The Thieves of Legend

by Richard Doetsch

  But when she turned, she saw that KC was gone.

  CHAPTER 36

  THE VENETIAN

  Busch zipped down the line into darkness, descending the hundred-foot elevator shaft at nearly twenty miles per hour, past the chaos and confusion in the security office on Sub-Three, past the money floor on Sub-Four, past the gambling chips on Sub-Five…

  If his wife, Jeannie, had any idea of what he was doing she’d kill him before the guard they were about to confront had the chance.

  Finally slowing his descent, he arrived on the lip of the Sub-Six landing. The elevator pit, a story below him, was dimly lit with an orange glow. Michael and Jon landed seconds later, checking their gear and unhooking from their lines. Busch released the door and the three entered the vestibule.

  Twenty seconds gone.

  BRAD DOREN WAS former British Special Forces—SAS. Having spent fourteen years in the service, he had seen enough of war that if his nephews ever considered such a career he’d shoot them himself and save both himself and their parents the anguish.

  Stationed in Hong Kong for two years, the Englishman had fallen in the love with the city. He had met his wife there and was raising his two daughters in a small apartment with spectacular views of Victoria Harbor. The one-hour commute across the water four nights a week was well worth the inconvenience; his pay was higher than he’d ever imagined, the three-day weekends were more than appealing, and the fact that he hadn’t had to draw his gun once since he’d started eighteen months ago made this the best job of his life.

  When the lockdown hit, he and Lao Che were directed to inspect the lower levels. He was more than happy to go, actually excited about getting out of the lounge where he sat around discussing his war efforts with the security team. He was like a rock star to them, as they all came out of various police forces in Asia and Europe. He was particularly fond of Lao, a former cop. The man had a quiet wisdom, knowing when to listen and never asking sycophantic questions about battle and death as the others did. The former Hong Kong SWAT sniper was bright, talented, and had leaped at the chance to earn a salary well above what he’d been looking at for the next ten years.

  The two checked their guns and holstered them. With a special key, Brad opened the door of the sealed stairwell and headed in, the deadbolt auto-locking behind them. Though he had been told nothing was going on, deep down he hoped something was, that maybe he would get a chance to fire his gun again. It would give the staff something to talk about for the next month besides war.

  JON WALKED INTO the vault room just as Rama Schavilia hung up the phone. The grotesque guard leaped from his chair, holding a gun, his finger tight around the trigger. But instead of shoving a gun in Schavilia’s face, Jon shoved a picture. It was small, date-stamped an hour earlier, and far more effective than a gun. Schavilia stepped back, his foot now clear of the alarm button, laid the pistol on his desk, and put his hands in the air. They could have taken his wife, his father, or his brother and it wouldn’t have mattered to him; he would have stepped on the alarm even if it meant their death. But his grandfather was different. He had lived a hard life, yet he’d always been there for Schavilia. He had helped him with school, when he was in trouble with the law, when he needed money. And he was the one who had straightened him out.

  “Security is down for another four and a half minutes,” Jon said in Chinese. “What we are here for no one will miss; its owner is dead. When the cameras come back up, give the all-clear, and once we leave the casino, we will release your grandfather and pay him twenty-five thousand dollars cash for his and your silence.”

  Schavilia said nothing. He pulled his chair away from the desk into the middle of the room, away from the foot switch, and sat.

  MICHAEL REACHED INTO his bag and grabbed the long, thin gooseneck scope and a precision drill. He looked at vault 16. There was one vulnerable point: a thin plate over the tumbler mechanism. The schematic showed it was two inches thick, but Michael and those in the trade knew it was really only a sixteenth of an inch thick. It was an unspoken fail-safe, a means to accelerate the opening of the safe if it was ever a matter of life and death—which right now it surely was.

  With the drill already spinning, he quickly drove it through the plate and slipped his scope in. He had crafted the 1mm fiberscope from fiber-optic cable, its pliable, threadlike construct slipped through thin flex tube making a device like a periscope that could bend, twist, and peer around corners. He had attached four hair-thin wires that protruded from the rear and were affixed to small dials that allowed him to control the flex scope like a puppet. He had also attached a lens that the fiber cable ran to. Like a doctor performing emergency surgery on a patient seconds from death, he rested his eye on the lens cup and looked through the fiber-optic lens. A small LED fed a glow through the device and illuminated the inner workings, which were polished and brand-new. Michael could see everything as if it were right in front of him. He twisted the gooseneck, dialing the contraption, looking, seeking… and found the central lock mechanics. A series of four metal wheels, each with notches and a single pin that aligned to a number on the exterior dial.

  Reaching up, Michael spun the dial three revolutions, clearing the pins. He focused himself and turned the wheel to the right, watching as the dial turned and a pin finally fell into the seat of the second dial with a subtle click. He paid no attention to the numbers on the wheel in his hand; they didn’t matter, and besides, he only had one shot at this. Back to the left he went, watching closely until the second pin fell into the seat of the third wheel; back to the right and with two more iterations the final pin fell. Michael reached up and gently turned the handle, and a loud click echoed in the room.

  Busch stood staring at his watch; he had never seen the seconds tick by so quickly.

  Michael pulled back the safe door, an interior light automatically illuminating the contents. What Michael saw was not what he had expected, and certainly not what would normally be found in a casino. The bright light revealed what could only be described as a collection of museum-quality artwork. There were paintings—Govier, Picasso, Renoir, Monet—stolen, missing from history and mankind. The walls were lined with statuary and sculptures.

  The floor was clean, as if freshly painted, and sitting in the center of it, by itself, was a single box. It was eighteen inches square and high, gun-metal gray, marked with a single name on top: Zheng He. Michael quickly unhasped the single lock and peered inside.

  “Let’s go,” Jon said, standing at the exit.

  Out of everyone’s line of sight, Michael pulled something from the box and tucked it into his pocket. He closed the box and handed it to Busch, who tucked it into the bag on his back.

  And they were all on the move.

  “Not a word and we’ll release him in two hours,” Jon shouted as they ran by Schavilia. “If you alert anyone before then, he will be dead by the end of your shift.”

  Busch held open the door as they re-entered the elevator shaft. He let the door close behind them and glanced at his watch.

  Two and a half minutes gone.

  They each grabbed a rope and began to climb.

  BRAD AND LAO raced through Sublevel Four, Brad’s command master key overriding the locks. Peter Huang, fifty years old and frail, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, met him in the hall and escorted them into the work area.

  “Is this a drill or the real thing?” Peter asked.

  “As far as I’m concerned, it’s always real. Nothing out of the ordinary tonight?”

  Peter shook his head as he pointed to his staff. “All on time, no complaints.”

  Everything was quiet; everyone was in place. The team of ten was busy running a series of machines that counted and bundled cash, every dollar logged into the system, which, unlike the video server, was running just fine. The bundles of cash were then dropped into a repository that auto-packed the cash and stored it in the holding vault beneath their feet until morning. On the far side of the room five accountants
in short-sleeved white shirts were busily working the computer ledgers and spreadsheets, as lost in their work as their counterparts counting and bundling the cash. No one looked up or appeared aware of the severity of the camera outage all around them.

  As Brad had suspected, nothing was out of the ordinary. Only a fool would think he could steal from the Venetian. “Thanks.” He nodded to Peter and walked back to the vestibule.

  He thought of heading straight down to Sub-Six, but unlike Sub-Three’s cash and Sub-Four’s chips, nothing was out in the open on that level; everything sat behind ten-foot steel safe doors. And no one short of God was getting those things open. He’d continue in sequence.

  He slipped his key into the lock, opened the door, and he and Lao headed down to Sublevel Four.

  ARRIVING AT SUBLEVEL Five, Michael stepped on the narrow lip of the landing and turned to Busch, who was trying to catch his breath from hoisting his large frame up the forty-foot climb. It was a deadly fall into darkness, and as Jon arrived, gaining purchase, Michael felt like a bird on a narrow branch that was about to snap.

  Michael reached over, grasped the metal box on Busch’s back, and pulled it from the bag. Busch readjusted his footing on the lip of the elevator landing and released the elevator door.

  And as the door glided open, Jon snatched the gun from his waist and stepped inside.

  Unlike Schavilia, who had been surprised to see him, Shi Shou Nu was expecting them and had vowed his compliance several hours earlier before his midnight shift had begun.

  While it was every parent’s Achilles’ heel, Jon hated threatening children and knew he could never go through with the threat of death to a six-year-old girl. But the men who held her now in a basement in the Macau slums were different.

  She had been taken from her bed at gunpoint just as her father was leaving for his midnight shift. Jon’s instructions were simple and to the point: compliance, she lives; noncompliance…

  Shi was an in-house courier, part of the security personnel who shepherded gambling chips between Sublevel Four and the tables. His large cart would be loaded hourly with eighty boxes of chips, its contents verified at the door. He would wheel it into the secure vestibule and, by himself, free from interference, await the elevator. Following protocol, he would ride upstairs alone, where he would be met by an armed guard who, using the security wand, would verify the value on the cart before escorting Shi to his points of delivery.

  Shi was alone in the security vestibule, dressed in his uniform of blue jacket and maroon pants. Since the security camera had gone out and the elevators had been locked down, he had been nervously awaiting not only the all-clear signal but Jon’s arrival.

  As soon as Jon came out of the elevator shaft, gun in hand, aimed high, he and Jon set to work, removing dark maroon cases from the center racks of the cart, creating a cavity. Busch handed Jon the metal case and he quickly slipped it into the hole while Jon passed the boxes of chips to Busch, who stuffed them in the satchel on his back.

  Michael reached into his pouch, pulled out a small chip coated in adhesive and a small black box device with a built-in screen, and ran it over the maroon boxes in Busch’s satchel. The screen instantly flashed the denomination of $1.5 million. He hit a small red button, disabling the RFID in every chip within, and watched the value drop to zero.

  He punched “1.5 million” into the device’s touch keypad, entered a code, and hit Send. He then passed the scanner over the tiny chip in his hand, watched the screen flash $1.5 million, and quickly slapped the single chip onto the metal case. As Michael touched the screen again, the keypad disappeared to be replaced by a four-quadrant screen with a small blinking red dot in the center. With a nod of his head, he tucked the device into his pocket.

  Shi and Jon set several boxes in front of the metal case, completely obscuring it within the large cart, camouflaging it from the world.

  Jon stared at Shi, an unspoken message passing between them. The three stepped back on the elevator lip and let the door close in front of them.

  Michael glanced at his watch: three and a half minutes gone. He looked up the dark shaftway, a forty-foot climb. They needed to not only get back up to Sublevel Two but get the door open and return to the conference room before the cameras were back up.

  Ignoring the rope, Michael grabbed hold of the service ladder and began to climb.

  BRAD AND LAO entered Sublevel Five and found the area locked down. Brad slipped his special access key into his pocket, quickly spoke with the floor captain, inspected the area, and found nothing out of place. There was a chip courier in the holding vestibule, awaiting the elevator. Otherwise, all personnel were accounted for.

  It occurred to Brad that he would find that to be the case on each of the lower floors. If a robbery was in progress, the criminal would already be on his way out. The rebooting of the system would take five minutes, and anyone attempting to breach the security would have been in motion when the system went down.

  The chance that a robbery was in progress was slim to none. But it was that slim chance that was giving him anxiety. If something was occurring and he missed it, he would be held accountable not only to the Venetian but to his own conscience. A good thief, a top thief, would be thinking out of the box, and that was what he should be doing. An exceptional thief would have already pulled the job and be hiding behind the momentary blindness of the security system.

  Brad reversed direction and raced up the stairs.

  They bypassed Sub-Three and went to Sublevel Two. The main floor above was filled with guards at the elevators and at the stairwells, both of which were locked. If someone had stolen something from the depths of the Venetian, Sublevel Two would be the perfect place to hide. No personnel around at three in the morning, no security to deal with.

  He explained it all to Lao as they ran up the stairs and, using the access key, entered Sub-Two and found it vacant. The manifest said there were four people here, in conference room A.

  Brad drew his gun, Lao following his lead, and approached the conference room.

  “Thank God,” Carl said as he emerged from the conference room, closing the door behind him. “We’re trapped down here. No elevators, the stairwells are locked.”

  Brad stared at him a moment, finally letting down his guard. He recognized the man. He was a security liaison.

  “Carl,” the man said, introducing himself and offering his hand.

  “Brad,” he said in response, shaking his hand. “We should only be in lockdown a few more minutes. Cameras are down, the system is just rebooting. Only a precaution.”

  “You using that to fix the cameras?” Carl said with a half-smile as he pointed at Brad’s gun.

  “Better safe than sorry.” Brad turned and headed back toward the stairwell. He glanced at his watch. “The system should be rebooting any minute now. Once the cameras are live, the elevators and doors will be back in operation.”

  “No problem.” Carl thumbed his finger back at the conference room door. “These guys are so wrapped in discussion, they never realized they were stuck down here.”

  But as Brad passed the elevators, he looked to the right, up at the camera, and saw the small thin wire; he followed it from the camera down to the black box on the floor. Suddenly his mind was spinning.

  “Carl,” Brad said without turning his way. “Would you be so kind as to bring those men out here?”

  Carl froze in his steps. He didn’t answer.

  Brad looked at Lao, who decided against holstering his gun and walked toward Carl. But he passed right by him, reaching for the handle and opening the door to the conference room.

  Lao glanced back at Brad and shook his head.

  MICHAEL, BUSCH, AND Jon climbed the service ladder up through the shaftway, letting their ropes dangle uselessly beside them as they raced upward. Michael was in the lead, climbing as fast as he could, glancing at his watch; they had a minute to get back into the conference room before security once again regained their eyes
ight. He tempered his emotions but couldn’t help allowing a tinge of satisfaction to slip in as he neared his goal. And once he was in possession of what the colonel so desperately needed, he would have his means of getting KC back.

  As he reached the lip, he released the elevator door and climbed onto the floor, rising up only to stare into the barrel of a pistol.

  A second man trained his pistol on Jon, urging him up and onto the floor. With his gun trained on Jon’s head, he took the pistol from Jon’s side.

  “How many are you?” the tall man said in an English accent. His voice was calm, as if this were commonplace.

  “Two,” Michael said, not looking back into the elevator shaft.

  BUSCH REMAINED IN the shadows, listening to Michael’s words above. He held tight to the ladder, the weight of the bag full of chips on his back straining him. Though his arms and legs were exhausted from the climb, his pain quickly disappeared as he heard Michael’s captors.

  He glanced up the dark shaftway. He could see the light wash coming through the doors thirty feet above him, the doors to the main section of the casino. The light was landing on the two immobile elevator cabs. He held tight to the ladder and focused on his watch, Michael’s words ringing in his ears. Five minute to reboot, and that five minutes was almost up. And when it was, the elevator would start moving.

  Busch needed a plan and needed to formulate it in the next twenty seconds, for if he didn’t, not only would Michael be captured, but he himself would we swiped off the ladder by the elevator as it went back into service.

  “SIT DOWN,” LAO said in Chinese to Carl. “Against the wall.”

  He waved his gun at Michael to follow suit, and turned his gun on Jon, who stood with his hands against the wall.

  Brad reached for the radio hanging from his side, but Jon spun out, his kick rising with a blinding snap, connecting with the radio, sending it careening into the wall, where it shattered. Brad’s finger wrapped the trigger of his gun, but Jon snatched the barrel, twisting it over until it was wrenched out of the man’s hand.