Ghostman

by Roger Hobbs

KUALA LUMPUR

  Every heist starts the same way. After Marcus told us what to steal and how, we had to go case the joint. That, however, can be almost as risky as the robbery itself. It takes dozens of hours to get ready for a good job. You’ve got to know every inch of the target bank, from the door to the back of the vault. You have to memorize every teller’s name, every security guard’s badge number and every hiding place on every floor of the building. Do the glass doors have electronic locks? Does the vault have a time-lock mechanism? When does the bank manager leave for coffee, and how does he or she take it? You have to know everything.

  Therefore, you need to go into the bank and take a good, long look around. Twenty minutes won’t do. Two days is more like it. This observation period provides the professional heister with a unique set of problems. You have to have some sort of reason to be there in the first place. Bankers often notice when someone walks in, looks around for an hour and then just leaves without doing any business. And worse, even if you manage to scope the joint out without any of the employees noticing, there are cameras. Sure, they aren’t an immediate threat, because nobody gets arrested for walking through the front door and not doing anything, but cameras can become a serious problem later. Once you’ve robbed the place, investigators can scrub back through old footage to see if someone matching one of the robbers’ height and weight ever came through before. Every walk-in over the past six months gets investigated. If they make a match, they can put the picture on the news and they’re one step closer to catching you. So if we wanted to have a closer look at the inner workings of our bank, we had to go in as people we weren’t.

  Enter the ghostmen.

  Hsiu Mei was our controller. She’d stay in the van on a wireless link connected to our earpieces. She could translate for us, if necessary, but would really act as our guide. She’d gone over the schematics for the building again and again, drinking pot after pot of hot green tea from a Styrofoam cup.

  Angela and I were going inside.

  We spent several hours in the morning preparing our disguises, and Angela was absolutely radiant. Her costume was a red Gucci summer dress, a platinum bracelet set with expensive rocks, heels in the latest style and a handbag to match. She didn’t look anything like the woman I’d known for years. This Angela was a good twenty years younger and a few million dollars richer. Her contact lenses were an almost phosphorescent green and her hair was long, black and perfectly straight. Her lips were the color of blood, and it looked like she’d stepped out of a magazine. She wasn’t Angela anymore. She was Elizabeth Ridgewater, an heiress from New England.

  I looked a little different. I wore a plain black suit and a dark tie in a style that had gone out of fashion a couple of seasons ago. My makeup made me look only about ten years older, and my hair was a deep brown that made me look menacing. I worked my face until it was stuck in a nearly permanent scowl. I was William Gold, Ms. Ridgewater’s personal bodyguard.

  Angela handcuffed a Halliburton briefcase to my wrist. It was a light aluminum number with layers of foam on the inside for added protection. I could hear something small but heavy shifting around when I lifted it.

  “Let’s go,” Angela said.

  We got out of the van and walked through the revolving doors into the lobby. She led the way, of course, walking with the confidence and grace of a woman who could afford to buy anything that came into her sight. I kept my head down behind her and slipped on a pair of dark Ray-Bans. People were looking at us, which makes me feel uncomfortable, even when in disguise. I’m more comfortable pretending to be just another nobody.

  The target building was called the National Exchange Tower, a thirty-five-story skyscraper with a helipad on top. As we went through the lobby, I made a quick appraisal of the ground floor. None of the doors required any sort of access key or swipe, and there wasn’t a metal detector out front like some buildings have these days. The receptionists didn’t even speak to us when we went toward the elevators. One looked at us and nodded, but nothing else.

  Only the top portion of the building belonged to the bank itself. As I walked by, I took a look at the list of tenants posted next to the elevator doors. The lobby took up the first floor. On Two were offices for the building administrators, supervisors, cleaning staff and security personnel. A law firm had Three and Four, and the next eight held a large fabrication company. There was no thirteenth floor, but Fourteen through Twenty-one belonged to an oil company. Twenty-three and Twenty-four were under renovation, and Twenty-five was some sort of electronics start-up. Only the top floors, Twenty-six through Thirty-five, belonged to the bank.

  And only one of those floors housed the vault.

  Most of the bank’s floors were of no interest. Two were just customer-service call centers, and the other five were offices for account managers. The floor with the vault was at the very top. Floor Thirty-five was the bank’s primary foreign-currency depot, and it was the one we’d have to take over. As far as the schematics told us, there wasn’t much up there besides a few managers, some safety-deposit boxes and roughly eighteen million in cash.

  Once we were alone inside the elevator, I pressed a button on my watch that started a timer. With an accurate blueprint of the building and the time of the trip up, we could calculate the speed of the elevators. With the speed of the elevators, we could estimate call-button times and override-delay times.

  Once the lift jerked into motion, Angela gave me a concerned look. “Anxious?” she said.

  I shook my head. “I’m having the time of my life.”

  It took us two minutes to reach the top floor. We watched the numbers change in silence. When the doors finally opened, a bank manager was there to greet us. I shot a look at Angela but she didn’t return it. There must be some sort of sensor that alerted the top floor whenever an elevator was heading their way. This man’s position and readiness to greet us was too good to be a coincidence.

  The top floor resembled a regular bank, except it was thirty-five stories up. The elevators opened onto a reception room that was twenty by thirty and furnished only with a few couches facing the window. Opposite these were teller stations sectioned off with Plexiglas and a few double-locking doors through to the back. I could make out a few cubicles behind the teller stations, and behind them, far in the back, a secure elevator and the massive round door to the vault. The emptiness was part of the aesthetic, I suppose. No frills, all business.

  The manager shook hands with Angela and greeted us in Malay. Angela answered in English. “I’d like to inquire about a vault-deposit box.”

  It didn’t take much more than that to get his attention. He smiled and greeted us again in English, then invited us back to his office. Angela looked like the type of woman who didn’t like to waste any time, and the manager could clearly see that. He led us through one of the double-locking doors and down a row of offices to his own. Once we were settled in, I held up the aluminum case and Angela unlocked the handcuff on my wrist. I sat back and didn’t say a word. The less I spoke, the better it all seemed. It felt like we could have done the whole transaction without saying a single word.

  “While I’m here, I need a small vault-deposit box to keep an item of particular value to me,” Angela said. “If I can, I’d like to see what sort of security you offer.”

  “I assure you, you’ve come to the right place. We offer a range of security boxes with some of the finest antitheft technology in Asia.”

  “I was told you also offered vault security.”

  “We do, but our vault-security boxes are reserved for our corporate clients who wish to secure assets worth five million British pounds or more. Our private safety-deposit boxes, which are located in a separate room just across from our vault, will more than satisfy your needs, I can assure you.”

  “I think in my case you might be willing to make an exception.”

  Angela unlocked the other part of the handcuff, took the briefcase in her lap and opened it up to show the manager wha
t she was talking about. Inside was a rock about the size of a man’s fingertip. It was almost the color of a ruby, but a little too clear for that. It was a red diamond, the rarest color in the world. This diamond had been dug up almost three hundred years ago somewhere in India, and then owned at one point or another by two European kings, three princesses, two sheiks and three billionaires. At auction, it would fetch just over fourteen million dollars. It looked like a frozen drop of blood.

  This was the Kazakhstan Crown Diamond.

  It wasn’t the real Kazakhstan Crown Diamond, of course. That was behind two inches of bullet-resistant glass in Abu Dhabi. This was a fake, but a very good one. It was made of cubic zirconia treated with a slight amount of cerium to give it the same rare red hue as the original. Anybody with a few years of experience and a jeweler’s loupe could’ve seen it wasn’t the real thing, but that wasn’t going to be a problem. The case was piled with forged documents—insurance, provenance, appraisal. The rock simply had to look valuable, and let me tell you, it did that perfectly.

  The manager’s eyes went wide for a moment, but he suppressed his reaction right away. It’s part of the job, I suppose, to show little appreciation for the valuables he was tasked to protect. The slightest hint of avarice could set off alarms in a potential client. It was important to do everything by the book, with little variation. He took a glancing look at us and sat back in his chair.

  “I am willing to pay any premium to keep it safe,” Angela said, “provided you can offer me the level of security I’m accustomed to. I’ve had problems with Malaysian banks in the past.”

  She was playing a very delicate game. She had to convince the manager to let us look around the vault, without actually buying a box there. We wanted him to turn us down, ultimately, so we wouldn’t be as memorable. If he accepted her offer and we backed out at the last minute, he’d remember our visit for sure, and that might come back to haunt us. Angela’s voice was equally gentle and pretentious; she simultaneously came off as desperate enough to warrant consideration but arrogant enough to merit rejection.

  While Angela and the manager chatted for a few minutes about the vault, I was memorizing the positions of the security cameras. The whole bank was wired up with black security domes situated in the ceiling to provide redundant coverage of every square inch of the bank. There was one above each teller window, another behind it, one over each cubicle and four more facing the vault. The only place not covered were the employee-only bathrooms built into the far wall.

  I politely excused myself to visit the facilities so I could sniff around a little better. Once I was out of the office, I whispered, “Cameras.”

  Hsiu Mei whispered back to me through the transmitter in my ear. “Take a good look at the secure elevator in the back room, next to the vault and the safe-deposit boxes.”

  The secure elevator she was talking about was next to the vault and entirely different from the one we rode up in. This elevator had heavy doors made of solid steel and a state-of-the-art call system. The person at one end could have a conversation with the person at the other end through closed-circuit television. I gave it a hard glance as I walked by.

  “Dual-custody, card-lock,” I whispered.

  “Jesus,” Hsiu said. “And the vault?”

  “Triple-custody,” I said. “Time-release, time-delay, three-part mixed dial.”

  Hsiu swore in Chinese. The vault was a total monster. It had security features from several top manufacturers all piled on top of one another. I moved on before I drew any suspicion. By the time I got back to the office, Angela was wrapping things up. We’d gotten most of what we’d wanted. Ideally he would have shown us the vault, but we knew that wasn’t going to happen. A floor manager like him might approve, but a vault manager would shoot him down in a second. We wouldn’t get close to that vault unless we already had an account, and opening one would be far too risky. Angela thanked the man and cuffed the case back on my wrist, took my arm and led me quietly out the door. She looked disappointed and frustrated.

  That part, it turns out, wasn’t an act.

  Once we were back in the elevator Angela pressed the button to make the doors close, then paced once around the compartment and looked carefully at each of the light fixtures. There were hidden cameras, of course, but no microphones. Most elevators don’t have audio security, but she checked anyway. Once she was sure we weren’t being recorded, she leaned up against the brass bar on the back wall and whispered in my ear, “This bank’s a goddamn deathtrap.”

  “I love it,” I said. “Did you see that vault?”

  “The vault’s Diebold Class II, with a time-specific triple-custody delay lock, which means three managers have to enter three different codes known only to them simultaneously, and at certain times of the day known only to them, and once they do, the vault doesn’t open right away. It starts a timer that opens the safe half an hour later. Yes, I saw the fucking vault.”

  “I’m going to love getting through that thing,” I said.

  “No you’re not, because we’re walking away. If the vault weren’t enough of a problem, once we have the money we’re only a block from a police station and only a five-minute drive from PGK headquarters. That means helicopters and assault teams. We can expect guys in black masks and body armor dropping from zip lines, just like in the movies. We’ll be in cuffs before we ever touch that vault door. Or we’ll be dead.”

  I said, “Did you think stealing over seventeen million bucks was going to be easy?”

  “I expected it to be survivable. This isn’t.”

  I shook my head.

  “We should walk away from this job,” Angela said. “Vanish. Go to Prague. Book a suite in the Boscolo and stay there for a month.”

  “Where’s the fun in that?”

  “I’m not doing this because it’s fun,” Angela said. “I want to get rich and live a normal life.”

  “Do you know how bored I am being normal?” I said. “I live for challenges like this.”

  “It’ll get us killed.”

  I shook my head and said, “Then that’s how it’s got to be.”

  28

  ATLANTIC CITY

  I drove in silence for a while. I was halfway to Hammonton before I spotted my abandoned Suburban on the side of the road. I was lucky that the state police hadn’t spotted it and called for an impound. When I parked behind it, I could hear a single car passing in the other direction. The highway was empty at this time of night.

  Angela used to say she had a list of rules for surviving as a ghostman. Among them were only three she never broke and never changed. I used to call them the Big Three, like they were some sacred catechism handed down to us by god himself. The first: Never kill unless you don’t have a choice. The second: Don’t trust anyone you don’t absolutely have to. The third: Never make a deal with cops.

  The last one was strictly practical. The police aren’t in the business of letting criminals get away. No matter how corrupt a cop might be, he’s still sworn an oath to protect and serve the people and laws of his jurisdiction. You could call me a cynic, but an oath is an oath. You can’t cut a deal with somebody who has sworn to take you down. Simply put, police are the enemy, and no amount of talk, money or drugs will ever change that. And the cop isn’t always the problem.

  Sometimes the guys in your crew are.

  There’s a word for a heister who talks to the police—several, in fact. Snitch, rat, stool, fink. In some parts of the world, just giving a so-called peace officer the time of day is enough to earn a trip to the hospital courtesy of your associates. Nobody is more reviled than a guy who spills to the law. A person who vanishes on a job has a chance of earning redemption, if he works hard enough, but a snitch might as well sign the cops’ affidavit, go home and kiss a Beretta. A witness-protection agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

  Jugmarkers are notorious for taking revenge on people who rat on them. Some don’t even kill snitches right away. They k
ill a guy’s whole family first, just to get his attention. They’ll send somebody with a box of knives to work over the snitch’s mother. Then they’ll kill the girlfriend. Then the brothers. The sisters. The children.

  Then time’s up.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Rebecca Blacker. I could see the black eyeliner running along her lower eyelids and her hair spilling over her shoulders in rough tangles. I pictured her badge booklet. The woman in the picture was so much younger. Full of youthful excitement, anxiety, terror. The one I met was cool and calm and jaded. She was a different person now. I wondered how long it would be before she’d try to take me down, or if she was trying to already.

  I used the sleeve of my suit to wipe down the wheel of the SUV, the gearbox and the door handle, both inside and out. I remembered to wipe the passenger and rear doors too. I took off the jacket, tie and shirt, which had blood on them, and threw them in the backseat along with the last two pieces of my revolver.

  I went back to my SUV and pulled on a new shirt from my satchel and put on my old suit jacket, then went back to Aleksei and Martin’s SUV and opened the back hatch just to see if they had anything useful there. In addition to a second shovel, there was a length of green garden hose, two sweatsuits, a torch lighter, a spool of low-gauge wire, wire cutters, pliers, three knives, a box of large black trash bags, a hacksaw, duct tape and a hammer. To a naïve observer, this might have looked like an everyday collection of home supplies. But low-gauge wire is twice as good as rope if you want to tie someone down. Double-ply contractor bags can hold fifty pounds of human flesh without leaking. A garden hose can hurt worse than a baseball bat, if you know how to swing it right. A hacksaw can do lots of things.

  This was a torture set.

  I took the sweatpants and ripped them down the center and tore one of the halves in half again. I straightened out a length of the wire that was roughly two and a half feet long, then wrapped the cotton fabric around it.

  If I wanted to, I could have cleaned up this SUV out here in the pine barrens for the cops to find. Wiped down like this, they’d probably just return it to the owner. Hell, if I’d wanted to make a few bucks, Alexander Lakes could recommend a half a dozen chop shops that would pay good money for it, no questions asked, and have it cut down to parts by morning. But I didn’t want to play it safe.