Burke's Gamble

by William F. Brown

  Finally, Bob got up from the dining room table and walked into the galley for another cup of coffee, patting Linda on the butt as he passed.

  “There hasn’t been much of that lately, you know,” she said.

  “I know. There’s going to be some serious R&R when this thing’s over.”

  Patsy nudged Dorothy and laughed. “More R&R? Those two? Now there is a shock.”

  “Sweet young things like you aren’t supposed to know about things like that,” Bob answered.

  “Yeah, right," Patsy chortled. "Well, maybe I’d know more about them if you didn’t keep Jimmy up all night playing with that stupid computer.”

  “He isn’t playing, he’s working, and it’s important,” Bob corrected her. “And maybe he wouldn’t be up all night trying to get the work done if you didn’t keep tiring him out on your afternoon 'breaks.' ”

  “It’s called love.” Patsy turned and looked at the aft deck. “What do we have now? The Three Geeks? Athos, Porthos, and Fatso?”

  “Good one,” Linda laughed. “But it’s nice to hear you’re reading again.”

  “No, only the video,” Patsy answered, “but none of those three are Logan Lerman or Orlando Bloom. So who’s the new guy?”

  “His name’s Sasha,” Bob said. “He’s Russian, and he went to Berkeley with Jimmy and Ronald. He’s working with them on something; so don’t be a pest.”

  “Working with them?” Linda asked. “Really? Is that why you have Chester posted at the gangplank with a scowl and a bulge under his shirt?”

  Bob walked out on the aft deck and knelt between Sasha and Ronald. “How’s the foot?” he asked Ronald.

  “Awesome,” Ronald looked up, glassy-eyed, and smiled. “What foot?”

  “That’s okay, you’ll remember as soon as the Percocet wears off. Like the other guys, I’ve been shot more often than I care to think, and it’s going to hurt.” Bob glanced at the computer screens and asked Sasha, “Well, are you in yet?”

  “Oh yes, Mister Bob.” Sasha looked up at him and drooled. “These machines you buy Jimmy and Ronald are totally dope. You buy me one, I kill for you.”

  “Well, I don’t think we need you killing anyone at the moment, so you just keep popping the top on their databases and accounts, Sasha. That’s all you need to do, deal? But remember, if we don’t get everything, poof!” Bob pointed at Chester. “He sends the signal, the little chip explodes, and no more Sasha.”

  “No, no, no poofing, Mister B. I already give Jimmy codes.”

  Bob turned to Jimmy and asked, “So you’re in?”

  “Yep. About twenty minutes ago. Using his programmer back doors, we got behind all the firewalls with no problem, and I’ve been prowling around in their security and financial systems ever since. What do you want to know, Boss?”

  “Well, first, can you download the stuff we want without tipping off Van Gries?”

  “That arrogant MIT derb!” Sasha shook his head in disgust.

  “Jimmy and Ronald already told us that story.”

  “He tried to tell Sasha how to do firewalls.” Sasha pointed at the laptop. “He tried to tell me! He is Dutch moron!”

  “So I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ When we’re ready tonight, around 7:00, I want you to download all of his bookkeeping and financial structure stuff to a couple of email addresses I’m going to give you. When that’s done, stay ‘under the hood.’ At 8:00, I want you to start draining their accounts and transfer everything to a series of offshore accounts I’m setting up. Then we’ll crash their systems and get the hell out of Dodge. You got all that?”

  “Sounds like fun.” Jimmy rubbed his hands together and grinned. “The WOPR’s going to run Global Thermonuclear War on their asses!”

  “That’s exactly what I want, Professor Falken.” Bob smiled.

  “Totally dench!” Ronald grinned.

  “Who iz diz Falken?” Sasha frowned, not understanding. “Who iz Dench?”

  “Never mind,” Jimmy told him. “Once the flash drives are inserted into the pedestal computers, the Trojan Horses will take some time but they’ll upload automatically into the mainframe. Then, it’s goodbye Martijn.”

  “Goodbye, Martijn! Poof!” Sasha grinned.

  “Didn’t you say he was running their systems off that super laptop of his?” Bob asked.

  “My bad,” Jimmy confessed. “Sasha showed me where I had that all wrong.”

  “They have big mainframe, all right, Mister B. Eet iz in basement. Eet iz big mainframe — really big mainframe! That was where we work.”

  “But once we have the Trojan horses uploaded, we’ll control it,” Jimmy said. “We can tell it to do anything we want with those accounts, even lock Van Gries out.”

  “Yes, Boss.” Sasha grinned. “Anything.”

  “We’ll do it then,” Bob told them. “Have the flash drives ready to install by 4:00 p.m., when the janitors report in.”

  “Then you buy Sasha one of these,” the Russian said, pointing at Jimmy’s laptop and grinning. “The lovely EON17-SLX, yes?”

  “Actually, if everything goes right, you can have that one,” Bob said, pointing at Jimmy’s. “As I understand it, I owe Jimmy and Ronald something even newer and bigger.”

  “The new green logo Razer Blade!” The two Geeks high-fived each other and grinned, so Bob told Sasha, “And you’ll have something even better to work for next time.”

  “Ochin Khorosho! Very good,” Sasha said as he high-fived the other two as well. “At 4:00 p.m., eef eet iz Global Thermonuclear War you want, Meester B., then eet iz Global Thermonuclear War you get.”

  While Bob talked to the Three Geeks on the aft deck, Linda, Patsy, and Dorothy were finishing drying the lunch dishes. “How come we get stuck with this, while they drink coffee around the table, or sit out there in the sun?” Patsy complained as she put the last plate away.

  “Newbie.” Dorothy looked at her and laughed.

  “Definitely a Noob,” Linda cackled until she noticed the warm golden glow of the medallion hanging around Patsy’s neck. “Nice. I haven’t seen that one before,” Linda said. “Is it new?”

  “Oh, not really,” Patsy answered as she tried to slip it back inside her blouse.

  Linda was quicker, however. She took it out of Patsy’s fingers and held it up to the light. It was an animal of some sort, perhaps a lion, crouching in profile, on an ornate gold chain. “Jeez, this little sucker’s heavy,” Linda said.

  Dorothy took it from Linda and also looked. “It’s heavy because it’s gold.”

  “Oh, no,” Patsy said. “It’s just some cheap costume jewelry Vinnie brought back from the desert after his last deployment. Maybe it’s gold plate, but that’s about it.”

  Dorothy gave her a skeptical look as she bounced it up and down in her hand. “Costume jewelry, my sweet patootie. This is the real stuff, girl. Look at the sheen on it, and it looks old.”

  “No, no.” Patsy shook her head again. “He told me he bought a bunch of this stuff in the bazaar in Doha. He liked to dress me up in them at night, you know.”

  “His little Persian harem girl?” Linda said as she gave Patsy a tickle. “Sounds kinky.”

  “Hey, lady, Bob’s your second time around. You’re telling me you’ve never done a little ‘role-playing’ to spice things up?”

  “I’m not saying anything, girlfriend.” Dorothy laughed and then turned toward her and whispered, “But if you need to bring out the toys to get Jimmy turned on…”

  “Jimmy?” Patsy giggled. “Not hardly. But when I put all of them on, it really makes me feel… sexy, you know,” Patsy said as she gave the other two a very knowing look.

  “What do you mean, all of them?” Linda asked as she pointed at the medallion. “You mean there’s more of these?”

  “Look, I shouldn’t have worn it.” Patsy took the medallion away and tucked it back inside her blouse. “Vinnie didn’t want me wearing it around Bragg because he said the guys were already jealous enough of him
. It was just for us, for our little games. But with him gone, I thought it might spice things up with Jimmy, too.”

  That was when Bob came back in from the aft deck and walked by. Linda grabbed his arm and pulled him into the group. “Show him,” she told Patsy.

  “Show me what?” Bob asked as he smiled at Patsy.

  “It’s nothing,” Patsy answered as she shrank back and wouldn’t look at him.

  “Show him!” Linda told her, friendly but insistent.

  “I knew I should’ve never worn it today,” Patsy grumbled as she reached up, pulled the medallion out of her blouse, and held it up for Bob to look at. “It’s nothing, really.”

  “May I?” Bob asked her as he raised the chain over her head, taking it off so he could take a closer look at the medallion. He looked at the lion, turned it over and examined the back, and whistled. “Where did you get this?” he asked Patsy.

  “From Vinnie,” she said as her shoulders slumped. “I was just telling the girls that he bought a bunch of stuff in the market in Doha on his last deployment and he… well, he liked to dress me up in them at night. I’m not in any trouble, am I?”

  “You? No, I doubt it, but this isn’t cheap costume jewelry, Patsy.”

  “I told you it wasn’t,” Dorothy quickly agreed. “I’ve done a lot of traveling around with the Air Force and bought my share of bling. This is real gold, girl.”

  “The question is, where did Vinnie get it?” Bob said. “Look, he’s gone. You can’t get him in any trouble, and he can’t get you in any trouble, either, so just tell me.”

  “She says there’s more,” Linda told him.

  Patsy put her hands to her face and started to cry.

  Bob put his hand on her shoulder and quietly asked, “How much more?”

  “A box. There’s maybe two or three dozen pieces in there, maybe more. I’ve never counted it. Old stuff, big and heavy, made of gold, some with inlaid stones, and a bunch of coins, too. He just brought it out one night, and started dressing me up in it, you know.” She sounded embarrassed. “We were just… playing games. He had it before I met him, I’m sure of that, and he kept the box on the top shelf of our closet, pushed to the back. I’m not tall enough to see back there, but one night he decided to show it to me in case something… well, in case something ever happened to him.”

  “Did he say where he got it?” Bob asked.

  “He said he and some guys bought a bunch of stuff in the market in Doha. He said it was just cheap gold plate costume jewelry, but he figured out a way to get it back into the US without going through customs and paying any taxes and duties, and all that. The other guys are still over there, and he was holding it for them. He said they’re going to split it up after the rest of them rotate back.”

  “And the box is in the house, on your closet shelf?” Bob asked.

  “It was, but he started getting phone calls and he decided to move it. He let me keep a couple of pieces out so he could, you know… dress me up in them at night. But he moved the rest of it.”

  “Do you know where he moved them to?”

  “Well, he never told me, but after we moved into the new house, there weren’t but so many places he could have put them. The big dummy, even I knew that!”

  “So you know where they are?” Linda asked.

  “When he was off on a field exercise for a couple of days and I had nothing to do, I… kind of poked around a little. I mean, if something ever did happen to him, well…?”

  “So where are they?” Linda asked again. “You know somebody tore your house apart a couple of days ago. That had to be what they were looking for.”

  “That stuff? Come on,” Patsy scoffed until she looked around at Bob, Linda, and Dorothy’s faces, and her mouth dropped open. “He told me it was cheap costume jewelry. I thought maybe my neck would turn green. I never thought…”

  “I don’t think your neck’s going to turn green,” Bob told her. “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “Out in the garage, in the corner. The ceiling is made of plywood. There’s a pull-down ladder so you can get up into the crawl space, where we store suitcases and stuff. But that isn’t where he put the box. It’s in the back-left corner where the roof comes down real low. One of those pieces of plywood isn’t nailed down. It looks like all the others but you can push it up. The box is up there behind one of the ducts. Vinnie wasn’t as dumb as a lot of people thought. You could tear the whole house down and never see that box up there.”

  “Figures,” Bob said as he looked at Ernie and motioned for him to come over. When he did, Bob handed him the medallion; he didn’t need to say anything.

  Ernie held it up and looked at both sides of the medallion in the chain. “Wow! I did a few years in Burglary, but fine art isn’t exactly my shtick. I did make a few trips to the Art Institute downtown with the kids, and they have some stuff like this on display. I’d say this is old, very old, biblically old, and without biting into it and breaking a crown, from the patina it’s probably pure gold.”

  “Jesus, you think it isn’t just real, it’s real-real?” Linda asked.

  “Oh, yeah! They took their gold jewelry very seriously back then. From the luster and feel of the piece, it’s maybe 20 or even 24 karats, or pretty damned close, not that it matters. This is a museum quality antique,” he said as he looked around at the others.

  “That’s what I thought,” Bob said as a puzzled expression came over his face. “But if there’s more of this stuff, when Vinnie got in trouble and owed all that money to the mob, why didn’t he try to sell it, or trade it to them, or even melt it down? 47th Street in Manhattan is only a couple of hours up the road.”

  “I asked him the same thing,” Patsy said. “I didn’t think it was worth very much, but we were in real trouble with those guys. I told him, ‘Take it to a pawn shop and sell it.’ ”

  “What did he say?” Bob asked.

  “Nothing. All he said was that it belonged to the other guys, and he couldn’t. For some reason, he was more scared of them than he was of Van Gries and Shaka Corliss; and that never made any sense to me.”

  Bob looked at her and could tell she was telling him the truth. “All right, I’m going to give General Stansky a call. Someone needs to get that stuff out of harm’s way, and it will get you off the hook.”

  “So you think it’s hot?” Linda asked.

  “The truth is, I have no idea.” Bob looked around at them and lied through his teeth. “There are some stories floating around that Vinnie was working with some CIA guys up in Mosul at the same time there was a burglary at the National Museum in Baghdad, but who knows? The safest thing to do is to let the authorities figure this out. Agreed?”

  Patsy nodded and held her hand out. “Do you think I can keep wearing it, at least until we get back home?” she asked. “It was from Vinnie, and…”

  Bob looked at her for a moment and then hung the medallion back around her neck. “I don’t see what it would hurt if you wear it around here on the boat. We can tell them you found it, and after the break-in you realized it might be valuable and want to turn it all in. Just promise me one thing.” He looked Patsy in the eyes and laughed. “Don’t lose it.”

  Later, up on the flying bridge, Bob spent some time looking through the latest video feeds from the Bimini Bay casino, and then scanned the hotel, the parking lots, and the boat marina with the binoculars one more time. Satisfied that everything looked quiet, he sat down on the flying bridge with Ace, Koz and Ernie to finalize his tactical plan.

  “You two are the best shots in the outfit, next to me, of course,” he told Ace and Koz.

  “Once upon a time, old man,” Ace laughed.

  “And in a galaxy far, far away,” Koz added.

  “So, what are we going to do?” Ernie asked.

  “I’m calling it ‘the Casper Plan.’ The Geeks have figured out how to get into Carbonari’s computers. Tonight, while Chester and Lonzo make their rounds, they’re going to insert a half-dozen
flash drives into some of the desktop computers in different departments and upload the Trojan Horses. That will get us into their mainframe. Around 8:00 p.m., we’re going to clean them out, all their money and records. That’s going to all vanish, and so will we, like a bunch of little ghosts. We’ll be long gone before they ever know what hit them.”

  “You mean we don’t get to shoot anybody?” Ace complained.

  “Sometimes, that’s the sweetest revenge of all, but you don’t need to worry. If we take his money, his partners up in Brooklyn will do it for us.

  “And the Barretts?” Koz asked. “What have we been toting those suckers around for?”

  “Backup, if we have to go to Plan B… or Plan C.”

  “You want us to use the nests we checked out on Tuscany Towers and Siesta Cove?”

  “Correct. Ace, you take the Tuscany Towers, because it has the better view of the Bimini Bay helipad and Carbonari’s penthouse. Koz, you take the Siesta. It has a better view of the harbor, the side and rear of the buildings, and the access roads. Together, you’ll have it in a cross-fire if it comes to that, which I doubt. But you’re the last ones out. You provide any cover we need, and then rendezvous with us down the coast. Ernie, you’re in charge of the boat until I get back. The rest of us fall back here, and the gangplank comes up at 9:00 p.m.”

  “Are we taking spotters up to the roofs?” Ace asked.

  “Chester and Lonzo. They go on the clock at 4:00 p.m. They’ve got rounds to cover, so as soon as they finish planting the flash drives, I told them to get out. That should be by 7:00, when they can rendezvous with you in the parking lots and go up. Take the optical scopes as well as the night vision scopes, but keep the Barretts in their cases until you get up there. With their janitorial uniforms and the key cards, you should be able to get up there without any problem. And take the tactical radio headsets; we need to stay in touch.”