Ghostman

by Roger Hobbs

  I took the elevator up to the top floor. The top floor had only one room, where a long hallway led to a single set of thick mahogany doors. The penthouse. I swiped my card and walked right in.

  The doors opened onto a Roman-style atrium. In the center was a still pool of water with a plaster sculpture of the goddess Juno rising out of it. The ceiling was held up with massive Doric columns, and the walls were covered in frescoes that evoked antiquity. The floors were inlaid black-and-white marble with more mahogany doors on either side. It was the sort of place you’d expect the Wolf to stay. Every detail was extravagant to the point of garishness. The gold leaf and plaster gave it an air of fast money and grotesque overindulgence.

  Behind the pool were two men in suits.

  They didn’t look like the Wolf’s other heavies. These men were neatly dressed, clean-cut and well manicured. Their suits were custom-fitted. They both wore plain, gold-rimmed glasses and didn’t seem surprised to see me. One stood nearer the statue with a black duffel bag on the floor in front of him. The other stood a few feet away holding a 9mm Beretta at his side and when I’d come through the door he’d raised his gun and taken a bead on my head.

  “I’m here to make a trade,” I said.

  58

  KUALA LUMPUR

  Liam Harrison wasn’t dead.

  I merely assumed he was. At the time, I thought this was a pretty reasonable assumption. There aren’t a whole lot of bulletproof vests that can withstand a .44 Magnum round at point-blank range. Hell, even if I’d known he was wearing a bulletproof vest, I still would have assumed he was dead. That amount of force carried by that bullet should have broken his ribs and collapsed his lungs. He should’ve been dead twice over.

  He should have been.

  I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gone over that moment in my head. Sometimes, when I’m up at night, the scene plays on repeat, over and over again. I feel like there’s still a part of me lying on the floor of that armored truck with two nostrils full of coke and a trio of hollow points in my chest. For years now I’ve been thinking about that moment. Maybe if I’d been paying better attention, I might have saved myself a lot of trouble and pain. If only I’d been more careful, I could have saved Joe Landis’s life. I could have saved Jack Delton’s.

  Over the years I’ve tried to justify the mistake to myself. I had no idea that Liam Harrison had survived, after all. How was I supposed to know that he’d lived through our encounter and was then able to figure us out? But after a while, I came to see it from Marcus’s perspective. Marcus couldn’t afford to tolerate failure. On a heist, even the slightest mistake can have consequences beyond the wildest imagination. If he ever saw me again, he’d have to kill me. It was the only way the system worked.

  That one simple action—showing my fake passport to a police informant—ruined the Asian Exchange Job. After all my worries, the heist didn’t go bad because Marcus set me up. It didn’t go bad because we planned something wrong. It didn’t go bad because we bit off more than we could chew. No. It went bad because of a bullet-resistant vest, a fake passport and a bag of soy crisps.

  I slammed the door to my scatter and locked it.

  A guy’s not supposed to return to his scatter after a heist except under extreme circumstances. These qualified in spades. After our bloody breakout in the armored truck, everybody in the city would be looking for us. The small room behind the laundry was the only place I knew where I could lie low for a few hours. I knew damn well I couldn’t stay there. The police have ways of figuring that shit out. I put the chain on the door and my brain went into high gear. New plan. Right now.

  I hadn’t left myself much in the scatter. The soap and razor I’d used were still there, of course, but I’d gotten rid of everything else, like my spare clothes and petty belongings. I went to the bedroom, turned on the radio and switched it over to the local news broadcast. I put the police scanner next to the radio and turned it on as well. I wanted to hear both broadcasts at the same time. I needed to know everything the police knew at the moment they learned it.

  The rest of the getaway was completely shot. If the police knew about Jack Delton, they must have figured out who came in with him through customs. They’d get warrants for them too. All of our aliases were burned, not just mine. Police would be waiting for us at every point of egress—airports, train stations, harbors, highways. If they knew who we were, they’d be waiting for sure. Going to the airport was a deathtrap now. We wouldn’t even make it to the gate before security would take us down. Our only shot coming out of that bank was to break up and take our chances separately.

  This would mean I’d never see Angela again, but I didn’t have time to think about that. The last time I ever saw her was in the back of that armored truck.

  First, I needed to get the hell out of these clothes. Getting rid of the guard uniform wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t keep anything that had gone into that bank. The costume wasn’t the half of it, either. My face was on the security cameras, and in a few hours those images would be on every newscast in the country. I had to find a way to get rid of everything that could tie me to the heist, from the passports to the bulletproof vest. Do you know how hard that is? Ballistic Kevlar is part of a class of synthetic fibers that don’t ever burn. Hell, unless you’ve got an industrial furnace, they don’t even melt.

  Second, I had to change my appearance. There was no way I could get out of the country looking anything remotely like the person who’d robbed that bank. I needed to change into someone else now, which would be harder than it sounds. I had already thrown away all my spare clothes and I couldn’t very well go out and walk down to the store to buy new ones. The time for that sort of thing had long passed. I had to get some new duds without spending a minute longer out of this apartment than I had to.

  Third, I needed my getaway pack. Like I said, I never do a job without a getaway pack. In this case, my closest one was a half-mile away in an alley on the far side of an ikan bakar fish joint in the Pasar Seni marketplace. Inside was ten thousand dollars, twenty thousand ringgit, a 9mm handgun, two prepaid cell phones, two credit cards, a clean driver’s license and a Colombian passport with the name Manuel Sardi on it. I brainstormed approach patterns, search strategies, exit paths and patrol routes. Once I picked up that getaway pack, there could be no room for error. I had to stow and go.

  I pulled the window open and stripped.

  I chucked everything but my undershirt and pants. I tossed the clothing out the window and it fell two stories down into the gutter. I figured this was far more effective than just throwing it in the trash. In this part of town some street-dweller would claim those clothes in a matter of hours. If the police managed to find this place, the incriminating clothes wouldn’t be sitting there in the trash can waiting for them. I winced as I unzipped the bullet-resistant vest. Good god that shit stung.

  I touched the three spots over my ribs where I’d been shot. Three big black bruises were forming. It was a miracle that none of the bones were broken. I checked to make sure that I wasn’t bleeding, then shrugged off the rest of the vest and threw it on the bed. Kevlar may stop a bullet and put out a fire, but unless it’s been treated with silica, it won’t stop a knife. I pulled out the ceramic trauma plates and threw them out the window, then took a kitchen knife to the Kevlar and carved the vest up into a half dozen little pieces. When I was done the thing looked like somebody’d shredded a backpack. I tossed the big chunks out the window and flushed the little ones down the toilet.

  I went to the sink and put my head under the spout. I scrubbed and scrubbed until the makeup and one-day hair dye I’d used for the job ran in thick lines down the drain. Once I was done, I took the same knife to my hair. I didn’t have time to do it right. I just bunched it together at the back of my head and cut that part off with a few messy swipes. Once I had the hair down to a certain length, I soaped it up and shaved off whatever remained until I was completely bald. Some people have recognizable h
air. A shaved head throws that all off. I looked nothing like the kid who’d robbed that bank.

  The news on the radio and police scanner wasn’t good. Hsiu hadn’t even made it a hundred feet from the truck before they caught her. They hit her with tear gas and she couldn’t handle it. She crumpled up into a ball and didn’t move until the paramedics came. Alton Hill made it less than a block. He tried to hijack a car outside his scatter and took two bullets from a police officer. Vincent and Mancini managed to beat the dragnet, but the dirty passports did them in. They came up as known associates of Jack Delton when they went through security. They were both arrested before they got to the gate.

  There was nothing about Angela.

  I pulled the two safe-deposit box keys off the chain around my neck. I looked at them long and hard. Other members of the crew had already been caught. The police would surely notice the keys around their necks or in their pockets eventually and know to look for mine. Getting rid of them meant throwing away almost two million dollars, but I didn’t have a choice. That money was already gone. It was gone the moment those elevator doors opened downstairs.

  I flushed the keys down the toilet.

  I held a lighter to the end of Jack Delton’s passport and watched the cotton-polyester visa pages melt, shrivel and turn black. Less than an hour after the heist, Jack Delton was dead. Only the ghostman survived.

  I unlocked the door and left without looking back.

  I got about two blocks before I found a homeless guy. He was a thin man with pale skin and gaps in his teeth. I didn’t have to look close to see the track marks in his arms and jugular. Heroin. He was wearing a dirty tropical shirt with the name of some band on it and a pair of old black sneakers. I tossed him a wad of ringgit in exchange for both. The shoes and shirt didn’t fit right, but they’d do for a little while. And they got me to the fish market and my pack.

  I took the subway out. I got on the first train going in any direction, then got off two stops later and took a train going in the opposite direction. I ran the way Angela trained me to. I swapped my clothes for a few things from a secondhand shop and changed my appearance with a compact mirror while waiting for the monorail. Manuel Sardi and Jack Delton were entirely different human beings. Manuel didn’t speak a word of English and I liked it that way. The identity held up long enough for me to hire a taxi. I gave the driver a whole fistful of ringgit to drive me all the way to Port Dickson so I could get beyond the reach of the local law. From there I got on a bus to the city of Johor Bahru. I went to the port there and bought a boat with cash so I could cross the Johor Strait into Singapore. I scuttled the boat on the other side and went to the airport, where I bought a one-way coach-class ticket on the first flight to Bogotá, Colombia. After that, I did what I do best—I dropped off the grid.

  I traveled around the world without ever staying in the same place for more than six months. I became a true ghost, because I knew that if Marcus ever found me, I wouldn’t just take the blame for my own mistakes, I’d also take the blame for Angela’s. After all, we were the lucky two who’d walked away. Some day we’d all have to pay our debts.

  I tried for a few months to get ahold of Angela, but I should have known better. Trying to catch a ghostman is like trying to catch smoke. I’d spend days waiting to see a message from her pop up in one of my anonymous e-mail in-boxes. None ever came.

  To be honest, I don’t even know if she’s still alive.

  She was always the smarter one. If she wanted to disappear forever, I knew there was nothing I could do to stop her. Over the next five years, there were times when I’d spend whole days walking through the streets of whatever town I was in, just trying to see her face. I’d see her everywhere, because she could be anyone. It felt like she was watching me. It felt like if only I were smart enough, I could walk outside on any given day and see her waiting there for me with a cigarette and a crooked smile.

  Then, five years later and two days ago, Marcus woke me up with an e-mail.

  59

  ATLANTIC CITY

  The suite door closed behind me of its own momentum. I moved cautiously toward the man with the Beretta. I had my hands up to show I didn’t want him to shoot me, but then slowly slid the Uzi out from its hiding place and pointed it right back at him. He had the drop on me, but he let me take out the gun anyway. Neither of us wanted to turn this exchange into a firefight.

  The Wolf had tried and tried again to get the better of me, and he’d failed every time. If he were smart, he would have told his men to try to take this easy. That seemed to be the case. The guy with the gun didn’t look nervous. He had an empty, dispassionate expression that suggested he’d done things like this before. Even the Wolf couldn’t weasel his way out of a shooting in a casino penthouse. As soon as either one of us fired a bullet, not one of the three of us would get out of that room alive. The police would respond, fast and furious. So I figured that the Beretta guy didn’t intend on firing his weapon unless I did. I kept the Uzi up and steady as I sidestepped around the statue.

  “Who are you?” the guy said.

  He must have seen the security-camera picture of me going around on the local news, but I looked different now and that must have tripped him up. I’m sure he’d get the picture. There can only be so many men carrying $1.2 million around in a Kevlar sack, and with an Uzi in his face he’d be a quick learner.

  “I’m the ghostman.” I said. “Where’s the Wolf?”

  “Mr. Turner didn’t wish to be present for this transaction,” the man with the duffel said. “He wishes to express the sentiment that if he ever sees your face again, he will most likely put a bullet through your brain.”

  I nodded and didn’t say anything. I kept moving toward the man with the duffel bag. I stopped once I had moved far enough around to place the statue between me and the gunman. He shifted slightly to get me back into his shot frame, but he didn’t go very far. I wanted to have some cover, in case of the worst.

  I let the federal payload down from my shoulder. It hit the marble with a thud. Once it was down, I gripped the Uzi with both hands and trained it on the guy with the Beretta.

  The man with the duffel looked at me, then at the bag at my feet. He said, “Is that what you’ve promised?”

  “I’d show you, but opening up the bag might trigger the ink packs,” I said. “The bag’s lined with lead to block the GPS.”

  “I can verify the money,” he told me. “We’ve got a scanner.”

  He retrieved a large electronic device roughly the shape of a sticker-tape gun from a nearby drawer. The top was a blue touchscreen, and at the end was a laser like the front of a TV remote.

  I pushed the money over to him with my foot.

  The guy opened the lead-lined bag just enough to get the head of the device past the lead lining and waited for a few moments. The device made a pleasant ringing sound and the man put the device away.

  He nodded. “That’s it.”

  “Did you bring what was promised to me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Show it to me.”

  He stooped down and unzipped the black bag at his feet. He tilted the bag on its side so I could make out the pile of hundred-dollar bills inside. They were the old-style hundreds too. These bills had the large oval image of Benjamin Franklin on the front but no holographic security strip down the center. The straps were held together with rubber bands and paper clips instead of paper, so I knew they weren’t fresh from a bank. They’d be perfect for making a getaway, but I needed to be sure they were clean first.

  “Take out a strap third from the top,” I said.

  The man with the duffel gave me a look, then complied. He moved the top stacks aside, took a strap from the center of the bag and held it up for me to see the hundred-dollar bills on the top and bottom. He flipped through the strap so I could see the ink on every bill. This proved that the money pack wasn’t packed with blank filler paper. All fifteen ten-grand straps were hundreds.


  “Take off the rubber band,” I said. “Fan out the bills. Let me take a closer look.”

  The man with the duffel stripped off the rubber band holding the cash together and fanned out the money between his palms. He made sure I could see the markings on each bill in the pile. All hundreds. I could see the serial numbers printed to the side of the portrait. They had different letter headings, which means they were from different Federal Reserve branches. Nonconsecutive. I could even make out the faint ghost of the watermark to the far right. I nodded. The money was okay.

  “Zip it up,” I said. “Slide it over to me with your foot.”

  The man zipped up the money. He picked up the duffel bag and started to carry it over, but I stopped him.

  “With your foot,” I said.

  He stopped and put the bag down. The man with the Beretta moved slowly to the right until he was just at the edge of my peripheral vision. I couldn’t pay attention to both of them at once, so I took a step back to get a wider view. I kept the gun pointed at the man with the Beretta, but the other guy was now too close. I thought for a moment that things might get violent, but then the man with the money slid the bag along the marble until it stopped short next to my shoes.

  “Another thing,” I said. “I’ve got something that belongs to the Wolf in the trunk of my car. It’s the Bentley on the fourth floor of the parking garage. You should check it out when you get a chance.”

  I very slowly got down on my haunches and picked up the duffel bag with my free hand. The man with the Beretta lowered his gun. I kicked the federal payload over and started backing away carefully toward the door. When I felt the handle against my back, I eased the door open behind me. A second later I was gone. Everything had gone well. It was a clean deal.

  Except for the open cell phone line to Rebecca Blacker in my breast pocket.