Island of Thieves

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “Is there a staircase? This stuff is a pain. We got an extension arm for one of the pieces, an aluminum tube that’s close to ten feet. Sometimes we don’t take the big lamps like this on the elevators, too much risk of something getting scratched, you know?”

  “Sure, the maintenance guy can let you into the stairs if that’s better. You can take those right to the top.”

  “The top? Tell me I’m not schlepping this stuff up fifty floors.”

  The guard laughed. “Eight. Paragon’s on eight.”

  Perfect, thought Shaw.

  “Eight I can do,” he said. “Thanks a million. We should be coming by on Monday.”

  A service entrance that went straight up to Paragon’s floor. Ideal, if he could reach it. He walked through the blocks until he passed the Jansson Building. The loading entrance the guard had mentioned really did look like it was a back door to the shoe emporium. Peering through the slatted and scratched windows of the door, Shaw saw that the ramp descended belowground in a curve to the right.

  Next to the door, a push button labeled deliveries was shielded from the elements with a hinged plastic lid. Shaw wondered whether the maintenance guy would be around on Saturday. The weekend would be the right time to make his move.

  A sign in the window of a Walgreens gave him another idea. He had the store’s printing department take two passport photos of himself, which they slipped into a paper envelope to dry. He stopped at the discount clothiers on the ground floor of the Jansson Building and bought a full outfit, blue suit and white shirt and a plum-colored tie plus socks and shoes. The pants were half an inch short, and the jacket pulled tight over his shoulders. None of that mattered.

  Three blocks down Forty-fifth he found an art-supply store. He bought some stiff poster board in two colors and some marking pens. Once outside, he tore a page-size piece of each board free and threw the rest away.

  Arts and crafts, he thought. Today the art. Tomorrow morning he’d see if he was crafty enough to beat Paragon’s defenses.

  FORTY-SIX

  By 7:00 a.m. on Saturday, Shaw had shaved, showered, dressed in his new business suit, and left the truck in a midtown garage four blocks from the Jansson Building. Most of his gear was stored in the truck’s hidden compartment. Win or lose with Paragon, he would be leaving New York immediately.

  The few items he carried were tucked into a black messenger bag, slung over his shoulder. Without knowing exactly what security Paragon had installed in its eighth-floor office, he’d had to prepare for the likeliest options.

  Thanks to the helpful guard, he knew that the ramp next door to the Jansson would take him down to the basement level. He picked the exterior lock on the rolling door, pulled it up high enough to duck under, and closed it again. The door made a racket as it shuddered on its rails. Shaw pressed on.

  Saturday seemed to have left the basement empty. He walked past an industrial-size laundry room and a series of cages holding everything from rolling chairs to boxed computer monitors, held in limbo until granted passage upstairs.

  Shaw wouldn’t wait for that blessing. He found the service elevator the guard had mentioned and the stairwell door beside it. An office dork wandering around lost would take the elevator. In his motel room the night before, Shaw had cut and glued the poster board and one of his passport photos into an approximation of the IDs he’d seen on the Jansson Building workers the day before. It wouldn’t fool anyone closer than fifteen feet away, not with its lettering in felt-tipped marker. But on a security camera, it should pass for the real deal. He slung the ID around his neck on a lanyard before pressing the button to summon the elevator.

  All six surfaces of the elevator car were shielded with stamped sheet metal, each silvery wall marked by a thousand scratches and dings from years of haphazard freight. While the materials were different, the box reminded Shaw uncomfortably of his jail cell in King County. He tried not to think about the odds that he might soon be comparing East Coast cells to West.

  The doors slid wide to reveal a broad hall on the eighth floor. Shaw could see the main entryway and its bank of elevators at the far end. Between the elevators and where he stood were four sets of double doors in etched Plexiglas, two per side. Four entrances, four companies, he guessed, each one occupying a full corner of the floor.

  Paragon was at the southwest corner. A waiting area and reception desk lay just beyond the double doors. To either side of the desk’s backdrop, he could see the wider office beyond. The entry was equipped with key-card access, which he’d expected, and a fingerprint reader, which he had not.

  The black bubble of a ceiling camera had been set this side of the elevators. Keeping his face turned away from it, Shaw thumped on the Paragon office door. No answer. Either no one was working the weekend or all their resources were in Seattle right now. Focused on finding him.

  Two minutes, he guessed, before someone noticed him on camera, loitering in the floor lobby. No time for finesse. He would have to rely on brute force, electronically speaking.

  Standing between the camera and the door, he unfastened the plastic plate covering the reader with a power screwdriver. Letting the plate swing loose on its bottom screw, he pulled a modified smartphone and an adapter cord from his bag and plugged the phone into the key-card reader.

  The software on the phone mimicked the firmware of half a dozen leading RFID key-card programming manufacturers, telling the reader that it was erasing all codes, including the door’s master code, for a fresh start. It left the reader stuck in that bypassed mode with the door unlocked until a technician came to reprogram it.

  That dealt with the first hurdle. His approach to the fingerprint reader would have to be even less elegant, but Shaw was past caring if he left a trail the width of Fifth Avenue. Speed was the key.

  He had no program with him to disable the biometric machine. Reasoning that the two systems worked on a failsafe—if the fingerprint reader became disabled, the key-card system would take over all access for the door—the fastest way through the door was to take down the fingerprint reader, hard.

  Shaw plugged what looked like a homemade flash drive into the reader’s USB port. A lithium battery inside the drive promptly discharged hundreds of volts into the fingerprint reader. The screen flicked and popped as the electrical load fried its internal electronics. Shaw caught a tiny whiff of burned diodes as he pocketed the now-dead drive.

  The door opened with a tug.

  He made a quick circuit of the Paragon offices. No interior cameras on the ceiling. A dozen or so workspaces on the open floor for junior staff, with most of the square footage allocated to offices. Interior enclosures for some, window offices for upper management. He found James Hargreaves’s office in the corner and Edwin Chiarra’s five doors down from that. He smiled grimly. His first concrete evidence that Paragon was behind the team who’d broken him out of custody and the goon squad who’d done it.

  On the south wall he found a smaller window office whose nameplate read karla haiden.

  Shaw hesitated. Then he turned around and went back to Hargreaves’s office. Starting at the top.

  Two thousand eight hundred miles away in Seattle, in a twelfth-floor suite at the Mayflower Park Hotel, James Hargreaves woke to the ping of his cell phone. The tone was unique to a single purpose. He knew immediately what it meant and was alert within seconds.

  Hargreaves attributed much of his success in private intelligence to his reluctance to take people at their word. He preferred to verify facts, whenever possible, for himself. Whether that meant reviewing private call and text records of his clients or the Internet search histories of his employees, information was always useful. It wasn’t about knowing whom to trust. Trust was just guesswork. It was about gauging the odds that someone might lie about facts large or small and recognizing their behavior when they inevitably told you something that was untrue.

  So when his former CIO, a competent but rigid ex-FBI tech jockey whom Hargreaves had kept away from
the more clandestine operations, had told Hargreaves that the new fingerprint scanner would keep the office secure, Hargreaves had nodded and made a mental note to take some steps of his own. One was to install motion-sensitive cameras in the light fixture just above his office door and in the corridor just outside. The cameras sat dormant until his door opened, at which point they would begin broadcasting the images over the Jansson Building’s reliable Wi-Fi to Hargreaves’s cell phone.

  Picking up his phone, he expected to see his administrative assistant, Lacey, scrawling a note on his desk pad. The girl had keys to his office. On occasion she would catch up on invoices and expense reports on Saturdays, leaving the papers for his signature. He appreciated her diligence. Enough to discount the fact that Lacey occasionally ordered more expensive brands of office supplies than the products that filled the desks and printers of his staff. He knew she must be returning the premium items and pocketing the difference, hardly more than a hundred dollars a month. So insignificant a profit that Hargreaves had pondered whether she did it simply as a form of rebellion, to feel as though she had some power.

  He allowed her that. For now. Lacey had an acceptable face and a better than decent body. Some marks could be tempted by tits and ass, leaving them vulnerable to extortion themselves if they succumbed to their lusts. There might come a time when holding the threat of an embezzlement charge over Lacey would prove valuable.

  The office looked empty. For a moment Hargreaves wondered whether the cameras were malfunctioning.

  Then the image of Van Shaw appeared, moving from the far right into the center of the room.

  Hargreaves was on his feet in an instant. Impossible. Shaw was in Seattle, or at least holed up in some flyspeck apartment or cabin somewhere in the state, praying the cops weren’t about to break down the door.

  And yet there he was. Hargreaves watched as Shaw—in a suit and tie, no less—went through his desk and files, the locks offering no more resistance than soft cheese. How had the son of a whore found out who they were?

  Hargreaves would deal with that question later. The more immediate problem required action.

  He used his laptop to call Tucker’s number over Skype. He didn’t want to take his eyes off Shaw, who was searching the rest of his office, perhaps looking in vain for a safe.

  “Yessir?” Tucker, half asleep. Maybe feeling the night before.

  “Shaw is inside the New York office. Right now. Who do we have in the city?”

  “Shit,” Tucker said. Hargreaves heard the man grunt as he sat up. “Our team’s all here.”

  “Not our people. Freelancers. Is Gannon close?”

  “No. Jersey City.” There was a pause. Hargreaves knew that Tucker was running through a mental directory. The black man’s contacts were extensive and varied. It was one of the primary reasons Hargreaves continued to employ Tucker, even after a titanic misstep like Shaw’s escape.

  He watched the image of Shaw leave his office. Going down the hall to try his luck elsewhere. Hargreaves swiped the screen, and the image changed to the second camera, showing him a wider sweep of the office floor. Shaw was far in the background, moving down the row. To Karla’s office. Of course.

  “Riley. And Taskine,” said Tucker. “They’re both uptown.”

  Hargreaves grunted. Excessive, perhaps. But effective.

  “If you want to go that hard,” Tucker added.

  Hargreaves dismissed that. Tucker had compunctions. The man would kill—had killed, on Hargreaves’s orders. But Riley and Taskine enjoyed playing with their food. That made even hard men like Tucker pause, and they had no time for hesitation now.

  “Get them,” Hargreaves said. “Usual rate, plus a bonus if they take Shaw today without any noise. I want this done.”

  “You know how they work. We need to set a hard limit.”

  Hargreaves considered that question while Tucker was busy texting both operatives.

  “No bystanders engaged, no attention from the police,” he said. “So long as Shaw can still piece thoughts together and talk clearly enough to tell us what we want to know, I’ll be satisfied. Beyond that they have free rein.”

  “Chiarra said Shaw hinted at stashing the stuff in a safe-deposit box somewhere,” Tucker said. “You sure we don’t need him ambulatory?”

  “A ploy to keep us from breaking his bones. If he has the chemical, Shaw would want to reach it any time of the day or night. Would you limit yourself to bank hours?”

  Tucker coughed. “I wouldn’t. Hey, Riley responded. I’m sending him the address and Shaw’s picture.”

  “Warn them,” Hargreaves said. “Shaw’s dangerous, and he’s slippery. Share your story of how he wandered away on your watch. Make sure they hear it loud and clear.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” Tucker was back to sounding hungover.

  “Give them my number. They’ll report directly to me on this one.”

  Hargreaves waited for that last twist of the knife to be felt and then hung up.

  Hargreaves’s office had been a bust. No safe or lockbox, not even a computer Shaw might rip the hard drive from to hack later. The case information and contracts in the filing cabinets beneath the desk had looked like normal business records for a private intel firm. A lot of background checks and overviews of various companies, either clients or targets. None of the files mentioned Droma or Jiangsu Manufacturing. Hargreaves’s desk drawer had held ornate fountain pens and a little Ruger LCP in a leather holster. Less showy but also less likely to jam than the writing implements.

  Shaw searched Karla Haiden’s office as carefully as he had Hargreaves’s. The process took a little longer despite the smaller square footage, as Karla had made her workspace a homier environment, including paintings of seascapes on the walls and plants in the corners and on the shelves.

  There were two framed photographs as well, one a candid shot of a man in his fifties who had Karla’s shade of hazel eyes and one a more posed portrait showing a couple around the same age. The woman in the couple was unquestionably Karla’s mother. Same lean height, same shape of face, and still plenty of auburn strands in her graying hair. Remarried, Shaw supposed.

  He checked the drawers, finding only paperwork and office supplies and a few beauty essentials. No gun for the former policewoman. And no safe behind the seascapes or anything buried in the soil of the plants. If a hint of her perfume lingered in the enclosed space, that was probably Shaw’s imagination.

  Shaw moved on, to Ed Chiarra’s office. Like Karla, Chiarra had given some thought to decorating his corporate cage. If Shaw hadn’t already known that the lawyer was a New Yorker, the preponderance of Giants football swag on the shelves would have broadcast it. A ten-foot red-and-blue scarf made a knitted banner atop the bookcase behind his desk.

  Chiarra had an extra file cabinet taking up one corner, a beefier model than the cabinets in the other two offices. Steel instead of wood construction, with locks that required a barrel key. The drawers under the desk had the same reinforcement. It took Shaw an extra fifteen seconds before the top drawer clicked open. After that he had the feel of the lock’s model, and the rest came easy.

  He went through each in turn. Client contracts, almost exclusively, under the desk. Whatever Chiarra’s failings as a lawyer and a human might be, disorganization was not one of them. The man went in for color coding, with client contracts in blue folders and vendor contracts in red. Shaw didn’t find any files in either shade labeled droma, or rohner. He took the time to glance at the pages within a couple of random folders just to make sure the labels weren’t concealing something more interesting.

  The top two drawers of the cabinet held employee records in gold folders. Shaw grabbed the first name he recognized in the second drawer—tucker, emmet c.—and pulled the file. Beyond the basic facts like hire date and Social Security, the file had photocopies of Tucker’s passport and driver’s license—the operative’s deep brown face looking purposeful in both—and his résumé at the time of hiring. The b
ig man had been 101st Airborne, back before Shaw had enlisted, ending as a staff sergeant. Shaw had finished as an E-7, sergeant first class.

  I outranked your ass, Shaw thought. His private joke paled a little when he saw Tucker’s salary record on the second page. Being a gunsel for a shifty intelligence firm paid a lot better than bouncing at a Capitol Hill bar.

  Shaw used his phone to photograph Tucker’s file and went looking for others. Karla Haiden. Chiarra himself. urbaniak, victor. Vic of the twice-broken nose. With Tucker, that was two members of Paragon’s kidnap team. Shaw started back at the A’s to hunt through the photos on the copied licenses and passports, looking for the third man, the cyclist.

  He made quick progress. Until the sight of one familiar face caused him to stop cold.

  He pulled the folder out, looked at the name and the passport photo yet again, making sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. On the photocopied pages under the top sheet, black lines showed where the Paragon operative’s biographical and job-history information had been redacted. After another moment of staring at the photo, Shaw copied the file like the rest and carefully replaced it in the drawer.

  The file for the cyclist was near the end of the drawer. paolo, louis. His curly mop of hair had been much shorter when the passport picture was snapped.

  The bottom drawers held more blue-swathed contracts and red vendor invoices. There was no file for James Hargreaves. Maybe Hargreaves had erased his job records along with his history with the NSA or whatever spook incubator had spit him out.

  As Shaw pushed the bottom drawer shut, it jammed on something inside. He pulled the drawer out again and bent low to look between the row of files and the slim steel length of the roller track. Just under the drawer was a flat sheet of metal, forming a raised bottom to the file cabinet half an inch off the floor. The sheet had tilted a fraction to one side, and the rolling drawer had caught on its edge.