The Loot

by Schaefer, Craig

  Dom’s eyes lit up. “Yeah? You got hands on with a fifty caliber? Damn, I’d love one of those babies for my collection.”

  “Technically.” Charlie ducked her head and smiled. “See, it’s officially an option for ordnance disposal. Go long range, clear the immediate area, and terminate the suspect package with one very nasty, very expensive round of ammunition. Never actually did it in the field, but it’s an option. So once a year we had to go in for certification and retraining, which basically boiled down to screwing around on the range all day and playing with the big guns.”

  “You,” Dom said, turning to face her, “just described my dream vacation. Okay. You have earned my official blessing to use this range. There are rules. Rules which must never be violated.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Rule number one: Anything in the cage is company property. Use whatever you like, but you either supply your own ammo or log what you take from the communal stash and kick some money into the kitty when I go to restock at month’s end. If you use community ammo and fail to pay it forward, you will accrue Negative Bullet Karma.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “That’s terrible. Rule number two: You will clean anything you use. You will put anything you use—weapon, tool, anything you touch—back exactly where you found it. Otherwise you will accrue Negative Bullet Karma.”

  “I think I follow you,” Charlie said.

  Dom held up three fingers. “Rule three. Charlie, this . . . I cannot tell you, I cannot stress enough, how vital it is that you understand and follow this rule. When you are finished shooting, you will always—always—police your brass and clean up after yourself. It’s neighborly. It’s courteous. It’s the right thing to do. And if you fail to follow this simple rule—”

  “Let me guess,” Charlie said. “Negative Bullet Karma.”

  “Obey these rules, and the Goddess of Superior Firepower will shower you with her blessings. You will shoot straight, you will land on target, and you will reap a reward of unreported cash income as part of our monthly target-shooting competition. You will also not piss me off.”

  Dom practiced what she preached. She tugged down the perforated targets, cleaning up after herself, and Charlie pitched in. She gathered up the fallen shell casings and tossed the brass into a wastebasket marked SCRAP RECYCLING.

  “For today’s agenda,” Dom told her, “we’re taking a ride over to Deep Country HQ. Jake wants me to run a security-risk assessment—that’s my main thing, for the record—and he wants you to see how the job gets done.”

  “Wait, we’re keeping the contract?”

  “Expanding it. After last night, Deep Country is contracting us for twenty-four-seven security at their corporate office, plus an armed escort for Sean Ellis.”

  “Beckett was trying to convince Jake to walk away,” Charlie said.

  “And I agree with Beckett; these people are more trouble than they’re worth, but money has a way of smoothing rough edges. Sounds like Ellis rolled a wheelbarrow of cash up to Jake’s doorstep and groveled like a champ.”

  Charlie weighed her words, not sure how much she was allowed to share. “Did Jake . . . tell you anything about last night?”

  “Oh yeah. Chair bomb. Heard you earned your keep, and then some.” She patted Charlie’s shoulder and led the way to the door. “For the record? No hero shit on my watch.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Dom’s tone was light, conversational, but her easy smile didn’t reach her eyes. She and Charlie walked side by side through the tight, faceless corridors, navigating back toward the lobby.

  “I’ve got a little girl,” Dom said. “At the end of the day, I plan to pick her up from day care. Nothing matters more to me than that. And to do it, I need to be alive and breathing. Thing to remember, Charlie: We aren’t the Secret Service. We didn’t give a sacred oath to take a bullet for our clients. Do we want to keep them safe? Absolutely. That’s what they pay us for. Will we take risks, even big ones, to make that happen? Sure. But there’s an art to this job. You’ve got to find the balance between protecting the primary and protecting yourself.”

  “I’m starting to understand why you like rifles.”

  Dom laughed as she pushed open the lobby doors, stepping out into the summer sun. Charlie felt a wave of heat wash over her, the air humid and sucking her breath away. She fumbled for her sunglasses.

  “And when you’re in charge of moving the primary through dangerous territory, you’ll be damn glad I’m on overwatch. I’m not a sniper, Charlie; I’m your personal guardian angel. A missionary of the Goddess of Superior Firepower. So where’s your ride? As the newbie, you get the privilege of chauffeuring me around today.”

  Charlie led the way to her father’s pickup. Dom stopped short in her tracks, staring at the wreck as it broiled silently in the sun.

  “Change of plans,” Dom said. “I’m driving; you can pay for lunch.”

  All things considered, Charlie was pretty sure she was getting the better end of that deal. She followed Dom across the parking lot. The doors of a sleek white Lincoln Continental squawked as they approached. They opened the car up to air it out, letting some summer heat boil free, and Charlie gazed in at the buttery tan leather seats and a dash the color of cherrywood.

  “Damn,” she said. “This job pays better than I thought.”

  Dom gave the car a rueful smile. “Don’t get your hopes up. This baby’s six years old, and I bought her before I started working asset protection. Now I’m just trying to keep her running as long as possible.”

  She slipped behind the wheel. Charlie eased into the passenger seat, sinking into the leather, and shouldered her seat belt.

  “What’d you do before this?” she asked.

  The engine purred like a kitten. Dom threw it into reverse, one eye on the rearview as she pulled out of her spot and ignored the question. Charlie recalled Beckett’s words on her first morning, comparing this outfit to the French Foreign Legion; people around here weren’t big on talking about their pasts.

  “Let’s talk about risk assessment,” Dom said. “Number one rule of risk mitigation is that there is always risk. A dedicated-enough assassin, if they don’t care about their own life, can get at anyone. Anyone. Our job isn’t to eliminate risk but to minimize it and make our client as hard a target as possible, in the hopes of encouraging would-be threats to go elsewhere.”

  “At least Sean Ellis’s assassin doesn’t seem suicidal,” Charlie said.

  “Yet. Let’s see what happens once we lock his offices down and make it harder to take a second shot at him. If we’re lucky, the opportunity cost will make our mad bomber give up and go home.”

  “And if we’re not?”

  “If we’re not, he’ll get desperate. And desperate men do very stupid, very dangerous things.” Dom glanced into the rearview mirror. “Like I said. Anyone can be assassinated. You just have to want it badly enough.”

  SIXTEEN

  Dom toured the halls of Deep Country with a clipboard in her hand and absolute authority in her voice. Charlie stayed right at her side, eyes open, mouth closed, studying her every move.

  “I need to get in here,” Dom said to a harried-looking file clerk, pointing to an unmarked doorway. The brushed-aluminum handle jiggled in her grip.

  “That’s just a storage closet,” he told her. “We haven’t used it since we moved into this building.”

  “So you don’t even know what’s in there.”

  “Boxes?”

  “Are you asking me,” Dom said, “or telling me?”

  “Pretty sure it’s just empty boxes.”

  Dom took a deep breath and made a notation on her clipboard.

  “I need to get in here,” she repeated, and she stared him down until he scurried off to find a key.

  “What are we looking for?” Charlie asked.

  “Right now? Just taking the lay of the land. Probing for any cracks in the armor. Honestly, the security here is ade
quate, for most companies. Everyone has to get signed in at the lobby, elevators are key-card locked, and each of Deep Country’s three floors has a vestibule with an additional key-card door to reach the offices. Employees’ cards only work on the specific floor they’re assigned to, further cutting down the risk of theft and misuse.”

  “But,” Charlie said, catching the tone of Dom’s voice. It sounded like she was damning them with faint praise.

  “But at the moment, until the media feeding frenzy subsides, they’re the most hated company in America. What’s good enough for Mom and Pop’s oatmeal factory is not good enough for Deep Country, not this month. So we need to find temporary ways of shoring up their security without hitting their pain point.”

  “Pain point?” Charlie asked.

  Dom rubbed her thumb against her fingertips. “Money. Technically, we could surround the building with a cordon of several hundred armed security officers, put a checkpoint with bomb-sniffing dogs on every elevator and stairwell, and plate the entire tower in sheets of bulletproof ceramic. They’d be safe. They’d also be bankrupt by the end of the week. The ideal security solution lowers risk just far enough, without costing too much money. Problem is it’s the client who makes that decision, and they don’t always lean in the right direction.”

  Charlie glanced over her shoulder. She didn’t want any of Sean’s employees overhearing what she had to say.

  “Last night,” she told Dom, pitching her voice low, “his reactions . . . they weren’t right. Beckett and I both think he’s got something going on, beyond the scandal we know about. Something he’s trying to keep hushed up. Any normal person would have called the cops last night—”

  “We don’t do protection for ‘normal people,’ Charlie. Get used to it. Goes with the territory. We do our jobs, we keep our clients’ confidence, and we don’t ask any questions that don’t need answers. Nosy security companies don’t get referrals. There’s a lot of competition in this business and not enough work to go around.”

  “Just saying . . . seems contrary to what you said back at HQ.”

  Dom’s eyes narrowed. She stared at Charlie like a book written in a foreign language. “Meaning?”

  “We’re not dealing with a nut with a gun,” Charlie told her. “This person, people, whoever . . . they got access to the building, they got their hands on illegal explosives, and they used some fairly solid technical know-how to booby-trap Sean Ellis’s office. If that bomb had gone off, it would have killed anyone within fifty feet of him. Employees, us, anyone. The assassin knew that. They didn’t care.”

  “You’re thinking about what they’re going to do for an encore,” Dom said.

  “Can we agree that there’s definitely going to be one? Nobody goes to that much trouble to kill somebody and gives up when their first shot misses. Next time their little surprise might be wired to the elevators, hidden in the engine of the car we use to drive him around, right under our feet . . . there’s a thousand ways to kill somebody with a bomb, and most of ’em are dirt simple. Trust me. I know. You want to go home alive at the end of the day? So do I.”

  She had Dom’s full attention. The woman leaned in, her deep amber eyes narrow and sharp. “What are you proposing, exactly?”

  “Ellis doesn’t want the cops around? Fine. But we do a little digging on our own. Just a little. Not enough to step on any toes, not enough that he’s going to complain or pull the contract. But if there’s any way we can find out who and what we’re up against, it improves the odds for all of us.”

  The clerk came back. He pressed a chunky ring of keys into Dom’s hand, mumbled something about not being the building’s janitor, and made himself scarce before she could give him any more work to do. Dom tried the keys one at a time until the knob clicked and the closet yawned open. They gazed with dismay into a closet piled high with empty, moldering cardboard boxes, building a haphazard mountain under a burned-out bulb.

  Dom nudged a box with the squared tip of her shoe. A trio of silverfish went skittering across the soggy cardboard to escape. “Now that’s just unsanitary. Okay, Nancy Drew. I’m with you on principle. How about specifics? You got a plan to go with that goal?”

  Charlie had been thinking about that since they’d arrived. Her forebrain was on high alert, checking every nook and cranny like she was doing a patrol sweep—Because I am, she realized—so she attacked it like she’d handle any other intel problem out in the field: make nice with the locals.

  “I’ve got two advantages,” she told Dom. “First, I saved Ellis’s life last night. So that should buy me a little credit.”

  Dom snorted. “You might be surprised. Most of our clients think it’s our job to die for ’em with a smile on our faces.”

  “Even so, he seemed pretty grateful last night, albeit understandably shaken up. Second, he knows I’m new on the job. Meaning I might ask questions a veteran operative wouldn’t.”

  “Questions that could get you in trouble?” Dom arched an eyebrow.

  “Maybe. But if I happen to overstep my bounds, it’s a good thing you’re here to reprimand me and apologize on behalf of the company, isn’t it? No harm, no foul—I’m the only one who gets in trouble, hopefully minimal, and the contract is safe.”

  Dom shut the closet door.

  “If this goes sideways,” she told Charlie, “it’s all on you. I’m not sticking my neck out.”

  “Not asking you to.”

  She looked Charlie up and down, taking her measure, silently weighing her options. Then she nodded.

  “Go fish,” Dom said.

  One floor up, Charlie—flying solo now, toting a clipboard of her own with a few scribbled notes just for show—found Sean Ellis in his office. He sat cross-legged on the powder-blue carpet, surrounded by plastic parts and the skeletal aluminum guts of a mutant chair. He looked up, greeted Charlie with a perplexed smile, and ruffled the IKEA instruction sheet on his lap like a blanket.

  “I know it’s not your job,” he told her, “but I don’t suppose you could lend an old man a hand? This is really a two-person challenge, and my juggling days are long behind me.”

  She would have said yes anyway; even if Charlie wasn’t helpful by habit, the army had taught her that not my job was a fatal phrase that inevitably led to a dressing-down and even worse jobs. That said, she couldn’t have asked for a better opening. She cleared a space, gently shoving aside a leather arm with a backward-mounted bracket, and reached for a screwdriver.

  “I think I see the problem,” she said. “At least one problem. So . . . you doing okay? Had a little excitement last night.”

  Sean patted the breast of his jacket with a shaky hand. “More excitement than I need, but fine, thanks to you.”

  “Mr. Ellis,” she said, walking carefully as she angled toward the subject, “if I hadn’t been there, in the right place at the right time . . .”

  He fumbled with a washer. A screw rattled into another length of aluminum frame. “Things have a way of working out. I’ve always believed that. I started this company from nothing, you know. Just dirty hands and grit. They don’t talk about that in the news. Everything I did to build Deep Country up from scratch. They used to call me an American success story.”

  He pointed at the glass shelves set into an alcove, the rows upon rows of industry awards in crystal and gold. Sean looked at them like they were magic talismans, proof of his glory and shields against harm, that had somehow been drained of their enchantment.

  Charlie swallowed down a flash of anger. Maybe because thirty dead miners is bigger news, she wanted to say. Sean was clueless. He came off affable, almost grandfatherly, assembling his new chair like a kid playing with Tinkertoys. And his biggest complaint, after a would-be attacker at his banquet and a bomb under his seat cushion, was that he wasn’t getting enough applause.

  “That’s how fast the media will turn on you,” he warned her. “Oh, they’ll say they’re your friend, when everything’s going your way, but that’s just to
get their hooks in.”

  “But . . . yesterday,” Charlie said. “Someone really went out of their way to try and hurt you. Do you have any idea who might have the motive and the skills to—”

  He cut her off, charging over her words like a rhino. “No. No idea. Someone who blames me for . . . for what happened in Kentucky, no doubt. Some crazy.”

  “They used an M112 demolition block. You can’t just buy those at the hardware store. Without the right licenses and permits, you can’t get one at all.”

  Sean wagged a hex wrench at her. “Proves my point. We use demolitions for mining, fracking . . . I’ve got my people conducting a full inventory of company assets, as we speak. I’m sure we’ll find some explosives ‘wandered off the job’ around the same time one of my employees did. We’ll go to the police once we have concrete evidence to show them. Any sooner, and they’ll just trample all over the evidence and my business. No need for it.”

  Charlie thought again about the man she’d turned away from the banquet. Beckett was right; this bomber had a profile, and the agitated, righteous intruder didn’t fit it one bit. All the same, she had to admit Sean might have a point. His own company was the most likely source of the explosives.

  Before she could answer, his phone buzzed. He slid it from his breast pocket and gave the screen a look, and the blood drained from his cheeks.

  “Excuse me.” His Botox-locked forehead struggled to crease as he clambered to his feet. “I have to take this.”

  He stepped into his private bathroom and shut the door. The lock softly clicked. Charlie took a deep breath, got to her feet, and padded across the office in his wake. She leaned close to the door. With her ear a quarter inch from the wood, she could just barely make out his strained voice.

  “Made your point?” he whispered. “Yes, you made your goddamn point; now why won’t you listen to mine? I’m telling you, I don’t have it. How do you think I got where I—no, you do the math. I can’t give you what I don’t have.”