Andrew nodded. “Not just your money. We’re all banking on it. The key is, we don’t move until Faust steps away from the hub for a bathroom break, cognac refill, whatever. Then me and Fletcher approach the house simultaneously.”
Now Fletcher was huddled behind an ash tree, waiting for the signal.
“What am I wearing here?” Andrew asked through the headset. “Is this a fanny pack?”
“That’s not on me,” Happy replied. “Fletcher bought it yesterday.”
“On the contrary,” Fletcher said, “that’s from my personal collection. So you be careful with that, Andrew. That’s genuine faux snakeskin right there.”
He smiled to himself. The shopping list from the Alchemist had called for a “small tactical field bag,” and Fletcher’s first instinct had been to check an army surplus store. But considering his annoyance at the time and knowing that Andrew would be the one to wear it, he’d brought in one of the storied fanny packs instead. He had packed it with his own things three nights earlier, thinking he might break it out to make Meg laugh, recreate the spark. Instead, he had become a literal stench in her nostrils.
“I have another one too,” Fletcher said, “if you need more room next time. You could always wear one on each hip. Start a trend.”
“I won’t forget this,” Andrew said. “Thing’s purple. Is Faust still at the security desk?”
“Yeah,” Happy said, “he’s . . . Wait, he’s moving. He’s headed toward the front of the house. Go! Go! Go!”
Andrew rushed down from the cover of the woods, the van’s two floor mats rolled up under his arm. He unfurled them as he approached the fence and leapt up onto the chain link, grabbing on with one hand and swinging first one mat, then the other, over the four strands of barbed wire, overlapping them by several inches. He flipped over the top and dropped seven feet, rolling as he landed.
A small bulb lit up in front of Happy. “That tripped the alarm, Fletch. Pick up the pace.”
Fletcher was power walking up toward the front door. He needed to get there fast, but couldn’t afford to be winded when he greeted Faust. He had about sixty feet to go—more than he’d estimated—and he knew Faust was a fraction of that from the image of Andrew breaching the perimeter. He doubled his speed, chastising himself for not picking a closer spot to wait.
“Hurry, Fletcher,” Happy urged. “You need to ring that bell. Faust is turning back toward the security hub. He’s fifteen feet away. Ten.” Fletcher began to run at a full sprint.
“We’re toast,” Happy said. “Andrew, he’s gonna see you! Abort! Abort, you guys!”
Fletcher threw himself onto the porch, all of his momentum going through his index finger into the doorbell, sounding an obnoxious recording of chimes.
“He’s at the security hub!” Happy was saying. “He’s gonna make us. Fletch, get out of there.”
Fletcher was frozen in place. He knew they would not get another shot at this house. Once someone like Julian Faust sensed a threat, security would tighten like a python. What would be the price of failure? He looked up at the reinforced steel door, adorned with decorative fiberglass panels—an attempt to disguise its utilitarian nature. It wanted to keep them out, but Fletcher would be invited right in. He could feel his heart slamming against his rib cage. He told himself it was the running, not the stress. A grifter had to stay cool.
“Wait,” Happy said. “He’s on the move again. He’s getting the door.”
Fletcher took a deep breath, in then slowly out, and straightened his tie.
“Yeah, baby!” Happy shouted, holding his fist out toward Dante expectantly.
“Nope,” Dante said.
“Fine.”
It took the dogs a good twenty seconds to find Andrew, which gave him time to pull the large Ziploc bag from his vest pocket and retrieve three sticks of Buddy Bac’n—long, stiff dog treats, the consistency of cardboard. Each treat had been caked in peanut butter, into which a number of small blue pills had been pressed. They looked to Andrew like twisted little Christmas cookies.
The first dog closed in, baring its teeth. Andrew was momentarily thrown by the sheer size and girth of the thing. It skidded to a stop five feet away and leaned into him, barking savagely, spit flying, eyes wild. Andrew tossed a treat at the dog’s feet. It looked down and back up, still growling, then began sniffing the peanut butter. Three more dogs bounded in, not as angry as their brother but all of them bigger.
Andrew threw two more treats, then went back into the bag for more. By the time they were all delivered, the first dog had finished his and was looking up at Andrew eagerly, a bit of a snarl brewing. Andrew reached back into the bag and withdrew a small, bone-shaped rawhide treat, also covered in sticky peanut butter. He distributed one to each dog, all the while making his way closer and closer to the house, entering its long shadow. He could see two cameras mounted beneath the eaves and had to remind himself that Faust was currently occupied and that the dogs wandering freely throughout the yard ruled out the possibility of motion-activated video recording.
He crouched at the side door, the largest of the dogs happily licking away about twenty feet from him, and studied the lock. He was inside the proximity sensors now and directly beneath the cameras, no longer subject to their constant reporting. He could relax and take his time, as long as the night guard didn’t decide to show up early. He looked up the stone walkway, ending at a locked gate in the fence, about five feet from the house. This is where the security guard would enter. Security guard . . . right. This would be a professional with an impressive military background and all kinds of expertise. And even if everything went according to plan, Andrew had twenty-four minutes and counting to find and recover the Alchemist’s trophy.
“Okay, walk me through the breach of the door, just so I have a feel for the timing,” Fletcher said, pushing the remains of his hippy hash away from him. It had reminded him of Little Domino’s prison creations, keeping him from fully enjoying it as he had hoped.
“Keypad’s the easy part,” Happy said. “The code rolls over every night at midnight, halfway through the night watchman’s shift. So you know what he does?”
“Writes it down?” Fletcher guessed.
“On his hand,” Andrew said, laughing, “like Sarah Palin. I followed him into McDonald’s this morning, and when they handed him his Egg McMuffin I snapped this.” He held up his phone, which bore a photo of the number 6904 written in pen on a man’s hand.
“What about the sound sensors? We’ve never dealt with those.”
Happy grinned. Clearly he’d been waiting for this subject to come up. He reached into a bag at his feet and pulled out a small device—a few batteries wrapped in electrical tape with a wire running from them, culminating at a large suction cup. Fletcher recognized several components from the items he’d purchased the night before.
“Did you make that thing yourself?” Dante asked.
“Yeah,” Happy nodded, beaming with pride.
“I’d like to be paid in advance if you don’t mind.”
Andrew chuckled and pulled out a small stack of cash, which he plopped on Dante’s lap. “Half now, half when the job’s done,” he said. “Don’t worry; Happy goes the MacGyver route as a source of pride, not because we’re a low-rent operation.”
“Not pride,” Happy said. “It’s control. If I make it, I know it works. Do you want to rely on some poor sweatshop laborer on the other side of the world making two bucks a week? Besides, my stuff’s off the grid. No serial number, no digital paper trail.”
“So what is that thing?” Fletcher asked, nodding at the hand-made gadget.
“It emits a high-pitched squeal—outside the frequency range that trips the alarm but loud enough to drown out light footsteps, quiet movements, that sort of thing,” he explained. He looked at Andrew. “But you knock over a vase or something and we’re made.”
Dante folded his arms, dubious. “So, what, you stick that on the outside of the window? And that lit
tle speaker is strong enough to blare right through the glass?”
Happy shook his head. “No, the glass is the speaker. That’s the beauty of it.”
“And they won’t hear the squeal inside?”
“Nobody over five years old can hear this tone. It’s too high.”
“What about the manual lock?” Dante asked. “You got a gizmo for that?”
“No, something better. We’ve got Andrew Bishop.”
Andrew smiled.
CHAPTER 28
I hate to be a bother,” Fletcher said, panting in the foyer of Belltower’s house, “but could I have a bottle of water or something? Spring water, not distilled. I just need to rehydrate and calm down.”
Faust gave him the dead-eyes for a moment before answering, “Yes, of course.”
Fletcher smiled. Rusty, Andrew had said. Getting rusty. Could a rusty grifter have gotten to the door in time to save Andrew’s butt, then turned around and used the fact that he was sweaty and wheezing to the group’s advantage? Unlikely.
When Julian Faust had answered the door, Fletcher was ranting up into the air, “Eight! Eight o’clock you said!” He’d held a finger up at his would-be host, standing baffled in the doorway, and barked, “I need to be rested tomorrow morning when I get on that plane. You have exactly fifteen minutes to arrive or I do this without you, Jenkins.” With that he’d touched the Bluetooth earpiece, as if disconnecting a call, pulled his fingers together in front of his face and drew them down as if calming himself, and extended a hand to Julian Faust.
And now he was using his flushed cheeks to further the plan one more step. He unzipped his leather folio and flipped through a series of papers.
“Pardon me, Mr. Lyons,” Faust said as he wedged himself between Fletcher and a numbered keypad on the wall.
Fletcher took a step away to accommodate, making sure the lens on the back of his cell phone—gripped against the cover of the folio—was angled just right.
“What’s this card reader above the keypad?” Andrew asked. “You didn’t mention that.” He was carefully affixing the suction cup near the center of the security-filmed window.
“That’s just an override for the guards when they arrive so they don’t trip the motion detector on their way in. Or the sound sensors. Don’t worry about that. Worry about beating that lock.”
But Andrew wasn’t the least bit worried about beating the lock. Just as he thought, it was a Grade 2 mechanism—a challenge, but nothing too difficult. Happy had snapped dozens of photos of the thing with a telephoto lens and Andrew had narrowed it down to two picks, which he slipped along with a torque wrench from the zippered pouch in the purple fanny pack.
This particular lock had been marketed as impervious to picking, drilling, and sawing, but Andrew knew that with enough skill almost any cylinder lock could be picked. Ironically, as a grifter he felt a bit like a fraud every time he did. After all, he should be able to get himself invited inside, even trusted with his own key and security code.
He shrugged off the thought and refocused on the task at hand. It took a great deal of finesse to maintain exactly the right amount of pressure on the torque wrench. Too little and the pins would fall back to where they’d started; too much and they wouldn’t budge. As he felt the last pin stack reach the shear line, he coaxed the side pin into place and the lock rolled over.
“One down,” he said into his headset.
Happy tipped back his head and drained what was either his sixth or seventh cup of coffee—Fletcher had lost count.
The redhead was speaking at a mile a minute. “Now, while Andrew is neutralizing the lock, Fletch, you need to be taking out the motion sensors.”
“I thought I was keeping Faust and Belltower occupied,” he said.
“You’re multitasking. Here’s what we’ve got: the place is broken up into six zones, so the system is versatile. If no one’s home, you activate all six. If you’ve got a houseful of guests, you turn them all off. Or if you don’t want anyone wandering upstairs, you might leave those on. If you’ve got an art appraiser looking at your multimillion dollar collection, you lock everything down except that one zone.”
“So I need to somehow turn off all the zones.”
“That’s right. It’s called single sector mode—half an hour with all motion sensors deactivated.”
“Well, we’ve got the code, right? 6904. Shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Nah, that would be too easy,” Andrew said. “Remember, these are entirely separate systems. The good news is that this code doesn’t change every day. The bad news is we’ve got no line of sight and no helping hand from Mr. Egg McMuffin, so we’re going to have to get it the sneaky way.”
Happy smirked. “Luckily, that’s our specialty.”
Andrew flipped the switch on the battery pack leading up to the suction cup speaker. Gingerly, he turned the volume knob up. Happy had insisted that the sound could not trip the alarm, and yet he had warned him to ease into it—just to be safe. Of course, Andrew had no way of knowing if the device was even making a noise. He gave the knob a twist from two to six.
The dogs all snapped to attention, heads up, eyes locked on Andrew. He felt his heart phone in a couple of beats. Yep, it was making noise. The nearest dog—the largest of the group—popped up to its feet and began moving in Andrew’s direction.
The moment Faust was out of sight, Fletcher plopped the folio on an end table and dashed to the keypad on the wall. He yanked the small compact from his pocket and flipped it open. The tray of pressed powder foundation had been removed and replaced with a darker substance, composed of starch powder and soot from a candle left burning against a piece of porcelain.
Fletcher roughly dabbed the makeup brush into the powder and dusted it onto the keypad. “Okay,” he whispered, “four, two, seven, zero.” He pulled a handkerchief from his suit coat and wiped the powder away. “This model takes a five-digit code, so you’ve got a repeater.”
Up in the woods, Happy and Dante were watching the cell phone video of Faust punching in the numbers—watching it on a loop. He had blocked the keypad itself, but the movement of his arm was still visible. Happy zoomed in on the image of his elbow, moving almost imperceptibly down, then left, then back up, then down again. He looked at his cell phone keypad and mapped the numbers in his mind.
“Okay, it’s got to be 2–0–4–7–4,” he said, his voice betraying his uncertainty.
“No good,” Fletcher said a moment later. “How many tries do we get before it locks down?”
Happy didn’t answer him. The truth was that two more incorrect codes would fill the house with a shrieking alarm. He watched Faust’s elbow on the video again.
Andrew pulled the pepper spray from his belt, pushed aside the safety tab, and rested his thumb on the trigger button. The words Dog-B-Gone and a badly drawn attack dog looked back at him. The mastiff was closing in, teeth clenched, an angry growl emanating from its throat. Andrew did not want to hurt the dog, but it looked like he would have no choice. As a Hail Mary, he wrenched the Ziploc bag—half full of treats and peanut butter—from his pocket, turned it inside out with a flick of his wrist, and tossed it toward the hulking dog, which turned its attention toward the unclaimed spoils for just a moment before resuming its advance.
“Am I clear to enter the house?” he said into his headset mic.
“Not yet,” Happy said. “Fletcher, try 2–0–4–7–2.”
Andrew didn’t know how far the pepper spray would shoot, but guessed that it would be most effective at close range. Two more dogs came rushing up behind the first, converging on the plastic bag, the larger one snapping at the smaller, reestablishing dominance.
“Did that work?” Happy asked, glancing over at Dante, who was locked into the video loop on the iPad’s screen, seemingly zoned out.
“No,” Fletcher answered, exasperated. “It’s still not . . . hold on . . .” They heard movement through their headsets and then, “Thank you so much, Mr. Faust, b
ut could I trouble you for a glass with some ice? I should have mentioned that before, I know. It’s just—I can’t drink it directly from the bottle. That’s my own thing.”
Happy couldn’t make out Faust’s response, but the tone was clear enough.
“Look,” Fletcher droned, “I want to get out of your hair as badly as you want me gone, but I can either spend the next forty-five minutes recovering from a fainting spell on your lovely settee over there or you can bring me some ice. Or I can get it for myself. I’m not helpless. Where’s the kitchen?”
They heard Faust’s voice again, fading into the distance. “Okay, now what?” Fletcher whispered, his voice tinged with panic.
“Okay,” Happy said, “try 2–0—”
“No,” Dante said. “Don’t! It’s 7–0–2–4–2. I’m certain.”
“Wait . . . 7 . . .?”
“7–0–2–4–2.”
They heard Fletcher breathing heavily for a moment and the faint click of buttons. “That worked,” he said. “System’s unlocked. Now what?”
Happy let out a sigh of relief. “Hit Mode,” he said. “Now arrow down twice and hit Select. Now arrow down to Single Sector and choose that. We’re good now.” He muted his mic and turned to Dante. “How did . . .?”
“It’s an older system,” Dante said. “The numbers on the keypad go from one at the bottom up to nine, not vice versa like on a phone.”
Happy held his fist out toward Dante again. “Come on, man,” he said.
Dante smiled and gave it a bump.
The Last Con Page 16
