Ghostman (26 page)

“They put a bug on you,” I said in his voice.

I repeated the phrase twice, perfectly. After a few seconds I could feel the age shedding off me. I took a breath and it felt fuller. My shoulders
straightened up and my eyes became a little brighter. My joints lost their arthritic tremble and my smile lost its practiced character. I flexed my hands until they felt young again. When I spoke, I had his soft Atlantic City accent. I said, “My name’s John Grimaldi.”

John’s palette was black. That black leather jacket made him look like he was on his way to a club. He was a stylish guy who didn’t mind if he had to sweat for it. I used some hair dye and a lot of gel to turn my hair black and slick it down flat. I drew in a widow’s peak with a small makeup pencil.

“My name’s John Grimaldi,” I said. “But you can call me Jack. I’m from Atlantic City, New Jersey. I do a lot of different things, you know?”

As I put my clothes back on, I couldn’t stop thinking about this bug he said they’d placed on me. As long it was active, I was in danger. The next men the Wolf sent wouldn’t have orders to follow me around at a safe distance. The next men he sent would have orders to kill me. It didn’t matter how anonymous the motel was. If they tracked me here, I was dead meat.

I could only think of one more place it could be hidden.

I packed my things into the overnight bag and smoothed the wrinkles out of my clothes. I left the key to the room under the welcome mat and walked over to the Bentley.

It’s easy to track a car. Most have built-in GPS devices anyway so the owner can track the vehicle’s location remotely if the car’s ever stolen. Even if those features are disabled, however, an add-on tracker like LoJack can be very difficult to find. They’re small enough to fit almost anywhere and there are hundreds of places you could hide one in a car. Before I got back in the Bentley, I circled around and ran my hand under the bumpers and along the grille. I checked under the seats, in the glove box and in the trunk.

I only found the tracking device when I got on my knees and looked at the undercarriage. It was a two-by-three-inch white box attached to the chassis between the left tire well and the wheel by some sort of
heavy-duty adhesive. It had a durable rubberized exterior and a glowing green light. Goddamn.

Alexander Lakes had sold me out. I cursed and shook my head. He must have been tracking all the cars he gave me. That was the only way the Wolf could have got to me so fast. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Of course he worked for the Wolf. Everybody in this whole goddamn town did.

I pried the device off with my knife. It was very light. I slipped the knife through the gap in the plastic and pushed until the light on the device went out and the signal died. I looked at my watch. Eleven a.m. I had been at the motel for three hours.

Nineteen hours to go.

40

KUALA LUMPUR

I had no idea how bad that heist would go. I don’t recall much of what happened in the days that led up to the job, but I remember feeling both confident and scared. Fear is part of the job, of course. Anybody who isn’t scared to walk into a bank with a gun is nuts. But we’d all done this before, so I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. I thought I knew the routine. I thought I knew the bank. I thought I knew the people I was working with. I thought I knew the mistake I’d made, and I thought I knew the risks involved with that.

I had no idea.

At seven on the morning of the heist, the wheelman came to pick me up from a prearranged pickup point not far from my scatter in an old panel van. The detail on the side was in a mix of Malay, English and Arabic with an address for a window-cleaning company down in Subang Jaya. Window-cleaning companies get something of a free pass while driving around urban centers. The guys who run parking lots and do building security tend to cut them more slack than they probably deserve, because nobody wants a job that involves hanging from a wire
forty stories up and cleaning shit all day. Alton nodded at me with a cigarette between his lips from the driver’s seat as I opened the rear doors and climbed in the back. His black gloves made a stretching sound on the wheel.

This was the plan—the wheelman would pick us all up from different places around the city, we’d do the job and then we’d leave the country right away. It was much riskier now after what had happened in the Highlands, but we were all willing to take that risk. It took an hour to pick everyone up. We met Angela at the loading dock behind the Crown Plaza. We got Vincent and Mancini by a bus stop in the business district, under a billboard advertising a cell phone. Joe Landis and Hsiu Mei were having breakfast in a coffee shop out by the forest.

Everyone was feeling good about the job except Angela. Usually she bubbles with manic energy before a job, but not this time. Now she was cold and distant, staring off through the van windshield as she chewed a stick of nicotine gum. I wanted more than anything else to talk to her, but I knew it wasn’t the right time for that. She needed the silence.

Once everybody was in the van, we parked in an empty lot down the street from the Bank of Wales building and started getting into disguise. Vincent, Mancini and I were going in as security guards. We had hats with an armored-car company’s logo and dark sunglasses to cover our eyes. We pulled the baggy uniforms on over our clothes so we could rip them off in twenty seconds flat in the elevator and change into a different costume for the bank floor. Mancini fitted himself with a nylon shotgun rig. I watched as he took one of the shotguns out of the bag, loaded four bright red double-aught buck shells into the loading port and then slid the gun into the apparatus. Next to that was a bandolier of small, powerful tear-gas grenades. Once the uniform was on, though, it didn’t look like he was carrying anything at all. He took out a box of shotgun shells and poured extras into each of his six pockets.

“How much longer are we going to wait here?” Hsiu said.

“Don’t you have a watch?”

“I mean,” she said, “just what are we waiting for, exactly?”

Angela squeezed forward and pointed at the satellite phone on the dashboard.

I’m not sure how long we sat there, but it probably felt longer than it really was. We could all smell one another. Grease and gasoline, cigarettes and alcohol, clove and coriander and black pepper. Every little sound was amplified by the tight quarters. Alton took out a cigarette, but Joe Landis immediately put a hand over his lighter.

“Do you have any idea how much nitroglycerine I have in my bag?”

The wheelman made a face and flicked the unlit cigarette out the window. He said, “You mean I can’t get a smoke until this whole thing is over?”

“Here,” Vincent said. “We’ve got something for you.”

Mancini took a small vial out of his pocket and shook out about a quarter gram of cocaine onto the cardboard box holding the shotgun shells. He shaped the coke into messy lines with the edge of his pinkie finger and sent the first one up his nose. Vincent went next, then Joe and Alton. I sat there and listened to them until the vial was empty.

The satellite phone on the dashboard rang and vibrated. Nobody answered it; we just let it ring. We all knew it was Marcus, letting us know exactly what time it was and exactly how long we had before the point of no return. If there was a problem of any kind, we could’ve picked up the phone right then and told him. If we were running late, he’d adjust the timetable. When the phone stopped ringing, we knew exactly how long we had.

We had two minutes.

Alton started the engine and pulled out. The bank was less than a quarter mile away. After Angela and I had cased the joint, we’d decided to break in through the secure elevator. Thirty seconds later, our old panel van rolled down the steep incline into the skyscraper’s underground parking garage. The guy at the gate waved us through without a second thought. Like I said, window cleaners always get a pass.

We turned into the lowest of the two subbasement parking levels and pulled into a dark slot not fifty yards away from the secure elevator.
We turned off all the lights and inside the van it was very dark. Now we just had to wait for the first armored truck of the day to arrive. My tritium watch hands glowed an eerie blue.

One minute.

I’d done my research. This elevator was something of a specialty item. Since the vault was on the thirty-fifth floor, the bankers had no easy way of getting shipments of money up that far. The dedicated elevator was their solution. Instead of having armored cars park on the street and walk the cash through the lobby and up using the regular elevators that anybody could take, the deliveries would arrive down here and be sent up on this special dedicated two-point elevator. It was more than secure, of course. The shaft was loaded with motion detectors, so nobody could climb up, and it only stopped on this level and Thirty-five, which severely restricted access. The compartment itself had walls made of tempered steel and an emergency satellite phone that would connect automatically to the Royal Malaysian Police if the elevator ever stopped unexpectedly. The lift system had two high-tensile chromium cords, a magnetic safe lock and four emergency manual wall brakes so nobody could break in and get the money. And best of all, to get the thing to go, a bank manager at the top and an armored-car driver at the bottom had to look at each other over closed-circuit television and swipe their ID cards at exactly the same moment. Nobody other than the vault manager and the delivery team would ever see the inside of that lift. I’d seen the schematics. It was one of the most secure elevators in the world.

Today, however, it was our ticket in.

The van was dark and stuffy. Joe tapped his fingernails on the case holding his lock-pick set. He was nervous. We all were.

Thirty seconds.

We heard the armored truck coming. I raised my head and looked out through the dim, eight-inch-square window in the back of the van.

It was an older, cheaper model built on the chassis of a Ford F550 pickup. The windshield was divided into two flat planes of inch-thick bulletproof glass, and the entire body was covered by maybe half an inch
of steel armor. There were gun ports in the walls and doors, though not more than usual, and the tires were puncture-proof, sure, but not strong enough to stop a shotgun blast. In the States no self-respecting bank would use such a vehicle, but in Malaysia this was the best they could get. Back then, these deliveries weren’t nearly as high-tech as they are today. A lot can change in five years. There were none of those magnetic plates or GPS trackers or streaming color cameras that make modern armored vehicles so impenetrable. The only technology this rig had was a single CB radio in the cockpit, so the truck could go missing for close to thirty minutes without raising any suspicion.

Inside were three men: a driver, a money handler and a guard. The driver would stay in the cockpit and keep the engine running in case they had to make a quick getaway. The money handler would unload the money onto a cart, and the guard would stand outside next to him with a gun drawn to make sure nobody tried anything. We’d all done the research about these guys. The driver was the new guy on the team. He’d been on the job less than six months and had never fired his weapon except on the range. He had his hair cropped tight like a fresh recruit. The money handler, however, was a pro. He’d been doing this for five years, and not much else, apparently. He didn’t have a wife or girlfriend and didn’t see his family on a regular basis, either. He’d done nothing but deliver money to and from banks and businesses. He had a grim face and small eyes. The guard protecting him was the youngest by several years, though he was more experienced than the driver.

Once the vehicle made a complete stop, the driver put the hand brake on and left the engine idling. The guard opened the passenger door and stepped out and walked around back. He knocked twice on the rear door with his knuckles. The money handler opened the doors from the inside and hoisted a big blue nylon bag of valuables down to him.

Ten seconds.

I could hear the time ticking away on my watch. Angela was breathing hard next to me. She wasn’t nervous or anything. She was breathing like that to flood her body with oxygen so she’d be ready to go when
the moment came. I kept my eyes glued to the armored truck and the elevator.

The handler passed two more bundles of money down to the guard, who piled them up at his feet. The money handler briefly disappeared from view, then came back pushing a small dolly cart that he rolled haphazardly out of the truck onto the pavement. The driver lit a cigarette, leaned forward to adjust the air conditioning and cracked the door ajar a little, craning his head around to see how things were going. A second later, the money handler hopped down with something I didn’t expect—a large black assault rifle with a reflex sight slung by a strap over his back. We hadn’t planned for that.

Five seconds.

It was a goddamn G36. Next to a flight wing of police helicopters, that gun was the last thing we wanted to see. It could put out thirty NATO rounds in a little over two seconds. Each bullet could go through our secondhand body armor and out the other side, no sweat. If we didn’t do things exactly right, someone was going to die. I stopped breathing.

Time’s up.

Angela gave the signal.

Vincent and Mancini jumped out of the back of the van with their shotguns. They charged the armored truck like football players and shouted orders at the guards. Mancini ran toward the money handler and Vincent toward the driver. Before they could register what was happening, our buttonmen were shoving shotguns in their faces.

“Don’t move!” Vincent yelled in English, then in broken Malay to make sure he got the point home. He pressed the muzzle of the shotgun to the driver’s temple. The man dropped his cigarette and put his hands up right away in surrender.

The other two didn’t give up so easily. Mancini had two targets and only one gun, and the money handler had that rifle on his back. When he got close to the truck, he pointed the shotgun at the guard. As a result, the other guy tried to grab the assault rifle off his back. Before he could get a grip, though, Mancini stepped over into melee range and
bashed his head in with the butt of his shotgun. The money handler’s nose exploded in a torrent of blood and he stumbled backwards. The assault rifle slid under the truck. The other guard threw his hands up in the air.