“I am a love kitten. I purr, remember, I don’t work,” she said as she reached up and tried to pull him down on top of her again.
“How about, you’ve worn me out.”
She looked up at him and finally sighed. “I wore you out? All right. I guess that’s what I get for marrying an old man.”
“You got that right. Now get up and get dressed, because I’ll need you to untie the lines and go up to the bow and keep watch while I steer this thing out into the channel.”
“He rejects me, and then he wants to put me to work. The honeymoon is over.”
“I’ll get the engines and equipment going. You pull up the gangplank and untie all the lines, throw them up on the deck, and then get back on board.”
“Get back on board? With no gangplank? What if I fall in the water?”
“You won’t fall in the water. The boat shouldn’t move… just don’t waste any time.”
“As I just said, ‘if I fall in the water,’ I will not be happy, Burke.”
Bob threw the switches and started the big, twin MTU 2000 diesel engines, turned on the GPS navigation, the running lights, the satellite communications, the radar, and the depth finder. As night fell, he was taking no chances. Finally, he remembered the most important thing, and walked to the railing to see how Linda was doing. She had cast off the lines and stood on the pier, hands on hips, looking down at the gap between the pier and the aft deck of the boat, and then up at the bridge, glaring at him.
Quickly, he ran down to the rear deck, pushed the gangplank back out to the pier, and waited for her to walk back up. “Sorry,” he said as he pulled up the gangplank. “I guess that was farther than I thought for someone with short legs.”
“Short legs? Nice try,” she brushed past him and headed for the bow. “Let’s get out of here before you get yourself in worse trouble than you already are.”
Thirty minutes later and ten miles up the coast, they sat in the captain and mate’s chairs on the flying bridge as they neared the small town of Avalon, New Jersey, when Bob’s cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket, looked at the screen, and saw a 910 Area Code.
“Burke, here,” he quickly answered.
“Major Burke,” he immediately recognized the gruff, no-nonsense voice of Command Sergeant Major Patrick O’Connor, General Stansky’s lead NCO. “Hate to disturb you during the cocktail hour,” O’Connor began, “but the general asked me to call you.”
“Never a problem, Command Sergeant Major.”
“It appears that there’s been another break-in at Sergeant Pastorini’s house over in Fayetteville. We haven’t been able to locate Miss Evans, so the general was worried and asked me to give you a call.”
“She’s traveling with my wife and me. We thought it best to get her out of there.”
“Looks like that was a good idea. The Fayetteville Police told us they had been checking on the house; but on their last visit this afternoon, they found it thoroughly ransacked. All the drawers, boxes, and containers were dumped out, the cushions and upholstered furniture had been sliced open, even the mattresses. The ladder to the attic had been left down, some boxes up there dumped out. Downstairs, a few floorboards had been torn up, and even a couple of holes were punched in the walls.”
“Sounds like someone was looking for something.”
“That’s what the Fayetteville PD and our own CID think. No one saw anything, but it looks like it happened sometime within the past eighteen hours. With the previous questions that surrounded Sergeant Pastorini’s last tour in Afghanistan, the general immediately brought them in.”
“Good idea,” Bob quickly agreed.
“Do you know when Miss Evans will be returning here?”
“In a few days, probably not much more than that, but she needed to get away.”
“Understood, but please advise her that the CID needs to talk to her as soon as she does return here.”
“Will do. I’ll bring her by as soon as we get back, and let the general know,” Bob said as he rang off and began to think.
“What’s that all about?” Linda asked.
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think I like it.”
Ace’s father owned a small electric contracting business in suburban Pittsburgh. When Ace was in high school, he helped on small jobs and played general go-fer after school, spending much of that time driving around to the town halls in McKeesport, West Mifflin, North Braddock, and the other small suburbs to the south and west of the city. He filed construction plans and picked up building permits, so he had a good idea how to get his hands on the construction drawings for the Bimini Bay complex in the Atlantic City municipal offices.
As numerous undercover assignments with Delta had taught him, the secret to any good disguise was to talk and look the part. He and Dorothy wore blue jeans. He added a red plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up to his elbows, while she wore a baggy gray sweatshirt, a pencil tucked behind her ear, and a clipboard. Rather than drive straight to the city offices, they made a side trip to the Bimini Bay hotel. On his recon the night before, he remembered seeing a section of meeting rooms on the second floor that were closed for remodeling. A temporary plywood wall blocked access, and a contractor sign and row of city building permits were posted outside. Those documents provided a wealth of information on the contractors and subcontractors already working the site, which was all Ace needed, as he pulled out his cell phone and took a few pictures.
There was a makeshift man-door in the plywood wall, which closed off the construction area from the hallway. Workers in hard hats had been going in and out carrying tools and construction supplies, so Ace walked over, pulled the door open, and stuck his head inside for a quick look to see what materials and equipment they were using. Dorothy stuck her head under his arm and also glanced around. “See those?” she asked as she nodded toward a long plywood table sitting to the right of the doorway. On top of the table, she saw a recharger station that held a dozen two-way commercial radios, construction drawings, and a tall stack of white hardhats. “Just what we need to complete our outfits, don’t you think?” she whispered.
“Very sneaky, oh Captain, my Captain,” he replied as he reached inside, grabbed two, and quickly backed out again. He put one hardhat on his head and the other on hers, raised the clipboard as if he was studying something, and set off toward the escalators.
The city’s Licensing and Inspection Division reviews construction plans, issues building permits, and performs the subsequent structural, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, and related inspections while the work is in progress. They were located off Atlantic Avenue on Bacharach Boulevard in the center of the city, not far from the Holiday Inn. Ace had learned from his father that most of the people who staffed city building departments were old carpenters and plumbers who had spent too many winters on cold building sites, or who had hit themselves on the thumb with a hammer once too often. The rest had been tradesmen who went through one too many recessions, or small-time contractors who couldn’t run a successful business to save their lives. The net result was to opt for the lower-paying certainty of a city job, where the New Jersey public employees unions would prevent them from firing anyone for at least a month or two, even after they found his dead body propped up behind his desk, as long as he had a pencil in his hand.
Ace also learned that the best times to go to any city office was in the middle of their lunch hour or at 4:15, just before closing. That was usually when the counters were staffed by low-ranking clerks, who either were in a hurry, or didn’t care much to begin with. That’s what made it the best time of the day to get what you want, particularly if you came bearing gifts.
Ace and Dorothy entered the Licensing and Inspection Division at 12:30 p.m., purposely in the middle of lunch hour, wearing their new hardhats and carrying a large Donato’s carry-out pizza box. Behind the counter stood a bored, middle-aged clerk with thinning hair, a beer gut, and a large pin-on city nametag on his shirt po
cket that read, “Hi! I’m Larry!” As they approached the counter, Ace would have liked to think that the clerk’s eyes were on him, but he knew they were split between the gorgeous blonde standing at his side and the pizza box.
“Hi, Larry,” Ace began with a big smile as he set the pizza box down on the counter. “I’m Jerry with Consolidated Electric. We’re bidding some electrical work over at the Bimini Bay. You suppose we can take a quick look at the building and electrical plans?”
“Sure. All the city file copies are digitized now. You’ve got to order them, and that usually takes 48 hours. But there’s always work going on over at the Bimini, so we keep a hard copy of the full set in the conference room next door.”
“Hey, thanks, man,” Ace replied as he turned and began to walk away.
“Uh, the pizza, we can’t accept gifts.”
“Gift? Oh, no, that’s just trash,” Ace told him as he lifted the cover and let Larry see the fresh, hot pie inside. “We were going to throw it in the dumpster outside, but maybe you can do that for me… since it’s trash… and therefore not worth anything. So it’s not a gift, is it?” Ace smiled as he turned away, watched Larry raise the top of the pizza box, peek inside again, and slip it under the counter.
“That should keep him out of our hair for a while,” Ace said as they stepped out and walked down the hall to the conference room. There was a large stack of bound blueprints strewn across the long table.
“Where do we start?” Dorothy asked him.
“I’m looking for the set with the roof, the penthouse, and the helipad, the basement level, and the first floor admin area. We’ll start with those — the structural and electrical plans in particular. Let me look at them. We’ll photograph anything interesting with our cell phones, but I’d like to be out of here in twenty, maybe thirty minutes.”
It took them closer to forty minutes, but in the end, Ace had most of what he wanted.
“Learn anything?” Dorothy asked as they stacked the plans in the center of the table.
“Yeah, the major is right. That place is a fortress. If we want in, it’ll take some serious stealth and guile.”
When they walked back through the office, Larry the code clerk was still standing behind the counter where they left him, his mouth full of pizza, and several fresh tomato stains on his white shirt.
“Thanks, man,” Ace smiled and waved. Larry waved back, smiled, and mumbled something, but Ace couldn’t understand the words.
“Did you get what he said?” Dorothy asked as they went out the door.
“Yeah, something about putting more anchovies on the trash next time.”
“Okay, where now, back to the Holiday Inn? We need to grab our stuff.”
“No, there’s an electronics store I found just west of the city, off the toll road,” Ace said. “The major wants me to see if we can tap into the hotel’s security camera feeds and Wi-Fi the video over to the boat.”
“Can you do that?” she questioned.
“I think so. If I can get my hands on the right kind of modem, a couple of power packs, and two signal boosters, we’ll go ahead and do it right after dark.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
At 8:50 that evening, Bob slowly maneuvered the big Ferrenti yacht through the dark water and into its reserved slip in the small marina across the harbor, taking the time to turn the boat around so the bow pointed at the flashing neon palm trees on the Bimini Bay hotel tower. With some delicate back and forth, he finally managed to get the big boat pressed against the line of tires that lined the pier, where the others were waiting to come aboard.
“Linda, go down and toss them the lines, before this big beast moves again,” he yelled to tell her, but she had already run down the stairs to the lower deck and was chattering excitedly with Dorothy and Patsy about the boat as the three women finally tied it off.
Each boat slip had one of those cutesy, four-foot-tall, white fiberglass lighthouses into which a boat can connect all its utilities. The larger slips like this one had three of them, each with a working light on top to illuminate the dock. Looking down on the pier, he saw Ace, Dorothy, Ernie, Patsy, the Geeks and their bags. Most of them were looking up at the boat with their mouths hanging open. He went down to the aft deck and ran out the gangplank.
“Throw your stuff below,” he told them, “and grab a beer. The boat can hold eleven, and we’ll figure out sleeping arrangements for those of you who aren’t staying at the hotels.”
Looking at the faces as they paired off and came on board, he knew rank would have its privileges, as it inevitably did. He and Linda kept the front stateroom, while Ace and Dorothy took the other. Ernie and Koz could have one of the two side cabins. Patsy and Jimmy came aboard with their arms wrapped around each others waists and her head leaning against his shoulder. Given the inevitability of that situation, he gave them the other side cabin. That left Ronald, The Batman, and Bulldog with the three bunks in the crew’s quarters aft. Even that small cabin would seem luxurious for the two Army guys, and he doubted Ronald’s experience was much different. Since Chester and Lonzo were cleaning at night and still had rooms at the Siesta Cove, the numbers worked, at least until things blew up here in Atlantic City and they all bailed. By that time, the extra bodies could sleep on the floor in the lounge, because it wouldn’t matter.
The group assembled in the main lounge and paused, marveling at the gorgeous interior. It was airy and open, featuring a large, C-shaped white leather couch along the left bulkhead, a large dining room set beyond that, and refrigerators and coolers down the right side. While the others got settled in their cabins, he grabbed a beer and sat down at the boat’s dining room table with Ace. The big Master Sergeant pulled out his cell phone and showed him the photographs he had taken of the Bimini Bay building plans.
“The only way up to the roof is the private elevator to the penthouse, or the emergency stairs with those big mag-locks at the top and bottom.”
“Or rappel down from a helicopter?” Bob asked.
“Rappel?” Ace laughed. “When we were all younger and a hell of a lot dumber. But the big thing I discovered looking at the plans is that there’s something really odd about that Maintenance Building addition on the back of the building near the loading dock.”
“You mean that rinky-dink cinder block thing?” Bob asked as Jimmy came in.
Ace motioned him over. “Hey, take a look at this, Jimmy. There’s an entire second floor under this addition with major redundant power, a raised-floor on the lower level, and big cooling loads. The only thing that could possibly be for is a huge server array.”
“That’s a lot more data capacity than three hotels need,” Jimmy agreed.
“And the door from the loading dock is reinforced steel, if it opens at all,” Ace said. “So, the only way in might be through the basement, with more steel doors and mag-locks.”
“What could they possibly want that much data storage for?”
“Well, if we can’t physically get in, we can try ‘virtual’ access,” Jimmy smiled. “Ronald and I have been working our buns off all afternoon…”
Bob looked at him and then at Patsy, who had her head on his chest, both arms wrapped around his waist and enough of “that” sleepy glow left to force a skeptical response. “Really?” Bob asked.
“Well, most of the afternoon,” Jimmy blushed, trying to keep his composure. “But we couldn’t get into the really good stuff. We need some passwords or their programming codes. Without those, we’re afraid we might set off some alarm bells in their system.”
“We don’t want to do that yet, so hold off. How did the janitor thing work out?” Bob turned and asked Koz, while motioning for Ronald to join them. “I’ve got to think that’s our best shot at getting the passwords and the key cards Jimmy wants.”
“Chester and Lonzo got hired, just as you thought they would,” Koz told him. “They started at 4:00 p.m. on the evening shift, cleaning the back offices at the Tuscany Tower and the Bimini B
ay. Ronald and Jimmy have a lot more experience with what goes on in an office than any of us do. They told Lonzo and Chester that a lot of the secretaries get lazy and leave their passwords pinned to the walls of their cubicles, taped to the underside of their keyboards, or just sitting loose in their top desk drawers. They should be back by midnight, then we’ll see what they were able to find in the personnel, security, and finance offices.”
“Clever,” Bob said.
“Actually, it isn’t,” Ronald corrected him. “Convincing someone to give you their passwords and employee numbers with a telephone con, or simply finding them laying around in an office is how most hacking and data theft is done these days. Even the best security system breaks down when someone is dumb enough to hand you the keys.”
“In a few hours we’ll see what they were able to come up with and how useful it will be,” Jimmy added. “Most data’s segregated by department, so even if they were able to get a few passwords, they might only let us into part of the system.”
“You know, while we’re waiting…” Ronald began to fidget.
“We thought it might be useful if Ronald and I went in and took a quick look around the hotel and casino, in the flesh, so to speak,” Jimmy explained. “You know, if we can see the setup, the cameras, the alarms, the slots and gambling tables, and all the rest, it might make more sense later, when we try to get into their computers.”
“Maybe play a little, like the rest of the tourists,” Ronald said under his breath.
“You two are critical to the mission, I don’t want you…” Bob tried to explain.
“Neither do we. We’ll be careful,” Jimmy answered.
Ace looked at Bob and said, “What would it harm? Nobody’s seen them. Dorothy and I can tag along and keep an eye out.”
“Stay low key, and if you’re going to gamble, don’t lose too much.”
Jimmy looked at Ronald and they both giggled. “Lose? Mister B., we don’t lose at all, at least not at blackjack or some of the other card games.”
Burke's Gamble Page 20
