I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 (42 page)

*****

Spencer double-parked outside 110 E 71st, leaving the emergency flashers blinking while he rang the doorbell outside Terraza.

“Where do I park?” he asked, dropping his tool chest at the doorman’s feet. “I can’t afford more parking tickets.”

“What are you here about?” the doormen wanted to know. He was dressed in full livery: black police hat with gold band, full-length wool overcoat with more gold at the collar, gilded buttons and gold sleeve ribbons, crisp white shirt and gray tie, gray trousers, shining black shoes. His square stance said it all. That was his door; nobody was getting past it without his say-so.

Spencer thrust a pink copy at him and ran back to the car while he perused the work order. “So, where to?” he yelled back. The doorman produced a blue handicapped placard, ran it out to Spencer and pointed toward Madison Avenue. “Walter” was printed on his gold nametag.

“Watch my stuff, will you?”

“Grab a spot, then come back and register with me,” the doorman said.

Once he got inside the building, Spencer was startled. The building went far beyond the older-looking structure he saw on the online images. An entire modern new building had been added that towered over the original structure.

“So what’s this about?” the doorman demanded. Early forties, Spencer guessed. Protective. The leather thong and handle-end of a black nightstick dangled at the edge of his desk just behind the bar-height countertop.

“The roof deck. Regular six-month check-up. Got to get a look at the membrane, see it isn’t going to start leaking again. Ounce of prevention or a pound of cure.” He fished into pockets, coming up with a business card. “Jay Spender. That’s me.” Spencer pointed at the name and back to the work order in the doorman’s hands.

“You’re not on the list.”

“So that’s my problem?”

“You’re not on the list,” he repeated.

“Ok. I did my job, you did yours. So I come back in six months. Maybe it don’t leak.” Spencer picked the toolbox off the floor, turned toward the door, stopped, and pulled a small notepad from his pocket, then thumbed until he came to the right page. Returning to the doorman, he offered the pad and pointed.

“She’s your management agent, right? How ’bout you call and then she can send a right list.”

The doorman lifted his telephone in one hand and rested his other hand onto the nightstick while he pressed in the number. Voicemail picked up. She was on vacation. The doorman hung up, looked Spencer up and down, and then ordered him to place the toolbox on the counter, take two steps back, and hold still.

He hefted the toolbox off the counter down onto his desk. Inside the toolbox Spencer had a selection of used pawnshop tools along with the brand new drill-driver and the electronics. The doorman lifted open the lid, moved his gloved fingers through the various drill bits, safety goggles, screws, earplugs, and bits and pieces inside the upper tray, then lifted out the tray and examined the large compartment below. Box knife, wire-strippers, hammer, drill-driver, and electronics. He held up the electronics, turned them side to side and upside down. When he reached out his arm, Spencer caught sight of the crossed black powder pistols tattooed above his wrist.

“What’s that?” the doorman asked, still moving and examining the round black ball, tapered base, and tail antenna.

“Infrared moisture meter, sarge,” Spencer answered as he had practiced. “Looks for leaks where we can’t see ’em.”

The doorman put the camera back inside Spencer’s toolbox then looked Spencer up and down and came from behind the desk carrying a security wand.

“Take off the hat. Collar down. Arms out, legs spread.” Spencer obeyed as ordered. While he was passing the wand, the ex-MP patted along Spencer after each tone.

“Army?” Walter asked.

“82nd. Bragg.”

“988th. Benning.”

Spencer thought of Harmony Church, but didn’t mention the Sniper School. “Combat MP, huh? Saw your stamp. When did you serve, Walter?” Spencer asked.

“Name’s not Walter, its Vince, Vincenzo. Every doorman here since ’82 has been Walter, so here I’m Walter. Makes it easier on the residents. Deployed in Desert Storm, Sierra Leone in ’97, Kosovo in ’99. Ten years. Staff sergeant.”

“I’m only out a year. Not much.” Spencer pulled out another business card and read, “Maintenance Technician.

“I used to destroy IEDs, now I fix toilets.”

Walter gave him a gentle pat on the back then stepped back behind the counter.

“Come over here,” Vince said apologetically, lifting up a digital camera. “I got to do it.” After taking Spencer’s photograph, he pointed to the resident elevators instead of making Spencer trek to the service elevators in back and then around again to the front roof deck.

“Seventh floor,” Walter indicated. “Wait a second.” He ducked down behind the counter and came back with a fresh pair of black booties. “Put these on inside so one of them doesn’t shit themselves over the carpet and go nuclear on me.”

“Tough place,” Spencer remarked.

“Naw. Rich people. There’s a few assholes lighting me up over every fucking thing just ’cause they figure I’m the whipping boy. But most are ok. They leave me alone. The worst is the ones who act like they’re your best friend. Ask me have I ever seen one those guys one time outside the job. Have they ever had me up for a meal? A beer even? No fucking way. They’re not my pals.

“But I stay dry. We got the union. Sundays when I work I bring my iPad and watch the games.”

“Oh hey. That reminds me,” Spencer said. “It takes me forever to send the images back to the office over the phone. You think I can use your Wi-Fi, Vince? Sure would save time.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

All four techs were fidgeting more than their normal hyperactivity when they excitedly displayed their accomplishments. As they were getting more familiar with the huge enterprise system, they kept peeling back the onion to discover more and more functions. In less than two hours they had mapped primary and secondary events in order of the median incomes of known persons attending. They had every camera feed and all public transportation geo-linked in association with each specific event.

At the onset, the entire screen looked like a jumble of flags superimposed one upon the other. Stephen opened the map view outward until each was differentiated, yet the concentration of wealth remained staggering.

“Are you understanding this?” Dilip asked Owen.

“You see, we applied color intensity to coincide with the median wealth represented at each venue,” Stephen explained.

“Wow,” Owen agreed. “It hits you when you see it like this. I mean, you know the money is here. It’s New York. But holy crap.”

“I also wrapped each flag in those circles, with the width of the circle corresponding to a public exposure metric,” Dilip added eagerly. “The more each event appears online, the wider the circle.”

Dale opened the mapping tool wider still, exposing black camera icons. He suggested that Owen come closer and take the mouse. “Click on one of the cameras. Any one of them, just pick one.”

Owen did as instructed and instantly a live view appeared in the upper corner of the monitor. He moved the cursor, clicked again, and a new view popped up.

It was Kip’s turn now. Jumping in ahead of Dilip, he excitedly insisted upon showing the second side of the equation. “I correlated the Forbes 400 list with physical addresses here in NYC. Let me show you.”

Dale interrupted; they acted like gleeful children during show-and-tell.

“Here are their residential addresses; I backed out post boxes and commercial zoning.”

The map showed another confused concentration of flags, green and purple this time. Owen assumed that one color represented addresses, the other cameras, but he would have been incorrect. Dale opened the geography outward so that smaller areas of concentration displayed as distinct flags, sometimes as many as sixteen flags in single key buildings.

“Each of the purple flags is a Forbes 400 individual. Purple was, of course, the emperor’s color in Ancient Rome.”

“I did the green,” Dilip chimed in.

“The cameras,” Owen thought out loud.

“Not at all,” Dilip corrected him. “Green flags represent foreign nationals, known billionaires with residences here. I derived these by filtering State Department and IRS records and supplemented high net worth private client logs within investment banks, hedge funds, and private equity databases.”

Once he had the floor, Dilip continued frenetically, shifting to another screen wherein the black camera icons were so densely-packed that individual apartments had to be mapped room by room. As he moved the cursor over the icons, a graphic displayed the individual’s face, his ranking on the international wealth list, and net wealth in two digits—billions and hundreds of millions.

Dilip placed the cursor over a particular camera within a large room at the top of the sixty-eight story building occupying a whole block on 5th Avenue between E. 56th and E. 57th and began giggling uncontrollably before he clicked.

“No,” Stephen shouted, “not The Donald!”

“Oh yes,” Dilip confirmed. “The Donald!”

Dilip bowed and continued. “This is excellent,” he promised. With a right click, he opened a radius out to twenty feet, superimposed on top of the live feed. A number 4 flashed then moved to the upper-right corner.

“Four devices,” Dilip explained before moving his cursor over one of the small red earphone icons on the screen.

A valet appeared, with his back to the camera and a rack of gold ties from which The Donald, standing in his underpants, made his selection.

“You tell them,” the voice ordered, “if their security people won’t do the job, then I’ll get up and leave.”

Stephen beamed. His techs, Dilip especially, looked like three baby birds gaping for their momma. “Audio!”

“Audio!” they shouted in chorus.

“I don’t give a damn if they put up a Purell dispenser,” the voice affirmed. “I don’t shake hands. It’s filthy! They pick their noses! How hard is it to tell them in line before they get to me and up they come, reaching out?”

Dilip scrolled through until he found the mayor’s office.

Miller shut them down, the minute it appeared, scolding them all. “Jesus! Tools, not toys. If it isn’t Spencer, don’t put it up. Not on monitors, either!”

“Can you imagine how much the tabloids would pay?” Dale muttered. His mind was abuzz. “Even for the clips! Holy crap…there’s billions sitting there for the taking in this technology.”

Kip expanded the thought. “Board meetings. Getting ahead of every corporate announcement. Getting the inside track on product releases, mergers.”

“The person who controls this conceivably alters economies,” Dale confirmed, synthesizing all their thoughts. “Wicked shit.”

“The end of privacy,” Nussbaum murmured. He took over the program and moved his cursor around, doing a ‘fly-over’ across Manhattan.

“They’ve got security cameras everywhere, even in their toilet rooms,” Stephen explained. “We can see right into every room in their places.”

“And we can hear,” Dilip added. “And not just in New York. The fundamental architecture scales to Beijing, Berlin, London, Delhi.”

“Spencer!” Miller shouted at them, clapping his hands. “Stop with the Masters of the Universe. This is about one target. One!”

“Filter out the apartments and drill down to exteriors and public areas,” Owen told them. “Everything in and around the primary targets on my list.”

“Easy,” Stephen responded, “but thousands are still left. The system is built to spot any person we’re seeking across millions of cameras. It isn’t able to get inside his head!’

Owen threw up his hands and turned to Miller. “We need assets in place, here, now! The second we get the next hit on camera we need to move! Right away! The moment Spencer attacks again, it is going to be all over the news and there goes your low profile. This makes no sense!”

*****

Spencer stretched his legs out on the basement floor and sat, munching on peanut butter and Saltines, while he studied the camera feed until his eyes felt like they were ready to explode out of his skull. Individual recon always meant either boredom or terror, but it was necessary and no one else was handing him prepared intelligence data.

He awakened at 04:00 and studied the front and side entrances non-stop until 11:30. Middle of the week, yet he counted only eleven residents departing the front doors all morning long. The doorman walked them out under his umbrella to waiting sedans where drivers held open the doors. He had key faces committed to memory from photos off the web.

Even the lowest-grade spotting scope had better resolution than his wireless webcam. Not pretty, but it was sufficient; he could still recognize his target. This wasn’t Afghanistan; he had no satellites or drones to confirm target presence.

Mercedes, Daimler, Rolls Royce, Bentley, and one Mercedes Sprinter Van passed the front doors. He wanted to tie his target to one of the vehicles. Get some kind of an edge.

One drop of drizzle and the doorman’s umbrella obscured their faces; all Spencer could see were legs and shoes. “You’ll get one chance,” he observed. “You can’t miss it. That’s it. One chance.”

Eighty-five people have as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion. Let’s make that eighty-four.

Through the morning, he watched the screen off the feed from the camera he had mounted; it was fixed at 42-degree angle looking diagonally across the street to the corner of the Park Avenue structure. He counted thirty-one domestic employees entering off E. 71st. He also counted nineteen deliveries—FedEx, UPS, and DHL vans stopped in a nearly constant succession.

Bingo. Big box vans. Big enough to carry a bomb that could level a city block.

“Now make them believe it. Don’t leave them time to think. Get them running. Out the doors, straight into the line of fire.”

*****

Using a prepaid cell phone, Spencer dialed the Terraza.

Vince answered, “Terraza, Walter speaking. How may I help you?”

“Vince, Jay, calling about the roof deck. Good news and bad news, which you feeling like first? Ok. The good news is that the deck membrane isn’t too bad overall,” Spencer explained. “Bad news is there is a section along the southeast corner where the whole sub-structure is sopping wet. No good. Good news is we caught it before it soaked into the apartment underneath, but more bad news, too.

“Vince, with this wet weather I have to tent the whole thing, protect the ceiling below it when I cut out the wet plywood, and then get it good and dry before I come back and recoat it. Won’t get adhesion if it isn’t dry.”

“When you coming out?” Vince wanted to know.

“No promises, I can try for this afternoon late or at least by noon tomorrow.”

“No problem either way. None of the residents go out on the deck in the rain except to let their dogs go, and that is against the rules anyhow so they can’t bitch about anything. Thursday I’m off, but I’ll put you on the list.”

“Thanks, sarge.”

Spencer then made a second call, this time dialing 9-1-1.

“Emergency services. What are you reporting?”

“There’s some black dude with a pitbull dog that he just set loose on this guy. Can you hear that? He’s chewing his arm off! “

“What is your location?”

“Outside the restaurant. The Italian place. East 71st Avenue near Park.”

“What is your name sir?”

“Whoa. I’m just calling. I’m not getting involved. Oh man, he’s bitten an artery or something.”

Spencer hung up the phone and removed the sim card and battery. 11:43. At 11:46, a patrol car screeched to a stop on the curb directly below the camera.
Three minutes.
Spencer watched the ambulance follow at 11:50.

Quality information, but he wasn’t convinced. It wasn’t going to work, not by itself. The sort of people living at Park Avenue won’t march to anyone else’s tune. They couldn’t be given a choice. The city had to be on edge. They had to be afraid, really afraid, before he could make them march out the doors.

Spencer noted the response intervals, then pulled up the events calendar file he had been building and massaging.

“Something easy, flashy.” He needed an easy target first, something to set the tone. Put the city on edge. “Then everyone at Park will run straight out those brass and glass front doors.”

He turned back to the index cards. He still had the contact points and addresses in a file; all the television and radio stations and newspapers where he had sent out “I Kill Rich People.” He had tried seventeen different phrases, but none of them got across what he needed to say. The Captain would know the right words, but he couldn’t come up with anything.

“Crap!” he shouted. The Barrett had to speak for him now.

*****

Past 10 p.m., the techs were still working. Stephen, Dale, Kip, and Dilip had six primary events and eleven bracketed venues. It should have felt like an incredible accomplishment, but Owen was at the point of trying to ask a Ouija Board.

“Still way too many targets,” he complained.

“This will help,” Stephen offered. “I have the system set to an automatic function. It constantly scans through more than a quarter-million frames. The second it picks up Spencer, you and I get texted with the time, the camera footage, the location.”

Owen nodded, too tired to argue. So many empty pizza boxes and soda cans were scattered around the place that it looked like a fraternity house. “Ok,” he told the techs. “Back here 7:45 tomorrow morning. Get some sleep.”

He had a room at the Super 8 in North Bergen. Tired as he was, he couldn’t sleep. He wanted to get into the car and drive straight out to Long Island, but just showing up would be worse than drunk-dialing and he’d already done more than his share of that.

“Go when the job is done,” he told himself. “Then drive out there and get your family.”

At least he had Miller agreeing to
put all of the SWAT team on the clock immediately when they had another sighting. That was something, but they still hadn’t even considered commercial venues: the Stock Exchange, the Goldman Sachs Tower, or even one of the high-end restaurants catering to the city’s elites.

The task was fucking impossible. The whole thing. He might have stayed up all night, every night, forever, and still done no better than guesswork.

Miller, with his ten thousand dollar prizes, was staying at the Mandarin Oriental at Columbus Circle. Whatever Miller was doing all day was unclear. They must have been paying him hourly, Owen griped to himself, because Miller was on vacation again.

Miller came on like the leader, but where was he when everyone else was doing the heavy lifting? Owen was the one who waded through hours upon hours of looking at sidewalks through webcams. Too much information to wade through and not enough eyeballs.

Forty thousand law enforcement officers in the city and five people were doing this thing, him and four nerds looking inside rich people’s bathrooms.

God help us,
he thought.
We need more people.

*****

Vince’s part-time replacement looked like Lawrence Taylor, big as a house and still looking able to put the hurt on any quarterback. He wasn’t looking to make new friends, either.

“Mister, my handicapped placard is for loading and unloading cars for residents,” he informed Spencer. “Period.”

Spencer tried to break through, tried to find some common ground, but no-go.

“You call me ‘Walter,’” the doorman instructed him. “You don’t need another name.”

Spencer was forced to haul the tent all the way around the building, that along with the six heavy sandbags he needed to hold the tent in place. Down long interior halls to the rear service elevator and then back again in the reverse order up on the seventh floor. By the time he made it to the service elevator he was fighting to stifle back the searing pain shooting from his legs and his back.

One step forward, two steps back.

It was the first time he had humped a load in over a year, he realized. His Barrett and ammunition weighed about the same as the tent and sandbags: fifty-five pounds. Two hundred yards had him aching; he used to handle bigger loads over mountainsides.

Sixteen months ago he made double-time across five kilometers carrying the Barrett and a full field pack holding ten days’ rations and water.

As the service elevator opened on the 7th floor, the realization hit hard; he wasn’t a Tower of Power. That was something he used to be. All over.