“Oh, this is not good,” Swonger said.
“That doesn’t look like a Truck.”
“That Truck’s sister, Deja.” Swonger had spoken respectfully of Truck; now he sounded plain scared. “What’s she doing here? Remember what I said about Truck? She’s worse. Way worse. Don’t do nothing stupid.”
“Well, come on, then. I ain’t got all day,” Deja said as though they’d been keeping her waiting.
They both eased out of the car.
“Heya, Deja. Where’s Truck and Terry?” Swonger asked. “Thought we was meeting them.”
Deja Noble adjusted her oversized sunglasses. “Couldn’t make it. But when I heard this long-lost friend of our family, Gavin Swonger, wanted a meeting with my big brother? Well, that just warmed my damn heart. Couldn’t pass up a chance to reminisce, could I? How you been, Swong?”
“All right, I reckon—”
“Shut up,” Deja snapped. “Damn, you are too dumb for this world. Now . . . I know you’re strapped. So go ahead and ease it out, throw it there on the ground.”
Swonger started to protest.
“Boy, I’m not going to tell you again.” Deja lifted her tank top to reveal a pistol grip. “I am a loving person, but bullets misanthropic, know what I mean?”
Swonger tossed his gun at Deja’s feet.
“Your turn,” she said to Gibson.
“I’m not carrying.”
“That a fact?”
Gibson lifted his shirt and turned slowly in a circle.
Deja looked at him pityingly. “Show up for a meeting, you ain’t even strapped? Like I’m Sears or some shit? You disrespecting me?”
Gibson felt himself being sized up. She looked from him to Swonger and back again, trying to make up her mind about something.
“You setting my brother up, Swonger?” she said. “Is that what this is?”
“What? No!”
Even Gibson didn’t believe him. Deja took a step forward and drew her gun.
“There’s no need for all that,” Swonger said.
“Oh, there’s need when small-time white-trash car thieves who knew my brother once in stir call up out of the blue, looking to make a deal for a major piece of hardware. And I’m not supposed to wonder what’s what? Wonder if maybe my brother’s trusting nature isn’t being taken advantage of?”
“It ain’t even like that. This is on the level. He needs it.” Swonger pointed at Gibson.
“Oh, and I’m supposed to believe you two are friends?”
“Why not?”
“One thing, he’s got all his teeth.”
“We’re not friends. Believe me,” Gibson said.
“I got most of my teeth,” Swonger said, hung up on the wrong part of the conversation.
“So, what . . . ? You just business associates?” she asked. “That what I’m supposed to believe? Please. Tell me a bedtime story. Tell me how you got rolled up stealing cars again and cut a deal to serve up the Nobles to save your narrow ass. And after what my brother did for you . . .” There was cold fury in her voice as she strode forward and pressed the muzzle to Swonger’s forehead like the cold finger of God, forcing him to his knees.
She’s going to kill him and I’m next. Gibson believed it beyond a doubt until he saw her staring at him, calculation and purpose in her eyes.
“You police?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know this fool?”
“Hammond Birk.”
“Judge that lost his mind?”
“That’s the one. I owe him.”
“Owe him how?”
“That’s private between him and me.”
“That a fact? And what’s that got to do with Swonger here?”
Gibson shrugged. “Believe me, I’ve been asking myself the same question. I mean, you ever try and get rid of him? Can’t be done.”
“Hey!” Swonger said.
Deja’s piercing black eyes narrowed for a moment before she burst out with a laugh. “Well, that’s the damn truth.”
“Hey!”
Deja let the hammer down and stepped back. “Oh, don’t be sore, Swong. Had to make sure. Go on and get up out the grass.”
“I got my teeth,” Swonger muttered to himself. He stood and dusted himself off, pale and shaken.
Deja slapped the side of the van three times, and a man in camos emerged from the woods with a scoped hunting rifle. Pointed at the ground. Gibson took that as a good sign. The man strolled over and leaned against the van as if he’d just happened along and was taking a break before continuing his hike.
“Terry,” Swonger said.
Terry nodded but didn’t answer.
“So are we okay to do some business?” Gibson asked. “Or are you going to scare the piss out of Swonger some more?”
“Is he for real?” Deja asked Swonger.
Swonger shrugged. “Can’t do nothing with him.”
She gave Gibson another look. “Truth is, ordinarily we don’t have time for this kind of thing, you understand.”
“Swonger said the Nobles were the people to talk to.”
“Well, I appreciate good word of mouth, but our business model is pretty straightforward. We like it like that. And your needs are kind of specialized. A goddamn cell-phone interceptor? You know what a Stingray costs?”
“About three hundred thousand,” he said. “Give or take.”
“Give or take if you’re law enforcement, which we just established you ain’t. Gonna cost you a half mil on the street, easy.”
“That’s what I figured. We don’t have that much.”
“That’s all right. I don’t have one to sell you.”
“And yet here you are.”
“Well, these are what you might call special circumstances.”
“Special how?”
“An opportunity has presented itself to my family. Might be, we can help each other. You were in the military? Some kind of computer expert?”
“Something like that.” Gibson glared at Swonger, who looked guiltily away.
“I don’t have a Stingray, but I know who does. Owners aren’t going to sell it to you, but you might be able to liberate it. If you’re willing to cross the line.”
“What line?”
“I need a little something; you need a little something. Your lucky day because so happens they’re in the same place. Should be a cakewalk if you’re as good as Swong says.”
“What line?”
Deja slapped the side of the van three more times. After a moment, a second man stepped out of the far side of the clearing, also carrying a rifle. He moseyed toward them. Gibson wondered how many more guns Deja Noble had pointed at them.
“Starting to get hot,” she said. “Let’s go somewhere cooler and cut it up.”
“What line?” Gibson asked for the third time.
He didn’t like the answer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
12:57 a.m.
Three minutes until he crossed Deja Noble’s line.
It had been a hectic thirty-six hours prepping her little job. That’s what Deja called it anyway. Easy enough for her to say from the sidelines, but there was nothing little about the prison time they’d face if caught.
Gibson started the van and reached for his phone to send Swonger an angry text for running behind schedule. It had been tough to sell Deja Noble on his plan. She favored a far less subtle approach, but he’d made it clear that violence was not an option. No one would pay for his choices but him. Deja agreed and made it clear that any foul-ups would be on him, so a late start did not augur well.
As if on cue, Swonger roared to a stop in a black 2013 Mustang Boss 302 Laguna Seca, pelting the side of the van with gravel. The love Swonger had for that car was not wholly platonic, and he was already mourning her loss after tonight. The ex-con looked a full three inches taller in the driver’s seat—truly a case of the car making the man.
Swonger grinned, a little too amped up for Gibson’s liking,
and gave a thumbs-up that meant Lea was in position and the alarms and cameras were down.
Most modern security was networked to off-site servers that stored camera footage and other data. A good system, in theory, but one that rendered it vulnerable to direct, simple hacks. Gibson had found the junction/relay box a quarter mile up the road. A drab, easy-to-overlook metal box. Tens of thousands like it spread along roadways throughout Virginia, millions across the country. Those boxes cobbled together the digital infrastructure of the country, yet few had security beyond a simple pin-tumbler lock. It had taken Swonger less than a minute to pick it.
Security tended to be a reactive profession, and basic principles predicted that there was only ever enough to prevent the last type of intrusion, not the next. Most businesses learned the hard way again and again and again. American banks, for example, had excellent security precisely because they had been targets ever since the first bank robbery in the 1860s. By contrast, the average Internet-facing business was vulnerable because they didn’t think of themselves as potential victims. At least not until a hacker splashed their customers’ credit-card data across the web. A state-police motor-pool depot in the middle of rural Virginia fell into the latter category. It, too, had a false sense of safety derived from its low profile. Since no one had ever thought to rob it before, it got by with a few fences, cameras, and rent-a-guards. It was sufficient because it always had been. Until suddenly it wasn’t.
For the thirty-six hours, Gibson and Lea had toggled the network connection at the junction box off and on at irregular intervals for a few minutes at a time. Long enough for the outage to be reported but brief enough that by the time diagnostics were run remotely, the systems were up and running again. By now, it would have been logged as an ongoing issue, but a low-priority one since the outages were short and intermittent. No doubt, it lay near the bottom of the to-do list of some overworked technician. Tonight’s outage would be interpreted as yet another inconvenient outage. It would be called in—again—but security wouldn’t panic.
Gibson checked his phone. Time to go. He slipped off his latex gloves. He’d put them back on when he was through the security checkpoint. He dried his sweating palms on his shirt. He’d broken into a lot of places in his life but always from the relative safety of a computer. It was a whole other thing to drive up to the front gate, where an armed guard got a good look at your face. Unfortunately, though, this thing couldn’t be done remotely. Time to get your hands dirty, he thought, and put those same hands carefully back on the steering wheel at ten and two. He would wipe the van down once they were inside the vehicle storage facility, but he didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Thanks to his childhood indiscretions, the Virginia State Police were already intimately familiar with his fingerprints.
Swonger pulled out behind him, and together the two vehicles crested a small rise. Up ahead Gibson saw it: the Virginia State motor pool, which serviced and maintained police vehicles from across the state. Apart from the chain-link fence and barbed wire, it looked no different from your average auto dealer: At the center stood an operations building that was 90 percent maintenance garage but also housed offices and a waiting area. Hundreds of vehicles fanned out across the two-acre lot. Row after row of white-and-blue Dodge Chargers and Ford Interceptors—the backbone of the force. Mobile command posts. Heavily armored BearCats and other specialized SWAT vehicles. A fleet of pickup trucks. In addition, out of sight on the far side of the garage, the facility housed an impound lot for seized vehicles. Inside of which lay Deja Noble’s prize and the price for her support. The line she needed Gibson to cross.
They rolled toward the front gate.
“Are you really going to do this?” he muttered to himself. How many laws was he about to break? Turn around. Turn around now, call it off, go home. But his inner voice sounded distant, no real conviction behind it, and he pushed his doubts away. He would do it for the judge. And if he didn’t do it, then Deja Noble would, and then people would get hurt, or worse. On some level, he recognized it as hollow rationalization. Nicole’s words came back to him from their fight at the house: Were you always this person? He wasn’t as sure of the answer to that as he once had been.
They’d chosen the midnight to eight a.m. shift because of the skeleton crew. A team of two security guards rotated between the front gate and the main building every two hours. Vehicles came and went at odd hours, so the depot never technically closed. The overnight mechanic who handled off-hours intakes would be asleep on a cot in the garage.
Gibson pulled up at the gate and watched Bill Michaels rouse himself from his chair, find his clipboard and hat, and slide open the door to his hut. Having done his homework, Gibson knew quite a bit about the man. Michaels had graduated from Norfolk State with a degree in criminal justice. He was an ex-cop and a deacon at the First Baptist Church in Amherst, Virginia, and had recently purchased a used Sea Ray pleasure boat. Gibson knew Michaels’s wife’s and children’s names. He had learned enough about Michaels that Deja Noble’s plan to take the depot at gunpoint had been a nonstarter for him. There were lines he would cross and consequences he would bear, but putting Bill Michaels in harm’s way wasn’t ever going to be one of them.
Deja had sneeringly called him soft. Actually, that was the Sunday-night version of what she’d called him, but Gibson had insisted on no guns. The current plan, Gibson’s plan—if it worked—would see them in and out with no one the wiser. The depot wouldn’t even know a crime had been committed. That part had appealed to Deja, and she’d grudgingly agreed to let him do it his way, but with one parting caveat.
If you go in there unarmed, and they roll you up, that’s on you. That’s your time to do. Now, you start making out like we know each other to reduce your time, and I’ll be sure to introduce you to some folks inside who really know me. You hear?
He heard.
Bill Michaels slid open the glass door of his hut and offered an amiable smile. He took Gibson’s paperwork and scanned the name off the Robert Quine ID.
“Heya, Robert,” he said, flipping through the yellow sheets of Gibson’s counterfeit paperwork, making notes on his clipboard as he went.
Deja swore it would hold up, but Bill Michaels was no rent-a-guard with a GED. He was ex-Bureau of Criminal Investigation with numerous commendations and had cashed out on a disability retirement because of chronic back problems. He’d been a good investigator, and a bad back wouldn’t have dulled his instincts. In truth, this was the riskiest moment of the whole job. The depot had only one layer of security with the cameras disabled. They should have no problem once Michaels waved them through.
“How’s the back?” Gibson asked.
“Manageable. Started a yoga class.”
“Yoga?”
“Yeah, it’s helping, I think. Me and fifteen girls my daughter’s age. They think I’m adorable.” Michaels sighed. “I may be the class mascot. But you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Michaels’s brow furrowed, and he started flipping back and forth between pages. Gibson’s heart climbed his throat as if it wanted to get a better look.
“Problem?”
“These forms are out of date. We switched over in January.”
“Sorry.”
Michaels shook him off. “You’re in good company. Half the stations are still on last year’s.” Michaels crossed out a box and made a correction. “We sent three memos, but you know cops, never throw away a damn thing. Pain in my ass.”
“I’ll pass it along,” Gibson said.
“Appreciate it. So, you dropping this old tub off?” Michaels slapped the side of the van.
“Yeah, it’s way past overdue. Afraid it was going to die on me on the way over.”
“Careful.” Bill winked. “Still gotta make it over to intake. Aldo’ll be pissed if you wake him up to get out the pickup to drag it the last hundred yards.”
Gibson chuckled agreeably—good old Aldo—and put a finger to his lips. The guard tore off two pink
copies and handed the yellow originals back to Gibson.
“Who’s that?” Bill asked, pointing to Swonger’s car with his pen in between checking boxes on his clipboard.
“My ride back.”
“Good man. You better be buying his drinks. Sign here.” Michaels held the clipboard up for him to initial. “You know where you’re going?”
“Like I live here.”
“I heard that,” the guard said and took out his phone. “All right, last thing. I gotta take your picture.”
“Really?” That wasn’t standard.
“Damn security keeps crapping out, so I’m keeping a photo log of everyone coming in until they get around to fixing it.”
Damn, damn, damn. Normally you could count on lowest-common-denominator thinking, but leave it to good old Bill Michaels to blow the curve. Gibson had shut off the security, and Michaels had found a sensible, outside-the-box solution. Man deserved another commendation. Unfortunately, Gibson couldn’t see a way around it.
“Yeah, whatever,” he managed through a forced smile.
Michaels stepped back, lined up his camera, and took a photograph. “All right, see you in a few.”
“Few as I can manage.”
The gate swung up, and Gibson pulled forward to wait for Swonger to be checked through. He slipped his gloves back on while watching in the rearview. He wasn’t sold on Swonger’s ability to play any part but his own, but Swonger talked his way through and the gate went up.
They were in.
If everything else went as smoothly, they’d be on their way in twenty minutes. They started toward the intake lot at the back of the garage, but once they passed beyond Bill Michaels’s line of sight, they killed their lights and arced instead toward the impound lot. Based on Deja Noble’s map, the first vehicle would be in spot 562. Gibson breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the 2013 black Mustang that was the identical twin of the one Swonger was driving.
Poisonfeather (The Gibson Vaughn Series Book 2) Page 19
