Ghostman

by Roger Hobbs

  Lakes looked down at the gun and didn’t say a word.

  “You can speak, you know,” I said. “I’m not about to kill you without hearing your side of it. As a matter of fact, now that I know you’re working for the other team, I think we’ll have a stronger relationship. I have good reasons for keeping you alive. Of course, I also have good reasons to keep this gun locked and cocked.”

  Lakes still didn’t say anything.

  “Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo’?”

  Lakes shook his head and whispered, “Is that Latin?”

  “Yeah, it’s Latin.”

  “I’ve never heard it before.”

  “Do you want to know what it means?”

  Lakes stared back at the pile of napkins and said, “I’m not sure if I do.”

  “You do. Believe me, you do.”

  “Okay. What does it mean?”

  “It means a lot of things. I first encountered the phrase when I was a kid, in fact. Back then I used to read everything I could get my hands on. Every time a new book popped up on the rack at the supermarket, I’d buy it, and if I couldn’t afford it I’d read as much as I could right there in the checkout line. I lived in the library. I’d get in people’s way sometimes, because I always had my head down. But even though I read so much, I never really found a book I liked. I found most books okay—they’d be thrilling, or romantic, or scary, or true, but none of them really seemed to satisfy me somehow. There was always something missing. So I kept on. I did the literary stuff. I read Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. The Name of the Rose. They didn’t really move me, though. Then one day, somebody gave me a copy of The Aeneid. Do you know the story of The Aeneid?”

  He shook his head.

  “How about Troy? The Iliad and The Odyssey? Trojan horses and sea monsters and all that?”

  “Yeah, I know that stuff.”

  “The Aeneid is an epic poem about the founding of Rome. It’s sort of a sequel to The Iliad and The Odyssey. It follows a young man named Aeneas who escapes Troy after it falls to the invading Greek armies. With the remains of his people, he sets sail across the Mediterranean. He has adventures, falls in love, fights bad guys, experiences the supernatural. He did everything I liked to read about when I was a kid, and then some. I felt I was Aeneas. Like him, my real parents were out of the picture. Like him, I felt I was destined for something big. Like him, I was bored with an everyday life. And like him, I wasn’t a good guy. At least not in the traditional sense. Aeneas had to do bad things to get where he needed to go.”

  “You read Latin when you were a kid?”

  I shrugged. “Some kids collect model planes. I read Latin. It isn’t that hard to understand. I loved reading so much, plus I wanted to be Aeneas. But, you see, Aeneas knew his destiny, because a prophet had told him. I had no idea what would happen to me. Most days I felt like I wasn’t destined to be anything. I felt like I didn’t exist, except when I was reading that book. The only other time I felt more alive was the day I first bashed a man’s head in and robbed him in broad daylight.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I want you to understand why I’m doing this, and I want you to tell the Wolf too. Do you think you can remember that? Wrap your head around it?”

  Lakes didn’t say anything.

  “ ‘Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo,’ ” I said. “It’s a quote from the book. It’s also a personal motto. I remember reading it for the first time and sitting back and thinking, This is what I’ve been missing. That one line summed up everything I’d been feeling up until then. It made all of my anger and confusion and hopelessness go away. It made all my little problems make sense. I’ve been saying it to myself ever since as a reminder.”

  Lakes bit the side of his cheek. “You haven’t told me what it means.”

  “It means, ‘If you can’t reach heaven, raise hell.’ ”

  50

  Lakes placed his palms flat down on the table. He was sweating and when he withdrew them his hands left steamy prints behind on the laminate. When we first met he seemed a cool guy, but everything was different now. A gun pointed at your belly can do that. A bullet of sweat inched over the ridge of his forehead and fell down his cheek.

  I nudged the pistol to the left a little, indicating that he should stand up. He slid out of the booth with careful, practiced ease. I kept the gun on him the whole way. If he was going to make a move, he’d try it now. He was standing, I was sitting and the gun was well within his reach. If he was serious about getting away, he’d grab for it. A braver man would have. He didn’t. He stood at the end of the booth with a nervous expression.

  “Pay for your meal,” I said. “Leave a nice tip.”

  Lakes pulled out a wad of cash. He flipped out a few twenties and laid them next to his plate. His face was turning red. I could only imagine the sort of things going through his mind.

  I picked up the bag of clothes he’d brought me with one hand and kept the gun pointed at him with the other. I laid the new suit jacket across my right arm, hiding the gun from sight. Lakes backed up a step to let me get out.

  I eased up, careful to avoid giving him an opening. I wagged the gun toward the door. “Walk,” I said.

  The line cook gave us another suspicious look, but I ignored him. All sorts of things happen at a diner. For all this guy knew, I was just walking my tired friend home for the night. Suspicious looks don’t mean squat. I held the door open for Lakes and the bell chimed. He slipped through without any sudden movements.

  Once we were outside, he said, “What are you going to do with me?”

  I prodded him. “Walk.”

  We went over to the Bentley in near total silence. There was a pawn shop across the road that still had its lights on. The storm had cut through the heat and the evening wind was cool, but Lakes was sweating through his expensive silk suit anyway.

  “He’s going to kill us both,” he said.

  “I’ve been expecting Marcus to kill me for years.”

  “No. The Wolf’s going to kill us.”

  “You, maybe. I made a deal. I’m going to trade him the money from the casino heist for a significant cut of the profits.”

  “He made a deal?”

  “You didn’t think I’d be walking away from this with nothing, did you?”

  “I thought you worked for Marcus,” Lakes said.

  “I don’t work for anyone.”

  Lakes shook his head. “Look, the Wolf just doesn’t make deals. He’s going to kill you. If you go in empty-handed, he’ll torture you until you tell him where the money is. He’ll start in on you with a can of bear spray and a lighter.”

  “I’m not going in empty-handed,” I said. “I’ve got two guns now.”

  “You’ll never pull it off.”

  “I’m not stupid. I know he’ll try to cheat me.”

  “If you let me go, I can mislead him,” Lakes said. “I can make sure you get away.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  I popped open the trunk to the Bentley. The inside was coated with a thick layer of heavy-duty trash bags which I’d attached to the interior walls with duct tape. Trash bags and duct tape are criminal staples. Any worthwhile crime involves them. In this case, they’d contain the smell. A body could fester in a trunk lined with trash bags for months before attracting attention.

  Lakes froze when he saw what was inside. Part of me expected him to make a run for it. Another part expected him to finally throw a punch or make a move for my gun. That’s what I would have done. But fear does strange things to people, I’ve learned. Even when they’re facing certain death, some guys just can’t fight back. It’s like they’re paralyzed. They just can’t do it. It was like that for Lakes right then. His breath stopped short and his feet were glued to the concrete.

  And I wasn’t even really trying to kill Lakes. Hell, I didn’t even want to hurt him. I jus
t wanted to put the scare on him. He’d spend a few sweaty hours in the trunk terrified to death before someone would find him. Sure, he’d sold me out to the Wolf, but I never would have got this far without his help. Plus, murder isn’t my thing. I don’t kill unless I have to. Rule number one.

  “Please,” Lakes said. “I’ll do anything.”

  “I thought you’d say that,” I said. “And there is one more thing I want you to do.”

  I grabbed Lakes by the neck and gave him a head jog against the bumper. The slam opened up the skin on his forehead. He recoiled from the blow, stunned. Any harder and it would have put him out. I took him by the collar and the belt and tossed him headfirst into the trunk of the Bentley. After a blow like that, he practically helped me do it. He was a big guy, but I made it work. I let his arms flop down around by his head. He rocked back and forth and clutched his face. He was as soft as butter.

  I slammed the trunk and looked at my watch. Quarter to 7 p.m.

  Eleven hours to go.

  51

  KUALA LUMPUR

  The police helicopter came in from the east and made a low pass overhead, sounding like low churning thunder as it clipped by us. I watched it through the tinted-glass window until it was low against the morning sun. It was a cut-down version of the Eurocopter Twin Squirrel, painted with bright markings for better visibility. Two PGK snipers in black combat gear were seated over the hang bar. They looked back at me through binoculars equipped with night-vision, which seemed surreal in the mid-morning light and heat, but made a twisted sort of sense. If they were to take the bank back by force, they’d cut the lights and gas us first, then go in with night-vision and take us down blind.

  The chopper hovered outside the window for a moment before accelerating forward again. It circled the building eight times before it flew off and was immediately replaced by another identical helicopter. I noted the numbers on the tail. The Royal Malaysian Police had only six helicopters in the whole country, and they’d sent out the two newest ones just for us.

  The bank itself was eerily quiet. We’d moved the hostages into a back room behind the offices and shot them up with enough tranquilizer to keep them asleep for a few hours. The only sounds were the high hiss of the thermal lance and the endless churning of the helicopter blades. I looked out the window. Thirty-five stories down, the police had established a three-block perimeter with Unimog police trucks and yellow wooden barriers. Beyond that, all of downtown was blocked up with bumper-to-bumper traffic.

  We’d been in the bank for forty-seven minutes.

  The reason for our presence, of course, was directly behind me through two double-locking, teller-controlled doors and a sheet of bullet-resistant Plexiglas. We had yet to open the two-ton, triple-custody vault. Joe had been trying to spring the damn thing for three-quarters of an hour and only now was getting close. Of course, vaults require serious prowess. Even the best safecrackers in the world try to avoid them. But as fast as Joe worked, we all wished he’d go just a little bit faster. While he drilled, the police force outside grew stronger and stronger, and all we could do was watch.

  We’d all been expecting this and taken a lot of precautions. We knew the cops would get involved eventually. Nobody spends nearly an hour robbing a bank without that happening. If we’d been lucky, right now there would have been only a couple of squad cars outside and a few dozen armed officers in the lobby. Instead we had helicopters flying overhead and an army of PGK elite officers setting up a barricade around the building. It was just a game of chance, I guess.

  The sound of drilling filled the air. I won’t pretend I can crack a safe, but I know how it works. In order to open this kind of vault, three different codes need to be entered into three different dials at a particular time. Each code was three units long, with numbers between zero and eighty. That means the master-vault code consisted of nine numbers between zero and eighty entered in a particular order at a particular time. That’s a hundred trillion possible combinations right there. If someone were to try them all by hand, entering one number every five seconds, it would take one hundred billion years to guess the combination. The universe is only a little under fourteen billion years old.

  Joe Landis did it in forty-eight minutes.

  Joe Landis used a thermal lance, a fiber-optic scope and a black-box listening device. The lance was a six-foot pole attached to a canister of pure oxygen that would burn on one end at eight thousand degrees Celsius. He used that to drill a very small hole through the lock. The fiber-optic cable went through the hole, once it cooled down a little, so he could see the lock’s inner workings. The black box allowed him to hear the gears with superhuman precision and detect the slightest click of the drive cam falling into place. With these tools, Joe could look at each dial, see the open notches on each wheel and line them up. After that he worked backward to deduce the combinations. Of course there were ghost notches, phantom clicks and panic codes he had to watch out for, but Joe knew how to work around those. Once he figured out the code, he had to set the vault’s internal clock forward so it would open less than half an hour after the code was entered, and he did it with ease. He was the best I’d ever seen.

  And then music came to my ears: “Guys, we’re in.”

  That’s all Joe had to say to get us to come running. I watched as he entered the codes, his brow covered in sweat but his hands steady. He twisted one dial back and forth and back, then moved on to the next, then the next. As he put in the very last code, there was a click. He gave the lever a spin and the door slowly cracked open.

  Jackpot.

  The vault room was the size of an office and piled thigh-high with money. Purple ringgit, red yuan, teal baht, blue rupiah, orange riel, green dong, gray kip—a rainbow of currency. Vault rooms themselves, though, are always a little disappointing. Once the shock of seeing all the money wears off, the cash room is just another high-security box.

  We wasted no time—we’d calculated it would take five minutes to pack it all up, so it took us four and a half. We had to take precautions. After we opened the cash cages, we checked the money for booby traps. A few bricks of cash were loaded with hidden ink jets that would explode as soon as they got more than thirty feet outside the building. Bait money. Before we could pack the real stuff up, we had to take the ink packs out. Unlike the federal payload, however, these ink packs were big, dumb and easy to spot. They required us to flip through and examine all the bills first, which was an inconvenience but not a deterrent. It took us just a minute more.

  Then, after we’d removed all the hidden ink packs, we had to break the thin green straps holding the bills together and throw them away. The straps weren’t an immediate threat but could cause problems down the line. Each paper strap had the name of the bank on it, which would become evidence that the money was related to the theft later on. As soon as those straps were gone, though, nothing short of getting caught red-handed could tie that money back to this heist.

  I could hear the helicopter rumbling over us again. I wondered how long it would take before they sent a squad up the staircase with assault rifles and body armor. Hsiu’s hands were shaking as she filled a black garbage bag with hundred-ringgit banknotes.

  “Are we going to do anything about that?” she said.

  “About what?”

  “The helicopter,” she said.

  “Our first exit plan is shot,” I said. “We can’t leave through the roof anymore. Somebody get the wheelman on the radio.”

  Vincent came up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and handed me our black Motorola two-way radio unit. Of course the cops would be listening in on all the frequencies, but this particular radio was equipped with a 256-bit digital scrambler that made all the encrypted transmissions sound like white noise. The cops could be eavesdropping on our exact frequency and not even know we were there. I pressed the talk button. “Window washer?”

  “Here,” Alton said.

  “Our rooftop diversion is shot, so we’ve got t
o go to plan B. Get the armored car. We’ll have to drive away dressed as guards. If we do it right, nobody will even know it’s us.”

  “Could get hairy. It’s only a matter of time before the cops figure out we used the secure elevator. They could move on the garage any minute and turn this whole place into a shooting gallery.”

  “We’ll have to take that chance,” I said. “Have the truck ready to go as soon as the elevator doors open, got it?”

  “Hurry up.”

  “Roger,” I said. I tossed the radio back to Vincent.

  “What the hell do we do now?” Hsiu said.

  “Make a deposit,” Angela said.

  She produced the two gold keys Marcus had given each of us and held them out. They were keys to the safe-deposit boxes.

  Remember how the bank manager had offered Angela a private safe-deposit box outside the vault at a greatly discounted price? Months before we even started planning this heist, Marcus had rented twelve of the bank’s largest private safe-deposit boxes through one of his offshore corporations. The boxes were legally rented, with paperwork and everything, under various fake identities Marcus controlled. Right now those boxes were empty.

  We were here to fill them up.

  This is how it would work. Instead of taking the loot with us, we would stuff each of Marcus’s safety-deposit boxes to the brim with cash and then walk away. You see, even if a bank gets robbed, the bank can’t just open up all of their customers’ private safe-deposit boxes and see if anything was taken. Those boxes are private, and the bank has no right to know what’s in there. Unless ordered by a court of law, those boxes remain locked no matter what, even after a robbery. If we stuffed the money in there, we could each come back years later under new identities and collect the money completely legitimately. Twenty percent would go to Marcus, of course, but that didn’t matter. Just by thinking of this plan he’d made us all filthy rich.