by Roger Hobbs
“I know that.”
Spencer pointed to the tracks.
“There are mud tracks off the Dodge coming in, but there are no such tracks for the car going out. That means this was a one-step deal. There’s a little trickle of blood, too, from the driver’s-side door over to a patch of ground on this side of the building. From here, it looks like the driver left driving a midsize coupe, maybe sedan, moderate load, with slightly balding tires.”
I said, “You can tell all that from there?”
“Yeah. I can.”
Spencer took two steps toward me and snapped his fingers like he was ordering a beer. He wanted his BlackBerry. On the screen he had a picture of a naked woman lying on the hood of a yellow Ferrari Enzo. He flipped the phone over and snapped a picture of the grooves in the dirt by the hangar entrance. He examined the photo for a long second. He zoomed into it, as much as he could, until I couldn’t distinguish the tread marks from the mud around it. In two minutes, using only a photo, his memory and his connection to the Internet, he’d narrowed down the range of tires it could be to three. After five minutes, he had a match within 70 percent certainty. After ten, 90. He was a machine.
Wheelmen think differently from normal people. They see the little things.
“Your guy drove out of here in a Mazda MX-5,” Spencer said. “These are dealership tires for sure.”
I nodded. An MX-5, the Miata, is a standard choice for a getaway car. They’ve got decent acceleration and room enough for two, but the Miata has one thing going for it that lesser cars don’t. It can turn on a dime. It can spin through a corner at a speed that could send everybody inside up against the window glass before the tires gave a single inch. It could make it through cutoffs and weave through traffic better than cars that cost eighty grand more. Good moves for a getaway. In a getaway speed isn’t nearly as valuable as maneuverability.
Spencer stepped away from the tire marks and took off his gloves. “The thing about the Miata, though, is that there are hundreds of thousands of them. New models are coming out all the time, and have been for the last god-knows-how-many years. Thousands of them could be registered in this half of Jersey alone. It’s one of the most popular sports cars of all time.”
“Is there anything more specific you can give me?”
“There’s only so much I can do, man.”
“What do you think about the guy driving the Dodge, then? Do you think he was being chased?”
“He certainly fired enough rounds through the rear window, yeah. But there isn’t anything that I can say for certain, other than that there’s extensive damage from multiple crashes and half a dozen gunshots. When you came here, did you find those hangar doors open or closed?”
“Closed.”
“Then he wasn’t being chased. He was just getting sloppy.”
“Why didn’t he torch the thing, then?” I said. “If he could toss the Coleman fuel under the car, how come he didn’t light it up?”
“He did,” Spencer said. “Take a look.”
He beckoned me a few feet into the hangar, got down on his haunches, and I followed suit. Spencer turned up the brightness on his phone and shined it under the Dodge. I took a good look at the naphtha canister. Next to it was a very small string, almost like a thread, submerged in the gas. Spencer held the light on it. Though it was a few feet long it didn’t reach either end of the car.
“You see that?” He said. “It’s a fuse. Not a dynamite fuse, exactly, but similar. Homemade. Looks like it was made out of toilet paper and the stuff they put in fireworks. See how the end’s burned? Your boy lit the thing for sure, but it went out before it could ignite the gas. My guess is that he was trying to buy himself a few extra minutes before the flames went up, just in case someone noticed the smoke.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me?”
Spencer shook his head, ground his teeth together and pointed at the car. There wasn’t much to say.
“All right,” I said. “If you can’t tell me any more, give me a ride to the Boardwalk and then you’re done.”
“That’s it?”
“No, one more thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Do you have a cigarette?”
He gave me a strange look as he pulled a pack of Parliaments from his shirt pocket and patted one out for me. I put it between my lips and he took out a book of matches and struck one for me.
I took one long drag.
“Thanks,” I said. “Can I have the matches too?”
“Sure.” He handed me the matchbook and stood there for a second, looking at me with an odd expression. I couldn’t quite place it. After a beat he said, “Jack isn’t your real name, is it?”
“What’s a real name?”
Spencer nodded like he understood. He lingered for a moment longer, trying to find something else to say, then started across the tarmac back toward his car. I watched him walk off until his body faded into the darkness.
Sooner or later, someone would come by and find this Dodge, then this whole scene would be a mess of cops. They’d find the same things I did—the print, the blood, the drugs, the bullet casings. I looked it all over one last time. When the cigarette was about half gone, I opened up the matchbook and slid the lit cigarette into the fold between the paper and the match heads. The cigarette would burn for a few more minutes on its own, then the ember would hit the match heads and the whole thing would catch on fire. I moved very carefully into the hangar and placed the book of matches at the very edge of the seeping pool of naphtha. I was almost a hundred yards away by the time the ember hit the match heads. It echoed out over the waterway as the fireworks started.
I looked at my watch. Eleven p.m.
Thirty-one hours to go.
19
The Chelsea Hotel was downtown on the waterfront. Spencer dropped me off four blocks away and I walked over, keeping an eye out for the black Suburban that had been following me earlier. The taillights of passing cars seemed to blur together. I took shortcuts through other hotels and casinos, just in case. There was no one behind me.
The Chelsea had a vibe straight out of the sixties. The sign on the tower was illuminated from below by purple floodlights, and inside there were bars and pool tables with the same color scheme. The lobby’s furniture was shabby-genteel. I liked the feel of it. It was a place my father would have liked, if he were still around.
I scanned the lobby for security cameras, simply on instinct. They were there, but unsophisticated. I could see the bank of monitors tucked away under the marble façade, barely out of view. Their quality was minimal: no database of footage, no twenty-four-hour watch. The cameras were probably there for insurance purposes. I went up to the counter. The man there was an Asian old enough to walk with a cane. I said my name was Alexander Lakes. The old man looked down at the computer screen for a second then back up at me. He handed me a magnetized room card with a number on it for a place on the third floor. He reached down under the desk and pulled out a minibar key. Smiled like it was nothing. I smiled back at him and didn’t say a word.
When I got to the room, at the foot of the bed was a large brown paper bag waiting for me with a card on it that read Executive Concierge Services. Before I did anything, I closed the blinds on the window. In some cases, it’s better to leave them open. That way you can see things coming. Other times, a blackout is better. A person with binoculars can look through a window from anywhere with a comparable height, and people on the outside always have the advantage. They look in, you see out. It’s not the same, looking and seeing. The best way to do it is with blackout curtains with thin peek slits down the sides. The peek slits are too thin to see through from the outside, but wide enough to peek out from the inside, like a duck blind. The person on the inside can peer out, and people on the outside can’t peer in. Counter-advantage. Not that a hotel room is particularly safe. The inside is a three-hundred-square-foot concrete sarcophagus with only one exit. I was on the lowest customer floor,
three stories up. Good place. Angela taught me to never take a room above the tenth floor or below the second. Ten stories is too high for a fire truck and two stories is low enough for a climber.
I turned on the television and tuned it to the news. It was doing international stories. I called room service for a blackened steak with nothing on it and a carafe of coffee. I turned the TV sound off and opened the bag at the foot of the bed. I looked at the card again and flicked it in the trash.
There was a new black Hugo Boss suit, two white shirts and a blue tie. Under the clothes was a lock-picking tool set in a leather case. Below it was the slimjim, a Microtech Halo knife and a large black electronic key with the Chevrolet logo on it. At the bottom was a pile of prepaid cell phones and their chargers. Everything I’d asked for, nothing I hadn’t.
I put everything in my overnight bag and sat on the bed while waiting for my food to arrive. I watched the news cycle around to the heist. Ribbons’s photograph didn’t feature this time, but they flashed the image of Moreno and put up the number for the tip line. This time there was helicopter footage of the casino area and even a snippet of security-camera footage. Black-and-white, grainy as could be. It wasn’t much, but I got what I was looking for: an image of Ribbons in a mask firing his gun, and another of the parking-garage sniper. That confirmed my theory. The sniper had been waiting for Ribbons and Moreno. The video showed someone in what looked like a Nissan with tinted glass. I could see the muzzle flashes out the driver’s window. I turned up the volume and listened. The third shooter’s vehicle had been recovered, the reporter said, four blocks from the scene in a long-term parking lot. It was stolen a few days before and had been wiped clean.
No word on either suspect.
My steak and coffee arrived. I turned the bill upside down and, using my left hand, signed Alexander Lakes in that perfect handwriting I remembered from the airport. It’s easier to copy a signature upside down. I don’t know why.
I ate my steak and drank my coffee while watching the news on a different channel, but there was nothing I hadn’t seen before. I put the tray in the hallway, then went back inside and knocked on the door dividing my room from the next one over, 317. I knocked harder. No sound. I dialed the front desk.
When a man answered, I said, “My wife’s hearing a strange sound.”
“What room are you in?”
“Three sixteen.”
“Where is the sound coming from?”
“The one next to us, she says.”
“To your left?”
“No, the one on the right, number three-one-seven. She said it was some sort of scratching.”
“Is she certain? I can send someone up, if you like.”
“Could you just tell me if there’s somebody in there? I can go talk to them.”
There was a momentary pause. I could hear him working a keyboard.
“I’m sorry, sir, but that room isn’t occupied. Are you sure you don’t mean three-one-five?”
“That’s what she said, but it’s no big deal. Thanks anyway.”
I hung up. I took my lock-picking set and cracked the lock on the door between the two rooms. Inside 317 it was dark and the king-size bed was made. I brought all my things over from the other room and closed the door. I took one of my cell phones and set an alarm to wake me up in four hours, then opened my overnight bag and took out my gun. I brushed the cylinder to make sure it was loaded and ready. The cylinder spun around and clicked softly as the bolt stop pin locked into each chamber. I laid out the new set of clothes and put the old ones and everything else in my bag.
Some heisters take a lot of precautions before they go to sleep anywhere. I’ve met guys who take a newspaper and cover the floor around the bed with it, so they’ll hear the footsteps of someone sneaking up on them. I’ve even known guys who only sleep upright in a chair. I have my own rules, but nothing so drastic. My gun goes under the pillow, loaded and locked. My shoes go to the side of the bed with the laces loose, so I can slip into them in an instant. My clothes for the next day go beside me on the floor. My bag remains packed by the door, and the light in the bathroom remains on so it’s not totally dark. I don’t take off my makeup, and, when I’m on a job at least, I don’t take off my watch. I want to be good to go, and a few smudges don’t matter much.
If someone came to kill me in my sleep, I wouldn’t be able to put up much resistance. If I had to run, however, I could be out the door in ten seconds. Those are my priorities. Of course, someone did try to kill me in my sleep once. In Bogotá, I woke up with a man standing over me with a knife. I shot him twice before he could cut my throat. I got very lucky that time, but you can’t count on luck. I doubt I’ll ever be so lucky again.
I was still a little bit buzzed from the coffee, so I got my copy of Metamorphoses from the bag and spent a few minutes reading to clear my head. I don’t need a translation for Latin, but I like to read new translations anyway to see how the translator handled it. There is a finesse to translation that reminds me a little of my job. Translators take another man’s story and put it into their own words. In a way, I do the same thing. Angela never quite understood this. I’d try to explain it to her, but she was too quick-witted to really get it. For her, taking on a new identity was like taking a breath. For me, it was a work in translation.
I put the book back in the bag and the gun under the pillow.
I climbed under the covers and closed my eyes. I hardly remember falling asleep. Angela used to make fun of me for sleeping so well. My last thoughts were about us together in that Oregon hotel, listening to the sound of the forest and the crackle of the fire pit down below. If I dreamed, I don’t remember anything about it.
But I’ll never forget the sound that woke me up.
20
KUALA LUMPUR
On the first morning of the Asian Exchange job, Angela walked across the hall from her bedroom in our shared suite, came into my room and woke me up. She picked up the alarm clock on the bedside table and held it next to my ear. It went off and I jumped. She used to criticize me for being such a sound sleeper. When she slept, it was in hour-long bursts punctuated by insomniac pacing and the occasional cigarette. When I slept, it was like passing into a coma.
“Meeting in an hour,” she said.
It took me a moment to blink and get my bearings. Angela was wearing a blue pantsuit with a gold name tag that had the insignia of the hotel on it. Mandarin Oriental, Kuala Lumpur. It said her name was Mary. I don’t know how she got the uniform but she looked convincing in it, even as a white woman in an Asian city. Her makeup was perfect. She had the thick eye shadow of an exhausted hotel worker. Her shoes were worn-out flats. I looked out the window. The sun was already reflecting off the skyscrapers next to us.
I turned off the alarm.
Angela had an energetic beauty about her—she was an actress, and she had trained for it in college. All I had done in college was read and translate Latin and ancient Greek. I’d never even gone to see any plays, because the whole concept of acting was off my radar back then. I didn’t crave attention, I craved anonymity. All I wanted was to do my translations and be left alone. Angela changed all that. She showed me how, by being nobody, I could be anyone I wanted. She provided my real education. I copied people’s signatures until I could write in anyone’s hand. I learned how to transform the muscles in my larynx until I could speak in anyone’s voice. I studied the differences in posture and syntax. But most of all, Angela taught me that I didn’t need to be perfect, I needed to be convincing. She once handed me a toy police shield and told me to get a piece of evidence from a real crime scene. I got past the yellow tape, picked up a bullet casing with a pair of tweezers and walked away with it in a plastic bag. That was one of her final tests for me. That’s how she knew I was ready.
I moved over to the edge of the bed that morning and sat up. She looked at me, arms crossed, said she was putting on a pot of coffee, then left. When I got out of the shower, she handed me a fresh
cup, no cream, no sugar, and told me to get my ass in gear.
She never liked waiting for anything.
The video conference with Marcus happened right there in the sitting room of our suite. In the center of the table were twelve small golden keys, two for each of us, except for the wheelman Alton Hill, who wouldn’t do anything but drive. We didn’t know what the keys were for at that point, but we’d find out soon enough. All we knew then was that we were supposed to take care of them and take them with us everywhere for the duration of the heist. The room also had a large flat-screen TV with a glowing green camera attached by a wire. Back then, Internet video conferencing was less common than it is now. I remember being fascinated at how Marcus’s face jerked and paused on the screen. It was the middle of the afternoon where he was, nearly eight thousand miles away, yet it felt like he was there in the room with us. We gathered around the table as he described the job. In order to get it all done, we were going to have to start right away. No questions, no second-guessing. His voice was matter-of-fact. He spoke slowly, so we wouldn’t miss anything.
“In two weeks,” he said, “each one of you will be two and a half million dollars richer.”
The take was a block of foreign currencies for the exchange market, the value of which changed depending on who you asked and at what time of day. Liquidated, it was something like seventeen or eighteen million dollars. Yen, baht, yuan, ringgit, you name it. Even with traveler’s checks and credit cards, huge sums of these foreign paper currencies found their way overseas every month.
A German-based exchange company was the target. It shipped all their displaced Asian currency back here, to the financial equivalent of a weigh station, before distributing it back into the local economies.
The setting was the high-finance Bank of Wales in an office tower on Jalan Ampang. The money was counted and put in the vault there temporarily, then packaged and sent by armored trucks to the airport to be shipped back to the countries of origin. The armored trucks never moved more than about one and a half million U.S. dollars’ worth of currency at any one time, and never did deliveries more frequently than once every hour, on the hour. The vault was top of the line. Time sensitive, time delay, triple custody. In order to take the entire load, we would have to be creative. We would have to do what professional armed robbers usually consider suicide. We would have to drill the vault, which meant we would have to take over the bank.
