t think she did anything else but steal after that. She made enough money to eventually begin creating her own personal roles. She’d wake up each morning and choose who she wanted to be that day. When she found me, she was posing as an FBI agent so she could rob a cartel of counterfeiters. She tricked me into helping her, and I was hooked.

  From that day on, I was her apprentice.

  These days, I’m the best in the business. I can hit a bank and disappear in two days, and nobody would ever know I was even there. I could talk my way into Congress, if I wanted to. But as good a liar and a thief as I am, I could never hold a candle to Angela. She taught me everything I knew. I watched her flick her cigarette butt and stomp it into the soft, moist earth. I drank a bourbon and listened to the sound of her voice in my ear.

  When the meeting was over, Angela took me by the arm and led me off into the forest behind the last cabin. We walked and we walked and we walked until my pupils were like dinner plates. It was as dark as the inside of an eyelid back there. The only light was from the moon behind the clouds. After maybe half a mile, she stopped and turned and stared right at me like she had something to say. She didn’t speak for a long time, but when she did, she spoke in her real voice. She spoke in the voice that she only ever used with me.

  “What are you doing here?” She looked up and shook her head. “What did he do to get you here?”

  “Nothing. He gave me a location, that’s all.”

  “I thought I taught you never to go on a job without all the information up front. I thought I taught you never to trust a stranger, especially if that stranger’s planning a job. I thought I taught you to be careful.”

  “You did teach me that.”

  “Then what the hell are you doing here?”

  I didn’t answer. I thought it was obvious. I stared into her eyes for a while. She was a brunette then, with pixie-short hair and lipstick the color of blood oranges. She wore a four-thousand-dollar dress and diamond earrings no woman had worn in two hundred years, because she had stolen them from a museum. To say she was beautiful would be to miss the point. She was anything you wanted her to be. I stood there for a while until she sighed and took me by the arm again. When we got back to the hotel, her dress and my suit were covered in mud. She walked me to my room and said good night in the hallway. I listened to her footsteps down the stairs. That was how the Asian Exchange Job started.

  We went to work in the morning.

  Back then, Marcus was the man to work for. He wasn’t a cartel kingpin yet. He was a full-time jugmarker. He wrote heists the way Mozart wrote music. They were big and beautiful and
made money like you wouldn’t believe. Five years ago, everybody wanted a shot at one of his jobs, because everything he touched turned to gold. There was a dark side, even then, sure. I’d heard rumors about what happened to anybody who failed him. But those were just rumors. I saw firsthand what happened to the men who succeeded. They flew away rich. Very rich.

  Two days later, Angela and I were on a chartered jet with the others, flying from Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Though it was Marcus’s charter, he didn’t come with us. He was going to run the whole thing from Seattle by satellite phone. He was like Caesar when he was in the back of his restaurant, but none of us complained. He was going to make us rich.

  I was the one who screwed it up.

  6

  The flight to Atlantic City took five hours.

  The jet was a Cessna Citation Sovereign, a midsized two-engine the size of a semitruck, with a range of about three thousand miles. It was fueled and waiting when I arrived at the gate, and there was no security check. The man at the airport entrance took one look at Marcus’s limo and waved us through. We pulled up next to the plane on the tarmac and I walked directly up the stairs. I shook the pilots’ hands, but we didn’t bother with introductions. Time was of the essence here. We were wheels up in five minutes. We had twenty-five hundred miles to fly.