Not that I could blame him. Brandy had mentioned she might want to deposit a considerable amount of money, but somehow I think he was the one who was interested in making a deposit. We were handed off to the computer tech geek, since he handled all things technical. While we were waiting for him, my beeper went off and I asked to use the phone. My party picked up on the second ring. Our conversation lasted only a few minutes before I agreed very loudly that our tech guy ought to get his lunch finished and meet me here before I kicked his butt over to LILCO.
“You’re ten minutes away? You better be here in five,” I growled, loud enough for the women behind the teller windows to jump. “And don’t give me any more crap about union rules!”
The computer dweeb happened to walk in as I slammed down the phone. He quaked a bit, then offered Sean a tour of the building.
“Say, boss, should I wait for Jankolunitz?” Sean asked.
“I’ll take care of Jankolunitz,” I told him. “Get the job done, would you? I don’t want these poor people to go without power again. This is a business they’re running here. And if I hear one more word out of your mouth about that BMW piece of shit, I’m going to glue your car locks with Super-glue.”
Sean went off with the dweeb, who by now was shaking like a birch tree in a hurricane. Jankolunitz came running in a few moments later. I raised my finger at him accusingly, caught the manager frowning at me from inside the office, and then told my errant Con Ed specialist to wait for a second.
“Can I borrow a room upstairs to, uh, chat, with my employee?” I asked the manager, forcing a smile on my face.
“Go, go right ahead,” said the manager, eager to avoid an explosion in the lobby.
“I knew you’d understand. Managing people these days.”
I shook my head sadly. The manager gave me a knowing and relieved nod, then went back to ogling his prospective customer.
Jankolunitz followed me up the steps, tool kit in hand.
Jankolunitz is such a long name, especially when it’s an alias. Why don’t we use the one I know him and love him by: Shunt.
Cox had suggested we use an NSA techie, but under the best circumstances, I didn’t want anyone coming onto my team whom I didn’t trust 100 percent. And these weren’t the best circumstances.
Shunt, of course, loved it. He figured he was finally living out his dream of being a SpecWarrior, and I did nothing to dissuade him of that, even if my mock anger downstairs was maybe one-tenth as intense as everyday commands issued by some of the chiefs who had put me through my paces when I was knee-high to a bootlace. You call it flattery, I call it ego management, but Shunt was ready for anything.
“IBM shop, Dude,” he said, shaking his head as we walked into the computer room.
“That make it harder?”
“Hell, no. Easier.” He stooped down and looked at the workstation the techie had been using. “Doom. Duuuude!”
I played lookout while Shunt went to work. He had to somehow bypass the system before he swapped the drives, arranging it so the computer wouldn’t realize it was having its gonads snipped off. I don’t know the proper terms, let alone exactly what he did, except that when I put my head back in he had the computer in several pieces spread out on the floor.
“We’re on a timeline here, Shunt,” I told him. “This isn’t Rogue Manor.”
“On it, Dude.”
I put my head back out the door. Not a minute had passed before I heard footsteps trotting up the stairs.
The Doom Duuuude was heading back to check on his game.
I stepped back into the doorway, turned around, and let Shunt have it with both barrels.
“And another fucking thing. When I tell you to use 12-gauge wire, damn it, I mean 12-gauge wire. Who the hell do you think you are using 10-gauge? This is a commercial operation. I have a budget I have to live with. And if—”
I heard a sound suspiciously like a gasp behind me. I spun around. Doom Duuuude looked like he was about to faint.
“Yes?” I asked, leaning over him.
“I, uh—just going to the bathroom,” he said, spinning and sprinting across the hall.
I heard the sound of a case being clicked behind me.
“Ready and wilco, Dude,” said Shunt, pushing the computer back into place. The game on the screen appeared not to have been disturbed.
“Ready and wilco, Shunt?”
“I’m trying to, like, do the SEAL thing.”
Mission accomplished, we trotted down the steps.
“They had a mirror RAID system and it was nothing to slip it right in,” explained Shunt. “NSA guys are good. By the way, Dude, 12-gauge wire—that’s the sort of thing, like, a homeowner might use, not a power company. I don’t think you’d find it even in a commercial installation, like.”
“Next time I’ll run the script by you,” I told Shunt, gesturing to Sean to follow us out.
“Cool. When’s next time?”
“Soon,” I told Shunt, waving to the bank manager, who had spread out a brochure in front of Brandy and was leaning over the desk trying to explain it.
We got out of the bank just as an empty cab drove down the street. We hailed it and headed over to Steinway, one of the main drags a few blocks away.
Anyone familiar with New York City knows that cabs never magically appear like that, certainly not in Queens. The driver was Hulk, who’d been waiting up the block with another of our shooters. For a number of reasons, taxis are good covers in the city not the least of which is the fact that the driver can be as obnoxious as he wants and still stay in perfect cover.
As we were pulling up in front of a Greek coffee shop near the Astoria side of Queens, I heard a police siren in the distance. Five minutes later, my beeper went off. It gave a number that I recognized as a code from Trace to get in touch with her. I tossed a twenty on the table to cover our coffees, and we got back in the cab and headed over to her post, which was in a Laundromat just up the street from the bank. She was supposed to wait there and then escort Brandy away.
It took five minutes to get to the Laundromat, and it was a very tense five minutes. We actually didn’t make it—the area was in the process of being cordoned off by the police.
Trace met me near the police barricade when I returned on foot a few minutes later.
“Some bozos tried to rob the bank a few minutes after you left,” she said. “The alarm went off and they panicked. The police have the place surrounded. Brandy’s still in there.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. And one of the robbers yelled out that they’re going to start killing people in a half hour if NYPD doesn’t bring a bus down to take them to the airport.”
Chapter
11
I don’t know if you’ve seen Dog Day Afternoon, but if you have, you’ll recognize the situation. It’s an old Al Pacino movie without too much of a point that I can see, except that it’s based on a real incident that happened in New York City a number of years ago, when some punk bank robbers got caught trying to rob a bank and decided to take everyone inside hostage. It turns out New York City deals with this sort of situation all the time. They had a very similar hostage situation in 1983 or something, and yet another one in 1995. Probably correlates with sunspot activity.
Whatever. Mr. Murphy sure picked a hell of a time to stick it to us.
New York calls its tactical squad or SWAT team an “Emergency Response Unit.” It sounds almost benign, doesn’t it? The city is, after all, the capital of PC government. Whatever they’re called, though, the city’s team is actually pretty damn good. They train regularly, and even better, have enough situations to get on-the-job experience easily. Not that that’s better if you’re on the wrong end of the emergency, but you get my point.
Besides the sharpshooters, their hostage-negotiating team literally wrote the book on how to deal with these sorts of situations. The negotiators are more than good; they’ve given their spiel to SEAL Team Six and not been laughed out of the
joint. It’s their track record that counts, and they have a long list of saves, everything from little old ladies to psychos whacked out because they forgot to take their little green pills. The negotiators’ philosophy is more than a little different than the typical SpecWar attitude—they’d rather talk than fight—but they’ve proven their worth in a number of situations. You need a lot of tools in your kit when things get tough, and sometimes a blunt object is not the way to go.
It should be, but it’s not.
Capel joined us near the police barricade as Trace finished giving me her situation report. “Building’s locked down,” he said, adding a few more details to Trace’s report. He’d come out of the building right after us, looking for Shadow or one of his minions. He’d passed the two robbers going in, or at least thought he had. He told me later he thought they looked a bit suspicious and wished he’d turned around and gone in after them. He might have stopped the robbery. Or maybe he would have been killed. Hard to say.
“What kind of assholes rob a bank across from a police station?” asked Trace.
“Maybe they’re with the NSA and they want to check our work,” I said. But actually I was thinking something very different—I wondered if these jackasses had been sent by Shadow.
Capel knows half the police department, including most of the Emergency Response officers and just about all the area commanders and the deputy police chief. He got us past the barricade and down the street, where two officers with a bullhorn were trying to communicate with the people inside. That in itself wasn’t a good sign; negotiators almost always prefer to work with phones.
“Can’t get them to answer the phone,” said one of the detectives on the negotiating team, whom Capel knew. He referred Capel to the local commander, who had set up a command post in the police station—which was, after all, across the street.
“What do you think about going in through the abandoned sweatshop?” I asked Capel as we crossed the street. “Climb up from the hardware store building.”
“Only if they let us.”
“I’m not asking Mommy-may-I when one of my people is in shit. I’m getting her out.”
Capel didn’t argue. He did, however, have a point. There were already SWAT people covering the back alley and the nearby roofs, so there was no question of sneaking in that way without some sort of official sanction.
When we found the assistant chief, he’d just been faxed a set of plans on the building from the bank’s central office. On the plus side, the bank did well finding and hustling them over. On the minus side, the plans were pretty clearly out of date, something I was able to point out to the chief as I looked at them upside down on his desk.
“Besides being a friend of Big Dan’s,” said the chief, “which is a recommendation—who the fuck are you?”
“Dick Marcinko.” I shoved out my hand. “I was supposed to meet a friend of mine down the street and I saw all the commotion and then saw Dan.”
I didn’t tell him that I had an op inside the building for two reasons. One, that would make it clear that we’d just conducted an operation there, which would scotch a mission we’d just completed, apparently successfully, at least as far as the objective was concerned. And two, I was afraid that they’d think I was emotionally involved or something and not let me help.
Because I was going to help. One way or another.
“Dick Marcinko sounds familiar,” said the chief. “But I can’t quite place it.”
Capel played PR agent, talking me up as a security expert, former SEAL, all around hard-ass. He didn’t lie about any of it, but I had to smile when he was done.
“I do some work for Homeland Security these days,” I added. “Don’t hold that against me.”
“You have someone in the bank?” asked the chief.
I looked at him eyeball to eyeball. Give him this: he wasn’t stupid. And he didn’t blink.
Should I lie, or let it all hang out?
Gut call. And the gut says: when in doubt, fall back on the truth.
“Yeah, I do,” I told him.
“And you want to help get him out.”
“Yeah, I do.”
The chief could have told me to fuck myself. At that moment, I expected he would. But maybe Capel’s speech had softened him up, or maybe he knew exactly what I was feeling. I had the sense from looking at him that he’d bust his own belly to help one of his guys.
“If you can help us, we’d appreciate it. But you’re under my command,” he said.
“Fair enough.”
A customer had managed to escape after the robbers pulled their weapons, which helped NYPD blueprint the situation. Two men had gone into the bank for a robbery. Having more bullets than brains, they’d panicked when one of the tellers didn’t understand them at first, drawn their weapons, and plugged the security guard near the door. Alarms started going off; people started screaming. The punks had herded a half-dozen people back behind the tellers’ windows.
“There were two, but they had a backpack with them,” said one of the detectives who was coordinating intelligence. “We can’t see inside the building well enough to get a good feel for what’s going on, let alone figure out what they brought in with them.”
The possibilities ranged from dinner to enough dynamite to take out the block. The layout of the building made storming the offices difficult at best; there were only two ways in or out—the front door and an alarmed exit at the back. Screwing with the power sounded an alarm on the door—a fact I already knew.
The negotiators, meanwhile, still had been unable to make contact.
“Assholes won’t pick up the phone,” said the police chief.
“What you need is another door in the place,” I said. “Fortunately, you have one.”
Everybody looked at me as if I had two heads. I jabbed my finger down at the plans. “It’s right there in the women’s restroom. You go through there and come right up this corridor and get them from the back.”
The expressions changed. Now I had three heads.
“Go through the elevator shaft that runs from the old lobby back here up to the sweatshop,” I explained. “The elevator’s parked on the top floor.”
“How do you know that?” asked the chief.
I shrugged. “I just do.”
I took his diagram and showed him how the shaft—marked on the plan as a utility area—bordered the restroom. Come across the roof, get into the building, pry open the door, rappel down and cut in.
“We could do it inside of twenty minutes.”
“We?” said the chief.
“In the interests of interagency cooperation,” I told him, “we’ll let you help.”
Capel frowned and the chief shook his head. I’m not sure what I would have done if the chief had held his ground—slugged him, grabbed a gun, and gone off by myself, I guess.
And if I were in the chief’s position? I’d’ve kicked my butt and told me to take a hike. In the end, the chief proved smarter than me.
“All right. Let’s try it your way,” he said.
Part of the reason he did that may have been the fact that they had the security guard lying on the floor inside the bank bleeding. Another part was probably the failure of the bad guys to pick up the phone. That’s not a good sign in a hostage situation, especially one that sets up like this, where the bad guys ought to be looking for a way to cut their losses and get out.
And on the other hand, they were sure moving around a lot inside—possibly setting explosives.
We knew they were moving around because NYPD brought up a special radar unit they’d been using on a trial basis. Nicknamed “Soldiervision,” it’s basically a personal-size radar that can be used to look inside buildings without cutting a hole through the wall. It’s not as powerful as Superman’s X-ray eyes, but it does a reasonably good job of looking through walls and about forty or fifty feet beyond, depending on the thickness and composition of the wall. The technology is still being worked on, but it repr
esents the next quantum leap in dealing with combat and law enforcement in an urban environment.
At that point, the only leap I was concerned with was the one down the elevator shaft. Rather than risking any odd noise by prying the doors open, Capel and I—with six ninjas from Emergency Response tagging along—went to the sixth floor and the elevator. As we had hoped, there was a trapdoor in the bottom of the cab; the hinges were a little rusty, but the squeaks were faint.
“Still not answering their phone,” said the policeman handling communications, as Capel and I started downward.
I went first, easing my way down with the help of a rope. When I reached the first floor, I made myself as comfortable as I could on a brace at the side, then took out a razor and worked it into the plasterboard, pulling down quietly but forcefully. It took a few minutes to score a Rogue-sized passage, and even longer to get something wide enough for Capel’s frame. The bathroom wall was made of ceramic, and the mastic that held the tiles in place made it hard to get the second layer of plasterboard off. I had infrared glasses on, but it was hard to see precisely how deep I was making the hole. The metal studs were placed at odd intervals—I’m not sure why, maybe to provide a brace for something on the other side—and in order to make the largest possible hole, I worked right up to their edges. That gave me a good guide for the horizontal cuts, but I kept jamming my hand against the stud and cursing as silently as possible.
Capel was perched a floor above me, whispering with the Emergency Response team and commander through the comm system we’d borrowed from the NYPD. We’d chosen to use NYPD gear rather than ours. While the range and security on Capel’s was light-years ahead of the police versions, being able to communicate with everyone involved in the situation was a hell of a lot more important than showing off the latest and greatest.
“See daylight?” he asked me.
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