Burke's Gamble

by William F. Brown

  Carbonari tightened his grip on the heavy briefcase and quickly nodded. “All right, all right, then let’s get out of here!” he hissed and turned toward the door to the rooftop deck.

  “My point exactly, except for a slight change of plans,” Theo said as he pulled the chair away from the closet door and opened it. He reached inside, grabbed a surprised Linda Burke by the upper arm, and pulled her out of the closet. Quickly he closed it again and pushed the chair back under the door lock, leaving Jimmy and Ernie inside with surprised expressions on their faces.

  “My sincere apologies, Mrs. Burke,” Theo said. “But travel is so much more interesting when you have someone to share it with, don’t you agree? Besides, I will feel a tad safer with you by my side.”

  “Ghost, Ace. “They’re on the move again, coming this way and going out on the roof. I think they’re headed for Carbonari’s helicopter.”

  “Ghost, Chester. We’re downstairs heading for the service corridor. What’s your position?”

  “Halfway up the south emergency stairs. You and Bulldog use the key card and take the executive elevator to the penthouse. We’ll clear the elevator lobby and meet you up top.”

  “Roger.”

  “Ace, Ghost. No need to hurry. They may be moving, but they’re not going anywhere.”

  If nothing else, Martijn Van Gries understood timing. After watching enough gambling at the poker tables in the casino, he knew when a man should ante up, when he should double down, and when he should fold them and wait for a better hand. That time had come. He walked out of Donatello’s penthouse suite with what he’d walked in with two years before — a head on his shoulders, a Walther PPK tucked behind his belt, and empty pockets; but that would not last much longer. As he strode into the penthouse elevator lobby, he pulled out his iPhone, touched Eva’s speed-dial number, and pressed the elevator down button. Before he left the boat, he had told Eva to stay there, which should make things infinitely easier.

  “It is me,” he said as soon as she answered. “Get dressed and start the engines. Cast off everything except the bow line and be ready to leave as soon as I jump on board.”

  Cell phone reception inside a steel elevator never was the best, but he heard her say, “Leave? Where are we going, Martijn? I don’t have any of my things and…”

  As the elevator doors closed, he swore he heard some kind of commotion and doors slamming in the emergency stairwell. Trouble? Or Burke? Tonight, they were about the same. “Listen to me!” he cut her off. “You have your getaway bag on board…”

  “Yes, but the cat, the rest of my stuff, I never thought…”

  “It is too late for all that. Your passport is in the safe on the boat and it is time the cat learned to fend for itself. We can buy anything you need later. Get moving, now! I’ll be jumping on board in a couple of minutes.”

  Nine hundred and twenty-two meters away, Ace Randall watched the penthouse doors swing open and a cluster of people walked out onto the pool deck. One of the Dutch sergeants, Eric Smit, came out first, walking point, with Donatello Carbonari close behind. He was followed by Patsy Evans and Gramps Benson, side by side and arm in arm, whether she liked it or not. Theo Van Gries came next, with his left arm wrapped around Linda Burke’s neck and his Glock 17 in his right. It tracked back and forth as the group moved out onto the roof. To Theo’s right walked Lucas Bakker, and Joost DeVries covered the rear, walking backwards with his eyes on the inside of the penthouse and the doors to the lobby beyond. The group quickly passed between the swimming pool and the sauna, and headed toward Donatello Carbonari’s helicopter.

  About to engage? Ace chuckled to himself. You bet your sweet ass we are, general. The show is about to start. He was almost at the same elevation as his targets, and he had estimated the wind to be a negligible two or three knots, quartering from his right. He made a very slight one click adjustment to his scope, and knew he was ready.

  “Koz, see the two outriders? I’ll take the one in the rear, you’ve got the point man. On my mark…”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Martijn Van Gries ended his phone call to Eva Pender as the first floor elevator doors opened. He leaned out and made a quick scan of the service corridor. It was empty, so he walked far enough to be able to see the hotel’s reception area. Except for two desk clerks and several guests checking in, it was empty. Nothing appeared out of order. This was very late on a weeknight. Except for some scattered slot machine players and gamblers in the poker room at the far end, the casino appeared lightly populated. Satisfied, Martijn turned and was starting down the service corridor toward his office when something to his right drew his attention. It was movement. That was what always caught the eye, not shape or noise. He saw two men dressed in blue janitor’s uniforms running toward him from the nearby exit door. Whether they were coming for him or just the elevator was impossible to tell but both men carried pistols in their hands. Glocks, he recognized at first glance.

  “Dammit,” he swore as he pulled out his Walther and fired two quick rounds in their general direction. His silencer was in his pocket, unattached, but the Walther was only a .38-caliber. Its gunshots were enough to scatter the people in the lobby but not nearly as loud as the 9-millimeter cannons the other men carried. It was unlikely that he hit either of them, but all he wanted was to slow them down and buy time while he took off down the service corridor toward his office.

  He had always been more of a sprinter than a runner. With elbows and knees pumping, he even surprised himself how fast he was moving, faster than at any time since he ran track for the exclusive boys’ school in Leiden where his parents interned him and eventually his younger brother, like two illegal aliens. Being small, and effete, the only good things Leiden had taught him were how to run from trouble faster than trouble was chasing him, and how to “accommodate” it if he couldn’t, two lessons which proved useful in later life.

  As he reached the bend in the corridor and took the sharp turn to the right, three bullets dug long gouges into the wall to his left. He heard them rip into the drywall and saw the dust but he heard nothing, which meant they were using silencers. No matter how much he pissed off Angelo Roselli and the Brooklyn mob, they wouldn’t be using silencers or Glocks. They preferred loud .357 Magnum revolvers, sawed-off shotguns, and baseball bats, and would never be caught dead dressed like a janitor. No, these were Burke’s men, and it looked as if he was getting out just in time.

  “3… 2… 1… Mark,” Ace said into his chin mic as he ever-so-gently squeezed the trigger.

  For all of the power an M-107 Barrett delivered, its heavy, 661-grain, full-metal-jacketed steel-core bullet delivered a surprisingly easy recoil. Its unique barrel assembly, receiver, and internal springs absorbed most of the rearward kick, leaving the shooter ready to fire another round almost immediately, should that prove necessary. However, when that first shot was taken by Master Sergeant Harold “Ace” Randall, Staff Sergeant Rudy “Koz” Kozlowski, or virtually anyone else in the Unit, a second shot was rarely needed.

  Ace’s shot struck Joost DeVries “dead-center of body mass,” in the middle of his back, as described in the class, knocking him off his feet onto the blue plastic pool cover four feet to his rear. At almost the same instant, Koz took out Lucas Bakker with a headshot, painting Donatello Carbonari from the waist up with blood, bone, and bits and pieces of whatever else was inside the Dutchman. His body crumpled onto the deck as the warm, wet shower struck Carbonari in his face. He looked down at the gore splattered all over his $5,000 Savile Row suit, screamed, and dropped to his knees next to Bakker's body, shaking, and attempting to hide behind his briefcase: a physically impossible proposition for a man of his size.

  Chester wanted to fire a fourth round at Martijn Van Gries, but the Dutchman suddenly cut to the right, and disappeared down the service corridor before Chester could get in the shot. He quickly keyed his chin mic and said, “Ghost, Chester. We’re in the first floor service corridor. That weasel Martijn Van
Gries came out of the executive elevator and took off toward the offices. He fired on us so I returned fire but missed. Should we pursue?”

  “Negative,” Bob told him, still breathing heavily from the run up the stairs, resorting to monosyllables. It was a bitch to get old but he guessed it beat the alternative. “He can’t get far; let him go. We need to stay focused on the roof.”

  “Roger that,” Chester answered as he pressed the Up button on the service elevator.

  Since it had just brought Van Gries down, the doors immediately opened, and Chester and Bulldog stepped inside. Chester kept his eyes on the corridor, hoping Van Gries would reappear, but that didn’t happen. He quickly swiped the copy of the security master key card that Jimmy had made for them in the elevator card reader. That activated the penthouse stop and the doors immediately closed. As the elevator began to rise, both Deltas used the opportunity to check their weapons before the doors opened again.

  After Martijn turned the corner, he stopped dead in his tracks and doubled back, waiting with his gun drawn, listening, but the footsteps of the two men stopped at the elevator. He heard them talking, perhaps on a radio, but they didn’t try to follow. That was good, because he didn’t want a gun battle, not here, not now, and certainly not with them. He had too many other things to do before he could leave this stupid city and never come back.

  First, he had to go to his office. Once inside, he locked the door, went to the center of the room, and shoved aside one of the two matching armchairs that sat in front of his desk. He pulled up on the corner of the center carpet square beneath it, revealing a recessed piece of three-quarter-inch plywood set flush with the floor. He lifted it aside. Underneath lay the face of a custom steel-walled floor safe that he had installed one weekend, when Donatello went out to Vegas for a long weekend. The combination was an unusual five-number set, which made the safe virtually un-crackable. He went to all that trouble because this was where he kept his own, very private getaway bag. It did not contain underwear, socks, or toiletries, however. It was a custom-made, five-inch-deep, weapons-grade aluminum attaché case, which contained his collection of six forged passports, each in a different name and issued by a different country — the US, Canada, Ireland, the UK, Belgium, and the Netherlands — plus $200,000 in cash, $300,000 in bearer bonds, and a long metal tube with another $300,000 in gem-quality diamonds he had acquired on three trips to Amsterdam. That should be enough to tide him over for a quick getaway, until he was able to meet with his bankers in the Caymans and Switzerland.

  With his attaché case in one hand and the Walther in the other, he eased open the hallway door and took a quick peek outside. The corridor was empty, so he ran to the emergency stairwell and disappeared downstairs. There was a second reinforced steel door at the bottom which was capable of withstanding anything short of a howitzer or a half-hour with a blowtorch. It had both a key card and keypad for access control. Very few people had the required card, and even fewer knew the key code.

  He locked the steel door behind him and found himself inside his nearly dark Computer Operations Center. Even in the middle of the night, he always had one man on duty down here in “the dungeon,” as the hired help called it. Their job was to monitor the hundreds of hotel and casino security cameras, and to note any unusual activity in his “special” suites upstairs for recording. As Martijn strode in, the duty operator was sitting in front of the tall bank of security monitors with a headset on his ears and his feet propped on the console. His name was Philip, and the last thing he expected to see at this hour was his boss coming through the door. Martijn had to smile as he watched Philip turn his head, see him, and topple onto the floor when he realized who had just walked in.

  “Mister Van Gries,” Philip stammered as he got back on his feet, clearly flustered. “God, I’m glad you’re here. I put in some calls to you and Mr. Carbonari, but… well, you need to see what’s happening up on the roof, and in the penthouse. There are men…”

  Martijn nodded. “I know all about it, Philip, everything’s under control.”

  “Shouldn’t I notify someone? I know you said we should never call…”

  “The police?” Van Gries asked, with a frown. “No, you are to call no one, and certainly not the police,” he reminded him as he walked to the far corner of the room and used his key card and a still different key-code to open a cabinet that held a large, secure server. Martijn opened his attaché case, reached inside the server cabinet, and began pulling out two dozen Kingston Predator one-terabyte, high-capacity flash drives, one at a time, and dropping them into his case.

  “But there are men up there with guns, Mister Van Gries,” Philip blathered on. “And… well, I think people have been shot up there. I… I didn’t know what to do.”

  Several of the flash drives contained the hyper-secure backup set of his personal accounting and investment portfolio. For several years, Martijn had been using some very complicated algorithms to skim minor amounts of money from the transfers that went in and out of the hotels and casinos. The individual amounts were so small and the accounts so diverse that it would take an army of forensic accountants to figure it all out. Donatello knew nothing about it, the New York partners knew nothing about it, and he thought it highly unlikely that Burke’s hackers knew anything about the money or his private accounts scattered around in Belize, Bangkok, the Caymans, and Switzerland.

  The remaining thumb drives in the server cabinet contained the videos he had been using to blackmail several dozen VIPs over the past year or so. Martijn’s proprietary software integrated their personal information with hotel and restaurant charges, gambling records, and carefully selected audios and video feeds from the specially outfitted hotel bedrooms they had been assigned to upstairs. His custom audiovisual software was motion activated, and allowed Martijn to quickly edit everything out except the “juicy stuff.” As with the account skimming, he was always careful. He only hit these people up for relatively modest amounts of money, small enough that they could afford, but not large enough to drive them into doing something stupid, like running to the police or not paying. Potentially, his little extortion scheme could provide an even greater income stream than what he had been skimming from the three casinos. Yes, he thought, it was the gift that would keep on giving.

  “I… I saw you up there in the penthouse with the others, and I remembered that you said we should never call the police so I didn’t,” Philip went on, further sealing his own fate. “But I couldn’t get Security to answer their phones or pages, not even those new gentlemen from New York, so…”

  “There is no problem, Philip. Everything is under control. It is merely a security drill. Can you come over here for a second and give me a hand with this?”

  “Yes, yes, of course, Mister Van Gries.” Philip quickly stepped over and knelt next to the Dutchman. Martijn picked up one of the flash drives with his left hand and showed it to Phillip to draw his attention toward the attaché case, while he pulled out the Walther PPK from his pocket with his right hand and shot Phillip in the side of the head.

  “No loose ends,” Martijn began softly repeating his mantra. “No loose ends…”

  Finished retrieving what he had come for, Martijn reached back inside the server cabinet. At the bottom, under two locked but innocuous-looking metal covers, sat two red switches with small lights above each one. He unlocked the covers, flipped them up, and pushed the two switches down. The two lights immediately came on, turned bright red, and began to flash. The switch on the left deactivated the computer room’s foam fire suppression system, while the one on the right activated the timed detonators on a series of white phosphorus incendiary charges that Van Gries had placed inside the room, the servers, and control devices. There would be no explosion. The charges would ignite and burn for one minute at over 5,000 degrees, more than enough time to incinerate everything in the room and turn it into molten plastic, metal, and ash, even poor Philip. Because the ceiling and walls of the room were made of t
welve inches of reinforced concrete, a fire like this would create intense heat inside like an old-fashioned tandoor cooking oven, leaving the fire department’s arson inspectors scratching their heads, but it would have no effect at all on the hotel or casino.

  Martijn looked at his watch. Time to go, he thought, as he picked up his attaché case and quickly climbed the metal stairs to the rear loading dock door. Provided he encountered no further interference, he would be standing at the wheel of his yacht in two minutes, and motoring toward the headland and Absecon Inlet with the ever-erotic Eva at his side when the charges went off in another five. After a leisurely sail to a private marina he knew about in Bermuda, the yacht would be given a complete cosmetic make over.

  After that, he would visit his bankers in the Caymans before sailing east and island-hopping his way down the long chain along the eastern Caribbean, from the Turks and Caicos to Grenada and Trinidad and Tobago. The native populations there were a gentle and easy-going folk who spoke a lilting Dutch and French patois. They understood fine dining and civilized conversation, and Martijn could forget all about Atlantic City, its infamous New York City crime bosses, and the god-awful fractured English they spoke. More important still, he could forget all about that vengeful bastard Robert T. Burke. It was unfortunate that Martijn finally had his various operations and scams humming at full speed when Burke had to stick his nose in and ruin everything. After all, as his brother Theo amply demonstrated upstairs, in the grand scheme of things, what difference does one army sergeant make, more or less?

  When Bob and The Batman finally reached the top of the emergency staircase, they paused. From the blueprints Ace photographed in the City Building Inspector’s Office, Bob knew the emergency stairs terminated in the penthouse’s elevator lobby at a thick steel door, a magnetic lock at the top and a key card reader on the adjacent wall. Ace said Carbonari and the others had gone outside and were on the deck, but they may have left someone behind.