The Loot

by Schaefer, Craig

  He lowered his sleeve and shot Charlie a faint, almost imperceptible nod. She returned the gesture and got back to work. Guests were still pouring in, milling in front of the velvet runners, and the job wasn’t going to wait for her to catch her breath. She rode out the rush of adrenaline with a smile on her face.

  Eventually the last guest was vetted and waved through. The lobby emptied out. Up a hallway paneled in vintage cherry-toned wood, Charlie heard the muffled sounds of a party in full swing.

  “And now?” she asked Beckett.

  “And now,” he said, “we stand our post.”

  They stood their post. Waiting, watching nothing in particular, the silence leaden. It felt like old times. Those endless, crawling hours on watch, knowing anything could happen but probably nothing would. Charlie shifted her weight from foot to foot, staying limber. She tried to keep her brain sharp by studying the cavernous lobby and taking in every detail. She memorized the number of light fixtures, clocked the angles on the geometric carpet design. Nothing useful, just mind games to stay awake.

  “Little Duck,” Beckett said.

  She looked back at him over her shoulder. He hooked his thumbs in his belt.

  “You did good,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “While you were taking invitations, I got a call from the detail out front. Guy left in a ride with Kentucky plates, lotta road dust, and dead bugs on the grille. You picked a winner.”

  “So what now?” she asked.

  “They pass the plate number over to Boston PD. Not our problem to deal with. If he’s dumb enough to stay in town, they’ll find him and pick him up. After the scare you put into him, he’s probably halfway back to Skeeter Hollow by now.”

  “Wasn’t trying to scare him,” Charlie said. “Just wanted to defuse the situation.”

  “All kinds of ways to scare a man. You made him take a look in the mirror, and he didn’t like what he saw. Situation defused.” Beckett cracked a thin smile. “This is going on your permanent record.”

  “Yeah? I passed the audition?”

  “Far as I’m concerned. And Jake gave me the final word. So assuming you don’t stumble over your own feet in the next”—he checked his watch—“hour and twenty minutes or thereabouts, you’ve got the job.”

  A gust of relief washed over her, like a stray cool breeze on a hot summer night. The money was okay—enough to live on, not enough to dig her father out of his hole—but the job meant more than that. She’d returned to the States adrift and without a foothold, feeling like a ghost. Now she had a place to be. A foundation to build on.

  “Thanks,” she told him. “This means a lot to me.”

  Beckett snorted and looked up the hall, toward the banquet-hall doors.

  “Thank me when you’ve pulled a twelve-hour shift working parking lot duty in hundred-degree heat. Our jobs aren’t all glamorous and action-packed escapades like this one.”

  Charlie waved a hand, taking in the empty lobby. “Well, that’s good. I don’t think I can handle this much excitement on a regular basis.”

  Voices up the hall drifted ahead of a slow stampede, the party breaking up at long last. This part was easy; all they had to do was clear the velvet ropes, stand to one side, smile, and keep their eyes open as the guests queued up and the valets scrambled to bring an endless convoy of cars around the building. The VIPs were being escorted out the way they’d come in, safe in the hands of veteran operatives and blissfully unaware that they were ever in danger.

  Good patrol, Charlie thought, feeling satisfied.

  “Yeah,” Beckett said into his sleeve. He wore a bulky plastic earpiece, the ivory white standing out against his dark skin, and a tight spiral cord ran down into the neck of his jacket. “Yeah, the kid checked out. Sure. Right behind you.”

  He looked to Charlie and nodded to the door. “C’mon. Jake rode back to Deep Country HQ with the client. He wants to see both of us, and the client wants a debriefing, so we’re going to meet him there and kill two birds with one stone. Standard client-meeting protocol: mouth shut, eyes open, let Jake do the talking. Easiest part of your entire night. The hard work is officially over.”

  Deep Country took up the top three floors of a modest office tower in the financial district. This late, security was a single tired-looking desk clerk who signed them in and unlocked the elevator. They met Jake up on twenty-two, where he was glad-handing the client.

  Sean Ellis might have been in his sixties, but it was hard to tell: His Ken-doll features had the rigid sheen of a Botox addict, and either his teeth were too-perfect dentures, or he gargled with whitening treatment. His hair was a wispy chestnut helmet, as motionless as his forehead. Charlie and Beckett trailed behind him, down sterile beige hallways lined with powder-blue carpet, on the way to his office.

  “Jake was telling me we had a problem out front,” Sean said. “He also said that problem went away quietly.”

  “Both true,” Beckett said.

  “Thanks for that. The nuts are bad enough; last thing I needed tonight was a big scene. I have to tell you, I almost went with Eriksson Security, but it’s looking like I made the right call.”

  “We won’t let you down,” Jake said. “And did I mention you’re getting a significant discount with our comprehensive protection package? Eriksson can’t beat that.”

  Sean’s office was roomy, one wall lined with built-in bookshelves and the other adorned with framed photography. Vintage mines, the backwoods of the Deep South, snapshots of history captured in black and white. A crisp map traced the spread of Deep Country’s holdings, each mine a blossom of scarlet on creamy white like droplets of blood. Wounds in the earth. On the opposite wall, a recessed display of glass shelves glittered with crystal, award after industry award lined up under tiny LED spotlights.

  “You were pretty darn comprehensive tonight,” Sean said. He pulled back his chair, plush black leather with a high, winged back. “Honestly, for the first time since this mess started, I actually feel safe.”

  He dropped into his chair with a sigh of relief.

  The chair went click.

  THIRTEEN

  Charlie held up one hand. “Don’t move.”

  The room froze. Sean, his Plasticine brows struggling to knit, wriggled in his seat. “What was—”

  “Do not fucking move.”

  He stopped squirming. Beckett and Jake had already gotten the picture. They stood like statues. Or those petrified people in the wake of Pompeii, Charlie thought. Frozen where they died when the volcano hit.

  She willed her frozen limbs into action and crossed the office floor with light, ginger steps. She crouched down on one knee beside Sean’s chair and looked up at him, raising one finger.

  “Hold perfectly still. Don’t wriggle. Don’t shift your weight. Don’t breathe any harder than you have to.”

  He didn’t argue. The light bulb still hadn’t clicked on, but he was smart enough to read her tone of voice. Charlie ducked low. She craned her neck, head an inch from the powder-blue carpet, and checked under his seat.

  A coil of wires stretched from a digital timer to a trio of slabs, like gold bricks, wrapped in glossy black Mylar. Adhesive glue clamped the slabs firmly to the underbelly of Sean’s chair.

  “Mr. Ellis,” Charlie said, “it’s very important that you remain calm right now. And whatever you do, do not stand up. Do you understand?”

  His voice was a strained squeak. “Someone want to tell me what’s going on here?”

  Charlie knelt up so she could look him in the eye.

  “That click was a pressure-release trigger in the padding of your chair. That trigger is wired to an M112 demolition block. About a pound and a quarter of C-4 plastic explosive hooked to a detonator. You stand up, we all die. That’s problem number one.”

  Jake was already fishing his phone out. “I’ll call the police—”

  “That’s problem number two,” Charlie said. “Activating the pressure switch started a timer. He�
��s got nine minutes and change before the package goes boom. The bomb squad will never get here in time. Whoever built this wanted to make sure they got the job done.”

  The facts of the situation, cold and razor edged, settled in a leaden silence between them.

  “What . . .” Sean swallowed, his face going fish-belly pale. “What do we do?”

  “I do my job,” Charlie said. She peered over the desk at Jake and Beckett. “You two, clear the floor. Make sure nobody’s working late. Then clear out.”

  Beckett’s lips pursed in a hard line. “Jake, clear the floor and call it in.”

  Jake squinted at him. “What about you?”

  Beckett folded his arms, silent.

  Charlie studied the bomb. She didn’t look at the timer; the luminous green countdown was stress she didn’t need right now, an obstacle in the way. Every bomb was a puzzle. Every bomb builder, like a poker player, had signatures and tells. Quirks unique to their art. Quirks that could be exploited.

  You and me, she thought, talking to the bomber in her mind as she cracked her knuckles. One on one. Your skills against mine. Let’s go.

  When Charlie had left the service, she’d thought she’d never dance this dance again. Part of her, buried deep in her reptilian hindbrain, rose eager for the challenge. Her fingers probed the side of the chair and ran lightly along the supple black leather. She felt resistance here and there, hard edges buried in the padding.

  “Can’t you just . . . cut the wires?” Sean stammered.

  “No. We can’t just ‘cut the wires.’” Charlie looked over the desk. Jake was already gone, running up the hall and hunting for stray civilians. Beckett stood, impassive, arms folded.

  “I mean it,” she told Beckett. “Clear out. I can’t guarantee this is going to end well for anybody.”

  “Jake said we were partnered up. He hasn’t changed that order yet. So we’re partnered up.”

  Charlie sighed. He wasn’t going to budge. Fine, she could use a hand, and the timer wasn’t waiting. She looked to Sean. “Tell me you’ve got a decently stocked supply room.”

  “Sure.” His head bounced like an out-of-control spring. “Up—up the hall, on the right. Third door.”

  “Beckett, I need a decent pair of scissors: fabric shears would be great, but I’ll take anything sharp. A knife from the break room will work if that’s all we’ve got. Also some tape. Duct tape is ideal, but packing tape should do it if you find a whole roll. Also need a screwdriver. Phillips head.”

  “On it,” he said. The office door swung in his sudden wake.

  “Tell me you know what you’re doing,” Sean said.

  Charlie squinted at the Mylar bricks and the detonator prongs. Straightforward assembly. Almost too straightforward. She glanced up at Sean and tried to put on a reassuring smile for him.

  “Eight years as an EOD technician. You’re in good hands.”

  She didn’t tell him the truth: that in the field, she wouldn’t have gone near something like this without putting on an eighty-pound bomb suit first. In the field, nine-tenths of the time she worked with a remote-controlled robot called a Wheelbarrow, supervising the job from behind a wall of sandbags with a containment unit on standby. Most EOD jobs didn’t end with a snipped wire and a frozen countdown timer like in the movies. They ended with the bomb going off, on purpose. The point of the job was to safely control the demolition and make sure no civilians were in range of the blast.

  She glanced to a closed door, left of the desk. “Where’s that go?”

  “M-my private bathroom.”

  “Don’t suppose you’ve got a bathtub in there?”

  He shook his head, mute. She got up and poked her head inside. Five by five, porcelain tile floor, nice fixtures, no windows. If she had to contain the blast, it’d do in a pinch, minimizing the damage. That was step two of the job. Step one, getting Sean off that chair in one piece, was the hard part.

  “Have you ever done this before?” Sean asked her. “I mean, one . . . one like this?”

  “Once,” she told him. “A village chief told the Taliban to go pound sand. They didn’t like that, so they wired a bomb on a pressure trigger under his ceremonial chair. Pretty much like this one. I told him not to fidget and went to grab my tools.”

  “What . . . what happened?”

  Charlie gave him a humorless smile.

  “He fidgeted. So don’t, okay?”

  Sean squeezed his eyes shut. His lips moved in a silent prayer.

  Beckett ran in. He tossed the screwdriver underhand, and Charlie snatched it from the air. She dropped down on one knee, getting to work while he sat the rest of his finds on the desk: a pair of office scissors and a fat, sturdy roll of packing tape.

  “What else?” he asked her.

  Charlie found the threads of the screws holding Sean’s right armrest in place. She needed access and room to work, so the bulky black plastic had to go. She twisted the screwdriver like a mechanic working a pit stop, switching a race car’s wheels while the timer ran down.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “I’ll be right here, just in case.”

  She didn’t have the time or the breath to argue with him. One fat screw dropped onto the blue carpet, then another. She gently tugged on the armrest. It slid from its mountings, pulled back, and then came loose.

  The digital timer ticked down. Six minutes left.

  A bead of sweat tickled Charlie’s eyebrow, dripping into her eye and stinging. She brushed it away and gathered up the edge of the soft leather in her hand, bringing it to a tiny point. The scissors snipped through it, making an opening. Then she slowly sliced her way along the cushion, lengthwise, drawing a long and ragged line. Yellow stuffing poked out through the hole in fat rolls, like a wounded patient’s guts.

  Time to get surgical. She snipped at the stuffing, here and there, pulling it away as much as she dared and angling for a better look inside. There it was: the edge of the pressure trigger, a pair of steel strips with a spring and a circuit connection sandwiched in between, bare teeth on one end and a swinging hasp on the other. When Sean had sat down on the spring, connecting the strips and forming an electrical circuit, he’d started the countdown to his execution.

  Four minutes left.

  “Mr. Ellis,” she said, “I need you to wriggle very, very slowly a quarter inch to your left.”

  Cold sweat drenched his button-down shirt. “I thought wriggling was bad.”

  Charlie grabbed the packing tape. She took the loose end between her teeth, yanked it free, and shoved her sleeves back.

  “I’m giving you permission,” she said. “Very slowly, and just a quarter of an inch. Now, please.”

  She held her breath as he squirmed, easing away from her. The clenched teeth of the pressure switch stood exposed now, three inches from her face. She felt the psychic weight of the demolition block. If it went off now, with her kneeling next to the chair, there wouldn’t be enough left of either of them to fill a single casket.

  “Good. Now freeze. Just like that.”

  She held the steel teeth and coiled tape around the exposed tips, pulling it as tight as she could. The roll wrapped around again and again and again, coating the steel in glossy plastic. She couldn’t tell how strong the spring between the metal strips was. It was made to give easily under Sean’s weight; he looked like he weighed 150, maybe 160. She gave the roll eight more turns around the steel, layering the tape on thick, weighing the risk against the ticking clock.

  Three minutes on the clock. With no guarantee she could disarm the bomb, it was now or never.

  “Get up,” she told Sean.

  “Up? You . . . you mean, out of the chair?”

  “Now.”

  Time froze. Charlie’s stomach lurched sideways, dizzy and sick.

  Sean stood up.

  The tape on the pressure switch held. The bomb didn’t go off. The timer kept counting down.

  “Out,” she told him.

  She didn�
��t watch him go. No time. She stood over the now-empty seat cushion and cut along the sides, peeling back the leather and the yellow padding beneath. She gazed down at the guts of the bomb. Her eyes followed the lime-green cords running from the pressure trigger, spooling through the seat. There was the power source, nestled snug in a bed of yellow foam. She hunted for backup wires, trick fuses, all the little snares and stumbling blocks a smart bomb builder could throw in her path. This was the most dangerous part of the game. EOD techs kept finding new ways to make ordnance safe, and the bombers kept finding new and deadly games to play.

  Not this bomber, though. The device had looked crudely simple at first blush, and the exposed wiring didn’t change her mind. She summed it up in three words: efficient, tight, basic. The builder knew what he was doing, but his technique was a good three decades behind the cutting edge. Modern bomb makers had moved on, benefiting from advanced materials and techniques. By comparison this was Terrorism 101.

  She didn’t let her guard down. A simple bomb could kill you just as dead as a complicated one.

  She pulled away more bits of foam, exposing the power source, and studied the circuit. No visible countermeasures, no backup batteries. One quick slice stood between her and the moment of truth.

  “You got this?” Beckett asked her.

  She snipped the cord running from the pressure switch to the battery.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  The timer was still counting down. Thirty-two seconds on the clock. Charlie jumped up, grabbed the back of the chair, and shoved it across the powder-blue carpet, wheeling it into Sean’s bathroom. The plastic wheels thumped on the porcelain tile. She slammed the door shut and broke into a run.

  Charlie and Beckett burst through the office door and sprinted down the corridor side by side. They hit the emergency stairwell, thundering down the steps. Charlie kept a silent count in her head, seconds draining away as her feet pounded against the bare concrete stairs, and she braced for the sound of detonation.

  Silence.

  All the same, they didn’t stop until they hit the lobby, twenty-two floors below. They staggered through the brushed-metal door together, drenched in cold sweat and breathless.