the Second Horseman (2006)

by Kyle Mills

  "A typically cheerful analysis. Same question, Paul."

  "You know I don't agree with Edwin's conspiracy theories. Israel may not be perfect, but they're a strong ally in a part of the world where we don't have a lot of friends. And you have to understand that there are factions within Israel that aren't under the control of the government. A lot of times it's them, not the prime minister or the Knesset, that cause the problems. They can help us, they have helped us, and we should support them for that reason. As for the cab driver . . . We know he was from Syria."

  "What's that supposed to mea--," Hamdi started, but the president held up a hand.

  "What kind of targets do we have there?"

  "Sir . . . ," Hamdi cautioned.

  "We've firmed up our intelligence on a few training camps along the border," Lowe said.

  "But it's still incredibly soft," Hamdi said. "Please, sir --"

  "You have something better, Edwin?"

  "Restraint --"

  "Restraint? That's all I hear from you anymore! We get hit and you tell me to just sit on my hands and explain to the American people why Homeland Security and the military that they pay billions for are completely useless in the face of a bunch of illiterate Arab fanatics. Syria is a problem for us and you know it. There are terrorist training camps all over that border, and the Syrian government isn't doing a damn thing about it."

  Hamdi jerked forward in his chair, but then forced himself to take a breath before speaking. "Paul likes to point out that the Israeli government isn't complicit in many of the problems there, and I'd like to make the same argument about Syria. We expect them to know exactly who is and is not in their country and to completely control their border. But as the wealthiest nation in the world we can't control our own border with Mexico. And, frankly, our problems are no more a priority for them than their problems are a priority for us."

  The president folded his arms across his chest and cocked his head a bit as he examined Hamdi. "You're always saying that we get in trouble by reacting without fully understanding what we're doing. Well, let me tell you what I'm about to do. I'm going to give an order to bomb a bunch of people who had nothing to do with the attack this morning and who may have nothing at all to do with terrorism. In the process, I'm going to give Islamic fundamentalists fodder to recruit another thousand terrorists. And you know what that's going to get me? Credibility with the American people so that they'll allow me to continue your program of conciliation."

  Chapter TWENTY

  The room was typically spartan -- not so much as an inspirational poster about teamwork to break up the white, windowless walls. The long, rectangular table was straight out of government surplus, and so were the six men sitting around it. They all looked up at Brandon from behind steaming cups of coffee, expressions registering everything from intense curiosity to intense distaste.

  At Catherine's request, most of them had made some effort to soften their images, but it took more than a pair of worn jeans and slightly shaggy hair to disguise that they were all either former military or from some even scarier branch of the government. Even more obvious was that none of them had signed on with Scanlon to take orders from an escaped convict.

  Brandon drained the lukewarm remnants of his own coffee and stood, still waiting for the caffeine to kick in. He'd spent the last week driving desert highways, visiting gas stations and airfields, touring the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, and plinking away on that invention of inventions, the Internet. It would have been nice to postpone this meeting until after he'd been able to get a decent night's sleep, but time was working hard against them.

  He pointed to the man closest to him. "How many pull-ups can you do?"

  No hesitation. "With which hand?"

  Of course.

  As much as he hated to admit it, you just didn't get this class of manpower working with the average American criminal. If this had been one of his typical strategy meetings, at least one person wouldn't have shown, one would be high, two would be fifty pounds overweight, and the rest would be suffering from near-terminal hangovers.

  The question at hand, of course, was which of these disciplined and well-trained patriots was charged with putting a bullet in the back of his head when all this was over? Or was Scanlon on the up-and-up? Honestly, he was a trustworthy guy in a weird eighteenth-century kind of way, but Brandon wasn't one to bet his life on concepts as outdated as chivalry or honor. And then there were the millions of people who might just die if he screwed this up. Pressure anyone?

  "Is everyone in the right meeting?" he said. "This is Stealing Two Hundred Million from Vegas. Parents of Problem Teenagers is down the hall."

  Not so much as a tremor of a smile from anyone. "Start them out with a joke," his public-speaking professor had always said. Thank God he'd dropped out.

  Catherine gently prodded his leg from her seat next to him, prompting him to continue. He cleared his throat.

  "Okay. My name's Brandon and I'll be your guide today. Let's start with an overview. Basically, we have money getting picked up at various locations in Vegas, then transported to the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco. A simple concept, made complicated by various truck configurations -- sometimes a bunch of panel vans going out at different times, sometimes a single semi. Also, we have to deal with multiple routes and uncertain timing. The whole thing is super lo-fi. No armor, no motorcades, no machine guns."

  Brandon glanced at Richard Scanlon, who was sitting with the back of his chair leaned against the wall. "The whole thing's pretty clever, actually. It's not that hard to hit an armored car that goes out at the same time every day. They're obvious on the road, and there are all kinds of ways to get into them. When I was planning this before, the randomness and lack of concrete information was crushing. Obviously, I wanted to hit the semi and not the multiple vans, but when was it going out? Which route was it taking? Where was it stopping on the road? The list goes on and on. As much as I hate to admit it, Richard made this money incredibly irritating to steal. Too many uncontrollable factors. Too many potential surprises."

  Catherine slid a new cup of coffee in front of him and he took a grateful sip, motioning to the men around the table. "Crime is probably a little like war. Surprises are always a bad thing."

  That got a few nods. They weren't exactly eating out of his hand, but at least they seemed to be listening.

  "Now that Richard's feeding me information, it takes the main protection factor out of the equation. We should have only about a hundred insurmountable problems instead of the usual thousand." He pointed to Catherine. "Could you . . ."

  She tapped a few commands into her laptop and a projector mounted to the ceiling shone the image of a map on the screen behind him.

  "According to Richard, the next time a semi goes out is a little over a week from today -- so we're really up against it time-wise. It'll travel the route I've highlighted in yellow to San Francisco. Anybody been on that road?"

  The Pull-up King raised a hand. "I have. It's mostly dead straight and gets hardly any traffic. Couldn't be better."

  "Honestly, it has its drawbacks," Brandon said. "Remember, it's not so much getting the money, it's keeping the money that's hard. I mean, you've got a couple of tons of cash in a big, obvious truck on a road that's really hard to get off of and has almost no traffic to get lost in."

  He pointed to Catherine again. She changed the slide to one showing a plain white semi and two equally nondescript cars. "Here's what we've got. Two unmarked Ford Tauruses with one man in each. They're private guards -- nothing superimpressive, but better than your typical yahoos. I think both of them are former state cops. We'll have some more detailed info on their backgrounds before we go." He turned his attention to Scanlon. "Either of these guys new? Or have they been on the job awhile?"

  "Both veterans."

  "That's good. They'll be comfortable. The last thing we need is some rookie paying attention to everything."

  The man who had been
introduced to him as Daniel the week before raised a hand. "No police or federal coverage?"

  "None," Scanlon interjected. "Cops and feds don't protect property. And even if they did, I wouldn't have gotten them involved. It would just be more people with knowledge of this thing."

  "Okay," Brandon said. "Moving along. The driver is unarmed. An actual truck driver and the same one every time. He's never been told specifically what he's carrying but since he's picking it up from the casinos and going to the Fed, we can assume he's guessed. And finally . . ."

  Catherine anticipated him and changed the slide. This one showed a small Bell helicopter.

  "There's air coverage. The copter keeps an eye on the semi and the traffic, but doesn't constantly hover overhead and draw attention. Remember, these guys are putting most of their eggs in the stealth basket. Can anyone here fly a copter?"

  They all raised their hands.

  "Why do I even ask?"

  All hands sank again except for the Pull-up Czar's.

  "Yeah?"

  "We could take out the copter with a fifty-caliber rifle. You can buy --"

  Brandon held a hand out, cutting him off. "You bring up an important point. There will be no fifty-caliber rifles. No rocket launchers. And absolutely no grenades. In fact, no one is going to get hurt at all. Anybody can steal money by killing people. We're going to see if we can take a higher road."

  Daniel raised his hand. "What about satellites? Will there be anything overhead when we're doing this thing?"

  Actually, it wasn't a bad question.

  "It's possible," Scanlon answered. "But there's no way anyone would be able to get their hands on the information in time to interfere with us."

  "More of a worry is the random element of vehicle traffic," Brandon said. "But it's fairly light. Also, the men in the chase cars are armed. Again, nothing fancy -- just handguns." He looked around to see if everyone was tracking on the information. So far so good.

  "Moving on to electronics. The semi has a GPS tracker -- a commercially available model used by pretty much all trucking companies. Roughly the same unit has been installed in the chase vehicles. Another five GPS transmitters will be hidden in random bags of money in the trailer. All of these are being tracked real time by the security firm's head office."

  That elicited some frowns and fidgeting on the part of his audience.

  "The good news is that the company running this operation is still using essentially the same technology they started with when they originally set the thing up. You've got to love private industry -- they hate spending money to upgrade systems that still work. So what they're getting is location coordinates, direction, and speed. Also, they're getting data from the engine management system -- they're notified of things like hard braking, horsepower, gas mileage, and whatnot. That system also allows them to shut down the engine with the flip of a switch. Obviously, that means the truck and cars can't deviate from course or make any unscheduled stops, and they have to stay relatively close to each other. But we have more latitude than if they were using cutting-edge technology that read out three dots on some Doctor Evil ten-foot screen. And last, but not least, all three drivers check in with code words every hour. Richard assures me he can get those code words . . ."

  Brandon picked up his mug and looked into the eyes of every man sitting at the table. The lights were definitely all on, but some were dimmer than others. Time to find out what he had to work with.

  "Okay. So now we're seeing the complexities. The problem with the lonely road is that there's no way off the damn thing. The cops can close in from both directions, zoned in on the GPSes if there's any sign of trouble. So? What do you think? Any ideas?"

  Silence.

  "Seriously. Anything? Anything at all?"

  One of the men at the back spoke up. "We could dig a cave in the desert, hijack the truck and cars, and drive in there. It would kill the GPS signal."

  Brandon nodded noncommittally. "But how do we get the money out of there? The cops would descend on our last known position and since there's virtually nowhere for us to go, they'd eventually figure out to look for something underground. Plus, they'd be checking every vehicle coming off that road. And then there's the fact that digging caves is kind of time-consuming."

  More silence.

  Daniel put up a hesitant hand. "It seems like our problem is the tracking station. Why not take it out?"

  Brandon kept his expression passive, unwilling to show that he was impressed. "I actually looked into that years ago when I first started thinking about this thing and it turned out to be too hard. They have two redundant sites -- one in Vegas and one in Chicago -- plus an open line to the police and heavy security in the buildings that are both smack-dab in the middle of town. Also, it takes a long time to make that drive -- you'd have to hold the people for something like twenty hours without anyone finding out. Anyway, even if we could come up with something that would work, we'd need three times the manpower you see around you, and Scanlon tells me this is all we're going to get."

  Daniel nodded, chewing his lower lip. "Well, the copter's gonna have to stop for fuel. I don't know anything about trucks, but I assume it will have to stop, too. Can we get them there? Or would it be too public?"

  "Interesting you should mention that. It's one of the few things working in our favor. The truck has to drop money at the Fed when the Fed's open. That means it has to leave Vegas around nine P. M. and drive through the night. Combine that with the fact that it'll be driving through the middle of nowhere and that should keep our audience to a minimum. So let's assume we get control of all the vehicles. The monitoring station still knows exactly where we are. If we deviate, slow down, or do anything else unusual, they're going to shut down the engine and call the cops."

  Daniel spoke up again. "What about offloading the truck while it's still moving?"

  This guy was not only abnormally sneaky, he actually seemed to be getting into the spirit of things.

  "Okay, but what about the GPSes hidden in some of the bags?"

  "You'd have to scan each bag for a GPS transmission. If they're clean, toss them on the side of the road and have someone come through and pick them up . . ."

  Brandon motioned for the guy to continue.

  "What if you rebag them in orange so they look like garbage? You know, like those Adopt A Highway deals? Then we drive along in a garbage truck . . ."

  Brandon blinked a few times. Where had this guy been all his life? He was a fucking prodigy.

  "Consider me impressed, Daniel. Believe it or not, I tried almost exactly what you're suggesting. I rented some trucks and used an abandoned piece of highway in Utah to do a dry run. Getting the money off the semi was kind of a pain in the ass, particularly when you had to scan every bag for a GPS monitor. And picking it up was a nightmare -- essentially, crawling along in multiple garbage trucks, loading them. Also, we had a hell of a time finding bags that didn't burst when they hit the ground. Caused a real mess trying to get that right. But even with all those problems, I liked it. Simple and straightforward. Until . . ." He pointed to Scanlon and everyone turned.

  "It's how I would have stolen it, too," he said. "The signal from the GPSes in the money bags runs into a PC with a simple program that constantly compares their proximity to one another. It allows for a bit of cargo shifting, but nothing more. Moving any one GPS relative to the others would set off an alarm."

  Daniel looked genuinely disappointed.

  "Then how?" one of the men asked.

  "Yeah," Scanlon said. "How?"

  Chapter TWENTY-ONE

  Jamal Yusef was certain he was being led in circles.

  The cavern, deep beneath the Carpathian Mountains, was almost cathedral-like -- stalagmite pillars rose into an endless, suffocating blackness, and the ground was strewn with broken boulders the size of houses. Five minutes earlier, though, he'd been slithering on his belly, scraping his head on the jagged stone above and trying to control a vague panic that
was almost certainly justified.

  The most prevalent impression, though, was cold. Not like the Syrian desert at night and not like those winter nights in New York where the wind whipped between the buildings like a freight train. There was something malevolent about this cold. The stillness of it. The way it penetrated so quickly and deeply. Like a virus.

  The man ahead of him was better prepared. He wore a down-filled jumpsuit with a thick hood edged in grimy fur. An equally filthy Kalashnikov hung over his shoulder.

  He pointed right and Yusef looked down, squinting into the intermittent shadows. He hadn't been given a flashlight and was completely reliant on the one held by his guide. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite powerful enough and left about half the cave's deadly obstacles a bit ambiguous. Would a stumble to the right lead to a twisted ankle or a free fall through the blackness that would leave him impaled on a rock formation below?

  He wasn't particularly anxious to find out. He moved as far left as he could, using his already numb hands to steady himself against a wet wall of stone.

  The courting process had been a long one: more like two predators circling a carcass than a business negotiation. The Ukrainians were understandably cautious, and so was he.

  Organized crime had identified terrorism as a growth industry but had yet to learn to deal with the fanatics involved. Religious ecstasy, while a good motivator, didn't necessarily create predictable business relationships. And so, while Yusef had proven his credibility as a terrorist, his reliability was still subject to substantial skepticism.

  The tight corridor they'd entered twisted and climbed violently for another few minutes and then abruptly widened again. As they continued forward, Yusef could see the flash of preternaturally white faces hidden in small alcoves to both sides -- armed men watching through dead-looking eyes.