by Ted Dekker
The dog jumped out before Stephen could shut the door. “Spud!” But the dog ran up the street and disappeared. This was getting to be a bad habit.
Stephen locked the car and turned north, searching for the dog on his way. Surely she would come back. He felt oddly lost without the dog’s carefree presence.
The sidewalk was deserted except for a woman walking directly toward him, half a block up. Where had she come from? Avoid eye contact. Natural. They passed each other without incident. Had she seen his car?
He cut east at the next street and then turned left into an alley that approached the rear of the abandoned complex across the street from Rachel’s building. Darkness swallowed him. He hurried his pace. So far, so good, but still no sign of Spud. Maybe just as well for the time being.
Stephen stopped at the end of the alley and poked his head around the corner. The windows of what he’d decided to call “Building B” were patched up with plywood. Graffiti covered the back wall. How many pimps and drug pushers frequented these shadows each night? He hoped not to encounter any. Beyond Building B, across the street, stood Rachel’s apartment. If he could get into Building B, he might be able to find a window with a view of her apartment. He glanced at his watch—11:30. Half an hour to burn. He looked down the empty alley and then stepped lightly toward the back door.
Something clattered noisily on the asphalt and he jumped. His foot had hit a bottle. Enough of this. He ran for the building, pulled up beside a rear service entrance, and twisted the knob. To his surprise, it opened. He slipped in, shut the door, and heaved a sigh of relief.
His breathing sounded like billows in the hollow chamber. The lines of walls slowly grew out of the darkness. A long hall and stairs. Couldn’t use the light yet.
He mounted the stairs and felt his way up one flight, then two, then three. Fourth floor. He pushed on the door exiting the stairwell and stepped cautiously through it.
Moonlight shone through a single window on the opposite wall. The rooms had been gutted—sections of framing lay in tangled heaps in every direction. But the floor seemed sound enough. He picked his way across the room to the window.
There it was, illuminated by a bright moon—Rachel’s apartment. Stephen’s pulse surged. The lights in her fourth-floor suite were still on. The lights of her master bedroom. The sunroom.
He instinctively pulled back from the window. Rachel’s curtains were drawn. Made sense—the men who’d thrown him out didn’t seem the kind to walk around in their underwear with the drapes wide open.
Stephen slid the backpack off and settled to one knee. They were up there all right, picking through her belongings. How dare they? But on the bright side, if they were preoccupied with the fourth floor, they wouldn’t be in the basement.
If.
Thank God he’d taken the picture of Ruth from the sunroom. He straightened, struck by a terrible thought. The picture! Where had he put it?
He remembered immediately and relaxed. He’d left it on his desk. For a brief moment, he considered retracing his steps, racing home, retrieving the photo, and returning. What if the rabbi entered his room and found it? He could trust Chaim. After all, it was only a picture.
Stephen studied his mother’s building. The real trick was to get in and out without dropping any clues. Leaving a trail to the boiler room would only proclaim that it possessed something noteworthy. In the unlikely event that he failed tonight, he couldn’t afford to tip his hand. He was smarter than that.
Eleven thirty-five. His fingers trembled with anticipation. There was nothing magical about midnight. It had just seemed a good time. The neighborhood was already quiet; maybe he should just go now.
No. He had to follow the plan, and the plan was midnight.
Was it illegal, this plan of his? Maybe. Maybe not.
On second thought, absolutely. But at times, principle should supersede the law, and this was one of those times.
The sum of the matter was this: if Rachel had intended the museum to have the contents of the safe, she would have specified as much in her will. The fact that she hadn’t meant its contents were for someone else. Someone like him. That’s why she’d inscribed the safe with words that would have meaning only to an orphan branded with a Stone of David.
An element of danger trailed Rachel, a secret that put her son’s life at risk. She had hoped that her son would recognize the caption in the paper—“the Stones are like the lost orphans”—and figure out the rest. As he was doing.
As Chaim would say: If you want to have what others do not have, you must be willing to do what others are unwilling to do. If ever there was a time to prove such an axiom, it was tonight.
One hundred million dollars—more money than he’d ever dreamed about. The idea made his mind hurt. He could walk down Sepulveda slipping hundred-dollar bills to the down-and-out and watch their eyes light up. He could buy an island with a yacht parked in the slip down by the shore.
On the other hand, his passion for this safe was as much about principle, about his mother and her secret, and about a little girl named Esther who’d been lost to Ruth. Put together—the safe, the Stones, Rachel, Esther—the sum was too much to ignore. As a Stone of David, he had an obligation. A calling.
It occurred to him that his liberation of this treasure was, in some convoluted way, not terribly unlike the liberation of a concentration camp by the Allied soldiers. He was redeeming what belonged to the Jews. Restoring their inheritance. His inheritance. This would be his part in the war. Stephen’s mind reeled with a dozen thoughts, some completely reasonable, others admittedly less.
Desperate times; desperate measures.
Watch. Eleven forty. Time was crawling.
Something thumped softly across the room. Stephen started, nearly choking on his heart. He pressed himself against the wall and gazed into the shadows.
A dog bounded silently over the rubble, grinning wide, tongue flopping. Spud! She jumped up and stretched to lick his face. “Where’d you go? Okay, enough. Enough!” Stephen hugged the dog. “Boy, am I glad to see you.”
No, he wasn’t. What was he going to do with her now?
“She likes you,” a woman’s voice said.
Stephen bolted up, knocking the dog to the ground. “What?”
“I said, she likes you.” A petite woman in her twenties stepped out of the shadows. She wore torn bell-bottom jeans with a light-colored blouse and beads. Hundreds of beads: on her wrists, on her neck, in her braided hair.
“What are you doing up here?” she asked.
“I was . . . I was just looking around.”
“Is that right?”
What was he supposed to say? Nothing came to mind.
“The last time I saw anyone wearing those kind of duds up here was three months ago when they put this building up for sale. But nobody’s buying. You know why? Because it belongs to us.”
“Oh.”
She stared at him, uncertain, then a smile slowly formed on her lips. “Well, the dog likes you, so maybe I do too. You can call me Melissa.”
“Okay.” She was a hippie type. Stephen had only one thing on his mind now. Get past this and pretend she’d never seen him. This wasn’t in the plan. “Groovy,” he said.
“Groovy.” Melissa walked around him, wearing a whimsical smile, smelling like jasmine tea. “Groovy. Well, Mr. Groovy, you are in the wrong building. This building belongs to the Brotherhood of Bohemia. What’s in the backpack?”
“Nothing.”
“Mr. Groovy, whose bulging backpack has nothing in it, and who doesn’t like to talk. That about cover it?”
He just nodded, then glanced out the window over his shoulder. Street still empty. Almost midnight.
Melissa suddenly started to chuckle, and Stephen smiled with her.
“What’s so funny?”
“You.”
Her laughter grew until it echoed around the room. He stepped forward and tried to wave her down. “Could you hold it down? The who
le place will hear you!” Across the street, the curtains were still drawn.
“There’s no one in the building right now but us, baby.” She controlled her laughter. “I think you just might do. You could play the city slicker who wants to be groovy but doesn’t have a clue.”
He had no idea what she meant.
“Okay, you can stay for a bit. But I’ve gotta cruise—city’s just coming alive for us bohemians. Wanna join us?”
“No thanks. I’ve got some stuff to do.”
She looked out the window. “They moved in a few days ago. Friends of yours?”
“Who?”
“The people you’re looking at. You know, Rachel’s place.”
“You . . . you knew Rachel?”
“Not really. She was friendly, and she asked me to take care of Brandy here.” Melissa bent and rubbed the dog’s back. “But that’s about it. You knew her?”
“No.”
Melissa nuzzled the dog playfully, cooing. She jumped up. “Gotta go. Come on, girl.” She hurried off. Spud—no, Brandy, the dog’s name was Brandy—gave Stephen a long, indecisive gaze, then bounded after the girl.
It took ten minutes for Stephen to recover from the intrusion. He wasn’t sure how he felt about Melissa’s attachment to the dog. A constant companion like little Brandy, although something he never would have sought, appealed to him. But there Brandy went, bounding after the girl.
Stephen surveyed the street one more time. Not a soul had walked by in ten minutes. Time for Mr. Groovy to boogie.
16
STEPHEN MADE HIS WAY DOWN THE STAIRS, STOPPING ON EVERY floor to listen. Apart from his own pounding heart, he heard nothing. Melissa and Brandy were gone.
Every Special Forces movie he’d ever watched barked the same mantra: Get in quick, and get out. Made sense. In his case: Get in quick, secure the fortune, and get out. Without leaving a calling card, of course. Or, better yet, leave a calling card with the wrong address.
Stephen huddled at the base of the gutted building for a full minute, trying to overcome an acute case of hesitation. Once he went to work there would be no backing out, no explanation that any cop would buy.
A hundred million dollars.
Esther.
He headed toward the apartment. Natural. Look natural. But when his foot hit the lawn, he couldn’t resist hunching over and scurrying for the apartment’s dark shadows, natural or not. He squatted at the wall and looked back. Coast clear.
Keeping low, Stephen rounded the corner and walked to the metal garage door. As he saw things, the garage was the best way in, because it faced the side street rather than the main thoroughfare, and also because it was hidden from view. The most brilliant break-in artists always found the weak holes, however unexpected. Besides, the windows were high and covered with wrought iron—no easier to deal with than the garage door.
He fell to his knees, unzipped the backpack, and yanked out a roll of heavy, dark gray plastic. Gray, same color as the building’s stucco. The plastic unfurled noisily with a whip of his wrists. He shoved his hand into the pack, pulled on a pair of gloves, withdrew a roll of duct tape, and quickly taped the plastic onto the garage door over his head, so that it covered him like a lean-to. Working under the crackling plastic, he was sure half the neighborhood could hear him. It was possible that from the street he looked like a gray ghost, flailing under the plastic sheeting in the moonlight. No, he’d made sure the plastic was thick, hopefully thick enough to block the light. Of course, the plastic was thick enough to prevent him from noticing whether a crowd had gathered to watch the specter.
The roll of tape slipped out of his sweaty fingers. He drew back the plastic and peered toward the street just to make sure. No one.
He fumbled for the roll and completed his disguise. Now he crouched under the plastic lean-to, taped above him and on both sides. The idea was to blend in, but he couldn’t shake the suspicion that he was doing more poking out than blending in.
Cutting torch. He’d used one once, in Russia many years ago, a monster consisting of twin bottles on a dolly. The largest part of the setup he’d purchased today was the torch itself, a foot-long silver tube with a ninety-degree cutting tip. Green and red hoses fed into two football-sized canisters in his backpack. One oxygen, one acetylene. He fired up the device in an alley after buying it—seemed simple enough despite the clerk’s warning that it wasn’t a toy. No, of course not.
Stephen cracked the acetylene valve and lit the cutting tip with a lighter. Yellow light filled his hideout. Safety glasses. He reached into the bag, came out with a set of dark glasses, and tried to fix the band around his head with one hand. No go. Sweat snaked past his left eye. He raised his right hand to nudge the goggles into place.
The plastic to his left sizzled. He jumped back and inadvertently dropped the torch. Flame licked at his legs and he cried out, kicking at the torch. The plastic to his right pulled free, exposing him to the world.
Stephen dived for the pack and twisted the canister’s knob. The flame died. He sat on his knees, shaking. He’d burned a hole in the plastic and singed his leg hair.
It took him a minute to calm down, resecure the plastic camouflage, and set up for a second, informed attempt. Goggles on, nerves under control, flame down. With dark goggles on, he found he couldn’t see to light the thing, and his nerves were anything but under control. Bringing focus to bear, he finally managed to light the torch, pull his glasses into place, and set up for the burn.
He took a deep breath. This was insane.
The words of his foster father blazed through his mind. He’d spoken them a hundred times during Stephen’s adolescence: Try to see trouble as you would see a brick wall, Stephen. Then try not to run smack into it at every turn. Seriously, son, I worry for your life at times.
He felt like a fifteen-year-old boy at the moment, running straight for a brick wall.
Then again, there was Chaim: If you want to have what others do not have, you must be willing to do what others are not willing to do.
Like run straight at the brick wall.
He cranked the oxygen, adjusted the flame until it was bright blue, and tested the pressure trigger. The miniature jet flared to life. Stephen leaned forward on his knees and committed an irrevocably criminal act.
He cut into the building. That was the breaking part of breaking and entering.
But he was smart about his breaking. Cutting too close to the plastic would melt the tape. He cut a foot in, slicing right through the thin sheet metal as if it were butter. With any luck, he didn’t look like a glowing Christmas bulb from the street. He shielded the light with his body as much as possible.
If Braun was in the garage at the moment, watching red sparks spray over his floor, Stephen would be toast. And if the metal fell inward onto the concrete, it might wake the world. But if he could cut this hole without setting off any alarms, the plastic would hide the hole while he did his real business.
Halfway through the long arc, Stephen concluded that his idea wasn’t so brilliant after all. No doubt he did look like a glowworm. No doubt the metal would fall in.
As it turned out, the sheet did fall inward, despite his attempt to pry it toward him with the torch’s cutting tip. But the sound it made wasn’t so much a clang as a whap.
Stephen yanked off his goggles and held his breath. A dome-shaped hole led into the dark garage. No Braun. Only the black limousine parked on the right-hand side.
He wrapped a rag around the hot torch, shoved it into his pack, and pulled the bundle into Rachel’s garage behind him. The plastic settled into place, masking the ragged opening.
He let his eyes adjust to the deeper darkness. If they came down now, he would roll under the Cadillac. Or maybe he’d just dive back out the hole. Out the hole, he decided, definitely out the hole.
Now for the car. He had to make it look like some local hoodlum had seen the car and broken in to steal it. Sleight of hand. Get their attention on the garage so the real
damage in the basement would go unnoticed.
He pulled out a screwdriver and approached the Cadillac’s driver-side door. It was unlocked. And the key was on the front seat. His first real stroke of pure fortune.
He left the car door wide open for his return later, cut across to the garage, and eased through the door. The stairwell was an echo chamber. He tiptoed down into the basement.
A buzz grew louder in his mind. He’d made it into Rachel’s basement. His plan was unfolding in brilliant fashion. Had his pulse eased even a beat or two since breaking and entering, it would have surged now, but his heart already was maxed out.
No windows down here. He hit the light, acquired the boiler room, turned the light off, and angled for the door. He found it with his forehead in ten strides. Good to remember that—ten strides.
He opened the door, closed it behind him, flipped on the light. New gas water heater, black potbellied boiler, empty fifty-five-gallon drum. And under the drum . . .
The safe.
Stephen stared, mesmerized. The room was black and gray and smelled musty from concrete and dust and water. But the bland colors were inviting and the musty smell intoxicating. He’d let his mind walk into this small room a hundred times over the last forty-eight hours, and to actually be here again . . . the feelings of comfort and accomplishment surprised him.
For several long seconds, Stephen stood immobilized with anticipation. His world was spinning in a new direction, and this room was its axis.
He crossed the floor and tugged at the drum. It scraped loudly against the concrete. Could they hear that? He had to get the torch out first. Get the torch out, pull the drum off, slice through the safe’s metal lid, extract the treasure, flee.
He grabbed at his backpack and then abandoned it in favor of the drum again. He had to see the safe, just to be absolutely sure that it hadn’t been opened by the idiots upstairs. The drum slid with another wake-the-dead scrape. Stephen tilted it on edge and froze.
Exactly as he remembered. Undisturbed beyond his own work. An irresistible sense of urgency swarmed him. He released the drum and yanked the backpack from his shoulder. The drum clanged to the concrete. The fact that he was now making enough noise to wake Braun from a coma occurred to him as a distant abstraction. The man was four stories above him anyway.
