by Roger Hobbs
The Wolf’s man was a big white guy with plain looks. He didn’t look like a tough guy. He was wearing a leather jacket, sure, but his pale baby-blue eyes and round face belonged to a man who was soft on the inside. He looked more like a guy on vacation than a member of a vicious drug gang. I grabbed him by the collar but his jacket ripped in half. Under the expensive leather were prison tattoos. Faded blue-and-black markings. He was covered with gang tags he’d picked up for the price of blood in Marienville or Bayside or someplace. On his left shoulder was a black swastika no bigger from side to side than a silver dollar. Next to it was a bleeding heart with four tears bursting out. I gave up trying to move him and let him fall back against the sand.
We were silent for a second. The breeze came in off the ocean with the sound of seagulls. The Wolf’s man was crying blood. It soaked through his eyebrow down his cheek to his neck and spread through his shirt. He spat out a tooth and a wad of bloody phlegm.
“You know,” I said, “I love moments like this.”
He closed his eyes. I got down on my haunches next to him so we could have a talk. I grabbed his cheek and turned his face toward me. He might have been crying, but it was hard to tell. There was too much blood.
“You hear me?” I said. “I love moments like this. It’s all over your face. Right now you’re looking at me with more intensity than you’ve probably put into anything in your whole life. You’re fully inside this moment, because you’re afraid I’m going to kill you. Do you know how rare that is for me? You’re not worrying about your credit-card statement or your mortgage or how many cigarettes you have left before you’ll have to buy a new pack. No. Right now every fiber of your being is focused on me and this gun.”
I tapped the end of the silencer against his chest. The man was breathing like a machine, practically hyperventilating. His one good eye was as wide open as could be and focused on my face like a laser. I don’t think he could stop looking at me if he tried.
I glanced at the wrecked car and then out over the ocean. The air smelled like salt water and gasoline. I breathed in through my nose, relishing it. It reminded me of something, but I wasn’t sure what. I let my breath out and looked back down at the Wolf’s man.
“I only have one question,” I said. “I think you know what it is.”
“Tracking device,” he said, the blood now gushing through his teeth. He started to reach into one of his pockets. When I saw he wasn’t going for another weapon, I let him. He pulled out a simple black cell phone that was still powered on. On the screen was a highlighted portion of a map with a blue arrow showing our exact location.
“Where’s the signal coming from?”
“You,” he said.
“Is it one of my phones?”
“They put a bug on you.”
I took the phone from his hands and moved it around. The location of the dot didn’t change. It must’ve been some sort of GPS tracer, which means the signal could have been coming from almost anything. The Wolf might have slipped it into my clothes or one of my cell phones. I’d seen GPS trackers as small as buttons before. The professional-grade trackers don’t even need their own power supply. They can run for weeks on a hearing-aid battery and track a location down to a point the size of an oversized armchair. I sighed and pointed the gun back at the man’s chest.
“I’m not going to kill you,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong, though. I don’t particularly mind killing guys like you. I’ve done it before. But you’re going to get through this alive. Consider it my way of thanking you. You see, when I flew in yesterday I was afraid this job was going to be too easy. Before I got off the plane, I was worried that I’d find the heist money right away and I wouldn’t get to do anything fun in the process. It’s a good thing you guys showed up. Without you in particular, I never would’ve got to enjoy this moment. All the colors are a little brighter. The air tastes a little better. Even the sand feels good. There’s no drug out there that feels like this.”
I pressed the gun into his sternum with one hand and went through his pockets with the other. He had a black leather wallet in his left pants pocket. His driver’s license said his name was John Grimaldi. He was six feet tall and had an address out in Ventnor. He was just a little over thirty years old. The license had been issued a few years before. In the photo, he was almost handsome. I took the license and threw the wallet on his chest.
“Are they listening to me right now?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“I hope they are,” I said. “Even if they aren’t, I hope you are, John. There’s a reason I’m telling you this. The Wolf is going to find you, after all. When he does, he’ll want to know what I said. I want you to tell him a few things, okay? I want you to make this clear to him: I don’t belong to anybody. I’m not Marcus’s man, and I won’t be his. I’m just here because I’ve spent the last six months staring at an empty wall in my apartment and waiting for something interesting to come along. This is interesting. I live for moments like this. So if the Wolf wants to stop losing his men one by one, he should leave me alone or make me another offer. This time, however, it had better be interesting.”
The man’s good eye stared up at me in terror. He nodded with desperate eagerness.
“I hope you remember that, John.” I said.
Then I took a look at my watch, pressed the end of the gun against his knee and squeezed the trigger. The silencer made a thump that echoed out over the water. His eye fluttered for a second before he passed out from the pain. I picked up his phone, tossed it into the ocean and walked back up the hill to the Bentley, taking the pistol with me.
I looked at my watch. Eight a.m.
I had twenty-two hours to go.
39
I checked into a small motel at the edge of the city. The desk clerk barely looked at me. It was still only morning, long before any reasonable check-in time, when he handed me the key. It would do for a few hours of anonymous privacy.
After a couple of years in this profession, cheap motels are like your second home. You get used to certain things. The Gideon Bible’s always in the same place. The bedsheets all have the same quality. The rooms all have a piney, freshly scrubbed smell at first, but that soon fades into its natural, dirtier musk. This one smelled like ammonia. I took a long breath through my nose, closed the blinds and put the chain on the door. It felt like coming home.
Once I was sure I was alone, I took out my cell phones. It’s easy to check a cell phone for added GPS trackers. If it’s hardware, it’s easy to find. There isn’t a whole lot of extra space in there. If it’s software, it’s easy to turn off. Once the battery is out, it all turns off. First I scrolled through the menu interface to make sure that each phone’s built-in GPS transmitter was switched off. They all were. Then I cracked the phones open to see if they had been tampered with. One by one I removed the batteries, SIM cards, fractal antennae and digital-memory cards. Nothing looked out of the ordinary, so I put them all together again. Once I was done, I lay back on the bed for a while and thought it over. They obviously weren’t tracking me that way. Huh.
I turned the shower on to make some noise. The water came up slowly from the pipes with a low whine. In the other room I turned on the television with the volume all the way up. I didn’t really think that their bug would have audio, but I didn’t want to run that risk. After what happened with Harrison in the Genting Highlands all those years ago, I’ve had nightmares about hidden microphones.
I went through my overnight bag and my clothes after that. It wouldn’t have taken much sleight-of-hand for one of the Wolf’s operators to slip a transmitter on me. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and carefully combed over my body. I turned each of my pockets out. I emptied my bag and flipped through my copy of Metamorphoses. Nothing.
I gave myself a long hard look in the mirror. After two days with little food and no rest, I was actually beginning to feel as old as I looked. Jack Morton had seen a little too much action lately.
It was time to change. I wiped the condensation off the mirror. My makeup was running in the heat.
I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower for a good long while. My arm had developed a string of bruises where Aleksei had struggled to free himself during our fight. They were turning black in the center already.
Once I toweled off, I got my makeup kit out and placed the ID card I’d taken off the man in the Mercedes in the corner of the bathroom mirror. I focused on his face for a while and tried to mimic his fearful yet confident expression. He had deep, sunken eyes and an empty, black-and-white pallor. Even though he lived in a beach town, he didn’t have the slightest hint of a tan. He looked lost, somehow.
“They put a bug on you,” I said in his voice.
I repeated the phrase twice, perfectly. After a few seconds I could feel the age shedding off me. I took a breath and it felt fuller. My shoulders straightened up and my eyes became a little brighter. My joints lost their arthritic tremble and my smile lost its practiced character. I flexed my hands until they felt young again. When I spoke, I had his soft Atlantic City accent. I said, “My name’s John Grimaldi.”
John’s palette was black. That black leather jacket made him look like he was on his way to a club. He was a stylish guy who didn’t mind if he had to sweat for it. I used some hair dye and a lot of gel to turn my hair black and slick it down flat. I drew in a widow’s peak with a small makeup pencil.
“My name’s John Grimaldi,” I said. “But you can call me Jack. I’m from Atlantic City, New Jersey. I do a lot of different things, you know?”
As I put my clothes back on, I couldn’t stop thinking about this bug he said they’d placed on me. As long it was active, I was in danger. The next men the Wolf sent wouldn’t have orders to follow me around at a safe distance. The next men he sent would have orders to kill me. It didn’t matter how anonymous the motel was. If they tracked me here, I was dead meat.
I could only think of one more place it could be hidden.
I packed my things into the overnight bag and smoothed the wrinkles out of my clothes. I left the key to the room under the welcome mat and walked over to the Bentley.
It’s easy to track a car. Most have built-in GPS devices anyway so the owner can track the vehicle’s location remotely if the car’s ever stolen. Even if those features are disabled, however, an add-on tracker like LoJack can be very difficult to find. They’re small enough to fit almost anywhere and there are hundreds of places you could hide one in a car. Before I got back in the Bentley, I circled around and ran my hand under the bumpers and along the grille. I checked under the seats, in the glove box and in the trunk.
I only found the tracking device when I got on my knees and looked at the undercarriage. It was a two-by-three-inch white box attached to the chassis between the left tire well and the wheel by some sort of heavy-duty adhesive. It had a durable rubberized exterior and a glowing green light. Goddamn.
Alexander Lakes had sold me out. I cursed and shook my head. He must have been tracking all the cars he gave me. That was the only way the Wolf could have got to me so fast. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Of course he worked for the Wolf. Everybody in this whole goddamn town did.
I pried the device off with my knife. It was very light. I slipped the knife through the gap in the plastic and pushed until the light on the device went out and the signal died. I looked at my watch. Eleven a.m. I had been at the motel for three hours.
Nineteen hours to go.
40
KUALA LUMPUR
I had no idea how bad that heist would go. I don’t recall much of what happened in the days that led up to the job, but I remember feeling both confident and scared. Fear is part of the job, of course. Anybody who isn’t scared to walk into a bank with a gun is nuts. But we’d all done this before, so I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. I thought I knew the routine. I thought I knew the bank. I thought I knew the people I was working with. I thought I knew the mistake I’d made, and I thought I knew the risks involved with that.
I had no idea.
At seven on the morning of the heist, the wheelman came to pick me up from a prearranged pickup point not far from my scatter in an old panel van. The detail on the side was in a mix of Malay, English and Arabic with an address for a window-cleaning company down in Subang Jaya. Window-cleaning companies get something of a free pass while driving around urban centers. The guys who run parking lots and do building security tend to cut them more slack than they probably deserve, because nobody wants a job that involves hanging from a wire forty stories up and cleaning shit all day. Alton nodded at me with a cigarette between his lips from the driver’s seat as I opened the rear doors and climbed in the back. His black gloves made a stretching sound on the wheel.
This was the plan—the wheelman would pick us all up from different places around the city, we’d do the job and then we’d leave the country right away. It was much riskier now after what had happened in the Highlands, but we were all willing to take that risk. It took an hour to pick everyone up. We met Angela at the loading dock behind the Crown Plaza. We got Vincent and Mancini by a bus stop in the business district, under a billboard advertising a cell phone. Joe Landis and Hsiu Mei were having breakfast in a coffee shop out by the forest.
Everyone was feeling good about the job except Angela. Usually she bubbles with manic energy before a job, but not this time. Now she was cold and distant, staring off through the van windshield as she chewed a stick of nicotine gum. I wanted more than anything else to talk to her, but I knew it wasn’t the right time for that. She needed the silence.
Once everybody was in the van, we parked in an empty lot down the street from the Bank of Wales building and started getting into disguise. Vincent, Mancini and I were going in as security guards. We had hats with an armored-car company’s logo and dark sunglasses to cover our eyes. We pulled the baggy uniforms on over our clothes so we could rip them off in twenty seconds flat in the elevator and change into a different costume for the bank floor. Mancini fitted himself with a nylon shotgun rig. I watched as he took one of the shotguns out of the bag, loaded four bright red double-aught buck shells into the loading port and then slid the gun into the apparatus. Next to that was a bandolier of small, powerful tear-gas grenades. Once the uniform was on, though, it didn’t look like he was carrying anything at all. He took out a box of shotgun shells and poured extras into each of his six pockets.
“How much longer are we going to wait here?” Hsiu said.
“Don’t you have a watch?”
“I mean,” she said, “just what are we waiting for, exactly?”
Angela squeezed forward and pointed at the satellite phone on the dashboard.
I’m not sure how long we sat there, but it probably felt longer than it really was. We could all smell one another. Grease and gasoline, cigarettes and alcohol, clove and coriander and black pepper. Every little sound was amplified by the tight quarters. Alton took out a cigarette, but Joe Landis immediately put a hand over his lighter.
“Do you have any idea how much nitroglycerine I have in my bag?”
The wheelman made a face and flicked the unlit cigarette out the window. He said, “You mean I can’t get a smoke until this whole thing is over?”
“Here,” Vincent said. “We’ve got something for you.”
Mancini took a small vial out of his pocket and shook out about a quarter gram of cocaine onto the cardboard box holding the shotgun shells. He shaped the coke into messy lines with the edge of his pinkie finger and sent the first one up his nose. Vincent went next, then Joe and Alton. I sat there and listened to them until the vial was empty.
The satellite phone on the dashboard rang and vibrated. Nobody answered it; we just let it ring. We all knew it was Marcus, letting us know exactly what time it was and exactly how long we had before the point of no return. If there was a problem of any kind, we could’ve picked up the phone right then and told him. If we were runn
ing late, he’d adjust the timetable. When the phone stopped ringing, we knew exactly how long we had.
We had two minutes.
Alton started the engine and pulled out. The bank was less than a quarter mile away. After Angela and I had cased the joint, we’d decided to break in through the secure elevator. Thirty seconds later, our old panel van rolled down the steep incline into the skyscraper’s underground parking garage. The guy at the gate waved us through without a second thought. Like I said, window cleaners always get a pass.
We turned into the lowest of the two subbasement parking levels and pulled into a dark slot not fifty yards away from the secure elevator. We turned off all the lights and inside the van it was very dark. Now we just had to wait for the first armored truck of the day to arrive. My tritium watch hands glowed an eerie blue.
One minute.
I’d done my research. This elevator was something of a specialty item. Since the vault was on the thirty-fifth floor, the bankers had no easy way of getting shipments of money up that far. The dedicated elevator was their solution. Instead of having armored cars park on the street and walk the cash through the lobby and up using the regular elevators that anybody could take, the deliveries would arrive down here and be sent up on this special dedicated two-point elevator. It was more than secure, of course. The shaft was loaded with motion detectors, so nobody could climb up, and it only stopped on this level and Thirty-five, which severely restricted access. The compartment itself had walls made of tempered steel and an emergency satellite phone that would connect automatically to the Royal Malaysian Police if the elevator ever stopped unexpectedly. The lift system had two high-tensile chromium cords, a magnetic safe lock and four emergency manual wall brakes so nobody could break in and get the money. And best of all, to get the thing to go, a bank manager at the top and an armored-car driver at the bottom had to look at each other over closed-circuit television and swipe their ID cards at exactly the same moment. Nobody other than the vault manager and the delivery team would ever see the inside of that lift. I’d seen the schematics. It was one of the most secure elevators in the world.
