Firebreak

by Richard Stark

  Wiss said, "Fiber-optic lines in conduit in concrete, under the house, underground down the hill, separate power source, separate alarms, unreachable."

  "You can turn off everything in that house," Elkins said, "shut down the electricity halfway down the road, that art gallery's still humming."

  "Which we didn't know," Wiss pointed out, "till our partners yelled down to us there's red flashers coming."

  "If they'd of come up quiet," Elkins said, "they'd of got us."

  Wiss said, 'They got our partners."

  Parker said, "How'd that work?"

  Elkins explained, 'They thought they could outrun them downslope to the intersection. We didn't. We took the other truck and drove up into the woods, along that road he built."

  'That doesn't go anywhere," Wiss added.

  Elkins shook his head. "Only to the elk."

  Wiss said, "We came to the end of the road, and fuck it, we kept driving."

  "Until we crashed the truck," Elkins said. "From there on, we walked."

  "Freezing our asses off," Wiss said.

  "Come on, Ralph," Elkins objected, "it wasn't that cold. It was September."

  "It was September in Canada," Wiss said.

  "Anyway," Elkins said, "we didn't want to walk in circles there in the dark, so we just got away from the truck and hunkered down and waited for morning."

  'They never did come up," Wiss said. "Not that night."

  "We figure," Elkins said, "at first they thought it was just the two guys they caught, and the one truck. So that worked out for us. But we still had to walk north, away from there, all the next day, through this forest, until we found a road in Canada."

  "So you got out," Parker said, "but your partners got nabbed."

  "Right now, they're out on humongous bail," Elkins said. "Their lawyers are dickering with the prosecutors."

  "About what?"

  "Us," Wiss said.

  'They blame us for what happened," Elkins explained. "If we'd just gone in and took the gold, plan A, we wouldn't of tripped those extra alarms."

  Parker said, "So what do they want?"

  "Us to go back," Elkins said. "Get the Old Masters this time, divvy with them." "Why?"

  "Because they wanna jump bail, and it's their families' money and houses and stuff, and the job would cover it."

  "Or?"

  "Or they turn us up for a better deal and they don't jump bail."

  "Not good for us," Wiss pointed out. "Frank and me, we're family men, we got roots, we can't live on the run."

  "Or in the pen," Elkins said.

  Parker said, "And this has to be done right away."

  "Before they get a trial date."

  Wiss said, "And that brings us to Larry."

  Standing, Elkins said, "Larry, you explain it, I made myself thirsty," and he went off to get the bourbon bottle.

  Lloyd said, "When I got out, Frank and Ralph were among the people I was told to get in touch with by

  friends I made on the inside. That was four months ago. I don't think they took me seriously at that time."

  "We didn't have a use for your talents at that time," Wiss corrected him.

  "Whatever." Lloyd nodded at Wiss, then said to Parker, "What they did at Marino's house, essentially, was make a firebreak, the small fire you set in front of the big fire to steal its fuel and keep it from coming on. By breaking in once, but not managing to come out with anything, they've told Marino and his people what the weaknesses are in the system. It will have been upgraded by now, but there's no telling exactly how. I do know the original structure used the Internet as part of the alarm system, but apparently they didn't have cameras installed in there."

  "Lucky for us," Wiss commented.

  "Probably what it is," Lloyd said, "if this art collection really does contain that many well-known stolen artworks, Marino doesn't want to train a surveillance camera on it. But he might decide now to go to infrared. We can't tell from out here what he'll decide to do. The only thing we know for sure is, whatever he decides, he'll have the money to pay for it."

  Elkins was in his chair again, the bottle on the coffee table. Parker said to him, "What's your idea?"

  "We're looking for one," Elkins said. "Once we're in, Larry can deal with the science-fiction shit, and Ralph can handle the normal locks and barriers and all that, and I'm good at the logistics, getting the materiel we need, getting everything out."

  Wiss said, "We were thinking, this time, maybe we'd come in from the north."

  Elkins said, "I got Saskatchewan maps, Montana maps, surveyors' maps, all that stuff. There used to be a lot of logging up there, still is some, there's little roads and trails all over the hills up there."

  "None of which we found, unfortunately," Wiss added, "for most of a day."

  "But now we know where they are," Elkins said, "from the maps. And we can get to the place from that side. But we still need a solid way to get in."

  Parker said, "I don't like traveling a lot around Canada. Too many ID problems."

  Wiss said, "No, we don't need to go through Saskatchewan, we can still be based in Great Falls like last time, and drive up eighty-seven through Havre. It's when we're in the wilderness up there, we may cross-border a little."

  Parker said, "You don't have an easier way to get these guys their money?"

  "If you know of something," Wiss said, "Frank and me'11 listen."

  "No, I've got nothing," Parker said. "A little thing I have to do, but there's no money in it."

  "This one isn't easy," Elkins said, "but they never are. It's worth your while, Parker, if you come in on this."

  "Worth your while, too."

  "We know that," Wiss said, "that's why Frank called you."

  Parker considered. He had nothing else, he didn't know who had hired the hit man, Charov, he didn't know what complications that could lead to, but it looked as though he and Claire should stay away from the house for a while. He said, "You cover my expenses."

  "Done," Elkins said.

  "And I don't pay you back out of my piece."

  "No, I understand that."

  "I gotta deal with a different problem tomorrow," Parker said. "Where and when do you want to meet?"

  "The Muir, in Great Falls, next Monday," Elkins said. "You'll still be Lynch?" ,

  "Yes." Looking at Lloyd, he said, "You're gonna be in Montana, your electronic gizmo is still gonna think you're in a library in Massachusetts?"

  Lloyd laughed, with real pleasure, like a kid. 'That's what makes it fun," he said.

  4

  Charov's place was a furnished apartment on Chicago's South Side, near Marquette Park. It was a sprawling dark brick building with a transient air to it, as though no one had ever planned to stay there long. Half the mailboxes and doorbells were unmarked, and many of the rest were handwritten on torn-off pieces of cardboard or strips of masking tape. Two bicycles in the clean but bleak front vestibule were heavily chained to vertical metal pipes, heat risers.

  Charov's name was among the missing on mailboxes and doorbells, and Parker had no way to know which apartment was his. He found the super's apartment at the ground floor rear, beyond the staircase, and the second time he knocked the door was opened by a fiftyish very short stout woman in yellow tank top and jeans, barefoot. A lit cigarette was in the corner of her mouth, an unlit one behind her left ear. In her free hand she held a copy of the Star. She gave Parker a sharp suspicious look, decided he was neither a tenant nor a cop, and said, "Yeah?"

  "My brother Viktor's supposed to meet me at the airport," Parker told her. He acted bewildered, starting to be worried, not very smart. He held his airline ticket up to show her, saying, "See? I flew in from Albany, Viktor's supposed to meet me, he never showed up."

  She frowned at the ticket he was waving. "Whado I care?"

  "He lives here! Viktor Charov!"

  "Oh," she said, nodding, recognizing the name. "Sure, that's right."

  "I had to take a cab in from O'H
are," Parker told her. 'Twenty-three bucks! Viktor never showed up."

  "Maybe he's stuck in traffic," she said.

  "Maybe it's his heart," Parker suggested. "He had heart trouble once, maybe he's sick."

  She made an effort to act concerned. "Did you try calling him?"

  "No answer," he told her. "Come with me, open the door, let's see if he's there."

  She looked at her newspaper, frowning, not wanting to have to move out of her nest. "My husband's upstairs fixing a sink," she said.

  "We'll just take a look," Parker told her, "make sure he isn't there, hurt or something."

  She sighed, feeling sorry for herself. "All right, just a minute."

  She didn't ask him in, but shut the door, and he waited in the hall until she came out, now wearing sneakers and a lavender cardigan sweater. The cigarette was gone from her mouth, but the other one was still behind her ear. "Come on," she said.

  The elevator was old and slow and a little too small. It creaked up the shaft to the fourth floor, and she led the way down a clean gray hall to the third dark brown metal door on the left. "L" it said. The slot for a tenant to slip a card into with his name on it was blank.

  She unlocked the door, leaned in, called, "Mr. Charov?" She listened, then turned back, shaking her head. "He isn't here."

  "We gotta look," Parker said.

  She frowned at him, irritated at how much of her time he was using, and shrugged. "But we don't touch nothing," she said.

  They entered a narrow short foyer with a closet on the left, then a small living room with two windows in the opposite wall overlooking the street, and doors open in both side walls. The one on the left led to the bedroom, with a bathroom beyond it, and to the right was the kitchen. All was anonymously furnished by the landlord, with a few stray indications of Charov's tenancy. The rooms were empty.

  "Like I said," the woman told him. "Stuck in traffic."

  "I'll wait for him," Parker said.

  "You can't wait in here," the woman said. "I know, I know, you're his brother, but I still can't let you wait in here. The weather's nice, you can sit on the stoop."

  "Fine," Parker said.

  They went back to the hall door, Parker first. He held the door open for her to go through, and on the way out pushed the button that unlocked the door.

  Guns were stashed in every room, small lightweight .22s, meant to end the argument right away in small rooms like these. They were snapped into clips under chairs, behind the toilet, under the bed.

  Twelve thousand dollars in twenties and fifties was rolled into an orange juice concentrate can in the freezer. Inside the lining of the suitcase in the bedroom closet were Russian, Ukraine, and Belarus passports with Charov's face but other names. Under the socks in the top dresser drawer was a manila envelope that had once been mailed to Charov at this address, with a printed return address of Cosmopolitan Beverages in Bayonne, New Jersey; whatever it had originally held, Charov had been using it to hold his papers. There was an American green card, plus documents describing him as an executive employed by Cosmopolitan Beverages, an importer of Russian liquors. Also in the envelope was an open-date Aeroflot ticket, first-class, from New York's JFK to Moscow.

  Stuck into the edge of the mirror over the dresser were three color snapshots of what had to be Charov's family, back in Moscow; a pleasant plump wife, three teenage sons, and a large brown-black dog that looked like a mix of German shepherd and wolf, all standing in sunlight in front of a large, comfortable-looking but not gaudy suburban house.

  Beside the bed was a telephone with answering machine, its red light blinking the news that it contained two messages. Parker pushed play and the first message was a guttural voice leaving a brisk statement in what was probably Russian. The second, in English, was from somebody who sounded hesitant, nervous, a little scared: "Charov? Are you there? I thought I'd hear from you by now. Everything's okay, isn't it? I'm ready with the money. Just call me. Let me know how things went."

  The customer. Too cagy or nervous to leave his name.

  Parker played the message again. The voice was almost familiar, almost. He played it a third time, but he wasn't going to get it. Too far in the past, or too little known.

  Next to the answering machine was a notepad, with three items written on it:

  n.EpOK M.PoaeHWTePH

  WILLIS

  That last one was in the Roman alphabet because that's what it would say on the mailbox outside Parker's house on the lake. It was the landmark Charov would have looked for.

  And the first two names, if they were names? They looked like names. Was one of them the nervous voice on the answering machine? On the phone, here, had Charov written the names of his new employers and the target?

  Parker left the guns where they were. He took with him the money, the passports, the manila envelope with everything in it, and the notepad with the names.

  5

  "Cosmopolitan Beverages."

  "Viktor Charov, please," Parker said. "I'm sorry, what?" 'Viktor Charov."

  "No, sir, I'm sorry, there's no one here by that name." "Oh, is he in Moscow?"

  "No, sir, we don't— What was that name again?" 'Viktor Charov," Parker said. "He's a purchasing agent with your outfit. He isn't there?" "Hold, please."

  Parker held. Traffic was light going by the gas station, the same one where he'd talked with Elkins. He hadn't been to the house yet, see what was going on there. Claire had moved to a hotel in New York, planned to do some shopping; he'd call her later, after he knew what was going on. "Ms. Bursar."

  "Hello," Parker said. "I'm looking for Viktor Charov."

  "Would you spell that name?"

  He did, with the k, and Ms. Bursar said, 'There's no one by that name employed here."

  "I'm sure he is," Parker said. "He travels back and forth to Moscow for you people."

  "Sir, I am the firm's accountant," Ms. Bursar said. "I write the salary checks, and I have never written a check for anyone named Viktor Charov."

  "Well, I got a bum steer then," Parker said. "Sorry about that."

  'There are a number of other beverage importers in this area," Ms. Bursar pointed out. "Perhaps he's with one of them."

  "Could be," Parker said, and hung up, and went back to the Lexus.

  A no-show job, to cover Charov's travels between the two countries and explain his income. Somebody connected with Cosmopolitan was mobbed-up in some way, and could insert this ringer into the company without its accountant knowing he was there.

  Which was why, though his "employer" was in a town next to the harbor of New York, Charov's American base had been Chicago. That was much more central for somebody whose actual work might take him anywhere in the country.

  For years the hit men came from Italy, know-nothing rural toughs called zips, who spoke no English, came in only to do the job and collect their low pay, and then flew back out again. But that system soon began to break down. Some of the zips refused to go home, some of them got caught and didn't know how to take care of themselves inside the American system, some of them had loyalties in Europe that conflicted with their one-time-only employers in the United States.

  It's still better, all in all, to have a contract killer whose home base is far away, in some other land. But it pays to have somebody reliable, educated, useful over the long term. Viktor Charov could come and go as he pleased, cloaked by his 'job" at Cosmopolitan Beverages. He could take on whatever private work he wanted, and from time to time the people who'd given him his cover would ask him to do a little something for them.

  But the mob wasn't behind the run at Parker. That had been a civilian, that nervous voice on the answering machine in Chicago. It was one of his independent contractor jobs that had run out Charov's string.

  No one had been in the house. Parker went through it, slowly, room by room, and all the little signals he'd set there were unsprung.

  The civilian employer of Charov would react slowly to the Russian's disappearance. Ther
e was time to see if the Montana job was worth the effort. Time to find out what those two names in Cyrillic looked like when they were at home.

  Parker phoned the hotel in Manhattan, but Claire was out, as he'd expected. He left a message: "See you in a week or two."

  6

  The Big Sky Airlines commuter plane took Parker the last leg from Great Falls, Montana, up to Havre, twenty-five miles from Canada. Elkins met him in a rental Jeep Cherokee. "Get your other stuff taken care of?"

  "It's waiting for me," Parker said.

  They had to go through Havre, small and neat and flat, still a railroad town, surrounded by the mountains. Three peaks of the Bear Paw Mountains, Baldy and Bates and Otis, six to seven thousand feet high, were all within twenty minutes of the center of town.

  Route 2, the east-west road, ran along beside the Milk River from here almost a hundred miles to Malta, but their motel, a non-chain operation called Thibadeau View, was just a couple miles east of town, toward Chinook. The motel, a long white one-story wood clapboard building dwarfed by its Indian-motif sign, stood on the left, the north side of the road, with the quick-tumbling Milk River behind it.

  It was seven in the evening, local time. The motel didn't have a restaurant, so after Parker put his bag in his room the four of them drove to a place that called itself a family restaurant. They weren't the family the owners had in mind.

  Over the meal, Elkins said, "We figure to go up there tonight, take a look at the place. Also, Larry's gotta head back to Massachusetts tomorrow."

  Parker looked at Lloyd. "You're gonna commute? Massachusetts to Montana?"

  "No, I won't come back after this," Lloyd told him. "I have to get physically close just this once, to find my access, since it isn't a normal site with normal ways in. But after that, I can deal with it from home."

  Wiss continued to take an almost paternal pride in Lloyd, saying, "Do you like that, Parker? He's gonna pick the lock over the Web."

  "If he misses," Parker said, "we're the ones on the scene. And he's the one with the electronic alibi."