Yeah, man.
Roll with the weirdness.
“When this is over, I’m done,” I tell him. “I’m taking my money and if we find Toni, we’re gonna live happily ever after. Like normal kids.”
“You can’t. It’s in our blood, Elroy. It’s all we know how to do.”
“I’ll learn to do something else.”
“Like what? What would you do with a normal life? Would you even know how to live it? That’s my fault. For putting you here, in this world. We can retire, but it’ll always be in our blood, forever.”
“That’s not just your cross to bear.”
Dad takes a hit off the flask. Then:
“I never trusted Toni, you know that. I thought she was bad for you. The way she would take over the show. But I was wrong. She was bad for me. I think I might’ve even hated her a little, because she was a reminder of what I did that was wrong. Toni was your lifeline when I went away, when I failed you as a father. She taught you things I never even bothered with.”
“I taught her, too.”
“I know.” He almost laughs. “You turned out to be a real smart kid. She was behind you all the way. I never was.”
“Sure you were. Nothing was normal, but I always knew you were behind me.”
“Thanks.” He hangs his head and says it like he’s ashamed, like it’s something I have to give him, just to make him feel better. He looks off into space again.
Then, almost like he’s speaking in a dream:
“You’ll see Toni again. I promise. What we are doing is important.”
“I know.”
He gives me an absent stare, looking into the past. “Mollie Baker knows, too. That’s why he’s not with us.”
“Mollie Baker’s not with us because he can’t get over the past, Dad. That’s nobody’s fault. Just the way things worked out.”
He smiles again, and this time it’s really enigmatic. Like he knows a secret and won’t tell me what it is. Instead, he gets up and puts his arms around me. Says he loves me.
He doesn’t say good-bye.
• • •
That night, I only sleep four hours, and they come hard. The worst part is a dream about Toni, of course. She still has no face. She mocks me without a voice. A ghost with black glass for hair, a demon in a red dress. Roses and rusty metal. The sting in my head, punishing me. The little blonde girl in the photograph holds her hand and tells me I am a sinner. I tell her I am coming to save her. She doesn’t care. I am a fool to wish her back.
Let me see your face.
Please.
I wake up in a room I almost don’t recognize. I get up and sit on the floor, looking at the photograph.
Trying to bring her back.
Trying to resurrect her.
So I don’t have to do this important thing.
• • •
You can’t hear much when you’re riding in a helicopter. And there’s no such thing as silent running in one of these machines. You can feel them in your chest from a mile away and then they sound like a thunderstorm landing on your front lawn—that’s why we’re not using it for the approach. It’s a military model painted black, designed for troop transport. Old and clunky, retrofitted slightly, but it gets the job done. The pilot looks like a scarecrow wearing a flannel shirt and camouflage pants, and he keeps complaining about how there’s no LED readout on the panel, no GPS, and the stick is for shit. He wears aviator shades and has a necklace made out of turquoise. I guide myself out of the noise while we’re in the air, ignoring the chatter over my headset. The Sarge barks instructions as we run through the final escape drill, keeping the men pumped with dumb machismo. I’m worried about this guy. We’ve never had a drill sergeant counting off numbers on a job before. Once, we had an ex-military officer with a bunch of maps helping out when we were planning. It was his job, his intel, so we said what the hell? He smelled like cigars, even when he didn’t have one in his mouth. He was an idiot, too. I had to get through one of those tricky security corridors in a bank building on that job. You have to use infrared to check for laser beams along the floor. Banks love their laser beams.
The Sarge barks in my ear.
I don’t hear it, or the thunder of the chopper.
I take myself out of it.
Into the future.
I see everything but her.
We set back down on the concrete helipad that looks like a basketball court, and I have to check my watch to see how much time has passed. A little under an hour to circle an area the size of a small city. We were hauling ass.
I take note of the date and time, like I always do just before any job.
October 22.
Eleven thirty in the morning.
Sixteen hours to showtime.
The Sarge lines us up just beyond the dull frapping of the dying chopper rotors, tells us we all look like badasses, even me. I give him the finger when he’s not looking.
I haul my gear into the ready room, followed by Bennett.
She is wide-eyed, poised to strike.
She tells me again that it’s gonna be close. I tell her again that we’re gonna make it just fine. We go over a checklist while the men load their weapons. The rig is compact enough to carry in a pack on my back, along with all the power sources, screens and external drives. Check, check, and check. I carry the main laptop processor in a medium-sized Gold’s Gym bag. It never leaves my sight. Check again, by God.
The boys are all carrying Mossberg 500 pistol-grip assault shotguns, still the most compact and efficient sweep-and-clear hardware you can buy, twenty years after they hit the consumer market. SPAS-12s are bulkier, harder to run with—the Sarah Connor gun. Meaning they look real good when you’re sweaty and snarling in an action movie, but in the real world they can be a bitch. Mossberg fits right in the palm of your hand and cleans the area nice. Just in case, our guys have MP-5 Heckler and Koch machine guns on their backs, all notched up to full auto with home conversion kits. You see those in action movies a lot, too, but they’re the real deal. Dangerous hardware designed by the Germans and built on an innovative auto-feed mechanism called rollerlocking, which holds each bullet in place and protects the round in a tiny steel brace for the split second it takes to fire—which means you can theoretically unload on somebody underwater, at below-zero temperatures and in high desert heat, where other guns jam and explode. It’s kind of fashionable these days for weekend warriors to argue about rollerlocking on the Internet, now that there’s a lot of other innovative ways to shred target ranges with automatic weapons, but guys who really kill people still go old school with HK every time. Dad says there’s no other machine gun in the world as reliable—unless you wanna do the AK thing, of course, but those are a lot more expensive. He also insists on grenades, tear gas, plastic explosives, the works. We all wear night colors, not camouflage. I’m carrying a Ruger on my hip and that’s it, except for my walking-around money. The getaway insurance, taped to my leg.
Inside the tiny package with the cash is the photo of Toni, folded in half.
For luck, I guess.
The Sarge isn’t carrying a Mossberg or an HK. He’s got a monster hunting weapon, the invincible Remington Supermag Predator shotgun with a laser scope, modified with a fold-out stock. He’s literally armed for bear.
My father doesn’t speak to me. Part of the SOP in the final hours just before. Talking to each other has always been bad luck, like seeing the bride before the wedding, I guess. He amazes everyone by field stripping his Smith and Wesson automatic .357 down to the last coiled spring and reassembling it on a table in less than four minutes—with less than ten fingers. He used to do that in under sixty seconds. The younger guys on the team back away from him slowly like he’s some far-out old freak.
Bennett nods her head reverently at him.
She respects his years, not like these other jerks.
I come over to her, as the other men file out of the ready room, one at a time, most of them muttering weir
d half curses, the kind dumb muscleheads come up with when they just don’t understand something. She shakes her head after them.
“Punks,” she says. “I served with assholes like that.”
“There’s just two kinds of people in the world,” I say. “Us and them.”
She looks back at my dad at the worktable, as he starts taking apart his gun again. “He’s intense just before a run, ain’t he?”
“Yeah. He’s old school.”
“Those kids today all think classic is another word for dumb.”
“They’ve never seen my dad work. He’s the best.”
“I don’t doubt it.” She shifts her gaze to me, lowering her voice to something more intimate, confidential. “Can I ask you a question?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
She tilts her head thoughtfully. “Has it always been like this? You and him, I mean?”
“You mean the family business.”
“Yes.”
Dad hears the question and looks up from his work, eyebrows raised, almost forcing a killer’s smile at us.
I take a deep breath. “Before it was him and me, it was him and someone else, and before that it was some other guy with a big gun. Tech thieves didn’t really exist before the seventies. Not in the way they do now.”
“Seems crazy,” she says softly. “We’re only on this earth a few minutes. And so much has changed in our own lifetime.”
She’s damn right. We define ourselves through technology, we live on the Internet—the most old-fashioned among us do it every day. But the muscle to control the machines wears out eventually. When we get old and it all catches up to us.
Dad shrugs again.
I know exactly how he would answer her right now, so I say out loud for him:
“The gadgets get smaller, but the guns never do.”
She throws me a look. “And dead is dead, no matter what, right?”
I suddenly get a flash from an old Peter O’Toole movie, and I find myself overwhelmed with absurdity.
“Dying is easy,” I tell her. “Comedy is hard.”
She laughs for the first time since I met her, really loud, as if I’ve just said something funny.
“Pretty slick, Slick,” she says.
• • •
A few hours left till showtime.
My stomach is doing outside loops.
I go into the farmhouse when no one is paying attention and I visit the restroom. I sit on the closed lid of the toilet and take the key to my safe deposit box out of my pocket. Stare at it. The tiny little thing could be worth three hundred large. Or nothing at all.
So I swallow it, just to be on the safe side.
It goes down like a metal-flavored sleeping pill.
When I was a kid, just out of the army and running with Jett Williams, we came at banks and ATMs empty-handed, like kungfu fighters in the street. Nowadays, the money is locked up tight. You have to know every security grid on every corner in every damn neighborhood to get away with wahooing an ATM. You have to be able to trick every eye in the sky into seeing something else. They have digital tattletales and silent-alarm sucker punches rigged to every plastic terminal chassis and keypad. Pry one open with a screwdriver and watch your life go up in flames instantly. It’s enough to make you long for the good old days, when easy money was printed on the street.
At least enough to make you really damn afraid of the future.
• • •
I have one last bit of business while I’m in the bathroom. Something that Axl taught me, of course, and that something is this:
Always go in with confidence, but prepare yourself for the worst.
I slip my ace into my shoe.
Just like he said.
When I finally flush the toilet and come out, my father is watching. He doesn’t say a word, just smiles at me. Time to go, son. Our biggest score yet. Our life’s work.
I put my hand in my father’s.
We nod, like this is all we have left, this last Coffin Run.
Maybe it is.
7
00000-7
THE FACE OF GOD
11:50
October 22 is almost over as we bail from the truck a half mile from the site, split into three teams. I’m on A-Team, with Dad and Bennett. B-Team circles the fence, two men, one from either side. The idea is that they take out any security walking the perimeter and close on the roof, where the main power boxes are located. Then they’ll stand by and wait for my signal. C-Team is the Sarge, who’ll go in through the front gate with one other man, which is where the two security guards posted there will run into their guns. They’re hauling the drill rig on a custom gurney—six hundred pounds of heavy metal on mechanized, all-terrain wheels. My team gets to the primary transformer in three minutes, which is just beyond the fence. I pry the lid and Bennett wires up the 248 handheld, deactivating the alarm systems between the gate and the front glass entranceway to the building. She deep-sixes the power in the fence, too. It’s Saturday-morning cartoons, man. Nice and easy. They didn’t even have a silent alarm out here. Inside the building, it’s a different story. There are five places you can call in the cops, silent toggle switches that are manually controlled by the security guards. Motion sensors on the vault floor. It’s all controlled by one little circuit board inside the transformer box, and she gets to it real fast. Attaches a wire on a clip to a mini-processor/transmitter so she can kill the circuit with a remote command on our final approach. Our boys on the roof will shut down the power in the building right after that, and the outside lights. The two guys watching the front desk are the only security the place has on the inside. They’ll be in the dark until we get to them. B-Team leader crackles over the headset, reporting in. They’ve just finished their sweep. Nobody’s home. I tell him we’re all clear at this end. They roger out and move for the roof of the building now, over the fence. The Sarge whispers in my ear next, says the guard post is terminated. That’s our signal from C-Team. I hope he didn’t kill them. The plan was to drag the security guys into the woods and tie them to trees. During the dry run, he used the words “guard post secured.” I’m worried about this guy.
12:05
October 23 just started, and we’re three minutes behind schedule as we get to the front gate. The Sarge and his man are waiting in the little yellow booth. The gate clatters open as they come out to meet us. We use nightvision on our approach. Tech Noir. Bennett hits the 248 remote switch and the silent alarm system inside the building goes. That’s right when the two guys on the roof use bolt cutters grounded to a custom circuit sensor to kill everything else. The whole joint gets real dark, real fast.
12:11
Still behind schedule, we get to the main glass entrance doors. The two guards are literally stumbling around inside. They can’t see a damn thing and have no idea what’s going on. Through my goggles, they look like blind neon video warriors in a blue room. The five of us walk right in, single file through the front door, which isn’t even locked. The guard on the left hears the door open and the sound of our footfalls but he doesn’t draw his sidearm. Neither does the other one. These guys were trained at Walmart. The Sarge uses the butt of his Predator gun to knock both of them cold with one clean sweep. Two of our men get the rent-a-cops on the floor, secure them with those titanium-plastic wrist-cuff things. The Sarge tells his men to check the perimeter twice before we move again.
12:30
Vault floor. Basement level. We take the stairs. The Sarge and his boys grunt with the heavy equipment. Bennett is a sleek red blur at my elbow, fast and efficient. The room has red emergency lights burning in it, and those lights remind me of her hair. That worries me because the motion sensors are supposed to be deactivated. I tell everybody to hang in the stairwell while I scope it out. I try infrared, then adjust the Tech Noir. Normally, I would light a cigarette and blow smoke into the room—it’s the low-tech approach that usually works best when you’re looking for grids and heat sensors. Bu
t we have the MI6 Corps of Gadgeteers on our side tonight. So I give the signal to Bennett and she checks the perimeter with a sweep from the Kimble Infiltrator on her arm. No lasers. No motion readers. Nothing. Looks like we already cleaned house. As we step into the room, I tell her to check the 248 remote, make sure the circuit is still closed down at the transformer outside. Everything’s cool. The front of the vault is typical, just like in the photos and digital simulations I saw. Dual spinning combination lock system, all solid steel. Easy to cut through. But guarded by a very treacherous mistress. Time to set up shop.
12:40
We pry up the floor, hunting for the main power cables. The vault is on an indie source, probably a generator way offsite. We have to kill that last, after I do the time locks. I unpack the drill rig myself, inspect it carefully. The array has a powerful suction system that keeps it on the floor right where we need to bore the holes. I use a grease pencil to draw a map for everybody. Three key points with the 10-millimeter titanium alloy, and then a final one with the 20-millimeter diamondback, dead center. Bennett unpacks her tools and starts taking apart the main terminal that controls the entrance to the vault. What happens here during normal business hours is that an employee sits down in the comfy little swivel chair and slides his code card through a reader, then two other guys turn their keys simultaneously in the slots on either side of the console—that unlocks the system and allows the guy sitting in the chair to punch in the entry codes. The men who designed this amusing little terminal have no idea how simple it is to use a set of screwdrivers and power tools to replace their screen with yours. But that’s the easy part. I use a handheld diamond drill to cut through the two locks while Bennett starts setting up the rig. Once we’re past the main panel on the vault terminal, though, it’s all about being experienced enough to know what wires to look for, and which circuits to intercept, how to trick the meaty parts into thinking it has a new interface. There’s no security at all on the lock system itself. All it does is turn on the computer. Child’s play. Bennett checks the 248, just to be on the safe side. Still no silent alarm. Dad says someone needs to walk the perimeter again while I work, secure the whole building. The Sarge tells my father congratulations, he’s been elected, and sends one of his men with Dad, up the stairs, tells him to keep in touch—he talks to his boys on the roof and tells them to meet the old man in the main lobby. He puts Dad in charge of the recon unit. I hear two men give a quick yessir over the headset. They sound like robots.
Resurrection Express Page 10
