Ghostman

by Roger Hobbs

  For at least an hour.

  Takeover heists are very risky. They’re very rare too. Most bank robberies are as simple as you can imagine. A person walks into a bank wearing a hoodie and sunglasses and hands the teller a slip of paper asking for all the money. The teller empties all the cash from the drawers and the robber leaves. There are no guards anymore, so it’s as easy as that. The problem is, there isn’t a whole lot of money to be gained that way. There might be ten or fifteen thousand in those drawers, but that’s it. In order to get real money, you have to do the whole bank takeover-style, with masks and guns and precision timing. The take’s bigger by ten or twenty times because you’ll get all the money in the vault too. But the risk’s much higher. Go in armed, and you have only two minutes to get out. Even if you don’t have any money yet, you leave after two minutes because that is the minimum amount of time it takes for someone to trigger a silent alarm and for the police to mount a response. Each second longer, and your chances of going to prison increase tenfold. If you’re there for five minutes, the robbery’s gone wrong. If you’re there for ten minutes, the robbery’s botched beyond repair. If you’re there for thirty minutes or more, the robbery’s the last thing you’ll ever do.

  And that’s what we were planning: in order to drill the vault, we’d have to be inside for at least an hour, maybe more.

  There would be multiple issues. The first was damage control. A takeover heist means hostages. Hostages mean guard duty. We needed someone watching them at all times. If someone wasn’t, one of them might get brave. If one got brave, somebody could get hurt. If someone got hurt, more people would get brave. Rinse, repeat—people start dying. None of us liked the prospect of killing anybody whose only mistake was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We’d need a guy, maybe two guys, to act as babysitters.

  Location was another problem. The bank was in a skyscraper thirty-five stories up. Once the word of the situation got out, security on ground level would shut down all the elevators, effectively barring our exit. Even if we managed to get all the way up there wearing masks and carrying guns, we had a very good chance of getting stuck.

  The third problem was the getaway. Jalan Ampang, one of the city’s most important arteries, is nine lanes wide and runs past a quarter mile of skyscrapers, restaurants and hotels. In the middle of the morning it would be packed with traffic and pedestrians, which meant there would also be a lot of cops. There was a freeway just a block to the north of our target, but the nearest on-ramp was four blocks west. Not to mention that if the alarms went, an hour would be enough time for the Royal Malaysian Police to set up a barrier and wait for the military to send in helicopters.

  And finally, even if we somehow managed to get out of the bank and away from the cops, then we’d have to get the money out of the country. Seventeen to eighteen million dollars in relatively low-value foreign currency could weigh anywhere between ten and twenty metric tons. I’m talking about bricks of money the size of hay bales that could fill up a fairly large semi. If we loaded it all onto a waiting jet, it would be too heavy for the plane to make it off the runway.

  Marcus’s voice was dry as stone as he laid out the whole thing, step by step. He presented all the problems, then the solutions, one by one. Angela was wrong about him. Marcus wasn’t intelligent. A dog could be intelligent. A kid playing chess could be intelligent. A guy doing his own taxes could be intelligent.

  Marcus was genius.

  Vincent, the loudmouth of the group, said very clearly, so everyone could hear, “How the hell are we going to move that much money?”

  “You’re not,” Marcus said. “It’s never going to leave the building.”

  21

  ATLANTIC CITY

  I was woken by a sound coming from the room Lakes had bought me.

  As soon as I heard it, my eyes shot open and my pulse quickened. I sat up and suddenly froze, focusing all the energy in my body on listening. I held my breath and pulled the gun out from under the pillow. I looked at my watch. It was just a few minutes to 2 a.m.

  It was a hard sound that suggested some sort of heavy movement, similar to the scraping sound a big cardboard box makes when you push it around. Modern hotels have thick, insulated walls. Gone are the days of banging against the headboard, trying to get the amorous couple in the next room to quit it. They use solid doors now and make the walls extra thick, with two layers of foam filler between them. All the sounds made in one room get absorbed into the foam, just like in a recording studio. That meant that if I could hear a sound in here, the sound would be five or six times as loud in there.

  I moved very quietly off the edge of the bed and slid on a pair of pants. I put the gun in my pocket, just in case, and picked up one of the complimentary water glasses off the dresser. I crept slowly over to the door between me and room 316 and carefully pressed the glass against it as a listening device. The walls might be soundproof, but the interior doors are just wood. There was a tense moment of silence when I heard only the low thud of my heartbeat and the almost-imperceptible tick of my wristwatch. I waited for the sound to happen again, just to prove to myself that I hadn’t been dreaming.

  It happened again.

  Somebody was pushing the furniture around. I could hear a strained groan of exertion and the low, hard grind of the bed frame shifting over the wall-to-wall carpeting. The groan sounded distinctly female. I could hear her swear once as she pushed. She had a deep voice, a beautiful voice, like she’d once been a singer. I heard the rustle of the bedsheets as she pulled them off, and the flop of the mattress as she turned it over. She mumbled to herself as she worked, but her words were garbled and formless.

  I’d bet anything it was the FBI agent.

  I knew exactly what she was doing.

  She was tossing the joint.

  Rebecca Blacker was searching every part of the room, from floor to ceiling, so she wouldn’t miss any hiding spots. I heard her take the large generic painting off the wall and fling it on the bed. A moment later, she opened the closet and brushed aside all the metal hangers. I waited to hear what she would do next, but nothing happened for another quiet minute. I could hear her talking, but I couldn’t make out the words. I wondered if someone else was in room, but then ruled against it. If she were talking to someone, that person would’ve talked back.

  She must have gotten a key card from the hotel manager. The police need a warrant to search a hotel room only if the hotel manager says no. Managers rarely say no. Police raids are bad for business, sure, but not as bad as having a reputation for harboring criminals. Not in a place this nice, anyway.

  Careful not to make a sound, I put the glass down and walked over to the hallway door with almost glacial slowness, then put my good left eye up against the peephole. I looked left and right as far as the limits of the fisheye lens would let me.

  Feds have a tendency to work in groups—even when only one agent’s assigned to a case, sometimes people from local law enforcement work alongside. I half-expected to look out my peephole and see a uniformed cop out there, or a guy in a rumpled sweatsuit with a detective’s shield, or another cheap suit with an FBI badge standing guard. But I was in luck.

  She was alone.

  Across the hall was a room-service cart with upturned metal covers and a couple of dirty plates stacked on top of it. Other than that, though, it looked like we were completely alone. The hall was empty as far as I could see.

  I knew what I should have done. If Angela were there, she would’ve thrown the overnight bag in my hands and told me to get the hell out right away. She would have told me to walk calmly and directly toward the emergency-exit staircase and go immediately to the basement. From there I’d cut through the kitchen, go out into the garage and get in my car. If she were in charge, she would’ve yelled at me for being so stupid as to trust a concierge service to book my hotel room. She would’ve rushed into action the very moment she heard the sound.

  But Angela wasn’t around.


  And I was curious.

  I slowly put on my new shirt, jacket and tie, which was difficult because I didn’t want to turn on any of the lights. I ran my fingers through my hair a couple of times to make sure I didn’t look like I’d just climbed out of bed, then grabbed my bag and went out the door.

  The hallway was completely empty, and the door to the room Lakes had bought me was closed. I moved up to it and tried to look through the peephole, but those aren’t designed to work like that. All I could see was a blurry splotch the color of the hotel curtains.

  I ducked back into 317 and pulled a page from the pad of hotel stationery. I wrote Courtesy of J. Morton on the paper, along with one of my new prepaid–cell phone numbers. I went back out into the hallway and placed the note over the bill on the empty service cart. I put the metal covers back on the plates, until the cart looked mostly full, then slowly rolled the cart over to 316. If she opened the door now, she couldn’t miss it.

  I walked down the hallway toward the elevators, took the magnetic key card out of my pocket and snapped it in two. I pushed through the doors to the stairs and took them two at a time. The woman was in my head the whole way. She knew my face now, sure, but I also knew hers. Better yet, I knew her name and her badge number. If I could get to a computer, I could access everything there was to know about her. Something in me wanted to find out.

  I wondered how long it would take her to figure me out in return. I knew it was only a matter of time before she’d check the surveillance cameras and see what I’d done. It was how she’d gotten this far that bothered me. Alexander Lakes told me everything he would do for me would stay private. Clearly, that wasn’t true. Somehow she’d figured out where I was staying, which meant Lakes had a very serious security problem.

  I took out a phone and pounded in Lakes’s number. It rang. Three times. He finally picked up on the fourth ring.

  “Hello?” I could hear the sound of his bedsheets rustling. His voice was sleepy.

  “You gave me a burned room,” I said.

  “Who is this?”

  “Who do you think it is? You gave me a burned room at the Chelsea. The FBI’s there right now tearing the walls down.”

  “Ulysses.”

  I got to the bottom of the stairs and found the exit into the basement, which was wired to trigger the fire alarm if opened from the inside. I sandwiched the phone between my cheek and shoulder, then took my knife and slipped it between the contacts for the alarm. I gently eased the door open with my hip and kept the knife there until the door was closed again.

  “It’s the middle of the night, sir,” he said. “How are you sure it’s a Fed?”

  “I met her earlier. She said I interrupted her vacation.”

  “A woman? What’s her name?”

  “She’s a Fed. It doesn’t matter what her name is.”

  At this time of night, the parking-garage lights were off and would only turn on if triggered by motion sensors. The only permanent light came from the dim floodlight at the base of the stairs. I crossed to the parking garage, took out the key Lakes had left me and started pressing the button that unlocks the doors. As I walked the lights started flicking on all around me. I got about halfway through the garage before I heard the unlocking sound and saw the car’s lights flashing. The black Suburban Lakes had promised me was parked near the exit. It was exactly the type of car I’d been looking for. Brand-new, midnight-black, three-quarters of a ton with three hundred horses and chrome hubcaps.

  “Sir, I cannot apologize enough. I can get you another room at Caesars, this time as clean as you can imagine.”

  “No.”

  “I have contacts at a motel on the edge of town. I know a wonderful Indian guy there. I’m sure he’ll do anything you ask in complete confidence.”

  “I’ll get my own rooms from now on.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Do I sound confused to you?”

  “No, sir. Is there anything I can do?”

  “Meet me at the diner at Maryland and Arctic in twenty minutes. We need to talk.”

  I got in the car. Looked left and right. Checked the mirrors. Took a glance at the row of cars behind me to make sure I wouldn’t hit anything. Put my hand on the gearshift.

  But suddenly I froze and hung up on Lakes without saying another word. I adjusted the rearview mirror again.

  There was the other black Suburban, parked two cars down and a row back.

  22

  It was the same vehicle I’d seen before. Tinted windows, low suspension. The front bumper and the hubcaps were solid chrome. I blinked and tried to get a good look. Yes, certainly the same rig that had jumped me near the old airfield. No front plates.

  Son of a bitch.

  In the dim half light of the parking garage I could make out two people in the cabin. In the shadows they were nothing more than black silhouettes against an even blacker background. Only the pale white glow of the motion sensor lights above them suggested they were even there. They came into focus in parts—light reflecting off somebody’s hair, the dark mass of a torso, the shape of an arm. They blended in like they were made of smoke. Whoever they were, they must have been waiting there for hours. They must have found out where I was staying and parked here in the basement, listening to the sound of their engine tick and cool. Watching the exit. They weren’t listening to the radio or drinking coffee or bantering back and forth to each other. They were just sitting there in the stillness and waiting for me to show up.

  My hand tightened around the wheel. How the hell did they find me? I took precautions with these guys. I’d lost them on the highway. Switched cars. Spent a good portion of the night sniffing pine freshener in the passenger seat of Spencer’s Camaro. Even if they’d picked me up again when I went back to the hangar, I’d wandered around for blocks on foot before checking into the Chelsea. I’d dodged through crowded casinos and other hotels. There’s no chance they could have shadowed me. My jaw tightened up like I’d been punched.

  Who the hell were these guys?

  They were almost perfectly still for the better part of a minute, like hunters who’d spotted their prey. I stayed frozen in place with my eyes on the mirror. This time it would be a lot harder to lose them, that’s for sure. It would be much harder in a parking garage, in the middle of the night, with almost no other cars driving around. If there’s nobody else on the road, it takes an act of God to get away clean. Every move you make they can follow. They had me cornered, and they knew it. In such tight quarters they really didn’t have to do very much. They could just pull up in front of the exit and that would be that.

  I kept still and watched. A drop of water fell from the pipes overhead and made a slow trail down the windshield.

  A dozen different scenarios went through my head. I could turn the engine on, put the pedal to the floor and make a run for it. I could go back into the hotel and try to lose them on foot. I could drive out slowly like I hadn’t noticed them and then do my best on the road. Every scenario seemed wrong. I glanced down at my watch. I watched the second hand make a slow, jerking trip around the face.

  Two a.m. Twenty-eight hours to go.

  When I’d walked into the parking garage, the lights had come on. Wherever I walked, a few small floodlights lit up. Motion detectors. If these worked the way I thought they did, they’d turn off after a short period of inactivity. Without them, the parking garage would be nearly pitch-black. Only the glow of the Exit sign would give any illumination. That would give me a couple more seconds of lead time. I could start the engine and put the car into gear before they could respond. Of course, once I moved more than about ten feet, the lights would snap back on and we’d be in half shadows again. But it might be enough.

  I slowly reached forward, put my key in the ignition and turned it to the second position. The dashboard lit up for a moment and the computer screen on the console went from black to a pale blue glow. I flipped the switch that controlled the headlights. I turned everything of
f that could be turned off. The flashers, the daytime runners, the computer screen, everything. I looked back at my watch.

  Any second now.

  The first light I’d walked past in the far corner of the garage by the staircase started flickering and went out. Another one went out a second later, then two more. Then another two, then three. The whole process would take about twenty seconds, I guessed, because that’s how long it had taken me to walk over to the car. I counted it down on my watch.

  Ten seconds. The whole garage was returning to nearly pitch black.

  Five seconds.

  Three.

  Two.

  The light over the SUV behind me emitted a loud click and flickered out.

  One.

  Darkness. My breath was slow and deep. I started the engine. The red warning lights on the back of my SUV must have looked like a signal flare going up.

  I threw the car in Reverse and lay on the gas. The tires squealed as I did a kamikaze turn in Reverse, shifted back into Drive and slammed it. The motion-activated lights had a slow catch-up. I got nearly twenty feet out before they snapped back on. I sped up the ramp to the ground floor and cut two corners very close. Nobody was in the attendant’s booth, which was good because I had no intention of stopping. I went through the exit at thirty miles an hour.

  Still, my plan didn’t get me the lead I was hoping for. The other guys must have been ready. The warning lights were their starting pistol. Just as I fishtailed onto the street, I heard the other Suburban roar past the booth after me. There was no pretense anymore. They didn’t care about staying invisible. They wanted to run me down. Their brakes screeched as they sailed over the curb.